I am fairly new to the game (only about 125 hours played) and I'm having trouble with team composition. I know that this is difficult because some people are going to play whoever the hell they want to play. But, I like to win so I often find myself waiting until the end of the draft in order to counter the other team's hero picks. This question isn't solely based on countering the other team's heroes though. I guess, there are a few main bullet points to my question:
1) what is an ideal composition for a team (i.e.: how many support, how many carry, etc.)?
2) is there anywhere that has a listing of heroes and which heroes are good counters to them?
3) can I get some clarification on the terms carry, support, etc?
4) is there a convenient way to remember which heroes are carry, support, etc? For example, I couldn't tell you which class Sniper falls into.
I started playing this game only about 2 months ago and I literally jumped right in. The learning curve was steep and I feel that my mechanics have gotten much better in the past 2-3 weeks, but I think a big part of this game is understanding the gameplay and the factors I mentioned above. I played a fair amount of SC2, and although I was terrible, I understood why I was terrible (I was just too lazy to constantly make SCV's, upgrade units from the various buildings, haha).
Any help here would be greatly appreciated!
You'll typically see pros play a team that consists of the standard 5 positions:
1. Carry - Strong right click, largely item dependent, needs gold
2. Mid - Earlier levels, also usually item dependent, needs gold
3. Offlaner - Usually more survivability, less item dependent, moderate gold
4. Soft Support - More team item purchasing (Mech/Vlad/Pipe/etc), less item dependent, moderate/low gold
5. Hard Support - Most independent on items, buys lots of wards, smoke, dust...expendable items to control map
In pubs this varies dramatically, as you'll often see anywhere from 2-4 carries picked because everyone loves to be the hero. This strategy isn't completely useless, but it would be heavily dependent on either winning the laning phase by outplaying the other team and snowballing on multiple heroes, or pushing the game late where they should be unstoppable.
The higher in tiers you go in Dota, the more like the standard layout above you'll see. Not saying that straying from the formula is bad, but it's generally accepted that this is the standard lineup.
As far as hero roles specifically, in game you'll actually notice that there are icons on each hero designating their specific attributes like initiator or durable or carry or support...etc. While these aren't 100% accurate by the current meta, they should give you a decent idea of what to expect from the hero.
As far as hero weaknesses, I don't believe I've seen a specific breakout of those anywhere besides the DotaFire guides that attempt to spell out best allies and worst enemies. The old DotaCinema guides tried to do this as well.
This game is so diverse that spelling out hero weaknesses except in a few obvious cases would be rough to do accurately.
