Disclaimer: I’m not the best player in the world, but I can introduce you to some ideas and concepts that you might not have thought of if you’re a lower level player.
Striving to solo carry every game is a terrible idea that will lose you games, but some games there’s nothing else you can try. Some games fighting with your team will not provide good results. The need to attempt something like this depends entirely on the teams drafts; for example, a pickoff focused team won’t accomplish much playing to their strengths versus a team who’s 5 manning. The basic idea of solo carrying is that you apply pressure to objectives alone, farming along the way, so that the enemy team has to give up on their pushes to relieve this pressure that you’re creating on the map. It’s a common misconception that solo carrying is about 1v5 fighting the entire enemy team, but most of the time to do this you need to already be ahead. Obviously some heroes are much more suited to this than others — cores who are mobile, slippery and clear waves quickly have an obvious edge. Another important part is that the core scales; sure, you can push out waves and pressure things with something like a Puck for example but most of the time the enemy team as a whole can build around your main damage type and then you can’t fight them at all, while an am will get farm that allows him to take on a couple heroes at a time doing this. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t pressure waves with heroes like Puck, just that you should manage your expectations for when you eventually have to face an enemy on the map.
There’s a couple important aspects to this playstyle so I’m going to go over them one at a time.
Farm patterns
Your farming patterns change when you’re trying to solo carry a game. You focus less on the jungle, farming it only if lanes aren’t secure or if you still haven’t got what you need to pressure lanes. You’re not accomplishing much by farming a jungle camp when the enemy team is knocking on towers; instead, you’ll be farming camps close to lanes in anticipation of creep waves coming. Your objective is to clear these waves so that the enemy can’t go for smoke plays and so that they have to reveal themselves and push out these waves before going for any plays. If they don’t respond to waves pushing in, it can be a clear indicator that they’re going for a play on the map, for example. An important element that you need to incorporate into your play with this style is also cutting waves; if the enemy has a wave and is pushing in, you can kill new waves that spawn so that backdoor protection kicks in without those creeps. Another byproduct of this style is that you have to play much more carefully, hiding in trees and in jungle between creep waves, because dying is the most disastrous thing that can happen when playing like this. This requires really good map awareness and game sense. Basically, your goal when farming is to go for the most secure farm possible while still applying pressure to objectives so that the enemy is forced to react.
Itemization
Obviously, since you’re not fighting with your team as much, your itemization changes. Heavier focus is placed on mobility items such as BoT, Blink, Force and on wave clearing items like Battlefury, Radiance, Maelstrom (provided your hero doesn’t have an inbuilt wave clear, like Sven’s Cleave, Storm Remnants, etc). You might also consider items that let you push faster, like Deso, Blight Stone, Mask of Madness, etc. Defensive itemization like Linkens or BKB is also very valid, because you’re bound to get caught sooner or later. Once you have items that let you put pressure on the map efficiently you can start itemizing towards picking off stray enemy heroes and possibly even teamfighting if the game is looking like it allows for it. A good indicator of this is usually that your teammates have caught up in farm because the advantaged enemy has been trying to deal with you.
Deciding when to go for kills and fights
This is a very tough element of the playstyle. Depending on your hero, some power spikes will allow you to look for pickoffs on solo enemy heroes (AM Manta Abyssal, QOP Orchid, Jugg Blink, etc) and this is always very valuable when you’re behind and you should go for it when you know you have enough damage coupled with a way to get out after in case they respond, be it blink, BKB TP or just a load of movespeed. Proper map awareness is also very important for this — you need to keep track of where the allies of the enemy who you’re targeting are and act accordingly. Joining fights is even harder, because you need to be able to judge the viability of taking a fight based on enemy items and power levels. Again, staying alive is crucial, because if you’re not alive you’re not applying pressure. This is why you should be looking at the map constantly, checking items, keeping track of heroes last known positions and their TP and skill cooldowns. Usually however if you think you can handle fights, a good rule of thumb is that the most important fights are roshan and highground, and if you judge that you can take a fight you should respond to these two things.
In conclusion
Hit towers. Carry tps. It’s hard to generalize because Dota is a dynamic game, a team game at that. Additionally, it’s hard to go overly into detail and mention every trick I know for this because of the nature of the game, but keeping a cool head and playing objectives is bound to have positive impacts on your GPM and winrate.
Thanks for reading!
