How To Last Hit in Dota 2

Introduction

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Dota 2 is a complex strategy game with tons of interesting mechanics. Among these mechanics, the most important one to master is last-hitting. In Dota 2, last-hitting means delivering the killing blow to enemy creeps to gain gold. It is especially important during the laning phase as the laning stage sets up how your games are going to turn out during the early game phase. Gold obtained in Dota 2 is your ticket to buying items, increasing your advantage lead, and positively impacting the game for your team. Since the game is heavily based on economy management such as gold, experience, territory, and time, efficient last-hitting is necessary to get ahead of your opponents. Mastering how to last hit in Dota 2 means getting better laning phases, faster item timings, and easier games.

Understanding Your Hero

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To last hit well, you need to understand your hero’s attack animation, base damage, and the damage output of your allied creeps or tower. Every hero has a unique animation delay between when you click to attack and when the attack actually lands. Certain heroes like Sniper have quick attack animations that make last-hitting way easier than heroes with slow and clunky attack animations like Puck. This requires a lot of practice and familiarization with your preferred hero of choice to get used to the hero’s animation timings while factoring in your allied creeps’ or tower’s damage output.

Naturally, this will become a game of prediction, estimation and timing of when you should let your hero’s attack land on a creep at the right moment to secure the kill. As you get more levels and items, your attack animation will become faster due to higher attack speed, and your damage output will also increase in turn.

Learning the Basics of Last-Hitting and Practice Methods

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Level 1 to level 6

The best place to start working on your last-hitting is in a controlled, stress-free environment. This can be done by using Dota 2’s ‘Demo Hero’ mode to test things out with your preferred hero. Begin by spawning creep waves and attacking the lane creeps to test out your hero’s swing speed, attack speed, and damage output, particularly from level 1 to level 6. Try it with and without items to play around with the different stat bonuses and build up muscle memory over time. With repetition, you’ll start to learn how long your hero’s animation takes and when to actually click creeps to land the last hits. 

The timeframe from level 1 to level 6 is the most important window to maximize your last hits, as that will be the majority of your laning phase goal — to get as many last hits as possible in lane without dying. With certain heroes, you can also include spell-casting into your last-hitting training. This is a term known as ‘securing creeps’, whereby spells are added on top to finish creeps and ideally harass the enemy heroes at the same time.

For example, heroes like Weaver would want to use ‘Shukuchi’ for last hits, then run into enemy heroes for maximal spell efficiency while securing creeps at the same time. Normally, you would need to land one hit before casting your spell to ensure that the creeps are within your hero’s spell kill threshold before using it. This helps to prevent your opponents from being able to time their denies onto their creeps.

Stop Actions

It’s also useful to implement the ‘Stop’ action into your last-hitting regime to better time your last hits. For instance, when creeps are not low enough to be finished by your right clicks, it would be helpful to add in some ‘Stop’ actions (based on your hotkey button for this action, which by default would be the S button) before letting the attack animation go. Try to time your hits with your allied creeps this way until you are able to consistently secure at least 3-4 creeps every wave without any enemy heroes contesting you. Once you are confident enough, start practicing under a tower. This is more challenging because tower shots deal high damage in fixed intervals. Learn to calculate the number of tower hits necessary to drop creeps low before you throw out right clicks to secure the enemy creeps.

Applying Last-Hitting Skills in the Laning Phase

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After learning the basics of last-hitting, the next step is to apply the learned skills in actual games. During the laning phase, you will face not just creeps, but also enemy heroes who will try to harass, deny or outfarm you. New concepts like positioning, trading, creep aggroing and sustaining would be added on top of the last-hitting mechanic. As a result, managing all of these laning concepts together will become extremely challenging, but it’s oh-so satisfying once you master all of them. 

Positioning

The concept of ‘Positioning’ should be heavily emphasized while last-hitting to avoid getting unnecessary harass and losing lanes. Simply put, you want to stay behind your ranged creep for safety, and only move forward when it’s safe to go for a last hit. You also want to frequently spam ‘Creep Aggro’ to pull creeps away from your opponents to get safer farm, especially as melee heroes against ranged heroes in lane. 

Denying

You will also need to learn how to deny your own creeps — which is to kill your own creeps to prevent your opponents from securing them, thus denying your opponents of gold and experience. Denying becomes especially important when you want to prevent enemies from getting ahead of you in levels and farm, or to prevent your creep wave from pushing and keeping it closer to your tower. 

Securing Creeps

As previously mentioned, the idea of ‘securing creeps’ plays a huge role in lanes as well. This is especially true when it comes to the enemy’s ranged creeps or flagbearer creeps. Grabbing last-hits on these creeps provides huge amounts of XP and gold compared to normal melee creeps. If you are a support and your core is unable to secure these important creeps in lane, then it becomes your job to secure it instead of being denied by your opponents. 

Prioritizing

It’s important to note that last-hitting should be prioritized all throughout the game, and not just during the laning phase. Once the laning stage ends, last-hitting doesn’t stop—it simply changes form. Now, instead of just lane creeps, you’re farming jungle creeps, neutral camps, stacked camps, and lane waves when it’s safe. Ensuring that you are constantly getting last-hits over the entirety of the game allows you to continuously get gold in the game and speed up your farm to hit faster item timings.

Common Last-Hitting Mistakes

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Beginners often struggle with consistency in last-hitting. Even advanced and experienced players are guilty of this issue sometimes, as they neglect practice and experiment with too many different heroes without getting used to the hero’s animation timings and damage. Here is a list of commonly-performed last-hitting mistakes that you should be aware of:

1. Attacking too early or late, missing last hit
2. Denying instead of last hitting
3. Harassing instead of last hitting
4. Not using spells to secure contested creeps
5. Not securing the enemy’s ranged creep and flagbearer creep
6. Being too far from last hit, late to walk into creep
7. Being too close to creeps when last hitting, taking harass
8. Not aggroing creeps to last hit, especially as melee hero

Measuring Last-Hitting Progress and Final Tips

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Assessing your last-hitting progress by tracking your creep score after games is a good way to measure last-hitting improvement. Here is a table showing the recommended creep score to game timer by minutes.

Game Timer	Creep Score
10 minutes	50-60 last hits
15 minutes	100-150 last hits
20 minutes	150-200 last hits
25 minutes	200-250 last hits
30 minutes	250-300 last hits
40+ minutes	>300 last hits

If you are a beginner or inexperienced player, achieving something like 10% less than the recommended creep score to game timer benchmark is an acceptable range to assess last-hitting performance (AKA farm speed). If you are unable to hit these numbers, perhaps you might be missing a lot of last hits, whether that be in the laning phase, early game phase or mid game phase. The concept of ‘Farming’ comes hand-in-hand with last-hitting, therefore requiring a good mastery in both of these two concepts.

If you are missing a lot of last hits, go back to the demo mode and keep practicing on your favorite heroes. Improvement comes gradually, but the rewards are game-changing and extremely satisfying. Make it a habit to take just 5 minutes before each match to warm up in a demo lobby to boost your last-hitting consistency. Also, watch replays of skilled players and observe how they time their hits, position themselves in lane, and control creep equilibrium. These small observations add up over time.

Have fun grinding, and thanks for reading!