How Can Enchant Be Played Support?

Hi I'm Baby Sauce, I've really never made a thread here before but I use a lot of builds and I've never seen a "good" build for Enchantress support. Enchantress is a great hero who is relatively well-rounded. Add in the fact that I'm my team's primary support and you'd think I'd be all for a support enchantress. But when I play her (and I seem to be the only person on my team who does play her) I play her Jungler. Sometimes I'll play her hard Jungler, maybe semi-Jungler, depends on how my solo laner is doing. But despite the fact people have asked if I'd be interested in her as support I can't see how it would work.

Enchantress is not only ranged, but focuses extremely on being far away with Impetus. So the primary function to me of her Q untouchable is that if someone were to close up on her she could get away. But as a support if you are trying to protect a carry this seems a bit counter-intuitive. This would keep the focus on your carry, whereas most of the time if your carry needs saving you need to quickly turn the focus to you as you heal them or let them get away. (This is assuming you're playing babysit carry of course). So, how can that be used in a support scenario?

Enchant I can see alright, her slow is good for setting up kills and pushing lanes with enemy creeps.

Her E, Nature's Attendants, seems good as a heal but not a very good supporting heal. The purpose of the aoe heal to me is that she can heal her creeps and herself during pushes, fights, etc. but the main flaw of this is the mana cost. So if you have an injured carry early-game, to heal him you would need to have over half of your mana pool (using her lvl 1 stats, the problem decreases overtime but the mana cost problem is there) and when you do some of the heals will be transferred to you and possibly nearby creeps if you're not alone. Also, compared to superior heals like Living Armor and Shadow Wave, it takes time to accomplish, taking away the carry's farm. So how is this a good enough heal to make her a healer support, because if she is considered one it will appall me, because as I said it doesn't seem effective in a support scenario.

Now her ult. Impetus can be considered one of the best skills in the game, and it's my favorite auto cast by far. It can deal monumental damage and whither opponents down but I don't see how it can be used for setting up kills. It's very easy to take kills with this and if I try to set up kills for somebody a lot of times before you know I'm the damage dealer and woah what's that it's almost like I'm a carry who's getting kills taken from them. I guess this is more a personal quarrel that the carries get kills that I do the damage for, but you have to see my point with taking kills.

So how can she really be used effectively in that role? Sorry if I'm missing something, am thinking of something the wrong way, etc, go easy on me.

tl;dr enchant seems like a bad support and I want to know how people think she's a good one. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.

Hiya! I'm probably in no position to give advice since I'm fairly new but to me it seems you try to fit her in a niche she's not fit for!

If you want a jungler that really fits the standard support role you have chen, his offensive capability is very limited but his recall and ultimate makes him a very helpful addition to the team when you need defense / push / jungler. (Forgot to mention his Q which helps damage output but it doesn't provide it!)

Enchantress however fits a role where she can jungle / push / eventually sort of carry, all while being very survivable and can still support lanes with creeps or, as you were saying, her heal.

You said both Shadow Wave (one of my favourite spells!) and Living Armor were better, I strongly disagree. Shadow Wave's great for many reasons however it's actual heal is pretty mediocre, you use it for pushing or punishing melee heroes that try to last hit.
Shadow Wave = 1 hp healed per mana at lvl 1 and 1.27 at lvl 4 (If we disregard that it heals more than 1 person)
Living Armor = 1.2 hp healed per mana at lvl 1 and 3.9 at lvl 4
Nature's Attendants = 2.4 hp healed per mana at lvl 1 and 5.2 at lvl 4
Now of course this doesn't count in the damage block / nuke that armor and shadow provides however I rarely use shadow just to heal my carry up and I (before the latest patch) used living armor mostly on whoever needed it, rarely just to heal my carry up.

Impetus can provide some SICK dps late-game since it's both pure and adds at the very least 185 pure to each attack once she has aghs!

Untouchable gives her survivability against right-clickers and allows her to do some early roshans if she decides to skill it early (something I wouldn't recommend)
Enchant gets you creeps (obviously) and allows you to set up ganks in the lane you're jungling next to, which can get you some pretty early first bloods if you get the right creep, and at lvl 4 you can run around with I think 5 creeps at most, but most of all you can "throw" creeps away to harass a lane or stack ancients, something chen can't.

tl;dr, I pick enchantress when the team needs damage and not defensive capabilities
(sorry for the wall of text, hope I was somewhat helpful at least!)

Are you talking about her as a lane support? (i.e. not jungling)

If so, somebody did post up a guide on using her as a kind of semi-jungling support hero who harasses and heals in lane. Can't say I was totally sold, but it can work at a push.

I think when people talk about her a support hero, they mean more that she helps out with warding/utility items as well as getting her own core items. She's so easy to jungle with that grabbing an Animal Courier or Observer Ward is pretty easy to swallow (slightly slower Urn of Shadows).

Personally not a fan of getting a Mekansm on her as she has such a short window to really be effective with an Aghanim's Scepter/ Impetus before enemies start picking up magic immunity, but it can work if absolutely necessary.

While she deals a lot of right click damage in the right circumstances, you don't need a massive amount of equipment to make this happen (although obviously it helps), so again you can help out with "utility" items - ideally ones that gell with improving your right-click (e.g. Drum of Endurance, Orchid Malevolence, Force Staff, even an Assault Cuirass etc).

