Welcome to Dota, you su... well actually you guys have gotten a lot better.
I've been happily forced to rewrite my guide because the problems of the new Dota 2 player are very different from the problems of the DotA 1 player when I originally wrote the guide in 2011. In short, the tools that Valve provided and the learning resources that the community has created are very different than they were in the past. I also think that I can write a better guide now than I could then.
Before we start, I just want to thank you for taking a chance on this game. It takes a long time to refine your skills and learn, but that's often the most rewarding part about playing Dota 2. If you're here because your friends want you to play with them, then the social aspect makes learning easier as friends fix your new player mistakes, or at least give you a foundation that will help you see and correct your errors. Lets see if we can keep those to a minimum.
Dota 2 is a five versus five team game. You win the game by destroying your enemy's Ancient building also known as the Throne before the enemy team destroys yours.
At the start of the game every hero is weak, with little experience and little gold. Experience gives you levels and access to stronger skills, and Gold buys you items that make you do a variety of things, like run faster, do more damage, and cast special spells.
Your goal is to spend your time gaining exp and gold as fast as possible, or assisting your team in doing so while limiting and reducing your opponents' exp and gold gain. If you gain a significant exp and gold advantage by the later stages of the game, it usually allows your team to destroy all heroes in your path, followed immediately by buildings, and ultimately finish killing the enemy Ancient, upon which you win the game. How you go about doing this is playing Dota.
Lets start off with some more basics.
To move your hero to go to these lanes, you select your hero by left clicking on your hero and then right click the ground to move your hero to that position. If there is an enemy where you right click, you will issue an attack command, which means your hero will move to that target and attack when in range. All heroes have a basic attack that is often called a right click or right clicking. This is the main way that you do damage, especially in the early game. Most heroes do a low amount of right click damage in the early game because their levels are low and you have little gold to purchase expensive and strong items.
If you are the hero that does the final damaging blow to kill a creep (called the last hit), then you also get gold! If you do not get the last hit, you only get experience, assuming that you are close enough. This is the first thing that you will have to practice to become a better than average Dota player. Learn to get the last hit on a creep so that you get gold in addition to exp. In addition to last hitting, every player gets 5 gold every 3 seconds just by being in the game. However, last hitting is still extremely important because if you can last hit more often than your opponents, you will help your team get the gold advantage that allows you to buy the items that win you the fights that wins you the game.
This may make you think that this allows you and your opponent to stand in the same lane, but your opponent can attack their creeps when they get below half of their Health Points (HP) by pressing the 'A' key for attack and then left clicking their creeps. If they last hit one of their creeps instead of you, it's called a deny and an exclamation(!) point will appear over their head, showing that the creep was denied. When a creep is denied, it gives less experience than it would have, and there is no chance to receive the gold bounty. You don’t get the gold yourself from denying, but preventing them from getting full exp and any gold is worth the effort.
This creates a scenario where the player who is better at last hitting will get more gold and experience than their opponents, so do your best to focus and last hit for the first advantage in the game.
Being in one of the 3 lanes in the early game is important because of the gold and exp gain, but there are more places you can farm such as neutral camps, which are the many areas where neutral creeps spawn and sit. They can be farmed by either team, and the main locations of these neutral creeps are in the heavily forested regions on the map also known as the Jungle. There are very few heroes in Dota 2 that can gain gold and experience in the jungle at the start of the game because the creeps are stronger than regular creeps, but if your hero is one of those heroes, it's often worth it to put 1 hero in the jungle to start the game.
To sum up the very beginning of the game, heroes are distributed to each lane depending on their role and then do their best to get last hits and exp while limiting their opponents last hits by denying as well as some other advanced methods.
My favorite advanced method to deny your opponents of gold and exp gain while enhancing yours is to Kill Them.
You will get opportunities to attack enemy heroes (called harassing) while you are laning, but that mostly depends on the hero matchups. Matchups in reference to the laning stage (early game) means what heroes you are playing, and what heroes your opponents decided to put in a lane against you.
If your opponent is playing a melee hero (a hero whose right click is very short range) and you are playing a ranged hero (a hero whose right click is a long ranged projectile like an arrow) then you have many opportunities to harass your opponent when they go for last hits. If you harass your opponent enough and his HP becomes too low, it may give you an opportunity to use your skills to slow, damage, or stun (preventing any action) your opponent and Kill Them. If you are the one getting harassed, make sure that you use your consumable HP regeneration items that you purchased at the start of the game to keep your hp full after you take damage so that the damage required to kill you is increased. I’ll tell you which ones to buy later.
If you kill your opponent in lane or throughout the game, you accomplish a few things. First, your opponent isn't in lane anymore because all dead heroes are removed from the map for a set time depending on their level, and after they respawn, they have to walk back to the lane from base. Any exp and gold from creeps that die while they're gone is wasted. Second, you gain exp and gold for being present at their death, and that should make you a higher level, making your skills and right click stronger than your opponent.
With that advantage you just got, it becomes easier to kill them again, and again. This is called snowballing. You gain a small advantage, and you use that to take another advantage, and another advantage. One way to stop snowballs is by killing the player who is snowballing since you get extra gold from a wealthy hero, or a hero who is on a kill streak!
Keep in mind that snowballing might be because of you. If you repeatedly die (also known as 'Feeding' your opponent gold) then you are allowing your opponents to get an advantage and snowball. DO NOT FEED. You want to maximize kills on your opponents, get last hits and exp from creeps and in the meantime minimize your deaths. To avoid feeding, if your opponents are trying to kill you and you think you will lose the fight, it's generally best to throw your stun or slow (if you have one) andIMMEDIATELY run straight towards the nearest tower.
My second favorite advanced method to deny your opponents of gold and exp gain while enhancing yours is to Almost Kill Them.
By Almost Killing Them, you put their life at such a low point that they will be forced to run back to their fountain (which regenerates your health points (HP) and mana points (MP)). They will only go back if they are out of regen items, so it's much better if you kill them instead. If they do run back to their fountain they are wasting time, as creeps are dying without giving exp, creeps are not being last hit, and no one is around to deny you while you are last hitting, which gives you more gold and exp. This is not nearly as good as when you Kill Them, but it's better than nothing.
The best way to harass your opponents is to attack them if you have a ranged advantage, or use your spells to do damage while you get last hits. If you do disable them with a slow or stun, it’s important that you also right click them while they are disabled.
