Stacking and Pulling: techniques that win games

Stacking and pulling are two techniques you can use to weasel yourself a small advantage in terms of gold, experience and even lane control, and usual take place in the opening stages of a game. Stacking involves moving the neutral (called so because they are neither affiliated with the Radiant or the Dire) creeps away from their spawn point, to achieve a double spawn. This can be achieved by attacking the neutral at fifty-one, fifty-two or fifty-three seconds (except for the ancient camp which must be pulled at fifty-one or fifty-two due to their slower movement speed), and then running far away from the camp, drawing them far enough away so they do not block the spawn in the camp they originated from on the minute mark. But why would you want to do this?

Stacking has the advantage of a large experience or gold boost in a short space of time, which can be beneficial for carry players if they are adequately farmed, or have the correct abilities to decimate the camps quickly. You should not, however assume that stacking from the get-go is the way to go for any and all carries, some are better and worse at taking stacked camps early! Luna for example is incredibly proficient at taking stacks quite early into the game, due to her ability Moon Glaive.

To give an example of how this works in a game setting we can imagine two different scenarios. The first is in which your Luna carry has very good farm and manages to get a Helm of the Dominator early, which she will then use to control a neutral creep and use this creep to stack the ancients, allowing her to maximise her lead on farm. The other scenario is one in which the Luna is heavily under-farmed, during the laning phase the supports (assuming Luna is busy farming the lane as she should be!) should stack the other, easier neutral camps for her, in order to enable her to catch up on the farm she is missing by going on a blitzkrieg through all these camps.

Another proponent of stacking is any hero who's abilities synergise well with an increased number of creeps, these are generally heroes with area of effect abilities and include Dark Seer's Ion Shell, Batrider's Firefly and Axe's Counter Helix. This latter ability is an excellent example of the beneficial effects that stacking has on some heroes, allowing them to get farm where they sometimes would be unable to. Counter Helix is a flat seventeen percent chance to perform area of effect damage in a two hundred and seventy-five radius when hit. Therefore the more units you have hitting you, the higher chance you have of one of these units causing Counter Helix to activate. For this reason you commonly see Axe (when jungling from level one) stacking the yellow neutral camp so he may dispatch of the creeps in this way. It can also be a useful boon for heroes soloing the side lane, as commonly beastmaster and tinker use their area of effect abilities to stack the ancients, therefore gaining good farm in a lane they would otherwise be forced out of.

The final use for stacking leads us onto our next main subject, pulling. Stacking can also be used to deny the enemies a whole creep wave of experience, whilst moving their creep wave back to your tower in order to gain lane control. This trick is achieved by firstly stacking the camps (highlighted on the map in light blue) in the way I've outlined above, and then pulling these camps into the lane with the right timing in order to cause your creeps to attack them. At first this may seem like a daunting ask, and you might find it difficult to pull this one off, but there is a trick to this manoeuvre! If you look at the shape of the trees on the top lane for Dire and bottom lane for Radiant you will see that there is a line of trees in between the lane and the jungle, and there are gaps in the tree-line (marked with red on the map), if you fire off your auto-attack the creeps at exactly the time that the creep wave reaches these positions, then run into the lane with the creeps following (going in the direction of the black arrows) you are almost guaranteed to pull!

 

A mistake committed often by newer players is attempting a pull on only one spawn (this means you have not stacked the light blue camp but have pulled it into the lane). This error is often overlooked but it is quite fundamental in that you end up with the opposite of lane control, you don't bring the creep wave back to your tower, rather you advance it to theirs; you push. This occurs because commonly (alpha wolves and centaurs are the exception if you auto-attack your creeps from half-hp) a single spawn of neutrals will be unable to destroy your creep wave entirely, and when they are finished with the neutral camp your creeps will forge on into the lane, increasing your creep wave by at least a half. This is fine if you have a strong pushing line up on your team, and are aiming to get early towers, but usually you will not want to push the safe lane until your carry has adequate farm, and lane dominance.

This mistake is particularly irritating and damaging because it has three separate negative effects, firstly you don't deny as much experience as you would like because your creep wave isn't destroyed in its entirety. Secondly it prevents your carry from getting farm easily because the creep wave is moving away from the safety of his tower, and thirdly and most importantly it pushes the creeps up the enemies towers, meaning they can farm more productively. The message to take from this is; if you single stack pull you are giving the enemy heroes farm and taking it away from your carry! However if you have a tango, quelling blade or ability that removes trees (and isn't too mana intensive for a support!) up your sleeve, and you find yourself pulling a singular creep camp don't panic! There is another trick you can use to avoid the dreaded jumbo creep-wave, and that is chain-pulling.

Chain-pulling is using one creep-wave to take out multiple camps, by pulling the creeps from the camps (the two highlighted in white on the Radiant safe-lane above the light blue camp) to the initial camp to which you pulled the creep-wave from the lane. This has the bonus of not taking time to set up (as you must wait to stack camps) but as stated requires a method with which to destroy trees so that you have enough time to transfer the creep-wave to the next camp position. A chain-pull then is achieved simply by using a tango to destroy a tree at the back of the initial camp (light blue), and pulling the above camp (white) down to the first camp, this must be timed though that while the neutrals from the white camp are attacking your pulled creep-wave the last creep from the first spawn-point (light blue) dies, this process can then be repeated to kill nearby camps. It is not simple, but with practise it is possible to destroy these three camps, getting your support(s) key farm and experience they may not be able to find in the lane, whilst denying the enemy a wave of experience.

These are the basics of safe-lane pulling which is usually undertaken by a support, but there are more difficult pulls (shown in purple) for you to master, which in turn can be chain-pulled to further maximise your gold and experience intake. Moreover when these techniques are fully utilised they can be used as a strategic asset, giving your team increased map control and therefore increasing your chances of eventually winning the game. Especially when playing support the safe-lane pull (and chain-pull) is one of the key weapons you can wield from your arsenal to take back lane control, and to get yourself much needed levels and gold, they are tactics which should not be overlooked.