Draft, Comps & Counters

What Makes a Comp Good or Bad

Many players and coaches can feel whether their comp is good or bad, but often can't put it into words. A good comp starts with a foundation of drawing out the strengths of all five players and fitting the current patch and pace of the game. On top of that, ideally it aligns with your own team's playstyle and can also shut down the opponent's core strategy.

A bad comp, by contrast, is one that ignores each player's best heroes (their hero pool) and forces a build that doesn't match the team's playstyle, drifts away from the current meta, or has its very win condition countered by the enemy. Meeting every condition in a single game is hard, but if you can cover most of them, you can call it a strong comp.

The Four Pillars of Building a Comp

There are four pillars to think about when building a comp: each player's best heroes, the strongest heroes in the current patch, the team's overall playstyle, and the enemy's comp strategy. On top of these four, the coach's own philosophy and way of thinking gets added in, and the final draft plan is decided.

Rather than leaning on just one of them, combining these to paint the full picture is the premise for building comps consistently. From here, we'll look at these four in order.

Pillar 1: Building Around a Player's Signature Heroes

Top teams have players with rare and powerful signature heroes that only they can play. When a player has a hero they're known for, it heavily shapes how the entire comp is built.

For example, if you anchor the comp around a scaling hero that grows strong once fully farmed, you need resources early. So you pair heroes that can easily seize lane priority in the top and bottom lanes to set up that hero's farming environment. Once the core player scales, they become a threat capable of taking on multiple opponents alone, turning individual strength into map-wide pressure — an advantage for the whole team. If you have a player with a signature pick, optimizing everyone around them to maximize it is effective.

Pillar 2: Patch-Strong Heroes and 'Take First Instead of Ban'

With so much data available now, anyone can see which heroes are strong and which are weak. Powerful combinations with especially good synergy tend to get picked or banned. That's because when strong heroes mesh well, you get synergy where 1+1 exceeds 2.

An advanced idea here is 'take it first instead of banning it.' Rather than banning the combination the enemy wants to complete, you pick one of its component heroes yourself and take it away. This breaks up the enemy's plan while also boosting your own comp's synergy — killing two birds with one stone.

Pillar 3: Centering on the Team's Playstyle and Core

The stronger the team, the clearer its playstyle: the core lane may shift depending on the situation, but the 'true core player' stays constant. Once the core player takes their signature hero, the rest of the draft revolves around supporting that pick and filling in the missing roles.

For example, if you take a main-carry marksman, you add a support that maximizes that lane's pressure and speeds up their farming, plus heroes that create an environment where they shine in team fights. Early on, other slots may fall behind in gold because resources are concentrated on the core, but by mid game the core pulls ahead of the enemy, and that single point of focus turns into an advantage for the whole team.

Pillar 4: Counter-Draft That Targets the Enemy Comp

If you can read the picks or signature comp the enemy is likely to take, you can prepare in advance and build a comp that directly cuts down its influence. Matching strong picks against the enemy's key heroes in lane or team fights is the essence of counter-drafting.

Furthermore, if a specific player has a signature hero with a high win rate, removing it with your first two bans is the most effective. The more the enemy depends on that one hero or a specific comp, the more targeting it early breaks their entire plan and denies them the shape they're good at. If you're targeting the core player, the earlier the ban, the better.

The Mind Game of 'All-In Picks' vs. 'Deliberately Throwing One Game'

In formats where the hero pool is narrow and strong heroes and personal signature heroes are limited, two extreme strategies emerge. One is the all-in type, pouring all the strong picks into a single game. But even gathering four or five strong heroes won't work if their roles don't mesh — for instance, one geared toward river skirmishes and another toward jungle invades — making it high-risk.

The other is deliberately throwing one game to make the enemy spend their strong picks. If you can bait out the enemy's main comp, you can counter it with safe picks in later games. However, in short formats (like BO5), dropping a game early is hard to recover from, so it's a gamble suited to longer formats.

What You Can Actually Trust: Balanced Comps and Preparation

The most stable path is the balanced one, without swinging to extremes. Based on your players' strengths, prepare two or three practiced comp styles and build them into your plan ahead of time.

To build comps systematically, the coach must understand each player's hero pool and have team-fight patterns practiced until everyone's intentions align. No matter how strong it looks on paper, you must never bring an unpracticed comp into a real match. It only works once hero understanding and coordination are in place. From there, stacking up signature picks and counter comps, and accurately grasping what your comp is strong and weak against, is the key to staying a step ahead.

The Importance of the Draft and How the Match Unfolds

How a match plays out is heavily shaped by the draft (hero picks and bans). At the draft stage, the overall pace of the game and much of the advantage or disadvantage are already determined.

Analyzing the Team Compositions

My team includes an assassin and a hero specialized in burst damage, and since the mid laner can't provide burst, the jungler supplies the burst so the team can build an advantage from the early game.

The enemy team, on the other hand, has many late-game scaling heroes like Allain, Marco Polo, and Wukong, with a healer or a durable hero in the support slot.

Since the enemy's early-game damage output is relatively low, my team is set up to make good use of its early-game strength.

