How to Farm in Dota 2 – Improve Your GPM

Farming is one of the most crucial skills in Dota 2, as items make playing the game infinitely easier. After the laning stage, simply hitting creeps isn’t enough. Effective farming means you’re maximizing your gold per minute, map presence, efficiency, and impact while staying safe. In this guide, I’ll teach you the core principles to remember when learning how to farm in Dota 2. 

If you’re farming, you’re likely playing a core role like carry, mid or offlane. If you’re playing support in Dota, be careful not to steal farm from your cores.

Post-Laning Stage Farm in Dota: Push, Pull, Jungle

After the laning stage ends, which is usually around the 8 to 10-minute mark, you’ll have two options: stay in the lane and farm, or retreat to the jungle completely. This choice depends on whether you feel strong and ungankable, or weak and vulnerable. If you choose to stay in the lane, there are three things to remember: Push, Pull, Jungle, and then repeat. 

Pushing the Lane

When pushing the lane, you are essentially killing the enemy creeps as quickly as possible. Not only will this save you time for farming, but it will also push the lane into the enemy tower, which creates pressure on the map and forces an enemy to deal with it. 

Pulling the Camp

After you have pushed the lane, head over to your pull camp and pull the wave. Not only can you farm the creeps from the pull camp for extra gold, but you will also reset the creep equilibrium once the next wave arrives. 

To see the pull and stack timings in creep camps, you can hold down alt. You’ll need to be able to time this just right to get the outcome you want.

Jungling During Downtime

After clearing the pull camp, there will be some downtime between you finishing and the next wave arriving. Use this time to walk to the closest jungle camp and clear it as quickly as possible. Then, return to the lane to catch the next wave, and repeat this process until you’re kicked out of the lane. 

Retreating to the Jungle Completely

Knowing when to lane and how to farm in Dota is a bit of a judgement call. If you feel like the enemy laner has kill threat on you or the enemy mid-laner and supports go missing, sometimes, it’s best to retreat to the deeper portions of your jungle and farm safely.

You should keep farming in this area until more Dota map objectives appear (e.g., heroes start showing in lanes, or your teammates take the tower on the opposite lane).

Selecting Your Farming Item

When the early game is coming to an end, carry heroes must select their farming item suited to their hero and game state. This farming item aims to accelerate farming capabilities to scale into the mid-to-late game. There are three main farming items:

Battle Fury

Battle Fury gives you cleave on melee heroes, which allows for quick creep clearing. This item is best on melee right-click cores to hit their item timings and eventually carry the game.

Best heroes to buy Battle Fury on:

• Phantom Assassin
• Anti-Mage
• Ursa
• Troll Warlord
• Juggernaut

Radiance

Radiance is excellent for illusion heroes or tanky cores who want to farm while surviving. Though Radiance doesn’t clear camps as fast as Battle Fury does, it helps more during fights. 

Best heroes to buy Radiance on:

• Wraith King
• Lifestealer
• Alchemist
• Spectre
• Kunkka

Maelstrom

Maelstrom is effective on ranged heroes or cores that rely on attack speed for faster wave clear and team fight impact. It will later be upgraded to the Mjolnir.

Best heroes to buy Maelstrom on:

• Sniper
• Nature’s Prophet
• Lina
• Muerta
• Faceless Void

Built-In Spells

Some heroes don’t need to pick up any of the three items discussed earlier, as they have built-in spells that already accelerate their farm. Examples include Sven’s Great Cleave or Templar Assassin’s Psi Blades.

Instead, these heroes will focus on buying items that boost their stats or mobility, like Mask of Madness, Dragon Lance, or Yasha. These items help them go from camp to camp quicker and deal more damage. 

Farm in Dota Prioritization

Once the laning stage ends, mid-game farming begins. There is a clear hierarchy of creep order in terms of efficiency and impact. 

#1 Creep Waves

The Dota creep type with the highest farm priority should always be creep waves. These critters give the highest gold and experience value for time spent and difficulty clearing. Additionally, clearing creep waves creates pressure, as your wave will push deeper into the enemy team’s map.

Creep waves are essentially walking Observer Wards. If they make it to an enemy tower and nobody is clearing it, it’s a sign that the enemies might be smoke-ganking or taking Roshan. However, clearing creep waves can be risky, so be sure it’s safe before going there. 

#2 Jungle Camps by Lanes

Some jungle camps are positioned beside the lanes. These camps are the second priority, as they are convenient to farm after pushing a wave. Ancient camps take higher priority, as they provide more gold and experience compared to regular ones. 

You can normally farm one or two jungle camps in between creep waves, which means you’re farming extremely efficiently every minute. 

