Supports Who Could Use a Buff
The current support gameplay is exceptionally rewarding. The impact both position four and five supports can have on the game extends far beyond the laning stage and far beyond simple saves and disables. There are some supports, however, who really don’t fit into the current meta and could really use a buff or two.
Dazzle, 
Snapfire and 
Winter Wyvern
The reason we are grouping these three together is quite simple. They are very much playable in the core positions, but they are exceptionally underpowered as supports. We would love to see them return to the viable support pool.
Being Universal makes them excellent at dealing damage in the later portions of the game. Almost every single Universal hero gets to be a right-clicking core if built correctly and both Dazzle, Snapfire and Wyvern are no exception.
The problem is, they received some heavy nerfs to their starting attributes and attribute growth. They now have less HP and Armor, as well as less Mana to work with, which is critical for support heroes. The added benefit of extra attack damage is lost on them, so the end result is they are strictly worse off.
Dazzle with his reworked ultimate is especially weak as a support: he needs both HP and Mana sustain to function and a support Dazzle simply can’t afford enough items to make it work.
Wyvern is in a better state, and we feel like she is mostly simply out of meta for meta reasons. If the patch starts favouring right-clicking physical cores, Wyvern might make a comeback as a situational pick.
Snapfire probably just needs some direct buffs to her abilities. They don’t offer enough for how fiddly and unreliable they are, while her kit in general is kind of counter-intuitive: she needs to be both in the middle of the fight to maximise damage output and crowd control, but she also needs to be far enough away to use her ultimate.
Skywrath Mage
With Puck being dominant in this patch, the absence of Skywrath is extra baffling, but there are good reasons the hero isn’t being picked by high level players and in high level pubs.
He is extremely weak in lane against most meta supports, due to his low armor. He doesn’t offer much later on, since most heroes itemise against magic damage by default or are too tanky for Mystic Flare to be relevant. Finally, his utility is extremely limited and gets trivial to deal with as the game progresses.
We feel like we’ve already touched on this topic in our previous post, but the current HP and EHP pools are getting out of control slightly. It makes many “burst damage” heroes feel irrelevant and Skywrath is one of them.
Even with the talent, Mystic Flare is only 2000 damage over 2+ seconds and it can be split between opponents. We are not saying that it needs to deal more damage, we are saying that in the current patch it is not enough and in many cases will barely even register: given how it is a damage over time effect, 
Eternal Shroud fully stacks pretty quickly and late game, even a core solo target is unlikely to lose more than half of their HP with the Shroud.
Lich
Lich did get a couple of smaller buffs in the last patch, but for the most part the hero is still meta-irrelevant. When it comes to lane dominance, 
Crystal Maiden is simply better, offering more control, damage and scaling. Crowd control-wise Lich has always been below average and, similar to Skywrath Mage, his ultimate is more or less ignorable in the later stages of the game.
What the hero has is his Frost Shield, which is still incredible when it comes to dealing with strong right-clicking heroes. Once again, though, we are returning to the fact that the current meta is mostly ability-based and Shield is kind of irrelevant because of it.
We are not hoping for too many direct buffs for the hero, but would rather like to see some global changes, namely the HP on the heroes and the return of right-click, at least on some heroes.
Closing thoughts
Here are our picks for the supports that most desperately need some changes to the game to become relevant. What do you think of it? Do you agree or do you feel like there are other heroes who are even weaker?
Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
The best old school Doter is the most consistent dotabuff reader! Give me a badge!
deleting shaman from the game gives me a peace of mind
SUUKA ГАБЕН ДАЙ РИНГ МАСТЕРА!!!ОЛЕНЬ
they better just delete ww from the game
Dazzle and Lich are some of my most played heros, i would love to see them get a buff. Then again WW deserves it more then any. So does Snapfire i think.
I'm just chiming in on the Snapfire point:
My favorite hero designs are the ones that s u c k. Not completely, obviously, but just in ways that make SOMETHING feel hard to do well. Furion and Muerta being int heroes, any hero with an arguably crap spell (enigma, kotl, lich have all seen better days for example), or glass cannons.
I love that Snap can't be effective with every spell all the time. More of this kind of design please.
What if the Lich, instead of draining mana, reduced the cooldown of his Skills? So during E his other skills would be reduced for the duration of E (not counting e for cooldown reduction) and would increase the enemy's cooldown by the duration of E as well. This would make the lich a better farmer (I expect it would work on creeps) and AGS to be an even more disruptive ability.
fuck all of you
Lich just need sacrifice back.
Dazzle is exceptionally underpowered? LOL. Guess you've only met inexperienced Dazzle players.
"Underpowered as a support". Core Dazzle can be bonkers, but as a support the hero is strictly worse off than the previous version, that had passive Cooldown Reduction as ultimate. Health Cost form juju is very prohibitive unless you have sustain and you don't get to use Greaves every 20 seconds in fights, like you used to.
Dazzle is a hero I've climbed to top4000 EU Immortal back in the day and still have 56%+ win rate with, so for me it is a bit personal) That said, it could be the case that I am not being adaptable and flexible enough.
Crystal maiden can suck Lich icy balls ^^' Sinister Gaze + Scepter = mass hypno on whole enemy team
also CM scales better? infinte bounce ult + second ult on death? Bitch plz
Jasiuuu… looking at your record… and Kawaii’s…
You might need to simmer a bit there 🤣
Huh, Lich is the weak support? I don't think so) He's very good laner: 1st ability - low cd, high dmg and good slow; 2nd - good slow and also dmg. On the 2nd lvl he's able to slow by 20% enemy target for 9s and total dmg around 300. He looks good on each game stage and have various specter for item build. There's even dmg build vith khanda and etherial b. Btw u could check meta page on strats, wr ~52% for the large period
Оракл и Дизраптор определенно лучшие сапы в пабах, думаю стоит обратить на них внимание пока не понерфили
Сказал чувак с 1900 игр выше, верим что у него почти титан ребят? Не думаю, скорее всего купил аккаунт или жестко привязочку сделал , вывод можно не верить не одному слову
I think my 10 year Dotabuff membership is just around the corner.
As a Sky main i got to say hes still a Beast