Line and map control guide (written by BLAOW from dota-allstars forum)

[eXtasY]

This guide is made by BLAOW and taken from dota-allstars forum, and all credits go to him.
I've got permissions to copy it.[URL="http://forums.dota-allstars.com/index.php?showtopic=134642"] LINK[/URL] for the original one




BLAOW's guide to Lane Control
Designed to be viewed in either skin but best viewed in at least 1280x1040 resolution

Preface: This is a guide to early game lane dominance. I assume the reader has a basic knowledge of DotA and can refer to other sources to look up heroes/items/abilities. If I use an abbreviation or term you do not understand please refer to Malle's excellent [URL="http://forums.dota-allstars.com/index.php?showtopic=33832"]DotA game commands and common abbreviations[/URL] list. I will be focusing on non em since lane control in em is less important, although I will try to point out some points for em as well. If you disagree or have something to add please post and back up your points with a valid argument, I'll try to include other's view points with credit if they are good even if they disagree with me. Sometimes there is more than one right way, or different things work in different situations. Please post your comments, opinions, and disagreements, constructive criticism is welcome! Anyway, on to the guide.

What will I learn from this guide?
This guide is an effort to comprehensively cover every aspect of lane control and early game strategies within reason. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of lane control I suggest you read all of it. However more advanced readers will certainly be familiar with some or many of the ideas covered so if you belong to that group feel free to skip sections. If you wish to explore a certain aspect of lane control use the table of contents - hit ctrl-f and type in the section you wish to go to.

Brief Table of Contents

1. What is Lane Control?
2. Your Hero
3. How to Build a Lane Controller
4. Choosing your Lane Control Style
5. Harassing
6. Map Awareness and Ganks
7. Creeps and Towers
8. In-Depth Scenarios
9. Secret Paths and Juking
10. Replays and Other Reading Material

What is Lane Control?
I'll define lane control as keeping your opponent away from the creeps while you last hit and deny. Please note that autoattacking is almost always a bad choice unless you need to push up quickly. You should either focus on last hitting and denying or on keeping your opponent away from the creeps so they cannot last hit, deny, or gain xp. If you farm up or hold your opponent down you will have a significant advantage throughout the game, especially in non em games. For people who just autoattack, trust me, last hitting and denying is worth it. You will farm much faster and stop your opponents. For more info on last hitting and denying check out [URL="http://forums.dota-allstars.com/index.php?showtopic=37469"]inDe_eD's Guide to Micromanagement[/URL]
Your Hero
The key factor in how you lane control is what hero you have. Ranged heroes with a good attack animation and some form of harassment (for example, Tinker or Viper) are usually the best at laning. The worst are low hp melee heroes with no form of harassment (for example, Naix). If you think early game lane control is worthless compared to a great late gamer you've never laned against someone who is good at lane control. Here is a list of some pros and cons for lane control

Pros (good for lane control)

• Ranged
• Fast Attack Animation
• High Base Damage
• An Autocast (orb) ability
• Direct Damage Spells (from now on referred to as nukes)
• Damage over Time spells (from now on referred to as DoT's) (note some are useless, do the math on how much damage they do)
• Stuns/Disables

Cons

• Melee
• Slow/Awkward Attack Animation (Lina, Razor, etc...)
• No Escape Method (Blink, Waveform, some sort of disable)
• Low HP

As you can see, fragile melee agi heroes struggle the most early game, especially those with no means to defend themselves or harass. A lategame hero like Troll or Phantom Assassin can be outlaned so badly that it takes them the rest of the game to recover and catch up. Generally, better lane controllers go mid because most pushes are focused mid. Sometimes better laners will go to the side lanes so they can dominate a lane and farm up so be careful and always be ready to face against a strong laner. If you find you can't handle your lane then ask for a gank or switch lanes. If your teammates are smart they will help you, rather than letting you get destroyed while your opponent farms. It is just important to LET THEM KNOW you are in trouble, rather than they get the fun surprise of a farmed out Juggernaut (or any other item dependent hero) at the 30 minute mark.

In any case, if you have a potential good lane controller then you should aim at controlling your lane, otherwise you want to survive until your hero becomes effective. In EM you should lean more towards late game since early game is vanishingly short.

How to Build a Lane Controller

Once you have your hero there are 2 important parts to creating your ultimate lane controller (or surviving to late game): Item Build and Skill Build. Your goal here is to get harassing skills and hp so you can survive nukes/chain nukes so you can stay in your lane and continue to gain exp/gold.

