This is a continuation of my work on the earliest part of DotA - the lane phase. Bad lanes happen to everyone and can set us up for very painful games; this guide is meant to be a quick rundown of tips and tricks to keep in mind when bad lanes do happen. Not every lane is winnable, but by playing intelligently you can minimize the damage to yourself and your team.
Most bad situations are caused by improper planning and poor hero picks for the lane phase. Typically, the hero with nowhere else to go gets thrown in the offlane to drown. While this can be avoided in an organized team, it can be difficult to deal with in solo queue (especially if you play a lot of “all random,” like myself) and offlaners still manage to deal with a lot of the blame game when they drew the short straw to begin with. Even if a lane seems impossibly matched and there is no hope whatsoever, you still have options to consider to help make the most of your early game.
1) Don’t create bad situations in the first place
Yeah, yeah, it’s a pretty cheesy piece of advice for sure, and it goes without saying - after all, if you weren’t in a bad situation you wouldn’t need a guide to bad situations. Still, it’s worth remembering that DotA doesn’t have a magical set of rules that must be followed every game. Try to predict what lanes the enemy will use and play around them, you don’t always have to have a ganking hero solo mid lane with a carry in the safe lane and a jungler. In fact, most popular junglers work great in lanes, and most ganking mids make great supports. Take Nature’s Prophet for example:
Very rarely have I seen anyone use Prophet to do anything but jungle and carry, but he provides fantastic lane support to most heroes in the game with his incredibly powerful Sprout. If I had jungled this game, my allied Razor would have been soloing the bottom lane against Silencer and Weaver - a lane he would have lost horribly. Instead, I help him out in his lane and we have a great game right from the start.
Always judge the situation before the game even starts. If your team has a chance to turn a weak lane into a powerful one, there is no reason not to take that chance. I might have been able to get more gold by jungling with Prophet this game, but it would have come at the expense of Razor and to the benefit of the enemy team. It was far more useful for our team to overpower the bottom lane than for one hero to jungle while another fights an impossible matchup.
A similar piece of advice to this is
2) Phone a Friend
Even if you get stuck with impossible odds, there is no reason to face them alone. Teleportation scrolls are not very expensive, and if you need help with your lane do not hesitate to let your team know. Communication is vital for success, and many players will think your lane is going fine if you never ask for help. Getting the assistance of other heroes, whether it is permanently or only for a short time, can go a long way toward helping you survive your lane.
In the above game, I was sent solo against the infamous Phantom Lancer/Keeper of the Light lane - even by level two I was sent running for the hills. Luckily, I soon gained the assistance of Leshrac and we were able to push the enemy back some, allowing me room to last hit and deny. In the end, our team decided that I needed the help more than Dragon Knight did in the safe lane, a decision that ultimately won the game.
Unfortunately, sometimes help is not coming. Multiple lanes can go poorly at the same time, and the team might not be able to spare any effort to come help. If this is the case, sometimes you simply have to
3) Back off
I cannot stress this step enough, bad lanes are completely reliant on the patience of the unfortunate player. At some point, you must evaluate whether a lane is even remotely worth fighting over. PL/KotL can very easily kill me if I stick around trying to fight over last hits, so why should I? If I fight over the creep wave, I run a high risk of dying and giving the enemy heroes extra gold and experience. Meanwhile, they are going to have complete control of the creep wave while I’m dead. If I don’t fight them and stay away, they will have complete control of the creep wave, but that is all. It can be incredibly frustrating to sit back for potentially several minutes at a time doing absolutely nothing while the enemy enjoys an empty lane, but it is the best decision to make. Regardless of whether you try to fight for last hits or not, the enemy will win the vast majority of them - if you fight and die, you give them even more gold and experience; if you hide, all they get are the creeps. Backing off costs you nothing in a lane where you are already being zoned out. Additionally, enemy supports can quickly grow bored of standing around, themselves. Once they leave to go ganking or jungling, you will have space to get levels with.
Certainly, some early defeats in DotA are the result of a lane getting completely out of hand and an enemy using the resulting momentum to crush an entire team. However, a large portion of this early momentum is the result of kills at very early stages of the game. If an enemy only collects gold from creeps, and not kills, there is a cap on how much gold they can possibly collect in their lane (roughly eight creeps a minute!). Even ten minutes of creeps is not a game breaking amount of gold, especially when few players can perfectly last hit every creep - the lane phase of DotA is not nearly as important as it feels. What matters the most for a bad lane is that you survive it. Every time you die you give the enemy extra gold beyond the limit imposed by creep spawns - gold they can use to overpower your allies.
