dota 2 lining strategies

DotA 2 Guide by sheldon_

Understanding and executing lanes and laning strategies

Table of content

1. Introduction

2. General information on lanes and team composition

2.1 Easy lane

2.2 Middle lane

2.3 Hard lane

2.4 Jungle

2.5 How to fill your lanes according to map design

3. How to play different lane combinations

3.1 The 3-1-1 strategy




4. Conclusion and final words

1. Introduction

Welcome to my guide on laning and the strategical aspect of lanes and laning

strategies. In this guide I am going to explain the different lanes, what type of hero

should go to which lane and how you pick good lanes to get an advantage

Every team consists of five heroes, who have got different roles. Many people pick

their heroes just according to their mood and personal favor, but in games of higher

skill level, people are picking heroes to create synergies between the team’s heroes,

to counter enemy heroes and to fill their lanes in the best way.

What advantage do you get from picking your heroes according to a plan with the aim

and to have good lanes?

Good lanes are the backbone of every victory, because the lane is where you start

into the game. You get the first levels and lasthits of the game, and if you picked your

lane so that you get more of this than the enemy, you will most likely get an

advantage you can take into mid- and lategame to win the match.

If you see a good player with way fewer gold and levels than he should have in any

stage of the game, this can usually be tracked back to the lane he was in, where he

got dominated by the enemy who had a better lane and could outplay him.

Good lanes as such are a very difficult topic to explain in one guide, because every

hero is different and thus has got different strengths in lane compared to the enemy

hero(es).

In this guide I am going to explain what type of heroes should go to which lane, which

will prevent you from making the worst mistakes. Although it is a difficult topic to

explain and usually requires quite a bit of experience to understand, I am trying to

explain everything in the most basic way I could.

2. General information on lanes

There are three lanes in the DotA map, top, mid and bot. What defines a lane?

A lane is a path that connects the Radiant and Dire base. It is also the way the

creeps take, and where you farm said creeps during the earlygame or also called

laning phase.

The jungle is seen as a lane itself by some people, because you can farm it like a

lane and get an advantage from this if your opponent isn’t doing the same. For

myself, I don’t think of the jungle as a lane, because both are really quite different.

Why do I mention this?

The jungle can be a big part of your earlygame farm, and if you get a jungler to rush

an important item really quickly, your midgame will be a lot more effective. This

requires your team to have a jungler, which is simply a hero who is farming the

jungle, and not the lane. This is the part where we get to team composition and

laning strategies.

If you pick a jungler to get some extra farm for your team as a whole, you need to

make sure you don’t lose your other lanes!

This would for example be the case if you take a jungler instead of a support, and

your hard carry dies two times because he has to play a solo lane against two enemy

heroes.

What the thought process between safe lanes and good team composition is, and

how you can make the split between running a jungler and still having safe and

stable lanes will be explained in the further parts of this guide.

2.1 Easy lane

The easy lane is bot for Radiant and top for Dire.

Why is this you might ask? First of all, the creepline (the spot where the creeps meet

and fight) is naturally closer to your tower than on other lanes. This makes you hard

to gank when you are lasthitting, because you have a short distance to your tower,

which can be considered a safe area.

You can pull the neutral creepcamp into

your lane to draw your creeps off their path

and fight the neutral creeps, causing your

support to get easy lasthits, denying the

enemy team experience and gold, and

drawing the creepline closer to your tower

(if done correctly!).

There are a few more aspects which make

this lane safe for you, I won’t list them all.

The image shows both easy lanes (red

lines) and both pullcamps (yellow X’s).

Who should farm the easy lane?

The hero who needs the most farm to fulfill his role should take the easy lane. In

many cases, this will be the hard carry, who ideally farms the entire early- and

midgame to carry the team lategame with the items he farmed. If your team hasn’t

got a hard carry, you want to put a semicarry in this lane, to get him to his respective

items as quickly as possible.

You always want to couple your easy lane farmer with a support!

The support has to make sure the farming hero has a good time and can achieve his

goals. The support is also the one to pull the neutral camp, because leaving this

possibility open would a) be a waste of farm and thus a gift to the enemy team and b)

leave your support with nearly no gold at all, which makes him it hard for him to even

afford the wards your team desperately needs.

Why would your support be left without hardly any gold if not pulling? You could let

him get some lasthits on lane …

You want and need your hard or semicarry as big as possible, and for this, you want

him to get the entire gold a lane gives you. If you let your support have some lasthits

he will have an easy time affording wards and getting maybe Arcane Boots and a

Bracer, but your carry will be weaker to a carry who gets all the lasthits in lane.

