Talk: Ganking

Heroes

Venomancer counts as item-dependant, and Spirit Breaker as item-independant? hmm...

I think it's pretty hard to decide for most heroes. Tidehunter, for example, was played as a supportive roamer for a long time. Now teams started to put lots of farm on him. Same goes for Sand King and Shadow Shaman. Windrunner is often the Mekansm carrier for the team, so teams often want to give her some farm. I could continue this list forever, it's pretty hard to put Heroes into categories. Maybe we should add a short reminder somewhere in the text, like "these Heroes are well-suited for X, but can also be played in another way.". -derFreiBierFred 9th May 2012

When I made the list, the Heroes I categorized were based on my assumption that "Item-dependant" are ones that have a great potential to become a Semi-Carry, and are usually requiring to get the kill, while Item-independant are just ones that help with the gank possible, but not necessarily have the requirement to earn the kill to get the money.

Like you said, Heroes like Sand King and Sven are one of those heroes that also do good when they are farmed - and Venomancer and even Viper are ones that does not necessarily need farm to be good at ganking, but I don't know. Maybe item-dependence is a bad factor to create categories, and we should use another, or just remove it all throughout.

There's also difficulty in heroes like Pudge, Tiny, Leshrac, and Spirit Breaker. Denmax 10:48, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

My idea was to diffrentiate between these 2 types of gankers:

Type A (I called them "item-dependant" here, it might be misleading though):

- early on, they farm in their lane to get some core items (boots, urn, wand, bottle...)

- in the early midgame, they start ganking heavily. if successful, they "snowball" very hard. A pudge with an early 7:0 will most likely proceed to have a huge impact on the entire game, whereas a failed pudge won't do much later on.

- as you said, these heroes should take the lasthit on hero kills in most cases.

Type B (item-independant):

- they take few or no lasthits in lane

- mostly (hard) support heroes, often take care of wards etc. and try to leave the kills to their team mates (as you said)

- roam across the map (even from lvl 1), often end up underfarmed and underleveled because they do not lane very much

- they usually have a spell that is very powerful on lvl 1 (fissure, venge/sven stun, venomous gale)

This role is pretty much a mixture of ganker and support hero. Support heroes could be classified like this: a) babysitters (stay in lane to protect a team mate), b) roamers (Type B gankers).

I think this definitely has to be mentioned somewhere in the article, but it might be reduced to some sentences that explain this distinction.

We both agree that it's still pretty hard to classify some of these heroes into Type A or B, thats why I initially struggled to make such a long Hero list and just wrote a few, very distinct examples. We might merge the 2 Hero lists to avoid the classification problem, and just mention the 2 different types in the text.

Thanks for participating in the strategy section, this is what the wiki really lacks :) -derFreiBierFred 9th May 2012

I think a better divider would be their level dependency. In a sense, most if not all gankers do not actually need items to be effective (the aspect is ganking, not their overall effectiveness in the game), however some do need levels to be of actual credit. Example is Zeus. Zeus is a great carrier for support items, but his ganking ability is unreliable and mediocre early game. In opposition to this is Alchemist. A great Alchemist can start ganking very early in the game because he is one of the few who can stun enemies in almost 2 seconds as early as level 1, but he is a hero that needs farm to be actually effective since there are a ton more better heroes that fit the role better without items. Denmax 18:27, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Mhm. We could adjust this article to the Role article and mention that the main role responsible for ganking is called "Ganker" and characterize them shortly. Then we could add that "Roamers" (while simultaneously providing map control with wards, pulling, stacking etc.) often also help out with ganks. Because they're moving around anyways, they get good ganking opportunities and can move where their team needs them right now.

So we wouldn't divide gankers into two categories. Let's put it like this: Heroes who focus on ganking are gankers. There are other heroes that gank as well, but it's not their main job, because Roamers also have lots of other jobs to do, hence they are not actually gankers. -derFreiBierFred 12th May 2012

I've made the changes. See if it sounds and fits better. If not, revert history Denmax 12:51, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Yep, I like it better now. -derFreiBierFred 14th May 2012