Hero Roles

[Softmints]

We were having some heated discussion last night about what roles RoW heroes have. For clarity, my argument was as follows:

• If you play singleplayer Diablo, your hero does not have a 'role'. This is because roles are defined in terms of team objectives.
• In other games, team objectives include maintaining ward control, ganking the enemy jungler, securing farm for the carry, being the carry, etc. However, the only roles I can think of for RoW are the obvious primary ones: killing and pushing. Why is this?
  
  • There aren't enough competitive-minded players to determine secondary objectives
  • Most of the usual objectives (ward control, jungling) aren't in RoW
• Hence, until we know what our team's objectives are, we don't know what role each hero should play in securing them. That's why I don't consider RoW to have roles.

Don't get me wrong, heroes are better at some things than others. Nadir is great at getting Lightning Rod because he's so fast; but is 'getting Lightning Rod' a role? Would a team pick heroes for that purpose? I think we need more competitive thinking to figure that kind of thing out.

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There is an elegant way of thinking about roles called the '1-5' system, which I think originated in Chinese DotA. The '1' is highest priority for farm, the '5' is lowest. The carry is usually '1', a mid ganker might be '2', support is '4' or '5'. Heroes can switch places throughout the game; a hero who needs big item like blink might be '2' until they get it, and then drop to '4'.

I've made the gpm/epm numbers available on the homepage and in F9 if anyone wants to try analysing RoW using a simple farm priority allocation approach.