A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

“Buy wards” and “We need wards” in Dota 2

What this meme means

The eternal Dota 2 chat request “We need wards” and the stereotype of the poor position 5 support who buys and places them.

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Observer, Sentry and position 5

Map vision in Dota 2 comes from Observer Wards and Sentry Wards. By unwritten convention, the support buys and places them, above all the position 5, the “hard support” with the lowest farm priority, as dota2.ru describes it.

What is documented above all is the chat wheel line “Need wards.” The variants “Buy wards” and “Where are the wards?” are not recorded as quotes in the sources: they are colloquial forms of the same request with no single author. There is no way to pin down an exact date for the meme; it goes back to the days of DotA Allstars.

Since wards are by convention the support's job, the request is usually aimed at them, even when it comes from a player who could buy a ward themselves.

The support as “nanny and personal ATM”

The role split gave rise to a stereotype: the support is a poor player who places wards and dies for the carry. In June 2025, a cyber.sports.ru blog joked that to the carry, the support is a “bodyguard, nanny and personal ATM.”

That sets the tone of the meme. “Buy wards” sounds less like advice and more like a reminder of your role: while others farm, the support is responsible for the whole team's vision.

The blog's “personal ATM” joke takes the stereotype to its extreme: the support not only places wards but spends their own gold on the team, even though position 5 already has the least of it.

“Need wards” on the chat wheel

The phrase “Need wards” is one of the standard chat wheel lines, so you can ask for wards with a single click. Spamming that line became a target of criticism in its own right.

In December 2017, Esports Tales criticized spamming “We need wards” in chat and urged carry and mid players to buy wards too. At the time, two Observer Wards cost 160 gold and a Sentry cost 100, a price that, the author argued, any position could afford.

Esports Tales' main criticism was aimed not at supports but at those asking: instead of spamming “We need wards,” the carry or mid player could spend a couple hundred gold on a ward themselves.

Free wards and advice from FNG

Over time, Valve made life easier for supports: as dota2.ru notes, free wards and couriers took some of the costs off their shoulders. But the role itself has not gone anywhere; placing wards well is still the support's job.

In November 2024, professional support FNG put it this way, as esports.ru reported: “You need to know how to place wards well, and you need to know how to play around your cores.” In other words, warding is not just buying, but knowing where to put them.

FNG's words show the other side of the topic: for position 5, wards are a skill, not just a purchase, and free wards haven't changed that.

Two owls in the picture and example captions

The catalog image is in-game art of wards: two owl wards against a night forest. The big one is an Observer Ward with a yellow orb eye, the small blue one is a Sentry Ward.

These examples were made up for illustration: “Carry with 20 minutes of farm: ‘need wards’,” “Position 5: bought wards, placed wards, died next to the wards,” “When the only chat wheel line you know is ‘Need wards’.”

The jokes usually play on the contrast between the one who asks for wards and the one who pays for them.