What makes a good mid-lane hero?

First of all we need to see the advantages of going mid-lane solo:

• Faster XP gain
• Easy to gank either top or bottom lane
• Easy to get the runes (+bottle efficiency)
• Better lane protection (this means the enemy doesn't really have so much space to chase you on lane as they would have top/bottom so it's harder to be killed.)

It is good to go solo mostly because of the faster XP gain which is a huge factor.

Considering the facts listed above, we can follow-up with the 2 following reasons to go mid-lane:

1. You are a carry hero. Being a carry hero requires fast leveling/farming and the mid lane offers this to any decent player. If you can't farm that well, still you will level faster anyway. Now, 80% of cases are in the first category. This means you need a carry oriented hero which preferably can also farm/deny. This means most will be ranged, but there are some good melee heroes too. In what follows I will give some examples of some good range/melee heroes for mid:

   • Riki is my personal choice, but if you are a beginner do not take him as he is a little hard to manage. Riki is one of the best carries in the game due to high damage and smoke screen which is just imba (imbalanced). You will have difficulties in farming especially if you are up against ranged heroes. Early smoke will help out a lot. Blink/smoke farm will get you easily to lvl 6. Then go gank or keep farming like a boss if your opponent is a noob and doesn't yet have wards.
   • Shadow Fiend is a great carry, one of the easiest farmers there are in the game, has good ulti with blink dagger or lothar's and generally good at harassing. This will definitely be in the top choices for mid heroes.
   • Bloodseeker Passive for regen from creeps is just great. With axe for 32% damage vs creeps you will probably never need to go fountain for regen. When you hit 6 you can easily gank.

2. You have a good ganker hero. This means you have for instance Pudge or Mirana which after quickly achieving level 5-6 can go fast top/bottom for gank and get kill 100% sure if they get hook/arrow. Also take Tiny for example. Getting fast lvl 7-8 when all the other players are level 5 will get you easiest kill ever with avalanche/toss combo. Bane falls easily in this category with level 6. Lion due to ultimate of course, but arguably better as support/roamer. Tinker has so much burst damage at level 7-8, leveling him fast is a good idea as he can easily get some early game kills.

3. You are a good harasser. This means you can really slow down the enemy's mid hero leveling/farming. Most of the time you won't see this happening but I've seen this in some games.

This doesn't cover all heroes but hopefully will give you a good idea to start with.

Mid is most suited for level dependent heroes (heroes with good nuke abilities),most of those heroes will be able defeat their mid opponent without problems once they reach level 6.

Suitable mid heroes: Pudge, Boodseeker, Lion, Lina, Shadow Fiend, Tinker, Doom, Puck, Storm Spirit...

Carry heroes are often seen on mid since they need extra gold.If there is no better mid hero they are reasonable choice but they are preferred to be in woods or babysitted by a support hero.

Tanks usually lack the damage to kill mid opponent,and since they are melee they often get underfed with opponent denies.Tanks are better off helping other heroes in group fights.

Support heroes are self explanatory,simply there is no one to be supported on mid.

Mid is best soloed since you will mostly have someone level dependent there and with someone you will lose part of the experience.

However there are cases of hero picks,that you could send 3 heroes mid lane to get easy first blood and destroy the first mid tower quickly...it will allow 2 of your players to get solo experience and give them that quick tower gold...it could also ruin opponents mid hero role.

Mid is for heroes who can take advantage of RUNES because runes spawn either in between mid/bot or mid/top.

In competitive games runes are fiercely contested because they can literally turn fights around(DD)/force people out of mid(regen)/create unescapable deaths(haste)/create temporarily uncontestable advantages (DD)/cause mass paranoia (illusion/invis).

A rune resets a bottle which total gives something like 405 life and 225 mana.

Wisp + anything is incredibly scary middle (mostly seen in serious business games) because Wisp's tether allows his hp/mana regen to effect his ally and essentially double the bottle resets. Many more vulnerable mids (SF, Storm, Invoker) absolutely cannot do anything but die to a CK + wisp that knows what they are doing for instance.

Runes are made for aggression. The mid hero(es), their job is normally to help the rest of their team win their lanes (99% of the time in unorganized play. More likely to have more customized plans in organized but this is boiler plate and it works fairly well).

Heroes that snowball either themselves or their teams are generally a good choice (Wisp snowballs his team extremely hard). For example, Earth Spirit is over powered (cannot contest his runes, his spells are extremely mana efficient) but better now after nerfs. He is a good mid. TA is extremely good mid because she starts 1 or 2 hit killing people if she gets ahead too much and has 0 down time because her traps are always up.

Lion is not as good because his spells are mana inefficient and his Finger has a lot of down time.

Storm is very good because he theoretically has 0 down time if the player is good enough with mana management/lucky with runes. Also his first item is an Orchid which is an extremely aggressive and powerful item before people have Linkens/BKB.

Puck is like a safer more AoE version of Storm.

Dragon Knight is actually not bad because he snowballs his team by forcing tower fights/slowly beating them to death. He is basically invulnerable against most of the cast for most of the game if he gets a large gold advantage since he buys hybrid defense/offense items like BKB, Halberd, Cuirass, Satanic.

Invoker used to be popular mid but he dies to everything at lv 1/2, has 280 base ms and can't contest/use runes well and needs too many levels to get useful. Most mids get much more useful at 6.

Shadow Shaman is not bad despite being mana inefficient. Many heroes can't prevent the mid tower from falling when he hits 6. He gets extremely scary if he can start taking towers and working towards his Aghanims early in the game.

Pudge is fun but somewhat risky. He runs slow for one thing and is useless if he can't land good hooks.

Tinker is often times better left alone in the jungle to quickly farm his BoT. Mirana is good if paired with a BANE for guaranteed 5 second arrows, so no solo.

Map control heroes like NS and BS are actually usually better placed in a side lane since they often times can't effectively deal with bottle spam + nuke wave + get all the runes play that Puck/SF/DK/etc. can use against them. They're wasting the lane if they can't contest runes because they are always at tower.