Another version of this is called zoning, or in a sentence, 'yo go zone that offlane hero'. What that means is you put yourself between your opponent and the creep wave to make sure that they stay out of exp range. This is a bit advanced for a new player because you'll more often than not just feed your life away, but that should better teach you your hero's limits, 40+ minutes of pain at a time. You should attempt this when there is only one hero in the lane and you are equal levels. This will often turn into your two heroes auto attacking one another, but as long as you both use regen like a Tango you are gaining advantage because you keep them from exp.
Here is an example video showing this. Spending mana is often worth it to zone as well:
Before I throw more words describing lanes at you, here are the generic descriptions of places on the map. Things that I didn't point out that are worth recognizing, are the super strong Roshan and his icon near the Dire offlane, who can be accessed through the river, the Radiant(green) jungle which is between their Safe Lane and their Mid, and the Dire(red) jungle, which is between their Safe Lane and Mid.
The option to zone your opponent is mostly dependent on the position of your creep wave. A creep wave is where the two spawning creeps on each side of the map meet to fight. Creeps do a very consistent amount of damage, so if no one does any outside damage, it often takes a very long time for the creep balance to get out of whack. If you do extra damage, your wave will have more creeps left over, which does more damage, which kills theirs faster, which results in your wave building up creeps and pushing closer to the enemy’s tower and safety net. Unless you are trying to take a tower, you do NOT want to push a wave, ESPECIALLY in the early game. You should NEVER auto attack, or attack constantly, the creep wave. You should only be attacking their creeps when you are last hitting, and occasionally denying yours (can only attack below 50% hp) if the balance is off. The best rule to follow to keep creep equilibrium (stationary creep wave) is keep the same amount of creeps on their side as on your side.
The reason creep equilibrium is so important is because in the Offlane, or dangerous lane, you want your opponents to be as far away from the safety of their tower as possible. If your creep wave is close to your tower (but not inside the tower's range) then it doesn't take long to run back to the safety of your tower. If they are VERY far away from their tower, it gives you more time and opportunity to chase your opponents and get a kill. It ALSO gives your hero a chance to zone the Offlaner, like we discussed above.
Sometimes Killing Them and Almost Killing Them comes unpredictably, like when one of your allies walks over to your lane from a different lane and helps to kill your opponent. That's called a gank.
Someone setting up a gank is ganking, or is described as a ganker. Ganking is integral to games because it allows you to throw imbalance to lanes, or to hurt your opponents' ability to predict where heroes are. If you show up mid briefly with two extra heroes to gank the enemy mid, this gives your mid hero an advantage that will allow him to lane better because his opponent dies, or almost dies. Ganking is one of the ways a player can control where the game is going. You want to ensure your lanes are collecting more gold and experience, and sometimes that's done by killing enemy heroes and creating pressure on the map.
If your ally on the mid lane plays terrible and has a bad laning stage, you can help him by ganking the enemy mid. Sort of like teaming up on him. If one of your opponents is snowballing, you can use a few heroes to gank them so that they don't get out of control. Always remember that two to three weak heroes is almost always stronger than one fed or snowballing hero because you can team up on him.
The last advanced method is called pulling. To pull, you attack a group of neutral creeps and then run away so they follow you (this is called pulling aggro). While they are following you, they run into YOUR lane creeps, who have no brain, will see the enemy, and follow them back into the jungle to attack them. When you do this, the lane creeps are helping you kill the neutrals, and the neutrals are helping you kill the lane creeps. When the neutrals die, you and anyone nearby get experience. If your lane creeps end up dying to the neutral creeps, then the enemy doesn't get exp for them! If you get the last hit on the neutrals, you ALSO get gold!
I'm sure that was a little confusing, so watch this quick clip for a demonstration of pulling on each side of the map.
To expand on pulling a bit, a regular pull camp will not be enough to clear your wave. In fact, it usually takes 2 neutral camps. You can get your creeps to fight more neutral camps , but first let me explain how neutral creeps come into the game.
At the :00 second mark of every minute (with the exception of the first minute of the game), the game checks to see if there are any neutrals in their spawns. If there are no neutrals in their spawns, a new set of neutrals is spawned. To trick the game, all you have to do is pull the neutrals at the perfect time and run away (:53) and by the time the clock hits :00 a new set of neutrals will spawn, and the previous set will walk home to realize they have neighbors. This is called stacking, and this is one of the ways you can get your creeps to fight extra creeps. Keep in mind that stacking camps also makes farming gold and exp much faster for heroes with strong Area of Effect (aoe), so if you're ever running by a camp on your side of the map, make sure to attack the camp at :53 and run away!
Back to pulling, if you stack your pull camp so that a second camp spawns, you now have two times as many creeps attacking your pull camp. This is by far the easiest way to pull safely, but it isn't the fastest way for your hero to gain levels. The reason is because two camps attacking your creeps at the same time is too much damage. If you use this method for pulling you'll deny your enemy's exp, but you won't get very much exp yourself because few neutrals will be dying each wave. You'll get more or less depending on which creeps spawn because they do different amounts of damage. When you stack pull, I recommend auto attacking so that you can clear more creeps, unlike I did in this clip.
The better way to pull, though more difficult, is to CONNECT the pull. To connect a pull, you're imitating how you originally got your lane creeps there in the first place. Once the neutral camp is almost finished, you need to have already pulled a different close-by neutral camp into the previous one. If you can accomplish this, then you can clear about two full neutral camps with every creep wave. The time to start the pull is at the :13 second mark or the :43 second mark for both sides of the map, but you may need to adjust the time slightly if you are early or late. Connecting the pull is much harder and will require some eyeballing and practice. Usually when 1 full hp creep and 1 half hp creep are alive is when you should start to pull the second camp down. Each neutral camp is slightly different, so practice on this will make perfect!
Here is a video of a connected pull on both sides of the map. You can practice this in an empty game, if you're afraid to try it in a real game.
Make sure that you don't mess up your pull connect! If you do, your lane will push, which messes up the lane equilibrium. Messing up the lane equilibrium will give your opponents more exp, more chances at last hits, and it makes it harder for you to gank them. It's much harder to connect the pull on the dire side, so be extra careful on dire.
If you DO want to push, doing a single pull without stacking or pulling through is fine, but it's rare that you do this on purpose.
Pulling is a really good way to get levels in the early game, and an okay way to get gold. The most important part is that you have two people in 'one' lane getting levels, and it denies your opponent from levels because some of the creeps die in the jungle!
