Analysis: Neutral Creep Pulling in the Safe Lane

Pulling creeps is a tactic used for controlling the lane. A lot of player blindly say to stack-pull every time. Others completely ignore pulling. Neither is the correct approach.

DotA is a game of making decisions to fit the scenario. You can never just blindly do something for every situation.

Stack-Pull

Stack-Pull refers to stacking the safe lane pull camp before pulling it. This gives you two sets of neutral creeps. When you pull these creeps (around the x:17 mark), they will completely destroy your creep wave.

This does two things:

1. Moves the collision point of the creep waves closer to your tower and to safety
2. Denies your opponent an entire wave of experience (~250-300 XP, in the early game), and gold

You Do Not Always Want to do This Though

If done at the wrong time, this can prompt a few bad things:

• Your Opponents Push the Tower -- there are no creeps to help defend it, so they just apply pressure and get early tower gold
• Your Carry/Support Tanks Damage -- if you don't want the tower to get hit, you can kite the creeps to some extent, but a hero will inevitably take some damage
• Your Opponent Dives a Hero -- with creeps already there, your opponent can dive a hero while one support is busy with the pull. You may be able to react in time, but even then, your carry might be too low to do much beside leech XP until a Salve can be sent to them.

Also note that a good opponent can apply harass under the tower by attacking a hero, then immediately doing an attack-click on their allied creeps (thus losing aggro). By doing this, they will not be targeted by the tower.

Single Pull

Single Pull refers to pulling a single set of neutral creeps into your wave. This will deny 1-2 lane creeps potentially. It also delays the creeps from re-entering the lane.

Generally, you do this when you want to push.

For pushing, try to do this:

• On the wave that has the catapult
• Or the wave just before the catapult wave

Note: Siege creeps come every 7th wave (the first is at 3:00 minutes).

When you do this around Siege Creep time, you'll get a double wave + a siege creep, which is very hard to defend.

Other Times to Single Pull

When playing Trilane vs. Trilane, you typically do not want to be pulling much at all because they can take the tower, contest the camp, or get easy kills. However, you can single-pull the first wave (given your camp is not warded) to bring the lane creeps closer to your tower / a more favorable position.

If the wave gets too far out, but you cannot risk stack-pulling, a single-pull can be useful as well.