The five positions, and what each one owes the team

01A position is a share of the map

Positions one to five are not classes. They are an agreement about who gets the gold. Position one takes the most farm and is expected to win the game late; position five takes almost none and is expected to make everyone else's early game possible. Everything about how you play — which creeps you touch, which fights you show up to, which item you buy first — follows from that agreement, not from the hero.

02One and two: the win conditions

The carry (position one) plays the safe lane and is measured on one thing: how much damage it can deal when the game is decided. The midlaner (position two) gets a whole lane of experience alone, which means it hits level six first and is the first hero on the map able to make something happen somewhere else. If your mid never leaves the lane, your team is playing four against five for ten minutes.

• Position one: farm, then convert farm into map pressure.
• Position two: hit six, then leave the lane.
• Both: if you die with gold unspent, you lost twice.

03Three: the one who absorbs

The offlaner plays into the enemy's safe lane, usually outnumbered. The job is not to win that lane — it is to make the enemy carry's first ten minutes miserable while staying relevant enough to matter in fights. A good offlaner comes out of the lane with a fraction of the carry's gold and twice its impact, because the item that turns a fight is cheaper than the item that wins one.

04Four and five: the ones who decide the tempo

The soft support (four) roams: it is the hero that shows up where the enemy is not expecting a fourth body. The hard support (five) buys the wards, the dust and the smoke, and spends the early game making sure the carry gets to farm. These two positions decide when the game speeds up. If nobody is rotating, nothing happens until someone gets an item, and whoever farms faster wins by default.