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A hard carry is a style of play, rather than a certain bundle of heroes. Its the style where your early and mid game is relying heavily upon farming and avoiding to get ganked, hopefully leading to a lategame dominance where you destroy your enemies. Hard carry distinguishes itself from normal carry in the way that hard carry is a pure farming style of play.
Apparently, some heroes scale better with gear than others. You ideally want your hard-carry hero to scale better than anyone of your teammates heroes, and hopefully even better than the enemies heroes.
A few examples of heroes suitable for the role Hard Carry
* Faceless Void
* Morphling
* Sven
* Lifestealer
* Phantom Lancer
A few examples of heroes considered hard carry but you should avoid:
* Phantom Assassin
* Spectre
Why? If you can play PA and Spectre well, thats fine. But if you're new to hard-carrying, leave those two heroes alone. Both are very fragile, don't have good escape mechanisms and require so much gear to be even worthwile and even when both PA and Spectre get really farmed, they are quite counterable.
Intelligence heroes
Are generally ill-suited for hard carrying. There are a few exceptions, Storm Spirit and Outworld Destroyer perform so-so as backup/semi carrys, but not hard carrys.
When your team hasn't already. 1 Hard Carry per team is enough. Sometimes 2 is okay. 3 is way too much, in fact if you're in a team with 3 hard carrys, try talking sense to your team and encourage repicks.
Wether you pick a hard carry or not, there is one thing that has to be absolutely clear to you: You have to be able to farm efficiently for the majority of the game.
Optimal team setup: 2 int, 2 str, 1 hard carry ranged agility.
Example: Magnus, Sven, Dark Seer, Jakiro, Shadow Fiend.
Some teams do: 3 support/stun (str+int), 1 semi carry, 1 hard carry (Na'Vi has sometimes even gone 2 carrys 1 semi carry heavy late-game style).
Okay, that's a pretty lame AoE combination. But you get my point.
Faceless Void. I'm not even going to debate it, a farmed Void can beat any enemy hero in lategame. The best counter to him is to not let him farm and/or stun/sheep/silence him during team fights.
DotA 2, LoL, HoN and old DotA are team games. If you like to think only about yourself, I strongly recommend Starcraft 2. This is a team game, you're supposed to help your team win, not just think about yourself.
You play a hard carry because you love to farm. Farm, and again, farm. You have to learn to CK really well. Get a solo-lane if you can handle it, but heroes such as Morphling I recommend having a dual-lane, he is weak in mid-lane. Some statistics I did based on iG, Na'Vi, Fnatic games:
* At the 5 minute mark, pro carrys creep kills range between 15-30. The best players in my statistics have > 1600 gold farmed at the 5 minute mark.
* At the 10 minute mark, pro carrys CK is around 49-66.
These statistics I post are the best performers, not the average. Many pro players who play carrys face heavy nukeage in early game and thus die, so their CK and gold will be less. I just want to give you and me a bench-mark to aim for.
If your team is good, say you have a strong Pudge or a Tinker or w/e, who run around ganking and dominating the enemies. Your job now is to do nothing but farm as efficiently as you can.
If your team is not so good, theyre suffering heavy nukes early game. You have to help!
Use TP's, teleport around the map, support your team and farm when you can. Your hard-carry is worthless if your team gets dominated early-game and enemies get fed.
This is why I made a chapter which explains the optimal hero composition of your team, if you have a good composition you avoid facing terrible nukeage in early-mid game and your hard carry can farm in peace.
This is also why I don't recommend you to start off with PA or Spectre. If your team sucks in early-mid game, PA and Spectre cannot do anything about it, they will just watch as you loose the game. Again: If you are a pro carry, you probably dont need this guide go ahead play what u want but if you're new, avoid those two.
The three golden hard carry items are:
1) Hand of Midas
2) Battlefury
3) Radiance
You want to aim for one of those three. In some cases, depending on which hero you pick you might be able to farm efficiently without these gold-boosting items. But if you pick heroes that are slow on creeping such as Faceless Void, Chaos Knight and more, you are not going to be able to get the critical level of late-game gear fast enough. Therefore you have to aim for farm-boosting gear such as one of the golden three items. Some carrys even get two, in other words Midas + BF or Radiance.
A few more notes on choosing the lane
I cannot stress enough how much hard-carrying is about farming. How well you farm is heavily dependant on your hero. Some hard carrys go for jungling at level 1, like Lifestealer or Ursa. Others are bad at jungling such as Weaver. You really have to get a good lane - do not solo unless you can handle solo. Some carrys like Shadow Fiend (should you choose to hard-carry as a SF) will excel at soloing while others won't.