The support has to get his gold by pulling and maybe ganking, and the true art of

good support play is to keep your carry alive and farming, constantly afford wards

and still get upgraded boots at around 15 minutes into the game.

Something new players tend to not get is the fact that the jungler is not counted as

the support for the easy lane farmer. If you have a jungler and an easy lane farmer

they don’t form a dual lane, but a jungler and a solo!

2.2 Middle lane

The middle lane is the path in the middle of the map, connecting both bases in a

straight line. The river marks the spot of the creepline, which is located the same

distance to both towers. From middle lane, you can access both runes very easily, as

their spawn locations are in the river north and south of the middle lane.

All this makes the middle lane a lane where the heroes fight on even preconditions!

Usually, you will have a hero soloing the middle lane. In some cases teams put a

dual lane mid to achieve a guaranteed shutdown on the enemy mid-laner, but you

will rarely see this done in pubs.

As the solo mid hero doesn’t have to share the experience from the creepwave, he

gets to level 6 quicker than anyone else on his team. If your solo mid hero has got an

ultimate which has a lot of impact, it can mean a big advantage if this hero gets his

ultimate early and can use this to get an advantage for his team, be it in killing the

enemy mid hero or ganking the sidelanes.

The solo mid has also got easy access to both rune spots at the same time, whereas

the sidelanes can only access one of them quickly. This makes the mid hero an ideal

candidate for the bottle, an item which lets you regenerate health and mana, and can

pick up runes to activate them at a later point, the bottle also gets completely refilled

when picking up a rune.

If your solo mid hero has got an ultimate with a big impact, and can use the

technically infinite regeneration of the bottle as well as the runes to a big impact, you

are in a great position.

Conclusion: You want to pick a solo mid hero who has an ultimate of great impact,

and who can use the runes to get an advantage for himself or his entire team.

I’ll make a guide on playing the middle lane in the future, where I will go over

everything with a lot more detail.

2.3 Hard lane

The hard lane is top for Radiant and bot for Dire, and the name of the lane is self-

explanatory. The creepline is really far away from your tower, and people will have an

easy time ganking you, because they have a lot of space to cut your retreat path.

If you are lucky, people will be content with forcing you out of experience range, and

you have to be creative to get your levels (against good players of course). If you are

unlucky however, people will try to kill you at every chance they get, and if you are

not playing cautious you will feed the enemy carry a lot of gold, which he will be

thankful for and destroy your teams ancient before the 30 minute mark.

You ideally don’t want to send a dual lane top, but only one solo hero. This is

because you are at such a disadvantage just by the map design, that you won’t be

able to do a lot even when you are two heroes on the hard lane. Also, if you manage

to get some experience, you will have to share it between your two heroes. This

causes you to have two heroes who are underleveled and undergeared, and this is

not what you want!

The best hardlane solos are the ones who can get their gold and experience back

after they reached a certain point, or even better give some of this gold and

experience to the team as well.

The hard lane hero needs to be a hero who can get his experience even if the enemy

is trying his best to avoid this, and can escape death while doing this. He should also

be able to get his experience and gold back after a certain point, or give his team

some form of advantage that pays off on the long run.

2.4 The jungle

The jungle is the area between the easy lane and the mid lane of each side. It is a

large area of forest run through by paths and filled with five neutral creepcamps.

Certain heroes can farm these neutral creeps very effectively, and can create an

advantage for their team, because the team is farming not three, but four sources of

income and get items for four heroes instead of just three.

What effects does a jungler have on the team?

Easily listed, you will get gold and experience on an additional hero, who can rush a

core item like a Mekansm to help your team fight and/or push. You will not be forced

to play a dual lane top and possibly get very low experience and farm for two heroes,

and can instead run a good hardlane solo who can get everything he lost back, and

is still useful for the team.

You might think running a jungler is always a positive thing, but you will have a

problem if you pick a jungler and for example nobody on your team picks a hero for

the hard lane.

Communicate with your team and make up your mind what lanes you want to run. If

you have got a good dual lane on your hard lane, you might be able to get a kill on

the enemy hard carry or his support and fight the enemy lane for gold and

experience.

You can also run a an aggressive trilane, which is a trilane on the hard lane, to

seriously challenge the enemy’s carry for farm, all while having your usual solo mid

but also farming a solo hero on the easy lane. This hero might not have been good

on the hard lane, but because you are running an aggressive trilane you can give him

relatively safe farm on your easy lane.

As you see, there are many viable options how to set up your lanes, and I will talk

about all the different combinations later on.

2.5 How to fill your lanes according to map design

When talking about map design, I always mean the fact that by nature there is an

easy lane, a middle lane and a hard lane for each side.

If you want to fill your lanes according to this, you need three heroes farming the

lanes, one jungler and one support.

