Dota2: How to win Lanes in Patch 7.20

With every patch of Dota2 comes new meta and new strategies. We change our style of playing certain hero or roles and sometimes we change the way we lane. Now we all know how important it is to win the lane.

Long back I remember nobody really cared a lot about the lane control, there was a certain point when people even said winning a lane don’t really matter much anymore. Now, with 7.20 in our hands, laning does matter, however, killing in lane is now way more important than just farming.

Before explaining how to win the lane in 7.20B, I will explain how the laning stage was in the previous patches. Because if you are trying to understand why kills are so important right now, you need to understand the difference between the patches we had and the patch we have on our hand right now.

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Laning in previous Patches

The way we used to win the lane was slowly and methodically balancing between harassing your opponent and hitting the creeps, also denying and trying not to get denied too much.

Previously, you would kill your opponent but you would not necessarily win the lane by killing your opponent. Sometimes, in fact, you would lose the lane by killing your opponents because eventually your opponents will come back to the lane with extra regeneration item after an early death and would be able to harass you out of the lane.

So the goal of the laning phase was to get the creep waves to a point where enemies could not step up to the creep wave and if they were stupid enough to do so, they would die. You did not even want to kill them, you would sit between the creep wave and them and zone your enemies.

Eventually, you would force them to go to the jungle. Which is why we saw a lot of carries in that meta to just go to the jungle before they even died and the jungle was really weak in terms of experience and gold so those carries just ended up being under-farmed and under-levelled. And that was considered a good laning phase for you.

Laning in 7.20 B

Axe happened

So what’s different now? Before the calculations for experience or early levels did not favour kills at all. If you were the one to get a kill in the lane at early levels you basically get a base experience and gold bounty, few experiences from the dying hero’s level and comeback multiplier.

Since in terms of experience both teams were pretty much same in the lane, the comeback multiplier does not even matter here. So basically you got XP bounty and a base XP bounty and that was pretty negligible in terms of impact on the game because you don’t really make a huge impact with such small XP difference.

If you had killed an enemy who is level 5, you only got 90 experience. Considering it was split between two people, then you both only got 90 experience which is less than half the experience you need to reach level 2 from level 1 for killing a level 5 enemy. In other words, Kills did not matter in the lanes in terms of experience and experience matters a lot.

Now the experience calculation is as follows, 40 experience plus 14% of the dead hero's current experience divided by the number of people that killed them. So, you split it evenly, it’s much more simple now. This means if you kill a level 5 hero with two heroes, you both get about 275 experience which means that one kill in this meta’s laning stage equals three kills in the previous meta’s laning stage in terms of experience.

This means if you solo kill a level 5 hero like that, you get double the experience. Now, it’s a lot simplified, literally split evenly between everyone so a solo kill is 275x2 = 550 experience for one single kill.

550 experience for a single kill on a solo hero which happens all the time in lanes because you both trade, then your support tries to nuke and eventually dies and then you finish him off and get the entire experience all for yourself.

And BAM! Now you have an entire level advantage on the lane. It’s insane but great. This will force more laning phase battles and early fights rather than just controlling creep wave and farming safely.

Comeback Multiplier

Ogre Magi

Comeback multiplier has been removed from the game entirely. This means if you are behind in experience, you can’t just kill some enemy and get a bunch of experience. Ok so what does that mean or how does that really change your laning phase? This literally means now we are in a Kill-Lane with a snowball meta.

Which is why Sandking is having a very high win rate and skyrocketing day by day even though the changes made to him are not the biggest or game breaking. Games should end early and they have been ending early for what I’ve seen until now in my own games and top MMR games.

From last few patches, it seems Icefrog is trying to make Dota2 a fast-paced game and that begins with the adding talent to heroes, since then every update is just pushing us more to fight from an early stage and farm less.

More clashes to keep it interesting I guess, heh. Previously comebacks were a thing, now we don’t really see a lot of comebacks and even if we do those are pretty much based on turnaround events and such, not a slow paced “holding the high ground” type of comeback.

Anyway, denies and last hits don’t really matter a lot anymore because if you get denied all game and still be able to kill your lane enemy, you are getting all of the experience and gold you were denied and more.

You get levels and you kill them again, and even if they managed to kill your supports they get nothing and you end up picking up another kill to snowball even more. Before you would kill them to get experience, they would kill your supports and get huge but the fact that comeback multiplier has been removed changed that scene.

Now killing a support gives you nothing because supports are NOT getting that comeback multiplier.

Which heroes are going to be strong in this Meta?

Leshrac

Kill combos will be stronger in this meta such as Ogre with Leshrac, Lich with Leshrac, Lich with Axe, Grimstroke with Brewmaster. Shadow shaman with Sandking is pretty strong.

It’s also important to pick heroes that can take a lead in the laning phase and become unkillable and snowball with levels because your opponents will only be able to come back in terms of experience if the snowballing core dies. Remember you don’t get anything out of the supports anymore so you need to kill the snowballing core to catch up on the experience.

If you want to win pubs this is what you do, you pick heroes that are focused on getting kills. None of that Antimage bullcrap. Yeah I get it Antimage got buffed, he is probably better now compared to previous metas but it does not matter because he doesn’t kill heroes in the lane, so the game will be over before cores like that can even get farmed or have a chance to come back. Be smart.