How to Play Carry in Dota 2 Patch 7.35d

In every Dota 2 game, someone on each team needs to play the carry role. This role is highly demanding, requiring a deep understanding of all aspects of the game, from laning to farming, team fighting, item builds, Roshan timings, and much more.

Here’s what you need to do to improve your chances of winning and gaining MMR when playing carry in Dota 2.

Choosing the Right Hero

When you’re playing carry, you will often be given the opportunity to pick your hero 4^th or 5^th. This means that you will have the chance to pick something that’s not properly countered by the enemy team. And, in some cases, choose a carry hero that heavily counters your opponents’ picks.

If the enemy team picked too many strength-based melee heroes, ask yourself: what hero counters such heroes really well? In some cases, the optimal choice is obvious. In others, you will need to do something that goes contrary to the basic principles.

For instance, Outworld Destroyer perfectly counters strength-based heroes. But he’s not exactly a position 1 hero. However, if you’re confident in your ability to play him well, you should pick him regardless.

A different scenario is one in which a hero like Huskar, Anti-Mage, or Phantom Lancer has nothing to fear from the first minute to the ultra-late game. If the enemy team gifted you a free game, you should absolutely take it.

Nowadays, teams are generally smart enough to pick heroes that not only complement each other but also prevent the other team from picking something that heavily counters the entire lineup. Such heroes are either banned or countered to some extent. But from time to time, especially in the low MMR brackets, you will be given incredible opportunities.

When picking a carry hero, the goal is to have a good laning phase and then overpower the enemy cores in fights or outfarm them. It all depends on the strategy chosen by your team.

In a lot of cases, you should not rely on your teammates’ ability to group up quickly and start taking objectives. Instead, you should rely on your hero’s ability to farm quickly and become overpowered. In pubs, this path leads to victory far more often than the first.

When your window of opportunity is extremely narrow, you will miss it more often than not. But if time passes in your favor, you only have one thing to fear: a highly organized opponent that cannot be diverted from its plans.

Laning Phase

In the laning phase, the primary goal is to maximize your gpm and xpm. This can be accomplished by getting a lot of last-hits. Make sure that the creep wave is always close to your tower and ask your support to pull neutral creeps to maintain lane equilibrium.

You won’t have a lot of control over what your teammate does but you can communicate with him and give him basic indications. In some cases, he’ll know what to do on his own. If he often plays the carry role himself, he’ll understand what needs to be done so that you can have a better laning phase.

Support heroes should not steal gold from their carry and they should also try their best to not steal experience either. With that goal in mind, a good support will pull creeps, control runes, and stay on the lane only as much as needed.

Your starting items should include a Quelling Blade, Tangos, a Healing Salve, and some Iron Branches. Buy yourself a Magic Wand and some Boots as early as you can. Or, if you intend to buy a Battle Fury, gather enough gold to buy yourself a Cornucopia.

This item will give you excellent HP and mana regen. Its cost is 1200 gold, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you can farm properly.

Use the courier as often as you need and make sure he doesn’t get killed. Control him until after he leaves the base and bring him to you using safe pathways, ideally through the trees.

The initial goal is to gain levels and improve your farming capabilities. If you deal more damage, have better attack speed, regenerate faster, and can cover more ground per minute (either because you can blink or because you move faster), your farming speed will increase. And if you can farm faster than the enemy cores and especially the carry, you will quickly gain a gold lead.

In turn, that gold lead can be used to buy items that help you in team fights, split pushing, or whatever else you need to do. Some carry heroes are designed to split-push and farm. Others are designed to team fight and farm. Others should only farm and join fights when absolutely necessary or when it is favorable.

It’s generally fun to play a carry hero that can farm well but also join his team from anywhere on the map. That’s why many players love Spectre.

Farming

Farming should be done safely. If you get killed even twice in 15 minutes, you’ll lose a lot of experience plus more than 1000 gold. Always watch the minimap to check what your opponents are doing.

Spend time dewarding your own jungle, so that the enemy team doesn’t know where to find you. If you’re a ghost, you have fewer tactics to worry about. Most teams do not enjoy smoke ganking with zero vision because it’s dangerous and often useless.

Team maneuvers cost time. That time could be spent farming. That’s why such moves usually come in the third part of the minute or the first. The first option is the preferred one because 40s is often enough time for a good team to kill all the jungle camps on its side of the map. So even if the smoke gank fails, the team doesn’t really lose that much.