I think she can sit nicely in between that semi-carry/semi-support role. I don't agree with the Hand of Midas carry build though, she's at her most effective early game and you shouldn't waste that timing window.

Hope this helps.

Are they asking you to be a support or a lane support?
I don't think enchantress is that great in lane, it is almost like laning a Chen. (I heard Icefrog kills a kitten every time someone lanes a Chen. :P )
When playing Enchantress I usually play support and jungle. Buy wards, pool resources if you can actually co-ordinate with your team well.
Buy the mek if no one else is going to get it, if you get a decent creep for ganking early, I'm thinking centaur, troll or ursa, gank the side lane. Alternatively you could be a nuisance for mid if you find a wildkin or a harpy.

I also agree with what Sando said above.

Her heal can actually be rather effective as it will save a lot of time to heal your carry up in the jungle so they don't have to return to the fountain.

Personally I would probably just watch pro games where they play Enchantress, some players I would probably watch are Na'Vi's Puppey or Alliance's [A]kke.

"Jungler" is technically not a role, similar to "pusher", "babysitter", etc.

The roles are usually categorized by the laning of the heroes and the amount of farm they get in the course of the game, which are:

1: Hard carry
2: Semi-carry / mid
3: Offlaner
4: Semi support
5: Hard support.

Every hero is categorized into 1 or 2 of those roles. The other roles that I mentioned earlier are basically a different set of roles, which depend on what the hero does throughout the game.

So as long as you're getting support items and not carrying items (I.E get Mekansm, Pipe of Insight or Drum of Endurance instead of Aghanim's Scepter) while doing the things that supports are supposed to do then you're supporting such as warding, then she is a support. (She is BOTH a jungler and a support)

TL:DR - Do you get carry items on Enchantress?

Yes: Stop and get support items, you're a support.

No: You are already playing support Enchantress. Congratulations.

Why play support Enchantress? Her damage output with her ult is absolutely ridiculous.

Repost from another thread on this a while ago: (why Enchantress isn't a carry):

"Take for example a Phantom Assassin as an opponent - for your ~12,000 worth of gold ( Bloodstone + Aghanim's Scepter + Power Treads + Hand of Midas), she could get Battle Fury + Phase Boots + Black King Bar + Helm of the Dominator.

You have low agility growth and end up with only 6 armour at level 16 (~26% physical damage reduction), she has 11 + 5 from HoTD = 16 (49% reduction), plus another 40% from Blur's dodge.

You're hitting for ~96 damage at level 16, plus 18 from your Aghanim's Scepter and Power Treads (assuming set to intel) for a total of 114. Obviously this can be a lot higher if they're not magic immune and you're hitting that at range with Impetus, capped at 625 extra pure damage (nice!).

She's hitting for 96 base damage, plus 65 + +20 + 24 + 24 = 229, plus a 15% chance of doing 450% damage, which would result in a 1030 damage crit before reductions. (726 if she hit you). She has a much faster attack speed and can lifesteal 15% of her damage. If her BKB is on, and she's attacking you at melee range, you're getting no bonus/pure damage. She's reducing your damage by 49% (to 58), and also dodging 40% of your attacks (to 35 avg). She's got Phantom Strike to close the distance and you've got no magic block to stop it.

As you can see, in any kind of straight fight it's not even close, and once team's figure out you're the main threat/DPS you'll find it hard to stay out of the firing line. Obviously you do still have a chance if your team has a good stun (especially a BKB busting one) and you can pop away at long range using Impetus - but this is very situational. Sorry."

She shares similar traits (in a sense) to OD. She has a skill that does increased damage based on another trait, and with Aghs she deals even more.

But if you consider the two's differences :
- Enchantress isn't great in the lane. Her regen is very mana intensive, she has no nuke.
- OD is great in lane, has a int-steal skill that also removes the enemies from the battlefield, decreasing last-hit time, and a mana recovery skill, as well as a added damage effect to make LH easier with his orb, which is not an ultimate.

- Enchantress requires Aghs to scale to lategame. Her untouchable is useful, but she has low HP, so she's very easy to nuke down using your supports. This scaling is still limited to one item.
- OD's Orb scales as the game continues, increasing as his mana pool grows. His ultimate also becomes more powerful.

Both of them gets countered very hard by BKB, as the extra damage gets completely nulled. OD still has base damage that increases with INT however but it doesn't really help that much. But he can still keep himself alive.

So not a foolproof argument, I understand this, but this might give you some idea of why she's less viable. She can farm in the jungle, correct, but she doesn't scale that well to lategame, especially not if they counter with BKB's.

Skimmed the replies (really surprised at the amount of feedback I got tbh) and yeah, I never really saw her as a "Carry" per say but I see what people mean now when they say "support". I was assuming babysit support but you mean a bit more of a utility support, warding and getting some supporty items while still jungling. This role makes a lot more sense then the role I thought people were suggesting and I might try it out next game.

And I've seen Chen laned well once in a pro game, laned terribly in a million pub games. :D

Enchantress makes a great semi-support (number 4 slot), because she can get pretty good farm in the jungle for items like Mekansm, Force Staff or other utility items.