How to Speed Up Your Farm in Dota 2 Patch 7.35c

Dota 2 is a game that revolves around farming, taking objectives, and killing enemy heroes. If you know how to farm properly, your experience and gold per minute will improve. In turn, this will allow you to buy better items and deal more damage with your abilities.

Farming is not complicated. But you do need a basic understanding of it to do it properly. Otherwise, you will not know what you’re supposed to be doing at every stage of the game. Some farming patterns are more efficient than others. Furthermore, some farming patterns are safer than others.

The Basics of Farming in Dota 2

In Dota 2, farming begins in the laning phase, on one of the three available lanes. You’re not supposed to be in the jungle when the game begins. You’re supposed to be either top, mid, or bottom. Or, in some cases, you might choose to attempt a courier snipe before you go to your lane.

During the first 5 minutes of the game, the goal is to get as many last-hits and denies as you can, assuming of course that you’re a core. This requires you to position yourself correctly in relation to the enemy heroes, maintain lane equilibrium, and harass your opponents as much as you can.

Always engage in favorable trades and avoid unfavorable ones. As you gain gold, call the courier and bring yourself consumables. Don’t wait until you have enough gold to buy a big item. Buy small items and parts of items first. Put the gold you’ve acquired to good use. Otherwise it’s useless.

If your lane opponents use their gold efficiently and you don’t, being ahead in farm won’t help you. You need to make purchase decisions almost every other minute and stay as healthy as you can. Have enough mana for your important abilities and don’t let your HP fall below 50% if possible.

As your networth increases, you can slowly improve your HP regen, mana regen, and mobility. These are the top priorities in the first 5 minutes. After that comes either damage or durability, depending on the situation.

Some heroes greatly benefit from durability because their natural abilities allow them to farm jungle camps with ease as long as they have enough sustain. Others need to opt for a more aggressive strategy.

If you’re playing Axe, you should buy a Vanguard because your Counter Helix deals plenty of damage. But if you’re Templar Assassin, you need to buy a damage item that can speed up your farm.

Always aim for a combination of last-hits and denies during the first 5-10 minutes. It helps a lot to ruin your opponent’s farm, even if you can’t get perfect farm yourself. In Dota 2, the goal is to stay ahead of your opponent. If both teams struggle, it’s enough to be the one that struggles a bit less.

Increasing Your Farming Speed

To farm faster, you need to improve your damage output and sustainability. Ideally, you should invest most of your gold in improving your damage output. But it might be the case that your HP and mana regen give you better damage output.

Take for instance a hero like Leshrac. He deals damage using his spells. If he has good mana regen, he will be able to use his spells more often and hence, deal more damage.

Even a hero like Templar Assassin needs a bit of mana regen because her Refraction adds so much damage and damage block that she can’t afford to not use it.

When you have enough damage to easily kill small, medium, and large jungle camps, jungle camps, you’re in a good position and can move from camp to camp to gain more gold. But the question is: can you kill Ancient camps as well?

If you cannot kill Ancient camps, you need better damage output. But if you can, you need better mobility in most cases. Traveling across the map takes time. At a speed of 350 units per second, you are extremely slow. A Blink Dagger could give you the ability to skip 1200 units every 15s. That’s 4800 units per minute.

When we divide 4800 by 350, what do we find? That a simple Blink Dagger can help you to stop wasting almost 14 seconds per minute for the cost of just 2250 gold. It can also help you to fight better and avoid certain death, which further improves your gpm. This is one of those rare items that pay for themselves in subtle ways.

So keep this in mind: if you have enough damage and sustainability, the next bottleneck is your mobility. You could either buy some movement speed or you could buy a Blink Dagger. The second option is generally cheaper and more reliable.

Farming Principles

Your goal is to farm as much as possible, but not without ignoring your own safety. At a more fundamental level, the goal is to actually maximize your gold and experience per minute. Doing that requires you to stay alive. To stay alive, you need to pay attention to what is happening on the map and to make sure that you don’t get ganked.

When too many enemy heroes are missing, a smoke gank might be coming your way. When your team shows up in the top lane, you do not want to be seen in the bottom lane because the enemy team will immediately try to kill you there.

Of course, it all depends on the MMR bracket you compete in. But even in the lower brackets, some people understand the basics.

When you farm your own jungle, make sure to ask for Sentry Wards or to buy them yourself. Some heroes, such as Zeus and Slark, can deward with ease thanks to their abilities. Others need to use their intuition because you never know when the enemy team has vision of you and knows exactly where to find you on the map.

If your jungle is invaded and you can’t contest that, simply go to the enemy jungle, place wards there and farm until it’s no longer a safe place.

Always ask yourself: should I be here or is there a different part of the map that offers better / safer farm for me?

If you are stronger than your opponents, farm confidently and consider invading the enemy jungle too. Disrupting enemy farm patterns at the start of the farming cycle can lead to a big gold advantage. Every minute, the neutral camps respawn. If the enemy is forced to retreat and wastes an entire minute while you farm a lot of jungle camps, that could be worth 1000 – 2000 gold.

If they do nothing to stop you from repeating the same process in the next minute, you’ve already gained a big lead. That’s why a lot of good teams choose their moment carefully and strike exactly when it’s appropriate. They also do it in a way that maximizes their chances of success.

If you cannot farm Ancients at minute X, you can still stack that camp 4-5 times and come back to it later. Don’t let the potential gold go to waste. But, if you started to stack certain jungle camps, make sure that you have good vision there because you don’t want the enemy team to steal your farm.

Prioritize lane creeps because they’re easy to kill and give you a lot of gold, especially when you’re dealing with double creep waves. In between, move around the jungle and farm everything you can if it’s not too risky.

After you’ve lost your mid and bottom tier 1 towers, farming the jungle becomes a lot riskier. You can still farm the top part of your jungle but going bottom requires team coordination. Going there alone and without wards can often lead to unwanted deaths.

General Considerations

On both sides of the map, there are numerous neutral camps waiting for you. But you only have 1 minute at your disposal and on top of that, you need to keep in mind that on the same map there are 5 enemy heroes and 4 allies, 2 of which are cores who will be farming everything they can in most cases.

Below 5000 MMR, you should not expect players to understand concepts like farm priority beyond the basics. Players only know that in the first 5-10 minutes, core heroes should be allowed to farm the lanes. But they don’t know that after the 10-minute mark, the position 1 and position 2 heroes must be given farm priority in more subtle ways.

For example, if a part of the map is dangerous, you shouldn’t expect those heroes to go there to farm. Instead, you must make sure that the safe parts of the map are available for them.

Gold is only as valuable as the items you buy. If you have 3000 unspent gold, you are essentially 5-6 minutes behind your opponent. Your networth isn’t put to use. So if a fight breaks out, you will often get destroyed without understanding why.

Always analyze your replays and see what were the moments when everything went wrong. Quite often, you will discover that even when the two teams were equal in networth, you or a teammate made some bad decisions. You either forgot to spend your gold or you bought the wrong item.

At the fundamental level, stats and damage encounter stats and damage. If your opponent has much better stats and damage, you will generally lose the battles and the game. So it’s not enough to farm faster. You need to also put the gold to good use. If you can’t improve the numbers that matter faster than your opponent, you will lose.

Header: Valve