The three farming heroes should always be able to work under the circumstances the

lane proposes. The safe lane farmer doesn’t need to fill a lot of criteria, he is ideally

enjoying freefarm. This lane should be taken by a hard- or semicarry who needs the

gold.

The middle lane farmer should profit from quick levels to give himself or the team an

advantage. He also should be using a bottle to get (technically infinite) regeneration

and runes to use in ganks. If your mid laner profits from a level advantage, but

doesn’t need the runes, you should probably put another hero mid, just to deny the

enemy the runes. If you let your enemy mid laner get free rune control, he might get

some early kills when ganking with the runes which you would have fought for if you

sent a different hero middle.

Your hard lane solo needs to be able to get his experience in some unconventional

way, because he will be at least forced out of experience range against good players,

if not even killed. This requires a special skillset, usually involving invisibility or an

escape spell. The hard lane solo should also be able to get his gold and experience

back after he reached a certain point, all while still being useful to the team through

ganks or something else.

Your support will assist your easy lane farmer by harassing, denying, pulling and

whatever the situation requires. He has to do his best to be useful to his team, but is

generally the easiest hero role to play during laning phase. Personal experience has

shown the support needs to focus on the game way less than for example the solo

mid.

Your jungler is farming the jungle, as the name says. There are different heroes who

can farm the jungle, all with different kinds of impacts on the rest of the game. There

are junglers who gank, junglers who push, or junglers who just farm some items to

fight. The jungler should always fit the general playstyle of a team, but that is most

often served.

If you fill your lanes like this, and avoid complete anti-synergies in your team, you are

set up well. You will be able to farm your lanes effectively and are in a good spot for

midgame, where your personal decisions and play will decide about the outcome of

the game.

3. How to play different lane combinations

As I hinted earlier, there are different lane combinations you can play. The previous

part covered how to fill your lanes the most classic way including a jungler. This part

will more focus on what different lane combinations are viable, and what goal they

serve.

The lane setup worked out in part 2.5 of this guide can be described in a numeric

system with the code 2-1-1-1.

The code describes how many players are playing on each lane, going from easy

lane to middle lane to hard lane and adding the jungle last.

As you have a carry and a support playing on the easy lane, this lane is represented

by the number 2. One hero in the mid and hard lane each add two times the number

1, and the jungler makes the last number 1 in the code.

I will be using this system to describe the different lane setups explained now.


Let’s start with a slight variation of the 2-1-1-1 strategy. This laning setup leaves out

the jungler, but includes a second support for your safelane farmer.

What does a second support give you that you would leave out a jungler for him?

First of all, your carry will farm in maximum safety, which can only be broken if the

enemy decides to run an aggressive trilane to disrupt his farm. In this case, you are

in a fairly good situation with a second support, but would probably be in a lot of

problems if you ran a jungler who wanted to farm and couldn’t protect your carry.

You will also have a much easier time for your first support, because he hasn’t got to

do all the tasks alone by himself anymore. You can now let one support stack and

pull, and let the other one focus on denying and harassing the enemy hard lane solo.

You will still get a certain level of farm on the support who is pulling, but not as nearly

as much as on certain junglers.

Choose this strategy when your enemy is running an aggressive trilane, or when you

desperately need to shut down an enemy hard lane solo.


Everyone will know this setup, because it is the most played laning strategy in pubs.

You run two heroes on your easy lane, one hero solo mid, and two heroes on your

hard lane.

This strategy works because most pub players are not able to punish enemy

mistakes with the precision and dedication of more experienced players. In said pubs

it is not uncommon to see two farming carries share one lane, something I want to

desperately advise to not do! Most often this laning setup is chosen in games where

a lot depends on how many of the mistakes are actually punished and on pretty

random stuff, rather than on thought process and strategy.

There is a way to run this setup in the context of a strategy, and often times with

great success.

You have your carry farming the easy lane, guarded by a support, and your solo mid

farming the middle lane. You are still running a hero that would normally be the hard

lane solo on the hard lane, but you give him a defensive support to assist him. This

has been the usual laning combination in professional games before trilanes became

popular and has worked to great success, with Windrunner and Earthshaker being

one example of a successful dual hard lane.

What effect does this have?

Your hard lane hero can actually get close to the creepwave and get experience

without getting harassed out of lane. The enemy support won’t be able to harass two

people out of lane by himself, because you could easily turn on him and deal severe

damage.

If you extend this thought and play, your HARD LANE HERO becomes a HARD

LANE FARMER, as he can’t get harassed out of lane that easily and is able to get a

some lasthits which he wouldn’t have gotten if he was alone.

