Support vs Carry; Sometimes, It's your personality

A lot of times I find that new players want advice on which Gods they should play. Now, usually my first response is always Ymir. He's tanky, he's relatively easy mode at early levels, and he's been viable in upper level play pretty much since the outset of the game. But then I started to wonder, why do my teammates, that usually play carry, not think he's a good first god? Why can't they see how easy he is to play? And then it dawned on me: I always play support.

From the perspective of any good player, you will pretty much always notice they're more or less competent with pretty much any role and any god. Assault, in fact, is popular for that reason, because people get a chance to perfect skills with gods they don't normally play, but they still have a decent amount of understanding and knowledge to play. But at the end of the day, if you're playing a game you want to win, you usually have a role and a god that is your fall back, your main so to speak. What I have also noticed, though, is that experience and skill tends to rest in the same roles; I can play carry relatively well, but I will always play support if I'm going out to win. When my team plays conquest, and we're in tryhard mode, I play support tanks because that's what I do. So I began to wonder, why is it that tanks come naturally to me? And why do my carry friends just not understand how to play support as well?

I used to think it kind of just depended on who you picked up first; if the first god you learned was Ra, you were just going to be a mage player. But that doesn't really make sense, because knowing how to play Ra vs knowing how to play He bo is entirely different. Their damage is completely dissimilar, their movement works different, and they are usually pretty divergent builds. And that got me to thinking, maybe it's just who you are as a player?

With this in mind, I tried to pay more attention to myself and my lane mate from a Meta perspective in games (he's pretty much a dedicated AD carry). And it definitely seemed like there was something to the theory that our personalities match our roles. As we played, I realized that I was paying much better attention to the game as a whole than he was; I spent more time watching opposing lanes, counting out buff timers, keeping track of where our opponents were, and even trying to orchestrate initiations. But when the fighting started, it was all his show. I pretty much did whatever was necessary to keep him alive, and his one track mind just cut through both of our opponents.

What I think I've noticed is that Carries and Supports differ just in the way they play the game; Supports wait. They consider. They think about the game as a whole and the direct impact of each of their actions on the following ones. Carries, on the other hand, are about aggression. In the moment that fights need to be fought, they will react faster, move quicker, and keep focus on the enemy much better. A true carry should almost have to be reminded to retreat, because they are so focused on killing opponents that they may sometimes lose track of what's happening to them.

Now I don't mean to pigeon-hole either role; everyone has their own style, and not every carry thinks the same, and not every support does either. But I think both roles attract certain types of people, and my next few blogs are going to try to analyze the differences between play styles and general mindset's when it comes to Smite.

Thanks for the views, and any and all comments are welcome, even if you just want to tell me I'm wrong and why.