Keep in mind that all exp gained by killing enemies is gained by your team in an area, so one hero standing in lane gets all the exp from the creeps in lane, and one person pulling gets all the experience from the neutrals that die near them. If you both stand in lane, you split that same exp equally. One hero pulling and one in lane is much better for exp gain overall for your team.
At this point I've written a lot about 'the laning stage'. No game of Dota 2 is the same as another game of Dota 2, but each game can be referred to by how far into the game it is. There are three general Phases of the Game, and I'm going to outline how you should generally play during each stage. As you play more dota, you should and will think less about what phase you are in, and more about how each game feels. That's how you'll learn to make decisions in game.
For new players, note that the Laning Stage often goes on a bit longer because the players don't move around the map as much to gank, they are less likely to group up and push towers efficiently, and they don't understand the strengths and abilities of their heroes as well. You will get better at doing this as you improve in skill level.
The laning stage is so integral to how you play the later stages of the game because it sets tempo and gold advantage. If one team has better hero picks, good lane setup (what heroes go where) or just plays better, they will 'win' the early game, which should 'reward' them with more map control, gold advantage, and exp advantage.
Map control is an important concept when we talk about the next phases of the game.
Again, this stage is generally categorized by pushing. Pushing towers is important for two reasons. The first is that your team gets a lot of gold when a tower dies. When your team destroys an enemy tier 1 tower (the first ring of towers), everyone gains 160 gold. If the tower gets denied (towers can only be denied if they are below 10% hp), then your team only gets 80 gold. Higher tier towers are worth more gold, but that's still an 800 gold advantage for your team if you get the last hit! It's extremely important that your opponents don't deny your tower, since it's equivalent to 1-2 hero kills in terms of gold!
In addition, if you are the hero to get the last hit on the enemy tower, you get an EXTRA 150-250 gold on top of the 160 from the bounty, which means you can get a massive gold advantage (equivalent to 1-2 kills) from getting the last hit on the tower, rather than it being denied. Towers give your team a BIG gold advantage.
The second advantage that pushing towers gives you is map control. Map control is your ability to see your opponents' movement, move undetected where you want, and use that tactical information to influence the game in your favor. With the towers in the lanes, they not only provide resistance to pushing, they also provide true sight(to see invisible things) and vision of your opponents. When towers are up, there are simply less paths to walk without being seen. Most importantly, towers provide a team a place where they can use Teleport Scrolls(or TP scrolls) to teleport to.
A Teleport Scroll costs 100 gold to purchase, and 75 mana to use. You can use them to teleport to a building your team controls, which helps you adjust to your opponents' tactical maneuvers and set up some of your own. It's one of the most important items in the game and you should ALWAYS carry one once you reach about 8 minutes into the game, though sometimes earlier.
Another way that towers being dead helps you is it gives you more space to place aggressive observer wards, and makes it harder for your opponents to place observer wards since there are more paths you can travel now.
An observer ward(or obs ward) is an item that has limited availability that you can place on the ground or cliffs that gives you vision for 7 minutes. It's invisible to enemies(unless they have truesight/invis detection), and helps you track your opponent's movements and make decisions based on that.
Placing observer wards is an essential part of the game that gives you big advantages. Your team should be placing them throughout the game in locations that you expect your opponents to move through, areas that give you a tactical advantage to have vision of such as outside towers, up high ground since you can't see up hill, and by the roshan pit. Sometimes you even want to place wards deep in enemy territory so that when you move into their territory to gank, your ganks become easier.
In the Laning Stage you should be placing obs wards in lane to see enemy heroes ganking by walking through the lane or at the river rune spots to see rune spawns and help your mid get them.
In the mid and late game, you should be warding based on how the game is going, like where you expect the enemy to be, or where the fights will be. If you are behind, the enemy will be close to your towers. If there is no clear advantage, perhaps wards across the middle of the map is safe. If you are ahead, you should be warding closer to their towers where you plan to start fights.
The last aspect that defines the mid game is that there will be a lot of ganks. At low levels ganking will be very prone to mistakes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't practice it. The best ganks often involve 1-3 heroes depending on how many stuns and how much damage you need to get a kill.
Dota is about efficiency so it's important that you move as groups of 2 or 3 to get ganks off while your other 2 players are farming elsewhere on the map. It makes it harder to predict the ganks in addition to allowing your team to profit heavily instead of just a moderate amount.
The easiest way to throne an enemy (though not required) is to first 'Rax' them, or kill at least 1 set of barracks. Each lane has a melee and ranged barracks. When you destroy an enemy barracks it actually makes YOUR creeps in that lane stronger. If you destroyed the melee Rax, your melee creeps are stronger. If you destroy the ranged, your ranged creeps in that lane get stronger. The upgraded creeps get more damage, more hp, and they give less gold and exp, which over the course of the game disadvantages your opponents' income. It also constantly pushes in that lane towards the enemy base since the lane equilibrium is messed up.
All of this pressure that Raxing your opponents creates makes it easier to Rax a second time on a different lane, and once you have 2-Raxed your opponents, the victory is almost completely assured because it becomes far too hard for your opponents to defend due to the lanes always pushing in. Once you get all 3 Raxes, you have a 99% assured victory, as your creeps get a final huge upgrade and become almost unbeatable. I have played Dota close to 10,000 games, and I've only won against a triple rax less than 20 times. It is possible to come back from that kind of a disadvantage, but it has to be late game, and you have to have the right heroes for it, so do your best to Rax your opponents, and don't get Raxed yourself.Before we talked how lane equilibrium was something you wanted to keep neutral, but in the late game pushing is the better strategy. That's because it leads to a conflict of interest for the enemy team. If you have been Raxed, and you want to leave the base, you have to first make sure that the creep wave is pushed far out of your base because otherwise the strong enemy creeps will enter your base and do more damage to your structures, eventually leading to getting throned.
It's clear that Raxing is the best way to win the game, but the important part is that you do it safely. To approach up the hill into the enemy's tier-3 towers and barracks requires you to go uphill where you can't see, and you'll be standing in a clumped up group which makes your opponents' aoe spells much more effective, as they'll hit more of your heroes.
When attempting to rax there is often a team fight there, which leads to chasing their heroes back to fountain, which can mean overextending, or getting too far into dangerous territory. If you overextend deep into their base and then feed your lives away, the push is usually stopped. If you push high ground and FEED your lives without taking the barracks, you are throwing the game away.
