Dota 2 Farming Guide – Everything You Should Know

Introduction

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In Dota 2, farming is often considered to be one of the most important gameplay aspects that you should master. Without proper farming techniques, it will be very hard to hit power spikes and item timings faster than your opponents. In this article, you will learn the most efficient farming patterns to speed up your farm and outscale everyone in your games. If you have ever wondered how high MMR or pro players hit insane net worth and item timings by 20 minutes, or why you always felt behind compared to your opponents, this guide will clear all your doubts for you.

What is Farming in Dota 2?

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When we talk about farming, we are mainly referring to gold obtained from killing creeps. There are also other sources that provide gold for you.

In Dota 2, gold primarily comes from:

• Lane creeps (most efficient time-to-gold source)
• Neutral creeps (Ancients and jungle camps that are meant to fill downtime)
• Towers
• Hero kills
• Bounty runes
• Passive gold gains over time

The other sources of gold besides killing lane creeps and neutral creeps are simply additional bonuses compared to the majority of gold coming from creeps. Therefore, farming in Dota 2 heavily prioritizes the act of collecting gold and experience from creeps. It’s the absolute basis of winning games in Dota 2, and should be performed by every player and role in the game.

The key to good farming is efficiency — maximizing the amount of gold and XP you gain per minute without dying or wasting time. At the same time, you should be ensuring that you contribute to map pressure and participate in fights that are deemed necessary for you to be a part of.

When Does the Farming Phase Begin?

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Understanding when the laning phase ends is crucial to knowing when to begin the structured farming process. Most lanes are typically over within the 7 to 10 minute mark, where lanes become too dangerous to be in or certain heroes have hit their power spikes and begin pushing. This moment usually occurs for off-laners and their supports around the time they reach level 6, enabling dangerous ultimates to come online that can zone you or force you out of the lane altogether. Once this happens, you will move into the next stage of the game known as the early-game phase, and begin the Push-Pull-Jungle system.

The Push-Pull-Jungle Cycle

The Push-Pull-Jungle cycle is a proven farming strategy that I have taught to many of my students with very successful results. Basically, if you are playing a core role on the side lanes (carry or off-laner), you should be constantly pushing waves, pulling jungle camps, and rotating to neutral creeps when waves are not safe to farm. Repeating this cycle will keep your farm rolling without wasting time interacting with heroes you cannot push out or kill in lane. For the mid lane, simply push the wave out and head over to jungle once you can no longer punish your opponent or zone them out in lane. You can stop pulling and focus fully on clearing waves and jungle creeps once you can farm at an extremely fast rate, normally past level 7-9.

On the other hand, if you win your lanes, you should definitely push the wave into your opponent’s tower and attempt to break their tower. This is where most players make a very common mistake, which is defaulting to jungling most of the time. This is known as ‘AFK Farming’, the act of farming jungle camps for the majority of the time even when there are free lanes to farm, or good fights to join. Once your hero reaches the point where it can kill creeps quickly, the ‘Flash-Farming’ process begins.

Flash-Farming System (Ancients and Stacks)

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Flash-farming in Dota 2 translates to acquiring gold and XP at a rapid pace. This becomes possible once heroes reach a specific power spike that enables them to kill creeps quickly with spells or certain items. A big part of flash-farming revolves around Ancient camps, stacks, and clearing creepwaves. Not all heroes can farm Ancients early, but those that can should take advantage of it as much as possible.

Ancient camps are important because they provide slightly more gold and XP compared to what a creepwave offers. Therefore, cycling between Ancient camp farm, stacking neutral camps, and clearing creepwaves is the key to unlocking flash-farming techniques. Adding to this, watching the clock for stack timers and respawn timers is necessary to drastically increase your farm and maximize your farm efficiency even further.

Here are a few examples of flash-farming heroes (mostly carries) and their typical Ancient-farming timings:

Hero	Ancient-Farming Ability	Timing
Ursa / Troll / Juggernaut	Battle Fury	12-14 mins
Sven	Mask of Madness + Maxed Cleave	9-12 mins
Medusa	Yasha + Maxed Split Shot	9-12 mins
Sniper / Weaver / Nature’s Prophet	Maelstrom	10-12 mins
Templar Assassin	Power Treads + Lvl 6	7-9 mins
Tidehunter	Maxed Anchor Smash + Morbid Mask	9-12 mins
Sand King	Maxed Sandstorm	9-10 mins

I have summarized the number of last hits you should strive to achieve in the last-hitting article. You can check that out and measure your farming speed to the table’s creep score benchmarks. If you aren’t able to hit those numbers, then you should analyze your replays and look into where you have wasted time.