But if the neutral camps are ignored and the creeps’ gold is not collected, a failed smoke gank will have negative consequences. Such ganks can fail not just because you didn’t find anyone. They can also fail because they caused a lost battle or even because you found a mere support whose death is almost irrelevant.

When you farm as a carry, you need to know your limits and plan ahead. If you can’t kill Ancient stacks, just stack the Ancients. Go for the camps that you can farm with ease and work your way up. As you gain more damage and sustainability, your farming speed will increase and you will reach a point where you can farm anything quickly.

After that point is reached, speeding up your farm requires better mobility. Some heroes, such as Anti-Mage, are very strong after the 20-minute mark precisely because they have amazing mobility built into their toolkit. Other heroes will require a Blink Dagger. This item may not seem to be important but it actually speeds up your farm by more than 20%.

The reason is simple: much of your farming time is spent traveling between jungle camps. When you can skip 4800 units of terrain per minute thanks to your Blink Dagger, traveling is much faster.

Item Builds

Farming gives you gold. But if you don’t spend that gold wisely, you will essentially waste it. Team fights are not won by the team with the highest networth. They are won by the team with the best stats and the best way of putting those stats to use.

I’ve personally seen Wraith Kings buying an Aghanim’s Scepter instead of a Desolator or an Assault Cuirass many times, not just in pubs but in professional matches as well. And the match is almost always lost because of that decision.

Some items, even though they may seem useful or fancy, are merely traps. And you need to know enough about the game to avoid them. Keep it simple. In most cases, if you have enough damage, mobility, and durability, you will succeed. Don’t try something crazy and untested. Go for the direct approach that yields the best results.

If the enemy team has excellent crowd control, you should consider buying a Black King Bar. This is an item that every core hates buying. But it’s often the item that will give you the ability to fight unobstructed by stuns, roots, and other debuffs that can ruin your entire potential.

Playing carry tends to be, for the most part, a farming simulator. But after the 25-minute mark, it becomes a fighting simulator. You continue to farm, but only when there’s nothing more important to be done on the map.

Dota 2 revolves around objectives, so you should probably take part in fights, both offensive and defensive ones. If you’ve won the fight, go take Roshan or a tier 2 tower. Never go from winning an important fight to farming as if nothing would have happened. The goal is to increase your advantage, but there are better ways to do it than gaining 300 more gold.

Team Fighting

Team fighting is a huge part of playing carry. In general, if you’ve done your job correctly, by the 25-minute mark you will be the highest networth hero on your team. You’ll have between 12000 and 16.000 gold at this point, most of it invested in items.

Positioning yourself correctly is a key element of being good at team fighting. You don’t want to be caught alone between multiple enemy heroes that can burst you down. You want to let your other cores and supports make a play first. If you have a good stunner, let him initiate. If you have a support that can disable a target for 3s, let him blink in and do it.

From time to time, you will be expected to start fights. But that’s not the rule. Depending on what hero you are playing, you might need to go after the enemy team’s supports first. Slark, for instance, rarely goes for a direct clash with the enemy cores in a 5v5 scenario.

He doesn’t want to be targeted. What he wants to do is to split the attention of the enemy team in a way that gives him the chance to pick a favorable target. He’s like a Leopard, searching for the right moment to strike and the right prey to attack. That’s why he needs so much mobility.

Before you attack, make sure that your team is nearby. Fighting in Dota 2 is all about synergy. The combinations enabled by your heroes’ abilities tend to be a lot more powerful than any individual combo. There are exceptions, of course, such as Invoker. But for the most part, being a good team player pays off.

Sieging

Sieging is a mid to late-game element that you will be expected to handle well. If you’re sieging the enemy base, that’s a sign that you’re winning. But you haven’t won yet. And if you dive into the enemy base in foolish ways, you will get punished for it.

In most cases, it is not the carry who needs to attack the tier 3 towers and the barracks. It is the mid hero and the offlaner. The carry tries to stay behind, unless he has an Aegis.

When you siege, don’t overextend. If you managed to kill the enemy team but now they’re about to respawn while you don’t have your ultimates available, fall back, farm the enemy jungle, spend your gold, and then go on the offensive again.

After taking a successful fight, always remember that the reason why you won that fight probably had a lot to do with how you used your abilities as a team. So if you don’t have your strongest abilities available and your BKBs are on cooldown, don’t assume that you can just win again.

Prudence plays a huge role in being a good carry. You need to know when to stop. Otherwise, you’ll quickly lose the advantage that you gained and may even fall behind immediately after.

Header: Valve