'Throwing' means that you had an advantage and you should have taken an objective, but you did something stupid and lost your chance to do it then. You threw ownership of the win to your opponents. Don't be stupid. Take the barracks and get out of their base immediately afterward. If you don't have a lot of time, just take 1 barracks, preferably the melee barracks, since it makes your creeps much stronger than the ranged barracks.
Everything I just told you about Raxing left out one important part and that's that Raxing is easiest when your opponents are dead, which means you have to kill them.
To kill the enemy heroes, you need to have to be stronger than them. Strength in Dota can be outlined in 4 generic ways, some of which I've talked about already. Gold advantage which leads to item advantages, Exp advantage which leads to more stats and more skill points (so more damage and utility), tactical advantage like fighting by your barracks where your towers are, and finally the advantage of outplaying your opponents.
The possibility to outplay your opponents is what swings games in many different ways and ALWAYS allows you to win fights even if you have less gold and exp. One of your allies might completely screw up his ultimate which makes your team fight weaker than it should have been. Perhaps one of your important heroes might get bursted down at the start of the fight, without even using his spells. Maybe your enemies got a little too lucky with their crits and killed you faster than planned.
There are a lot of ways that your opponents can outplay you, or you can make mistakes allowing your opponents to outplay you, so the safest way to take a barracks, or attempt to take a barracks is to do a Gank and Push.
When you have a hero advantage like that there's a really good chance that you also have a gold+exp advantage in that team fight as well, since some of the enemy team's gold is now sitting around waiting to respawn.
A gank and push is a very standard method to give you an advantage when pushing that gives you a better chance to take an enemy barracks even if you're behind in gold and exp. If you are in any way worried about winning the teamfight, attempt to gank and push.
Another basic version of this is to kill Roshan, which drops an Aegis of the Immortal item which your carry should usually pick up. If you die with Aegis, you are only dead for 5 seconds, upon which you respawn at full HP where you died. When you push withAegis, you essentially have 6 heroes instead of 5, which in a way also gives you a gold and exp advantage. These are the 2 safest ways to push! Use one of them when you're preparing to take an enemy barracks to increase your chance of winning.
5 man strategies can be very frustrating to deal with especially if you're playing a ganking hero like Bounty Hunter or Riki. Those heroes strive on killing heroes that are by themselves, so if your opponents are 5 manning it's difficult to kill someone without being punished.
The counter to 5 manning is to split farm and split push.
To explain this lets talk about farming efficiency.
The fastest way to farm the map is to have 5 heroes in different places on the map killing jungle camps. 1 can be farming each lane, 2 heroes can farm each jungle, or a variation like that. This isn't very safe because it gives your opponents many choices for ganks, but it gets your team a LOT of gold.
If a team is 5 manning, they can't farm very rapidly because they are moving in a very small clump which has the farming efficiency of about 2 heroes.
To counter this, as boring as it is, you need to spread across the map(with good ward vision), and farm random places on the map where the enemy 5 heroes aren't farming. If you do this without getting killed(due to seeing where their clump is moving because of your wards), you will be gaining more gold and exp than your opponents.
They want to force a fight because they have gold advantage and good teamfight heroes (hence why they 5 man), and you want to outfarm them by split farming until your team is strong enough to fight them.
Their counter to your split farming is to push with their gold advantage. If they push all of your towers while you split farm, they easily get more gold advantage if they do it fast since towers give a lot of gold advantage. If they push your high ground and take a Rax, it also doesn't matter if you've been split farming. Raxes are far too important to let fall, so they force you to teamfight, which gives them an advantage.
To counter their push, you either need to endlessly counterpush by spamming ranged skills that kill their creeps, and prevent their push, or you need to Split-push, which is often called Rat Dota.
To defeat 5 man, you have to channel your inner rat, and to do this you have to push all of the lanes that your opponents aren't pushing. For example, there are a couple heroes that are good at split pushing, and they usually have units they can summon to tank damage, and they have high physical or tower damage.
While your opponents 5 man and attempt to push towers, you are threatening to take a tower by yourself, just 1 hero. It usually takes a little longer than when 5 heroes do it, but if their towers are constantly threatened with split push, it becomes very dangerous to push because they are likely to gain no more than your opponents, and while using less hero resources. To prevent an even trade, they will teleport 1 hero back to defend, and then the push usually can't continue because they no longer have 5 heroes to properly teamfight. By split pushing and split farming, you are delaying their way to take advantage (pushing due to 5 man) until your team is farmed enough to win a fight.
That may be a bit over your head if you are brand new to Dota, but I figured that some groundwork of what to do in the late game would be useful.
Just remember, the late game of Dota involves people farming items across the map, trying to avoid ganks which lead to pushes, controlling Roshan and his Aegis so that they can't push with that, and sometimes strategies of split push and 5 manning.
At lower levels you will mainly see 5 people farming the entire game until team fights happen and a gank and push becomes easy, but don't be afraid to start thinking about how to counter those kinds of strategies.
I've been happily forced to rewrite my guide because the problems of the new Dota 2 player are very different from the problems of the DotA 1 player when I originally wrote the guide in 2011. In short, the tools that Valve provided and the learning resources that the community has created are very different than they were in the past. I also think that I can write a better guide now than I could then.
Before we start, I just want to thank you for taking a chance on this game. It takes a long time to refine your skills and learn, but that's often the most rewarding part about playing Dota 2. If you're here because your friends want you to play with them, then the social aspect makes learning easier as friends fix your new player mistakes, or at least give you a foundation that will help you see and correct your errors. Lets see if we can keep those to a minimum.
Dota 2 is a five versus five team game. You win the game by destroying your enemy's Ancient building also known as the Throne before the enemy team destroys yours.
At the start of the game every hero is weak, with little experience and little gold. Experience gives you levels and access to stronger skills, and Gold buys you items that make you do a variety of things, like run faster, do more damage, and cast special spells.
Your goal is to spend your time gaining exp and gold as fast as possible, or assisting your team in doing so while limiting and reducing your opponents' exp and gold gain. If you gain a significant exp and gold advantage by the later stages of the game, it usually allows your team to destroy all heroes in your path, followed immediately by buildings, and ultimately finish killing the enemy Ancient, upon which you win the game. How you go about doing this is playing Dota.
Lets start off with some more basics.