Item Build
Someone on your team should buy a chicken, if no one else does you should get one. The advantage of being able to stay in your lane while items and consumables are delivered to you is just to good to ignore. In any case, there are 4 types of items which are commonly bought before going to a lane: items that boost strength (for hp), items that regenerate hp, items that boost int (for mana), and items that regenerate mana.

Note: There are almost NO situations in which you should get boots as your first item. Good job, you can run back to the fountain faster to miss out on exp.


The prime choice for boosting str and int are bracers and nulls respectively. Items which give lower stats are more efficient, that is, the more stats an item gives the more gold you pay per stat (ie gg branches are 57 gold per 3 stats while Ultimate Orbs are 2300 for 30 stats, or 230 per 3 stats, approximately 4 times as much). Getting early items like bracers and nulls is cheap and effective, giving you an advantage from early to mid game over people who try to save straight up to high cost items. This is definitely worth it, even if an extra bracer saves your life or helps you get a kill just once. Consider that four bracers gives one less strength than a reaver, costs 2/3's as much and also gives +12 to int and agi. Simply sell the bracers off as you run out of item slots for bigger cost items.

Items for regeneration are a bit more complicated. There are a couple of options here, ring of regen, tangos, or flasks, all of which have ups and downs. A ring of regen gives constant regen but it is still risky to hang around one if you are in red. Flasks on the other hand give you a big hp boost over a short period of time but can be canceled if you take damage. Tangos provide a good intermediate without the risk of cancellation.

At this point, I pretty much use tangos on every hero. Flasks require you to dip dangerously low in hp in order to get the full healing effect, and in the mean time you have to sit back out of combat or risk being canceled. I would only recommend buying them in the case that you are low on hp, but you aren't in great danger, but you want to be full hp soon (then have your chicken bring one to you). This situation is pretty rare though - you aren't in danger but need hp soon?

Ring of regen is only better than tangos if you are going to make something out of it, like a Headdress or a Hood of Defiance. Otherwise the burst regen of tangos is more useful than the slow constant regen of the ring.


For mana regen, things are pretty much the same with clarity potions and sobi masks. The only difference is that sobi masks increase your mana regen by a percentage rather than a set value like ring of regen. This means that if your hero has low int and thus crappy mana regen buying a sobi mask (or a void stone) is going to be less effective (increasing terrible mana regen by 50% is still pretty terrible mana regen (The exception to this is brilliance aura which increases mana regen by a set value)). This is usually the case for caster str heroes (earthshaker, tiny, etc), who are better off with an arcane ring which will greatly boost their base mana, provide decent regen and help teammates. A sobi mask will provide more mana regen than the RoB Brilliance Aura when you have at least 31 intelligence, so keep that in mind when you are buying your items. When will you pass that mark? In a few levels, or not for a while.

Arcane Ring
It is viable to rush Arcane sometimes, but you will have to sacrifice things like bracers which can be tough. A RoB can be disassembled in your Circle of Power (behind Taverns) so you can use the Ring to make Arcane Ring and have an extra Sobi. Arcane Ring is a great team item, and its not just about the mana regen; the 300 extra mana can really help low mana pool heroes.

Arcane Ring is coming more and more into use on spammer heroes and strength casters. It isn't to hard to farm up and provides enough mana to spam most "spammable" spells constantly, while also being useful for nearby ally heroes. I would definitely recommend it on Zeus, Death Prophet, and other spammers who are only limited by mana.

Bottle
The bottle is a great item for ganker heroes. The charges let you quickly replenish hp and mana to move onto the next gank without having to return to the fountain or wait for consumables that take longer. Another great benefit is that you can store runes in it, and once you use the rune the bottle is refilled. This means that when you switch lanes to gank, you can grab the rune, use it at your leisure, heal up with the bottle, and move to the next lane to gank. A good idea on heroes like Bounty Hunter, Night Stalker, and Pudge, who need hp and mana to gank, frequently moving from lane to lane. Runes spawn every 2 minutes starting at the 2 minute mark (unless there is already rune in existence). The deal maker is that you can now buy a bottle in the new secret shops in the side lanes, meaning you can easily grab it at any time once you farm up the 700 for it.