Also, take note that most of your last hits should come from lane creeps and Ancient camps, and not purely from jungle camps. If you get high creep score but most of it comes from jungle camps, then your levels, net worth, and item timings will still be very slow due to less efficiency in farming route selection. Jungle camps provide suboptimal time-to-gold ratio compared to ancient camps.

Farming Route Hierarchy

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Understanding which farming route to take and what creep types to prioritize is key to staying efficient and impactful on the map. 

As a general rule of thumb, follow this hierarchy of farm:

Lane Creeps (farming forwards and outwards)

• The highest farm priority in any game should always be towards lane creeps. Creepwaves are not only the most reliable source of gold and experience, but they also offer the best time-to-gold ratio in Dota 2. If you skip creepwaves and mostly farm jungle camps, you are already falling behind.

• Farming creepwaves is about more than just getting gold and XP. Pushing lanes out also provides you with map pressure, vision, information, and objective conversions. Every time you push a lane, you are basically forcing the enemy team to respond to your push; they need to depush the wave, or risk losing their towers. When this happens, you provide information to your teammates as enemies showing on the map helps your team understand the enemy’s movements. A simple way to conceptualize this idea is: “extended lanes act like wards”. 

• Pushing lanes is also a prerequisite to taking towers, Roshan, and invading enemy territory. Without pushing lane creeps, most actions in-game will result in random deaths and bad plays due to lack of vision and map control. That being said, farming lanes safely requires good map awareness and positioning. You should always be cautious when pushing waves, especially when they are close to your enemy’s towers and enemies are missing on the map. Creepwaves, when farmed properly, are the core of every efficient farming pattern.

Neutral creeps near your current lane (aggressive farming)

• The second farm priority should be towards the neutral creeps near your current lane, with priority towards Ancient camps. These Ancients and jungle camps are essential for filling downtime between waves, and are especially valuable for flash-farming heroes when creepwaves aren’t safe to be farmed yet. 

• As explained previously, Ancient camps are higher value compared to normal jungle camps due to their higher gold and XP yield. Whenever you are pushing forward and are farming neutral creeps near your lane, always prioritize Ancient camps if you can. Heroes with items like Battle Fury, Mask of Madness, or Maelstrom can farm Ancients extremely quickly, compared to heroes that cannot. The key to understanding aggressive / active farming revolves around timing and positioning. If you don’t want to give up space and area control while still keeping up on farm, then performing the wave -> jungle -> wave cycle is the bread and butter of efficient farming.

Neutral creeps backwards (defensive farming)

• The third farm priority should be aimed at farming jungle camps behind your tower, or around your triangle area for Ancients and big camp farming. However, this is one of the biggest traps for core players. After analyzing over 5,000 replays to date, almost every core player, even those in high MMR, treat jungling as their main source of farming without understanding farming hierarchy. 

• The only valid reason for picking defensive farming over lane creeps and aggressive farming is when vision and safety is compromised. You should go for defensive farming when there are no safe creepwaves to farm (e.g all lanes are pushed into the enemy side, or enemies are missing with high kill potential), or you are waiting for enemy heroes to show on the map before revealing yourself. 

• Nevertheless, many players make the mistake of defaulting to this style of farming from the start. They fall into the ‘comfort zone’ of passive farming without mindfully thinking about good map movements, and start to develop excessive fear of pushing out lanes or farming around the enemy’s territory. In doing so, they end up missing creepwave gold, they allow the enemy to take map control, they contribute nothing to map pressure, and they delay their power spike and item timings.
• In reality, this kind of ‘AFK jungle’ playstyle only benefits the enemy team, as it reduces your own presence on the map and generates no map impact for your teammates.

Conclusion

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Mastering the art of farming is one of the most impactful improvements you can make as a player in Dota 2. Farming knowledge should be learned by every role and hero, as it is not an action that is only fixated on certain roles. The idea that only core players are supposed to farm creeps, while supports are not supposed to farm is absolutely false. While it’s true that supports have lower farm priority compared to cores, if there are open lanes to push, or uncontested jungle camps to farm, then definitely go do that instead of roaming around the map aimlessly. This allows you to maximize your time, efficiency, and map contribution as a whole. 

Remember, farming is more than just hitting creeps — it’s about picking the right creeps at the right time, and in the right places. By learning to focus on waves first, aggressive farming second, and defensive jungling as last priority, you will start to accelerate your scalability, item timings, map pressure, area control, and build up a dominant presence on the map.

If you are serious about climbing MMR, feel free to reach out to me for coaching via my website. Thanks for reading, and best of luck!