Creeps
There are three lanes that spawn creeps every 30 seconds at the :00 and :30 mark for the entire game. These creeps run down each lane for both teams and attack each other until they die. You want to be close by for that because when your enemies' creeps die, they release experience for your team in the area.To move your hero to go to these lanes, you select your hero by left clicking on your hero and then right click the ground to move your hero to that position. If there is an enemy where you right click, you will issue an attack command, which means your hero will move to that target and attack when in range. All heroes have a basic attack that is often called a right click or right clicking. This is the main way that you do damage, especially in the early game. Most heroes do a low amount of right click damage in the early game because their levels are low and you have little gold to purchase expensive and strong items.
If you are the hero that does the final damaging blow to kill a creep (called the last hit), then you also get gold! If you do not get the last hit, you only get experience, assuming that you are close enough. This is the first thing that you will have to practice to become a better than average Dota player. Learn to get the last hit on a creep so that you get gold in addition to exp. In addition to last hitting, every player gets 5 gold every 3 seconds just by being in the game. However, last hitting is still extremely important because if you can last hit more often than your opponents, you will help your team get the gold advantage that allows you to buy the items that win you the fights that wins you the game.
This may make you think that this allows you and your opponent to stand in the same lane, but your opponent can attack their creeps when they get below half of their Health Points (HP) by pressing the 'A' key for attack and then left clicking their creeps. If they last hit one of their creeps instead of you, it's called a deny and an exclamation(!) point will appear over their head, showing that the creep was denied. When a creep is denied, it gives less experience than it would have, and there is no chance to receive the gold bounty. You don’t get the gold yourself from denying, but preventing them from getting full exp and any gold is worth the effort.
This creates a scenario where the player who is better at last hitting will get more gold and experience than their opponents, so do your best to focus and last hit for the first advantage in the game.
Being in one of the 3 lanes in the early game is important because of the gold and exp gain, but there are more places you can farm such as neutral camps, which are the many areas where neutral creeps spawn and sit. They can be farmed by either team, and the main locations of these neutral creeps are in the heavily forested regions on the map also known as the Jungle. There are very few heroes in Dota 2 that can gain gold and experience in the jungle at the start of the game because the creeps are stronger than regular creeps, but if your hero is one of those heroes, it's often worth it to put 1 hero in the jungle to start the game.
To sum up the very beginning of the game, heroes are distributed to each lane depending on their role and then do their best to get last hits and exp while limiting their opponents last hits by denying as well as some other advanced methods.
My favorite advanced method to deny your opponents of gold and exp gain while enhancing yours is to Kill Them.
You will get opportunities to attack enemy heroes (called harassing) while you are laning, but that mostly depends on the hero matchups. Matchups in reference to the laning stage (early game) means what heroes you are playing, and what heroes your opponents decided to put in a lane against you.
If your opponent is playing a melee hero (a hero whose right click is very short range) and you are playing a ranged hero (a hero whose right click is a long ranged projectile like an arrow) then you have many opportunities to harass your opponent when they go for last hits. If you harass your opponent enough and his HP becomes too low, it may give you an opportunity to use your skills to slow, damage, or stun (preventing any action) your opponent and Kill Them. If you are the one getting harassed, make sure that you use your consumable HP regeneration items that you purchased at the start of the game to keep your hp full after you take damage so that the damage required to kill you is increased. I’ll tell you which ones to buy later.
If you kill your opponent in lane or throughout the game, you accomplish a few things. First, your opponent isn't in lane anymore because all dead heroes are removed from the map for a set time depending on their level, and after they respawn, they have to walk back to the lane from base. Any exp and gold from creeps that die while they're gone is wasted. Second, you gain exp and gold for being present at their death, and that should make you a higher level, making your skills and right click stronger than your opponent.
With that advantage you just got, it becomes easier to kill them again, and again. This is called snowballing. You gain a small advantage, and you use that to take another advantage, and another advantage. One way to stop snowballs is by killing the player who is snowballing since you get extra gold from a wealthy hero, or a hero who is on a kill streak!
Keep in mind that snowballing might be because of you. If you repeatedly die (also known as 'Feeding' your opponent gold) then you are allowing your opponents to get an advantage and snowball. DO NOT FEED. You want to maximize kills on your opponents, get last hits and exp from creeps and in the meantime minimize your deaths. To avoid feeding, if your opponents are trying to kill you and you think you will lose the fight, it's generally best to throw your stun or slow (if you have one) andIMMEDIATELY run straight towards the nearest tower.
My second favorite advanced method to deny your opponents of gold and exp gain while enhancing yours is to Almost Kill Them.
By Almost Killing Them, you put their life at such a low point that they will be forced to run back to their fountain (which regenerates your health points (HP) and mana points (MP)). They will only go back if they are out of regen items, so it's much better if you kill them instead. If they do run back to their fountain they are wasting time, as creeps are dying without giving exp, creeps are not being last hit, and no one is around to deny you while you are last hitting, which gives you more gold and exp. This is not nearly as good as when you Kill Them, but it's better than nothing.
The best way to harass your opponents is to attack them if you have a ranged advantage, or use your spells to do damage while you get last hits. If you do disable them with a slow or stun, it’s important that you also right click them while they are disabled.
Another version of this is called zoning, or in a sentence, 'yo go zone that offlane hero'. What that means is you put yourself between your opponent and the creep wave to make sure that they stay out of exp range. This is a bit advanced for a new player because you'll more often than not just feed your life away, but that should better teach you your hero's limits, 40+ minutes of pain at a time. You should attempt this when there is only one hero in the lane and you are equal levels. This will often turn into your two heroes auto attacking one another, but as long as you both use regen like a Tango you are gaining advantage because you keep them from exp.
Here is an example video showing this. Spending mana is often worth it to zone as well:
Before I throw more words describing lanes at you, here are the generic descriptions of places on the map. Things that I didn't point out that are worth recognizing, are the super strong Roshan and his icon near the Dire offlane, who can be accessed through the river, the Radiant(green) jungle which is between their Safe Lane and their Mid, and the Dire(red) jungle, which is between their Safe Lane and Mid.
The option to zone your opponent is mostly dependent on the position of your creep wave. A creep wave is where the two spawning creeps on each side of the map meet to fight. Creeps do a very consistent amount of damage, so if no one does any outside damage, it often takes a very long time for the creep balance to get out of whack. If you do extra damage, your wave will have more creeps left over, which does more damage, which kills theirs faster, which results in your wave building up creeps and pushing closer to the enemy’s tower and safety net. Unless you are trying to take a tower, you do NOT want to push a wave, ESPECIALLY in the early game. You should NEVER auto attack, or attack constantly, the creep wave. You should only be attacking their creeps when you are last hitting, and occasionally denying yours (can only attack below 50% hp) if the balance is off. The best rule to follow to keep creep equilibrium (stationary creep wave) is keep the same amount of creeps on their side as on your side.