#3 Deep Jungle Camps

Jungle camps that are deep in your base (triangle or the camps close to your Tier 2 towers) are the final priority. These camps are close to your structures, meaning they are very safe to farm. However, they are far away from the creep waves, which means they are inefficient.

If you had a rough lane or all enemy heroes are missing, farming these deep camps might be the best option, as they are the safest camps on the map. Keep farming these camps until a lane opens up or if enemy heroes start showing on the map.

Buying Small Items

Knowing how to farm in Dota means knowing what the best items in the game are. To elevate your farming efficiency, there are some small items you can buy that provide sustain and mobility:

Stat Items

Items that provide you with stats like Wraith Bands, Bracers, or Null Talismans can improve your damage and survivability when farming. 

Wind Lace

Wind Lace is a great item that grants you movement speed to rotate between camps and waves. It only costs 250 gold. 

Infused Raindrops

Infused Raindrops are ideal for providing decent mana regen. Some heroes rely on spells to clear camps or move from camp to camp quickly, and this cheap item certainly helps. 

How to farm in Dota with impact

When you’re “farming,” you want to make sure you’re farming with impact. Let’s understand this concept better. 

Shoving Waves = Impact

As previously discussed, the top priority is to farm creep waves. This is because, by shoving waves into an enemy tower, you are forcing responses and making it harder for the enemy to know how to farm in Dota. When a creep wave is right in front of an enemy tower, someone will be forced to respond by teleporting there and farming it. 

This means that while you are farming camps and not contributing to fights, you are essentially forcing an enemy hero to deal with the wave that you pushed. This essentially makes the rest of the map a 4v4 scenario.

Stop AFK Farming

Passive farming is punished in modern Dota. “AFK Farming” means you are just mindlessly hitting jungle camps, especially deep ones, for the entire game. You’re not shoving any waves, and you’re not participating in any fights. 

You must balance farm with presence – join fights, push waves, pressure towers – anything other than hitting jungle camps with no purpose. 

Teleport to Free Lanes

Use your TP scrolls smartly to farm uncontested waves across the map. If you see an enemy creep wave pushing into your tower, you can teleport there and farm it. 

If you were farming aggressively and heroes started going missing on the map, feel free to teleport to your Tier 2 tower and farm the deep camps until they start showing again. This movement around the map either puts pressure on the enemy’s map or alleviates pressure from your team’s map. 

Jungling Efficiency

When hitting jungle camps, you want to do it as efficiently as possible so you can either catch the next wave in time or have as many camps as possible respawn on the next minute. Here are some tips to maximize efficiency.

Clockwise or Counter-Clockwise

Move in a circular pattern to minimize downtime. You should avoid backtracking so you don’t waste time walking. Also, avoid inefficient routes. Honestly, this skills comes with time so you can practice while figuring out how to farm in Dota 2.

Think of the camps as a rotating clock. Decide whether it’s best to go clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on which area is safer.

Using the Quelling Blade

Quelling Blade deals additional damage to jungle creeps, so you can clear them out faster. Cutting trees can also create smoother movement from camp to camp. 

Ranged heroes can also benefit from using the Quelling Blade, particularly to cut trees that are obscuring vision. The triangle has trees that block ranged heroes from seeing both camps at a time. 

Stack Whenever Possible

Always keep an eye on the clock. If you’re approaching a camp at the :50-second mark, it’s best to wait and stack the camp first before clearing it. You’ll get a huge gold and experience boost for stacking, leading to higher GPM and XPM. 

40-Second Rule

When you’re focused on jungling, pay attention to the :40-second mark on the clock. This is a good habit to get into while learning how to farm in Dota. Normally, this is the ideal time to walk to the closest Ancient camp to stack it. Stacking Ancients is the most efficient way to farm jungle camps for obvious reasons. 

Looking to Join Fights

When carry heroes are still in their “farming phase,” most of them want to avoid joining fights as they are still lacking items to engage in combat. Here are the situations where it’s best to join fights as a carry. 

Look to Clean Up

The main goal of carries in the early-to-mid game is to clean up easy kills during fights. These are low HP heroes or burstable supports. Make sure to play in the outskirts of the fight first, get the easy kills, and then decide whether you should go back to farming or commit to more kills or objectives. 

Join Fights with a TP Scroll

Walking to join fights is often dreadful, as you might arrive too late, or the fight might not develop at all, and you’ve just wasted your time. The potential risk of walking and missing the fight is just too inefficient for carries, so I highly suggest only joining fights by teleporting. 

This means you should only join fights that are near your Towers. For example, if your team is fighting in front of the enemy team’s Tier 2 tower, then teleporting to your Tier 1 and walking to the fight is going to take a very long time and is almost always not worth it.