Replay of a #5 player trying to play carry

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2271015191

Hello everyone. I'm a 2.5k player, and you can see from my DotaBuff profile I play mostly support, mainly because no one else wants to do it. As a result I'm on an endless loop when it comes to the carry role. I can't play carry because I don't, why? because I can't.

The thing is I joined this game you see with my friend as Earthshaker. I chose Luna because she's my favourite carry by far. My friend complained about our Pudge being lackluster, but I'm interested about my own play. Any blatant errors? Wrong decisions? Things I should have done but didn't?

I'll appreciate all kinds of constructive criticism. Thanks for your patience :)

I watched a reasonable amount of the game, here's a few thoughts:

Early game. Was pretty good overall, but here's some specifics to work on:

- Control your lane better. You were a little guilty of letting the lane mechanics work against you, and you lost farm/xp because of it and gave it to their offlaner. While your denying was good, trim down the health of your own creeps where necessary to maintain lane equilibrium. Go back and block your creep wave if their tower is getting pushed.

- Last hitting under your tower. Missed nearly all - as you say, lack of carry practice. These hits are important though, and it's a mechanical skill you can practice offline if necessary. Just know your hit routines - e.g. ranged creep = 1 hit, 3 tower, 1 lh.

- You baited the Phoenix quite nicely a few times, but he was kind of dumb, but he still nearly managed to get a kill on you because you'd got low in the jungle. Probably not worth it til you get your helm. Still, some nice plays.

- Bring consumables. You ran back to fountain rather than sending out a Healing Salve. This cost you a lot of gold/xp (ok you couldn't be visible cos of Sunstrike, but you could still soak xp and stack) - even a few last hits would easily have paid for the salve and kept you farming.

- Self-Stacking. You could have stacked jungle camps as you farmed (e.g. on 13:50 you start a new camp but don't clear it or pull it). Small margins, but it'll help your GPM, and is pretty important on a hero like Luna.

- Dominator stacking. Uhhh...you started with the right idea and stacked some ancients, but completely forgot after this, no dominated creep, no ancient stacks. It's really vital to keep your farming speed up, even though you didn't have as much map control as you'd like. Even just grab an alpa wolf for the damage aura.

Overall I think you did fine though, generally made some good plays and the mistakes kind of went narrowly against you - yes there are lessons to be learnt here, but you looked like that side of your game was relatively solid. Builds also looked ok, you made the right decisions, like switching to BKB when you needed to.

Carry is about efficiency, hitting your timing window and making the right calls on when to fight, keep working on it, but don't worry about the usual "I'm a support player, can't do carry" attitude. All those times watching other people do it right/wrong are a good grounding for doing it yourself, and you'll find you can probably learn most of the skillset to a reasonable level fairly quickly.

Thank you very much for your advice. Next time I play carry I'll keep this in mind and post the results here.

By the way, as a support player I'm a big fan of your guides. I even keep re-reading the "Picking the right support" and "Picking the right carry" ones every once in a while ;D

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2407016435

This is the first time I play carry after posting here. Luna again.

For now I see I need to control the dominated creep better when I tell it to go to the ancient camp. I think more than one died in the way. I also don't understand what went wrong, we had a very good start. I feel like I've failed my teammates. Maybe I should have joined fights earlier. Maybe I should have pushed towers harder. Maybe I should have split-pushed with Travels when they were trying to siege our mid high ground. I don't know.