The reason creep equilibrium is so important is because in the Offlane, or dangerous lane, you want your opponents to be as far away from the safety of their tower as possible. If your creep wave is close to your tower (but not inside the tower's range) then it doesn't take long to run back to the safety of your tower. If they are VERY far away from their tower, it gives you more time and opportunity to chase your opponents and get a kill. It ALSO gives your hero a chance to zone the Offlaner, like we discussed above.
Sometimes Killing Them and Almost Killing Them comes unpredictably, like when one of your allies walks over to your lane from a different lane and helps to kill your opponent. That's called a gank.
Someone setting up a gank is ganking, or is described as a ganker. Ganking is integral to games because it allows you to throw imbalance to lanes, or to hurt your opponents' ability to predict where heroes are. If you show up mid briefly with two extra heroes to gank the enemy mid, this gives your mid hero an advantage that will allow him to lane better because his opponent dies, or almost dies. Ganking is one of the ways a player can control where the game is going. You want to ensure your lanes are collecting more gold and experience, and sometimes that's done by killing enemy heroes and creating pressure on the map.
If your ally on the mid lane plays terrible and has a bad laning stage, you can help him by ganking the enemy mid. Sort of like teaming up on him. If one of your opponents is snowballing, you can use a few heroes to gank them so that they don't get out of control. Always remember that two to three weak heroes is almost always stronger than one fed or snowballing hero because you can team up on him.
The last advanced method is called pulling. To pull, you attack a group of neutral creeps and then run away so they follow you (this is called pulling aggro). While they are following you, they run into YOUR lane creeps, who have no brain, will see the enemy, and follow them back into the jungle to attack them. When you do this, the lane creeps are helping you kill the neutrals, and the neutrals are helping you kill the lane creeps. When the neutrals die, you and anyone nearby get experience. If your lane creeps end up dying to the neutral creeps, then the enemy doesn't get exp for them! If you get the last hit on the neutrals, you ALSO get gold!
I'm sure that was a little confusing, so watch this quick clip for a demonstration of pulling on each side of the map.
Radiant Single Pull:
At the :00 second mark of every minute (with the exception of the first minute of the game), the game checks to see if there are any neutrals in their spawns. If there are no neutrals in their spawns, a new set of neutrals is spawned. To trick the game, all you have to do is pull the neutrals at the perfect time and run away (:53) and by the time the clock hits :00 a new set of neutrals will spawn, and the previous set will walk home to realize they have neighbors. This is called stacking, and this is one of the ways you can get your creeps to fight extra creeps. Keep in mind that stacking camps also makes farming gold and exp much faster for heroes with strong Area of Effect (aoe), so if you're ever running by a camp on your side of the map, make sure to attack the camp at :53 and run away!
Back to pulling, if you stack your pull camp so that a second camp spawns, you now have two times as many creeps attacking your pull camp. This is by far the easiest way to pull safely, but it isn't the fastest way for your hero to gain levels. The reason is because two camps attacking your creeps at the same time is too much damage. If you use this method for pulling you'll deny your enemy's exp, but you won't get very much exp yourself because few neutrals will be dying each wave. You'll get more or less depending on which creeps spawn because they do different amounts of damage. When you stack pull, I recommend auto attacking so that you can clear more creeps, unlike I did in this clip.
The better way to pull, though more difficult, is to CONNECT the pull. To connect a pull, you're imitating how you originally got your lane creeps there in the first place. Once the neutral camp is almost finished, you need to have already pulled a different close-by neutral camp into the previous one. If you can accomplish this, then you can clear about two full neutral camps with every creep wave. The time to start the pull is at the :13 second mark or the :43 second mark for both sides of the map, but you may need to adjust the time slightly if you are early or late. Connecting the pull is much harder and will require some eyeballing and practice. Usually when 1 full hp creep and 1 half hp creep are alive is when you should start to pull the second camp down. Each neutral camp is slightly different, so practice on this will make perfect!
Here is a video of a connected pull on both sides of the map. You can practice this in an empty game, if you're afraid to try it in a real game.
If you DO want to push, doing a single pull without stacking or pulling through is fine, but it's rare that you do this on purpose.
Pulling is a really good way to get levels in the early game, and an okay way to get gold. The most important part is that you have two people in 'one' lane getting levels, and it denies your opponent from levels because some of the creeps die in the jungle!
Keep in mind that all exp gained by killing enemies is gained by your team in an area, so one hero standing in lane gets all the exp from the creeps in lane, and one person pulling gets all the experience from the neutrals that die near them. If you both stand in lane, you split that same exp equally. One hero pulling and one in lane is much better for exp gain overall for your team.
At this point I've written a lot about 'the laning stage'. No game of Dota 2 is the same as another game of Dota 2, but each game can be referred to by how far into the game it is. There are three general Phases of the Game, and I'm going to outline how you should generally play during each stage. As you play more dota, you should and will think less about what phase you are in, and more about how each game feels. That's how you'll learn to make decisions in game.
Somewhere between minute 0-15 is defined by the Laning Stage. As you may have guessed, laning means that you spend a lot of your time in one of the three lanes in close proximity to your enemies gaining gold and exp since you are still very weak in levels and items. Make sure that you stick to a variety of the advanced methods I outlined above. Remember that you are trying to maximize your and your team's exp and gold gain, while limiting your opponents'! That means pulling, getting exp and last hits from each of the three lanes, sometimes ganking, zoning your opponents when possible and sometimes pushing towers. And, you know, NOT FEEDING.
For new players, note that the Laning Stage often goes on a bit longer because the players don't move around the map as much to gank, they are less likely to group up and push towers efficiently, and they don't understand the strengths and abilities of their heroes as well. You will get better at doing this as you improve in skill level.
The laning stage is so integral to how you play the later stages of the game because it sets tempo and gold advantage. If one team has better hero picks, good lane setup (what heroes go where) or just plays better, they will 'win' the early game, which should 'reward' them with more map control, gold advantage, and exp advantage.
Map control is an important concept when we talk about the next phases of the game.