Jungling
Always jungle when you can. If you were in a fight and you're left with no mana and 50% of your HP, run through your jungle and get a few creeps before you go and heal. Or use the chicken and buy pots and stay in the jungle. When in doubt - go to the jungle.
Take risks - farm lanes!
Some carrys make use of Shadowblade such as Drow, this is excellent for pushing lanes. Note: Farming creeps on lanes is BETTER than jungling, so if you can stay at a lane - do so. However, obviously it is risky to stay alone at a lane farming creeps. Make sure you have an escape mechanism. Carry a TP scroll if you need to. Morphling, Magina and Faceless Void have blink abilities that can be used for escape. But you cannot be scared of taking the risk to farm. Don't feed, but go ahead and lane to get the high level farm!
Roshan
Do Roshan at your own risk. Personally I don't like Roshan too much, its easy to figure out for your enemies and should you get ganked while doing Roshan, well, you might just loose the game. Again, do Roshan at the right time and at your own risk.
* Morphling.
He dominates ridicoleusly hard in late-game and he has great early-game ganking potential with his wave-ability. I play him with fast midas, treads, linkens, ethereal blade in that order. I start by maxing Waveform 1st, Adaptive strike 2nd and I take 1 early point into Morph so I can morph high agility for last-hitting. Replicate I take at lvl 6, 11, 16. It's also possible to choose Replicate at 10, 11 and 16.
Below, I will post my own list of Hard-Carry heroes and I will argue for why I feel they are well suited for this job. I look at two things:
1) Farming ability
2) Damage output with high-gear
I will rate the heroes in a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is a really well suited hero for the hard-carry role and 1 is a relatively poor suited hard-carry hero.
* Alchemist (2): Has strong survivability and decent farming potential. His damage doesn't really scale that well with gear, unfortunately.
* Anti-Mage (4): Can really dominate most heroes late-game with strong gear. He gets -1 because of his rather bad ability to farm, however he has a good escape mechanism.
* Bloodseeker (3): Has great damage output during all stages of the game and can survive really well with BKB. He doesn't farm creeps that well thou.
* Chaos Knight (3): Is close to unkillable when he has his ulti up. No doubt one of the strongest strength heroes, but is a very difficult hero to farm well with.
* Clinkz (4): I like ranged carrys much more, they can deal more damage in a teamfight with good support. Clinkz farms well with fire arrows and dominates with Malevolence.
* Drow Ranger (5): Drow Rangers ability to farm creeps when she is lvl 6+ is really impressive and her early game utility plus lategame damage makes her almost imbalanced!
* Faceless Void (5): The strongest hero in the late game. Might have a difficult time to farm but makes up for it with his insane ultimate and perma-stun!
* Huskar (2): Has a decent ability to farm early-mid game and can be decent lategame if he gets kind of fed, but Huskar will not survive versus some of these other carrys.
* Juggernauth (4): A really underestimated hero in my opinion. I played Yurnero a lot in old DotA and Swiftblade in HoN. His ultimate destroys all, and with BF, Jugg is great!
* Kunkka (3): Isn't that strong in lategame unless he gets fed. However, Kunkka can farm really quickly, he has great AoE potential and he can midlane really well.
* Lifestealer (5): He can jungle since level 1, and he never dies because of his insane life-steal. He might be tricky to play, but definately a top-hard-carry!
* Lone Druid (4): Has insane farming potential and a very popular pick for hard carrying in professional DotA 2. I don't play Lone Druid that much myself though.
* Lychantrope (4): Gets stronger and stronger as level grows. He is really hard to kill with BKB in wolf-form and he can jungle, an excellent carry.
* Morphling (5): Is a hero difficult to learn, but can absolutely destroy any hero in lategame except Void.
* Naga Siren (2): Is very fragile and can get ganked quite easily. I dont have so much experience playing her so I might be wrong. Her ulti is a really nice teamplay spell thou!
* Natures Prophet (1): I only include him here because some people see him as a carry. Even though he kills creeps better than anyone in the game, his damage is really awful!
* Destroyer (3): Havent played so much, but I've seen him carry games quite well though. Can deal immense damage but kind of requires mid-lane.
* PA/Spectre (1 if you're new): Again, if you know how to play - go ahead. If you're new to DotA, avoid these.
* Phantom Lancer (4): Can push towers like no other. Not many heroes can combat a farmed PL with 6 images. He farms woods really well but his damage output isn't that great.
* Riki (1): Can be completely countered if your enemies put wards up. Farms awfully and only shines if your enemies do not use wards/dust of appearance.
