[Guide] Last Hitting and the Laning Phase

Many new players allow their hero to attack creeps as much as they want, thinking the more they swing, the faster creeps will die and the more gold they will get.  While this logic is used in some circumstances, what we would call pushing, early in the game it is often better to bide your time try to land the last hit.  Last hitting is when you do not attack until either your creep, or the enemy creep is able to be killed with just one hit. This leads to several advantages:

1. You can deny friendly creeps, which reduces the XP your enemies get, and allows you to level faster than them.
2. You can "last hit" enemy creeps, still getting the gold and full XP for yourself.
3. By doing both of these skillfully, you will slowly cause the friendly creeps to lose, "pulling" the creeps back towards your tower, giving you the safety of tower cover at a closer proximity.  A definite bonus!

This link is a Dota video, but the concepts still apply.

Posture, who is scarier? Often times people will talk about OP lanes such as swift blade and Glacius, and how there is nothing they can do to prevent feeding.  While these lanes are hard, denying when you can, and playing aggressive at the start to whiddle swift blades HP down will help.  Trying to knock someones HP down is an aggressive posture.  Remember if swift blade is too low, even if he twirls he'll die, so he'll just sit back and soak XP.  The stance swift blade is taking in this example, the passive sit back and don't die posture, is known as defensive posture.  Remember, posture and your choice of what you actually are can make a HUGE difference to the way you'll play and how easy it will be to not die and get last hits.

While we're talking about posture, sometimes you're going to have to play extremely defensively to not die.  In these cases make sure you are in XP range of the enemy creeps as they die.  To check this, check and see if there is a purple diamond above the creeps head.  If there is, you're in XP range.

Remember, playing your lane correctly and last hitting/denying can make a HUGE difference.

I want to apologize for the lack of pictures in this post compared to normal.  I had a few replays I was going to harvest for good last hitting pictures, but the server issues have made it almost impossible to get to them.  I will try to add them later this week along with more information with those pictures.  Feel free to leave any questions or comments as always.