An Early Lead and the Late-Game Danger

In this match, my team got ahead in the early game. However, my team lacked a heavy frontline (tank) who could soak the enemy's damage for long stretches, while the enemy team had a healer and durable heroes, so there was a real risk of falling behind if the game dragged into the late game.

With an early-game-strong composition, you have to close out the game quickly or you'll be in trouble.

Late-Game Challenges and Team Coordination

In the late game, the draft advantage matters much less, and individual skill and macro (overall strategy and decision-making) decide the outcome. The late game in particular is about isolating and killing enemy heroes and ambushing them.

Even though my team had the draft advantage, if the team doesn't understand how to play its composition, or if it can't coordinate in the late game, its chances of winning drop dramatically.

Conclusion: Consistency and Discipline

Every team composition has strengths and weaknesses; there's no such thing as an ultimately superior composition. Often a single wrong move leads to a loss.

To win, it's important to play with consistency and discipline all the way to the end of the match, and above all not to neglect regrouping with your team in the late game.

The Essence of Countering Is How Skills Interact

Supports are tanky against each other, and even with a full six-item build, taking one down in a straight 1v1 is difficult. Counter-picking still works, though, because the outcome isn't decided by "can one hero kill the other" but by "how much can your skills neutralize the enemy's skills."

In other words, you look at whether your skills can shut down the enemy's core moves. Can you nullify their crowd control with immunity or a cleanse? Can you interrupt the skill they build their plays around? Stacking up these matchups is the mindset behind picking a support.

Use the Draft Order to Pick Last and Punish

By the rules, the support tends to lock in a hero before the rest of the team, which conversely means that if the enemy support is already revealed, you can slot in a hero that's strong into them on your turn. The moment they show a specific support, options that hunt it start to become clear.

Simply being aware of this last-pick advantage makes it much easier to seize control of the support matchup. Deliberately stacking a skill kit that's favorable against the enemy's playmaker is the basics of drafting.

1v1s Happen Easily in the Early Window Before Level 4

Early on, before hitting level 4, the gold gap is still small, so the skill damage of supports and mages is roughly even. In this window, 1v1s between supports happen easily, and counter matchups actually matter in the trades.

Put another way, if you have a matchup that wins early trades, you can zone the enemy support one-sidedly, intimidating their mage and support and helping your own team's early game get going.

Prioritize Skills That Provide Value in Clashes

Supports come in two broad types: the kind that catches an isolated target and picks them off one-sidedly, and the kind that excels at CC (crowd control) or damage absorption that engulfs multiple enemies in a clash. The pick-off type is strong when it can split enemies apart, but in clashes where your team moves as a group, it tends to have its skills go to waste.

Honor of Kings sees frequent clashes, and the later the game goes the more everyone groups up, so a support that can engulf multiple targets at once does more work over the course of a match. Against a pick-off type, slotting in a wide-area CC type that doesn't go dead in clashes tends to land well.

Neutralize the Enemy's Trump Card With Immunity, Cleanse, or Interrupt

A win condition that keeps coming up in the chain is nullifying the enemy's trump-card skill with immunity, a cleanse, or an interrupt. Against types that catch you with a hook or a pull, you break the capture itself by latching onto an ally or with immunity. Against an ultimate with area crowd control, you slot in a cleanse before allies get caught and strip the CC off.

On top of that, if the enemy's powerful ultimate has a lockout or a charge-up time before it fires, you can time your own stun or interrupt into it and stop the entire ultimate. It's best to pick based on what the enemy's single biggest weapon is and whether you have a way to dodge or stop it.

If You Don't Pick Early, Match Your Team Composition

There are two guidelines for when you couldn't pick early in the draft. One is to pick a support that's strong against the enemy's paper-armor carries, especially assassin types with multiple dashes. Heroes with lockdown-style CC that won't let a target escape once caught tend to land well.

The other is to mesh with your team composition. If your team can deliver area burst damage, pairing a CC-type support that clumps enemies into one spot maximizes that damage and pushes up your win rate across the whole match.

Team Composition Traits and How to Play the Early Game

This team composition excels at picking off enemies individually and at split pushing. However, in the early game, partly due to your support hero's traits, your ability to force fights aggressively is low, so you should avoid team fights.

This is especially true if the enemy team is strong when they move as a group.

Avoiding Team Fights and Picking Enemies Off

Team fights where the enemy team clumps together are unfavorable for you, so avoid direct clashes. Instead, split the enemy apart and take them down one by one.

If this succeeds, you can build a numbers advantage and play from ahead.

Map Control and Sowing Confusion

If the enemy is pushing the farm lane hard, it's important to steal their jungle monsters for gold and punish their movement. Actively split pushing side lanes forces the enemy to spread out, applies pressure across the whole map, and creates confusion about which lane they need to defend.

The Importance of Understanding Team Compositions

Different team compositions call for different ways of playing. Understanding your own team's and the enemy team's composition and building a strategy accordingly is the key to victory.

A strategy that worked with other heroes may not fit this composition or this matchup, so flexible thinking is required.