If the enemy team is running a jungler and you have got balls you can leave the lane

to hunt the enemy jungler and kill him. This is risky because you will not always be

successful, and can easily find yourself cornered in by the jungler, the dual lane you

were laning against and the enemy’s solo mid hero, who came in to get easy kills.

If the enemy is running a defensive trilane, you should probably not play this strategy,

because their lane will almost always be stronger than yours and leave you

underleveled and undergeared on two heroes.

All this concludes in a lot more experience on your hard lane hero, who can help his

team way quicker than he would be able to if he was alone. This comes at the cost of

not running a jungler.


This laning composition is build out of a dual easy lane, a hard lane solo and a dual

lane in your mid lane. This dual lane mid usually has got a semicarry with a nuke or

stun, and a support who owns the counterpart.

The goal of this laning setup is most often to shut down the enemy mid-laner.

This lineup was run a lot around the time of TI2, where Morphling, Chaos Knight and

Antimage where the most common farming heroes in the dual middle lane. This

laning setup allows you to lasthit and deny almost every creep, harass the enemy

mid-laner and control the runes with the support hero without leaving out lasthits.

This comes at the cost of splitting the experience between your two heroes, but the

three heroes I mentioned don’t need the experience so badly. You also will also not

be able to control the enemy hard lane solo that easily anymore, and you will have

one hero with no income at all, this being your mid support.

As you are 2v1 in middle lane, you will probably get some kills going your way, and

this is how your support gets a bit of gold himself. Also you might have a hard carry

farming the middle lane with this setup, you want to play aggressive and shut down

the enemy, even more so if your second support leaves the easy lane to gank the

middle lane.

Run this lineup when you need to shut down the enemy mid-laner and can afford to

play a more aggressive style because you don’t depend on a lategame carry that

much.

Don’t run this lineup when your enemy is playing an aggressive trilane to shut down

your carry, because you will be at a disadvantage in this lane, which you can’t afford

to happen!

Having become more unconventional at the time I am writing this guide (Patch 6.76),

this laning strategy is still pretty good if you need to shut down the enemy mid-laner

and can afford to have your easy lane a bit weakened.


This strategy works around the so called aggressive or offensive trilane. You are

running one hero on the easy lane, one hero in middle, and three heroes on your

hard lane.

This setup is based upon aggression and kills, and you need at least 3 stuns and/or

nukes added in your aggressive trilane to be successful.

When running an aggressive trilane, there

is no way around getting good wards.

Ideally you want vision behind the enemy

tower and in the jungle next to your hard

lane. You can also leave out the ward

behind the enemy tower and block the

enemy’s pullcamp with it, but don’t be

surprised if your enemy counterwards it

very quickly.

The image shows the two standard ward

positions for vision for aggressive trilanes

(not including the blocking ward).

If you can’t get kills even on the enemy supports, don’t get lasthits for your carry and

maybe even get killed a few times yourselves, you should abandon your plan and

switch your trilane into your easy lane, because you will lose too much if you stay and

get killed over and over again.

The aggressive trilane comes at the cost of a farming hard lane solo for the enemy

team. Your safe lane farmer, who would normally have played the hard lane, is not

able to shut down the enemy hard lane solo. On the other hand, your easy lane solo

is way safer compared to a hard lane solo.

You can also pick a hero for your easy lane which you would not be able to run on a

hard lane solo, because you will almost always get farm on this hero. You could pick

for example a Brewmaster for the easy lane, and get him to a quick Blink Dagger.

However, if you fail your aggressive trilane and need to switch it to the easy lane,

your Brewmaster will have no chance on the hard lane and will be useless for the rest

of this game.

You need to make the balancing act between having a good offensive trilane and

being able to switch to a safer strategy if you are not successful. When picking this

strategy you are gambling, but if you play well you can be very successful with it!

4. Conclusion and final words

There is no completely right laning setup for a team composition, and there are no

completely wrong laning setups, as ridiculous as this might seem. Laning strategies

are not only determined by numbers, but also by heroes, playstyles and decisions, of

which I can only cover the first.

If you play a lot and watch a lot of games and/or replays you will be able to work hero

combinations and playstyles into your laning strategies, but the decision-making is

always gonna be unpredictable, for you as well as for your opponent.

I hope I could teach you a bit more with this guide, and encourage you to play more

experimental laning strategies to (hopefully) win your games. I know I didn’t answer a

lot of questions in this guide, but I will be creating more guides in the future and also

explain how to play each lane precisely.

If you liked this guide please leave me some feedback to help me improve my future

guides.

Made by: sheldon_

I do not own any the images used in this guide, if anyone wants to get his images

removed from this guide just write me a short message and I’ll remove them.

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dota 2 lining strategies