Mid Game
Mid game is defined as the part of the game where teams move around the map and begin to push and destroy towers. Most heroes will be between level 6 and level 11 and have access to their ultimates(at level 6). If we just reference pub games, there won't be a lot of coordination, but some of your players will start moving where the fights are, or moving where the best place to get last hits, or farm is. This stage of the game is going to be completely weird for new players because their sense of teamwork and game direction is terrible. Everyone on your team is going to do what they think is best, and usually best for their gold and exp intake, rather than the team's as a whole. To make things worse, organizing them for something different than their plan can be difficult as well. The mid game is the part in the game where playing with friends who are willing to work together makes the game a lot more fun.Again, this stage is generally categorized by pushing. Pushing towers is important for two reasons. The first is that your team gets a lot of gold when a tower dies. When your team destroys an enemy tier 1 tower (the first ring of towers), everyone gains 160 gold. If the tower gets denied (towers can only be denied if they are below 10% hp), then your team only gets 80 gold. Higher tier towers are worth more gold, but that's still an 800 gold advantage for your team if you get the last hit! It's extremely important that your opponents don't deny your tower, since it's equivalent to 1-2 hero kills in terms of gold!
In addition, if you are the hero to get the last hit on the enemy tower, you get an EXTRA 150-250 gold on top of the 160 from the bounty, which means you can get a massive gold advantage (equivalent to 1-2 kills) from getting the last hit on the tower, rather than it being denied. Towers give your team a BIG gold advantage.
The second advantage that pushing towers gives you is map control. Map control is your ability to see your opponents' movement, move undetected where you want, and use that tactical information to influence the game in your favor. With the towers in the lanes, they not only provide resistance to pushing, they also provide true sight(to see invisible things) and vision of your opponents. When towers are up, there are simply less paths to walk without being seen. Most importantly, towers provide a team a place where they can use Teleport Scrolls(or TP scrolls) to teleport to.
A Teleport Scroll costs 100 gold to purchase, and 75 mana to use. You can use them to teleport to a building your team controls, which helps you adjust to your opponents' tactical maneuvers and set up some of your own. It's one of the most important items in the game and you should ALWAYS carry one once you reach about 8 minutes into the game, though sometimes earlier.
Great uses of TP Scrolls:
- If your mid hero gets ganked, you can teleport into the lane and back him up with a stun or a slow, and maybe turn the kill around.
- If you respawn in your base and your team is pushing top lane, you can teleport to top lane so that you can get there faster and waste less time walking.
- If you barely survive a teamfight, you can immediately teleport home to your fountain so that you can start healing faster.
- If you find a strong enemy hero with good chase but no stun, you can simply teleport home to survive.
Another way that towers being dead helps you is it gives you more space to place aggressive observer wards, and makes it harder for your opponents to place observer wards since there are more paths you can travel now.
An observer ward(or obs ward) is an item that has limited availability that you can place on the ground or cliffs that gives you vision for 7 minutes. It's invisible to enemies(unless they have truesight/invis detection), and helps you track your opponent's movements and make decisions based on that.
Placing observer wards is an essential part of the game that gives you big advantages. Your team should be placing them throughout the game in locations that you expect your opponents to move through, areas that give you a tactical advantage to have vision of such as outside towers, up high ground since you can't see up hill, and by the roshan pit. Sometimes you even want to place wards deep in enemy territory so that when you move into their territory to gank, your ganks become easier.
In the Laning Stage you should be placing obs wards in lane to see enemy heroes ganking by walking through the lane or at the river rune spots to see rune spawns and help your mid get them.
In the mid and late game, you should be warding based on how the game is going, like where you expect the enemy to be, or where the fights will be. If you are behind, the enemy will be close to your towers. If there is no clear advantage, perhaps wards across the middle of the map is safe. If you are ahead, you should be warding closer to their towers where you plan to start fights.
Another early use of wards is to block the enemy jungle camps. Warding the pull camp operates on the same principle as stacking. If there is something in the camp, the camp will not respawn at the :00 mark, and wards count as something in the camp. If you then ward the pull camp, creeps will not spawn there, and that prevents your opponents from pulling! You will often block the enemy pull camps to prevent supports from pulling against you.
The last aspect that defines the mid game is that there will be a lot of ganks. At low levels ganking will be very prone to mistakes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't practice it. The best ganks often involve 1-3 heroes depending on how many stuns and how much damage you need to get a kill.
Dota is about efficiency so it's important that you move as groups of 2 or 3 to get ganks off while your other 2 players are farming elsewhere on the map. It makes it harder to predict the ganks in addition to allowing your team to profit heavily instead of just a moderate amount.
Late Game
The last stage of a Dota game has by far the most teamwork, the most organization and the most team fighting, which means fighting 5 heroes versus 5 heroes. Where these fights happen changes due to a few factors, but generally the last fight involves destroying the enemy throne.The easiest way to throne an enemy (though not required) is to first 'Rax' them, or kill at least 1 set of barracks. Each lane has a melee and ranged barracks. When you destroy an enemy barracks it actually makes YOUR creeps in that lane stronger. If you destroyed the melee Rax, your melee creeps are stronger. If you destroy the ranged, your ranged creeps in that lane get stronger. The upgraded creeps get more damage, more hp, and they give less gold and exp, which over the course of the game disadvantages your opponents' income. It also constantly pushes in that lane towards the enemy base since the lane equilibrium is messed up.
All of this pressure that Raxing your opponents creates makes it easier to Rax a second time on a different lane, and once you have 2-Raxed your opponents, the victory is almost completely assured because it becomes far too hard for your opponents to defend due to the lanes always pushing in. Once you get all 3 Raxes, you have a 99% assured victory, as your creeps get a final huge upgrade and become almost unbeatable. I have played Dota close to 10,000 games, and I've only won against a triple rax less than 20 times. It is possible to come back from that kind of a disadvantage, but it has to be late game, and you have to have the right heroes for it, so do your best to Rax your opponents, and don't get Raxed yourself.Before we talked how lane equilibrium was something you wanted to keep neutral, but in the late game pushing is the better strategy. That's because it leads to a conflict of interest for the enemy team. If you have been Raxed, and you want to leave the base, you have to first make sure that the creep wave is pushed far out of your base because otherwise the strong enemy creeps will enter your base and do more damage to your structures, eventually leading to getting throned.
It's clear that Raxing is the best way to win the game, but the important part is that you do it safely. To approach up the hill into the enemy's tier-3 towers and barracks requires you to go uphill where you can't see, and you'll be standing in a clumped up group which makes your opponents' aoe spells much more effective, as they'll hit more of your heroes.
