Survive
Most of the support heroes in Dota 2 is weak and have a small amount of HP. So correctly positioning your hero during every phase of the game is essential. To survive, you have to balance between keeping close to your tower so you can cower behind the tower if the situation needed, while staying in EXP range of enemy creep line. Not only that, you also have to stay close to the hero you are supporting and make enemy heroes uncomfortable in farming EXP and gold on your lane by harassing them.
Spend your money on healing items such as salve, and do not hesitate to give it to those who need it. It's much better to the team if your carry uses your salve worth 100 gold, instead of he dies and you lose team EXP and precious gold.
Make sure you don't die prematurely, or some may say "feeding", in team-fights. Make sure you use all of your skills (and correctly used) or even survive until your skill is needed before the inevitable happens. Since support role income is low, or even non-existent, avoid dying too much is the best way to maintain your gold income. If you survive team fights, you will get a nice gold bonus for supporting and more EXP!
Last Hitting, Denies, and Harass
It's not true that because you pick a support hero makes you can't farm at all. You still need gold to buy wards, regeneration items, and boots. But make sure you do not intentionally fight last hits with your carry. If you really have to because you are so close to the item you need to buy, ask the carry permission to farm one or two creeps. A good carry will understand you.Denying and harassing are the two basic skills in DotA 2. Denying is last hitting your own creeps before your enemies do so the enemies gold and EXP gain are reduced. Ideally, you last hit all of your own creeps to maximized this deficit while you make sure your carry get all of his/her last hits.
Harassing is the act of hitting enemy heroes with your skills or attacks so they will take some damage and get driven back so they are out of EXP range. Successful harass will make your carry farm comfortably and your enemies level lagged behind.
Warding
Able to see the enemy movement is important to avoid getting ganked. That's why wards are essential to your team survival throughout the match. It's your job as a support to place wards in strategic places to be able to see where are your enemies.
At the very beginning of the match, if you see the other support already purchased courier, then it's your job to buy wards. While Sentry wards are situational, depends on whether you up against invisible heroes, Observer Wards are an important part of every game.
Initially, you put an Observer Wards at the river that overlook both runes. By setting wards here, your team can see if the enemy team is planning on ganking and make strategies to counter or avoid it. This wards placement also useful for your midlaner to see if a rune has spawned and to judge whether it's safe or not to pick it up.
Wards run out every six minutes and they need to be replaced immediately. Rule of thumb: buy wards after you able to buy boots and buy wards again at 15 minutes, 30 minutes and 45 minutes.










