Dota 2: What is lane equilibrium and how to maintain it?

Lane equilibrium is one of the more fundamental concepts of Dota 2. At a certain time in any lane, the creep waves of two opposing teams meet at a particular point - this ‘meeting point’ is called lane equilibrium or creep equilibrium.

This concept is intrinsically related to the laning stage of any Dota 2 player. While a safelane carry player wants the creep equilibrium right outside the T1 tower range and farm them from under the safety of the tower, the offlaner’s job, in most cases, is to dislodge the status quo and force the enemy carry to farm in a spot far away from his tower. This makes kill attempts on the carry much easier to execute for an offlaner in Dota 2.

Maintaining the creep equilibrium in any sidelane of Dota 2 can be done by a number of methods.

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How to maintain lane equilibrium in Dota 2?

1) Utilizing the pull camps

For the safelane, pulling a stacked small camp into the creep wave means the enemy offlaner and position 4 do not get any XP from a whole wave of lane creeps as all of them get killed by the jungle creeps at the small camp. This can be used as a way to fix the lane equilibrium when the lane is getting pushed toward the enemy tower. The timing for safelane small camp pulls is at the XX:16 and XX:46 marks.

From the offlaner’s perspective, pulling the hard camp achieves the same goal. The pull timing for the hard camp is XX:18 and XX:48.

In this context, pulling an unstacked small camp can be detrimental for the safelane as most of the lane creeps stay alive after killing the neutral camp and they rejoin the next creep wave forming an almost double lane wave that pushes the wave strongly in the offlaner’s direction. However, this can be used sparingly to push the enemy tower with the siege creep wave.

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2) Creep Aggro

Aggroing creeps is a very useful mechanic in Dota 2. The way it works is, if any hero uses an attack command on an enemy hero while within 500 range of enemy melee creeps and 600 range of enemy ranged creeps, the creeps halt everything they were doing and start to attack the hero who issued the attack command.

Since the ranged creep has more attack damage than the melee creeps in a wave, aggroing the enemy melee creeps into an allied ranged creep and getting it killed, makes the enemy wave push toward your direction.

This does not fix the lane equilibrium as much as a neutral camp pull does, but it is an incredibly useful laning tool. A Dota 2 player can win otherwise unwinnable lane matchups by using the creep aggro tactics properly.