When attempting to rax there is often a team fight there, which leads to chasing their heroes back to fountain, which can mean overextending, or getting too far into dangerous territory. If you overextend deep into their base and then feed your lives away, the push is usually stopped. If you push high ground and FEED your lives without taking the barracks, you are throwing the game away.
'Throwing' means that you had an advantage and you should have taken an objective, but you did something stupid and lost your chance to do it then. You threw ownership of the win to your opponents. Don't be stupid. Take the barracks and get out of their base immediately afterward. If you don't have a lot of time, just take 1 barracks, preferably the melee barracks, since it makes your creeps much stronger than the ranged barracks.
Everything I just told you about Raxing left out one important part and that's that Raxing is easiest when your opponents are dead, which means you have to kill them.
To kill the enemy heroes, you need to have to be stronger than them. Strength in Dota can be outlined in 4 generic ways, some of which I've talked about already. Gold advantage which leads to item advantages, Exp advantage which leads to more stats and more skill points (so more damage and utility), tactical advantage like fighting by your barracks where your towers are, and finally the advantage of outplaying your opponents.
The possibility to outplay your opponents is what swings games in many different ways and ALWAYS allows you to win fights even if you have less gold and exp. One of your allies might completely screw up his ultimate which makes your team fight weaker than it should have been. Perhaps one of your important heroes might get bursted down at the start of the fight, without even using his spells. Maybe your enemies got a little too lucky with their crits and killed you faster than planned.
There are a lot of ways that your opponents can outplay you, or you can make mistakes allowing your opponents to outplay you, so the safest way to take a barracks, or attempt to take a barracks is to do a Gank and Push.
Gank and Push Strategy
When you do a gank and push, you generally grab an item called a smoke of deceit which makes your team invisible to enemy wards and creeps (but nearby enemy heroes and towers will reveal you). You push your lanes away from your base, smoke your team, jump on whatever hero you see on the map, and all of the sudden you have their death timer in time to force a team fight where it's 5v4.When you have a hero advantage like that there's a really good chance that you also have a gold+exp advantage in that team fight as well, since some of the enemy team's gold is now sitting around waiting to respawn.
A gank and push is a very standard method to give you an advantage when pushing that gives you a better chance to take an enemy barracks even if you're behind in gold and exp. If you are in any way worried about winning the teamfight, attempt to gank and push.
Another basic version of this is to kill Roshan, which drops an Aegis of the Immortal item which your carry should usually pick up. If you die with Aegis, you are only dead for 5 seconds, upon which you respawn at full HP where you died. When you push withAegis, you essentially have 6 heroes instead of 5, which in a way also gives you a gold and exp advantage. These are the 2 safest ways to push! Use one of them when you're preparing to take an enemy barracks to increase your chance of winning.
5 Manning Strategy
5 Manning is the counter to the gank and push. When your team 5 mans, you are moving around the map in a group of 5 in case a teamfight starts. It counters gank and push because you wait for you opponents to start a 5v1 fight, but in reality it's a 5v5. If your team has better teamfight heroes, or you think you have the gold advantage, then you will usually 5 man to protect your heroes from getting ganked, and the enemy team performing a gank and push.5 man strategies can be very frustrating to deal with especially if you're playing a ganking hero like Bounty Hunter or Riki. Those heroes strive on killing heroes that are by themselves, so if your opponents are 5 manning it's difficult to kill someone without being punished.
The counter to 5 manning is to split farm and split push.
To explain this lets talk about farming efficiency.
The fastest way to farm the map is to have 5 heroes in different places on the map killing jungle camps. 1 can be farming each lane, 2 heroes can farm each jungle, or a variation like that. This isn't very safe because it gives your opponents many choices for ganks, but it gets your team a LOT of gold.
If a team is 5 manning, they can't farm very rapidly because they are moving in a very small clump which has the farming efficiency of about 2 heroes.
To counter this, as boring as it is, you need to spread across the map(with good ward vision), and farm random places on the map where the enemy 5 heroes aren't farming. If you do this without getting killed(due to seeing where their clump is moving because of your wards), you will be gaining more gold and exp than your opponents.
They want to force a fight because they have gold advantage and good teamfight heroes (hence why they 5 man), and you want to outfarm them by split farming until your team is strong enough to fight them.
Their counter to your split farming is to push with their gold advantage. If they push all of your towers while you split farm, they easily get more gold advantage if they do it fast since towers give a lot of gold advantage. If they push your high ground and take a Rax, it also doesn't matter if you've been split farming. Raxes are far too important to let fall, so they force you to teamfight, which gives them an advantage.
To counter their push, you either need to endlessly counterpush by spamming ranged skills that kill their creeps, and prevent their push, or you need to Split-push, which is often called Rat Dota.
Split Pushing Strategy
Split pushing is best explained by using a vermin or rat analogy. Lets say you are 1 person in a large room and there are rats around the room that you're trying to kill because they are eating your cheese spread across the floor of the room. When you go to chase 1 rat away in one corner, that rat escapes into a hole and the other rats in the room are in the mean time eating cheese. You then run to the other side of the room to stop those rats, but the rat that you first chased away has reappeared.To defeat 5 man, you have to channel your inner rat, and to do this you have to push all of the lanes that your opponents aren't pushing. For example, there are a couple heroes that are good at split pushing, and they usually have units they can summon to tank damage, and they have high physical or tower damage.
While your opponents 5 man and attempt to push towers, you are threatening to take a tower by yourself, just 1 hero. It usually takes a little longer than when 5 heroes do it, but if their towers are constantly threatened with split push, it becomes very dangerous to push because they are likely to gain no more than your opponents, and while using less hero resources. To prevent an even trade, they will teleport 1 hero back to defend, and then the push usually can't continue because they no longer have 5 heroes to properly teamfight. By split pushing and split farming, you are delaying their way to take advantage (pushing due to 5 man) until your team is farmed enough to win a fight.
That may be a bit over your head if you are brand new to Dota, but I figured that some groundwork of what to do in the late game would be useful.
Just remember, the late game of Dota involves people farming items across the map, trying to avoid ganks which lead to pushes, controlling Roshan and his Aegis so that they can't push with that, and sometimes strategies of split push and 5 manning.
At lower levels you will mainly see 5 people farming the entire game until team fights happen and a gank and push becomes easy, but don't be afraid to start thinking about how to counter those kinds of strategies.
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