With that said, there are times where you can strategically use a fight over the creep wave to your advantage. Next bit of advice:
4) Get hit
It can be difficult for heroes to attack you without pulling the attention of the creep wave, especially melee heroes. If you goad them into clicking on you and they get the attention of your creeps, you can drag the creep wave back near your tower where it is far safer for you to last hit. If your creeps are busy attacking the enemy hero, they will die before the enemy creeps and the wave will move toward your side of the map. This method does not even require you to sustain much damage, even a few seconds of the enemy juggling creep aggression will slowly but surely pull the creep wave back. Luring the enemy into using area of effect abilities to damage the creeps even more can also be highly successful. In doing this, you can help reduce the distance between the creep wave and your tower, making you much safer from ganks and giving the enemy less room to push you around.
Note that the above example is rather messy. Spiritbreaker ends up attacking the enemy heroes and gets the attention of enemy creeps himself, reducing the effect of this strategy. This was a mistake for sure, and he sustains quite a lot of damage for only a slight movement of the creep wave. However, health restoring items are not very expensive, and even if you have to trade an entire Tango charge for a last hit, you will be able to buy your way through the lane. While chugging health potions might make you feel like you are losing, you get full experience from last hits that might have been denies instead. Furthermore, the enemy will sustain damage from the creep aggression and, over time, might actually lose their ability to pressure you. This is especially helpful when combined with the next piece of advice:
5) Airdrop Supplies
The courier is an invaluable resource that is not used nearly enough by most players. Many players will simply walk to the fountain to heal up, missing out on long periods of time spent collecting gold and experience in their lane. While you are away, the enemy gets to control the creep wave and enjoy the empty lane, erasing any pressure you might have put up against them. This was the case in the above game, where we pulled the creep wave to our tower by enduring enemy harassment. I used the courier to bring me health regeneration items - more than I could hold, in fact, which is why I dropped the health potion behind the trees for later use. Meanwhile, Chaos Knight returned to his fountain after being beaten to low health - plenty of free time for Spiritbreaker and myself to take control of a lane that was now two against one.
Not only were we able to keep the creep wave near our tower for a long period of time, the extra experience we gained by remaining active and not running to the fountain gave us an advantage over the enemy lane. While we were being pushed back and denied for the first several minutes of the game, the extra level we gain on Chaos Knight enables us to begin fighting back, and I am able to farm Arcane Boots by a respectable seven minutes. At this point, the enemy is unable to effectively fight back against Earthshaker’s incredible anti-melee power, and I no longer need Spiritbreaker at all to handle this lane. With that in mind, he takes to heart the last piece of advice:
6) Leave the lane
Nobody is forcing you to stay in a lane you are totally useless in. In this game, I was able to solo Chaos Knight and Broodmother both once I was high enough level and had Arcanes. By leaving the lane, Spiritbreaker helped apply global pressure with ganks, and being solo allowed me to level up faster in the bottom lane.
This applies to all lanes - getting overly attached to a lane is a mistake many players make, as they feel it is somehow their duty to protect their lane from the enemy at all times. However, again, there is no magic rule that forces your team to have heroes in a lane at all. If a lane is truly unmanageable, and you cannot use any of the above advice to help survive the early game, simply cut your losses and leave the lane. If you are unable to accomplish anything in your lane, you are not contributing to your team. You might not be able to help other lanes to a great extent, but it is still better than sitting around in a lane you cannot survive in.
This applies to all lanes. I have sent my lane supports away many times in lanes where they were of no use. They can help support other lanes where they can actually make a difference, and I can get the extra experience from being solo. One hero can sit around and hide in the trees just as easily as two. Even when you are already solo, if the enemy is strong enough and skilled enough to completely zone you out of experience range, you can accomplish more by running around the map than simply cowering in the forest. Go camp runes, gank enemy heroes, try to jungle. No matter how painfully slow any of these tasks might be, they are still beneficial to the team.
This is the main idea DotA players should keep in their minds throughout a game: “What can I do to benefit my team the most?” After all, DotA is a team game, and five people have a much higher chance of beating an enemy team than one. Bad lanes will happen, even impossible lanes will happen. This does not mean we have to simply sit back and endure the pain. There are ways to play around difficult matchups, and we have played a solid game as long as we actively contribute to the team.
Just remember - whatever you do, don’t die.
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