* Shadow Fiend (5): Such a GREAT teamplay hero. Stacks very well with Magnus/Enigma ultimate and farms creeps like a mad-man. (damn I miss Madman from HoN, thats a carry!).
* Skeleton King (4): Farms woods excellently and is quite unkillable especially when he gets some items up so that the life-steal kicks in for real.
* Slardar (2): Although really strong with gear, has an awful time farming. The same story was true for his predecessor Pestilence in HoN.
* Sniper (1): Farms well, has decent damage output but one of the lowest survivabilities
out there. A sniper will die so quickly to casters it's not even funny.
* Sven (5): Farms excellently, although a little bit tricky early game, can kill 5 enemy heroes in a few hits lategame. A BKB-Sven is quite unstoppable (except for Void).
* Templar Assassin (5): Farms greatly, is a great gank-hero and does midlaning really well. She scales well with gear aswell and is a very popular pro-DotA 2 pick.
* Ursa (5): Oh man, this guy does so much damage it's not even fun! He literally chops heroes to pieces and Roshan. Plus, Ursa can jungle at lvl 1 which makes him excellent!
* Weaver (3): Being ranged is always a plus, however Weaver faces survivability difficulties with low HP but his damage is quite nice and with gear, Weaver can be deadly!
Note that this ranking is how well the heroes are suited for hard-carry and hard-carry only! I do not focus or grade how well they perform as semi carrys or normal carrys!
I'm not going to go deep into this, I think this guide is long enough as it is. I'm just going to illustrate something you have to watch out for with an example:
You want to play hard-carry. You choose Shadow Fiend as the hero to hard-carry with (as I've recommended to be a well suited hero for this purpose). You are facing an opposing team with a Faceless Void. This is a bad situation for you as with equal farmed-gear, Void will destroy you. So you shouldn't go for a farming race in this game. You should go for a ganking semi-carry style of play instead. Certain heroes you are just not going to out carry, in that case hard-carry shouldn't be your game style, you should try a different approach.
If your enemy team has heroes: Faceless Void, Morphling, PA, Spectre, Lifestealer, Lychantrope (and others). Watch out! Hard-carry might not be the best strategy for you to go.
This guide isn't focused on how to play semi carry or normal carry, but there are great heroes for that purpose such as Vengeful Spirit, Night Stalker, Natures Prophet, Razor and others. Most of those heroes I mentioned in the chapter above where I ranked them - note that those ranks are how well they are suited for hard-carry. Some of those heroes are EXCELLENT for semi-carry normal-carry purposes!
Played DotA since 5.84b, have played competitively in a clan back in War3 TFT.
Played LoL with a KD of about 1.6.
Played HoN with a KD of 1.37.
Started DotA 2 not long ago and I'm loving it!
I'm the guy called "Light" in the replays. How to watch:
Open DotA, press "Watch", press "Recent Games", press "Filter", enter the Match-ID.
Matchid:
93664445 - Long tense game where I play Drow, outcarried enemy farmed PA and PL.
This game sort of demonstrates what I say about the limitations of PA as hard carry.
93188412 - Ursa game, not a super good game but shows you some cool things you can do as
Ursa. My jungling wasn't that good early on as you can see.
91070082 - How to play Jugg.
91005062 - Domination as SF.
95501654 - I just want to show you one more game of Jugg. Damn sexy hero, I play him like very aggressively, I spam the Phase Boots all the time. How you ideally want to play Jugg: Use your ulti each time its off CD and try getting a kill, the rest of the time just farm!
94584126 - 1-shotting enemies as PA, yes you heard it right, PA. The thing is, the game I ran will NOT work if you have good enemies. We had a really strong team and I was allowed to farm almost all game so I crit 2,2k at the end of it. I still recommend you to stay away from PA/Spectre if you're new.
Note: The best game of these replays is the first. It really shows how Drow can totally spin out of control even if the enemy hard carrys got good items. We were loosing hard against the enemies, when PA started getting kills I couldn't farm at all, and forest was occupied by Void and LD hardcore farming it. You have to adapt to the situation, if you have hard carrys like Void in your team maybe its better to let them farm while you try to play a semi carry / ganker carry instead, getting money from hero kills. That's what I did here, I switched from hard-carry style to semi-carry ganker style.
But, DotA is not always about winning. A replay where I lost:
91253975 - play as Void, had a terrible early game. Later on, I start spinning out of control and killing opponents however I got strong too late. Learn this you hard-carry players out there, we have to have a strong early game aswell, if we get a lot of items later on when our base is down - it might be too late!
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