Hood of Defiance
It is generally not a good idea to rush Hood of Defiance on most heroes. The regen is nice, and the spell resistance is also nice once you complete it. However in the mean time you are vulnerable with lower hp compared to a bracer build. Also bracers are more effective early/mid game for survivability, even against purely magic attacks. Before you decide on a skill/item build on a hero with a magic resistance skill and Hood of Defiance you should check out gradenko_2000's [URL="http://forums.dota-allstars.com/index.php?showtopic=62822"]Spell Resistance Stacking Guide[/URL].
Hand of Midas
This helpful farming item can really help a late game hero jump start themselves. However, to often I see people struggling in their lane just to farm it. If you cannot get Midas in a decent amount of time the net payoff isn't worth it. If you are getting destroyed in your lane then get items that will help you lane - bracers, etc. It is of no use if you get a midas but it took you 25 minutes and you died 3 times, you are going to be behind. You should consider midas if you are a late game hero but you are controlling your lane easily. In this case you should be making plenty of money from last hitting so you can farm Midas quickly. However this doesn't mean you should always get it. If the enemy pushes down mid and ends the game before you've farmed anything there is no point. The recent changes to the game have made it generally shorter (no tower regen, siege creeps, etc) so midas has become even less useful (shorter game means midas has less time to pay itself off and start making you money). Basically, there are many factors in choosing when to buy Midas, but don't do it if you can't get it quickly and without sacrificing lane control. You should aim for a midas in 10 minutes, 15 minutes at most. After 15 minutes you should really just buy another item instead.

The items you buy should focus on helping you survive against your opponents and ganks. If you need mana focus on nulls and mana regen. Otherwise go for bracers and hp regen to survive burst damage. Wraith bands are mostly useless early game despite the lower cost. Consider for an agility hero, the difference between a wraith band and a bracer is the wraith gives 3 extra damage while the bracer gives 57 extra hp. Lastly, do not be afraid to buy and use consumables. You are not throwing money away just because you only use the item once. If you eat a tango and it lets you get even one more last hit it has more than paid for itself in gold and exp.

Skill Build
Of course every hero has a different set of skills but there are some which are generally useful early game and some which are not. Usually most skills which scale over time or are percentage based are useless early game while skills which do a set amount of damage (or boost stats by a set amount) are more useful early game (note that this means stats are more useful early!). Stuns and disables are pretty useful all the time but are really great to get early game if they also do damage. So while Vengeful Spirit's Magic Missile is great early for its damage and stun, Naga Siren's critical (or any other number of criticals) should be put off until later because stats or other skills are more useful. Let me say this one more time in case I have not been clear enough, sometimes it IS better to take stats over skills early game. The best skills for early game let you harass, or survive, or both (stats falls under "both" since it boosts your hp and mana), choose your skills carefully. There is not much more for me to say about this because every hero has different skills.

Some examples of what skills to get and and which not:

Leoric the Skeleton King

• Storm Bolt(Recommended) - Ranged stun with constant damage, great for early game harassment and disabling
• Vampiric Aura(NOT Recommended) - Useless early game because your damage is low and you don't want to be autoattacking (which will make you push up, more on this later).
• Critical Strike(NOT Recommended) - Useless for the same reasons as aura - low base damage makes for crappy crits and you shouldn't be attacking anyway. If you get in a slug fest with another hero the bonuses from stats will help you more.

Recommended Build: Storm Bolt and stats

Yurnero the Juggernaut

• Bladefury(Recommended) - Great constant damage harassing tool. Magic immunity is also nice for escaping.
• Healing Ward(NOT Recommended) - A heal would be nice for staying in lane, but the fact that this is based on a percentage of your max hp (which will be very low early game, especially the fragile Juggernaut's) and has a large manacost makes it subpar
• Blade Dance(NOT Recommended) - Another critical. Low base damage and you shouldn't be hitting things.

Recommended Build: Bladefury and stats

Shendelzare Silkwood the Vengeful Spirit

• Magic Missile(Recommended) - Nice ranged stun with great damage and decent mana cost. What more could you want for early game?
• Terror(NOT Recommended) - Lowers enemy offense and defense by a percentage (armor adds a percentage amount of hp per point). Useless again in that main source of damage early game is nukes.
• Command Aura(NOT Recommended) - On top of the fact that you shouldn't be hitting things, Vengeful Spirit's base damage is crappy anyway. Raising a crappy amount by a crappy percent is still a crappy amount.

Recommended Build: Magic Missile and stats