General Positioning Guide

Introduction

Hello my name is SpoonyChan, and this is my second guide. My friend Leaf inspired me to write this.

You cannot believe how many times I seen people die because of bad positioning. If they had better positioning, then they would have survived. How many teamfights I've seen being lost because of poor positioning. I'm not just talking about my teammates or other people, I'm talking about myself too. I believe that positioning is one of the most important, yet one of the most difficult fundamentals to grasp onto. And I wrote this guide to inform people about it.

So what is positioning?

Great question, young grasshopper. Positioning, in basic terms, is where you place your hero. Placing your hero in a good position will make you have a better chance at surviving, winning a teamfight or pulling off a successful gank. Placing your hero in a bad position will make you lose a teamfight, get harassed out of lane, or killed.

There are two types of positioning. I call them Static Positioning and Dynamic Positioning

Static Positioning

Static positioning is all about zones. A zone is a specific radius around everyone's heroes. There are 3 types of zones, your sight range, your experience range, and your attack range. All of these zones are important. With your sight range, make sure you try to keep an eye on enemy heroes when it's possible. However, if you're a squishy hero, you're alone, and you're in Storm Spirit's sight range, he can easily zip in and kill you. Be careful in being in the sight range of heroes that can close the gap between you and them quickly. Also remember that a heroes sight range becomes smaller at night.


A picture showing Queen of Pain's sight range during the day.



I consider the attack range the most significant zone. Only ranged heroes have attack ranges, but melee heroes should still be paying attention to enemy ranged heroes attack range. Each hero has a different attack range. You generally want creeps in your attack range so you can lasthit properly, just as shown in the picture below. (Also keep in mind that if you attack uphill you can miss your attacks)




In the laning stage, most of the time, you and your oponents attack ranges will be overlapping, but neither of you will be in eachothers attack range.

What I see players most of the time doing incorrectly is letting the enemy get near them, making you in their attack range, and not doing anything while they get 1 or 2 hits off of you. That is a completely incorrect response. You cannot accept being harassed for free. You either trade hits with them, which is effective only when you either hit harder than them or you have more regen, or you kite them.

What is kiting?

Imagine this: It is a breezy spring day, and you decide to lift your lazy *** off the computer and fly a kite. When you are flying the kite, and you decide to go back a bit, the string gets tighter and pulls the kite back with you. But, if you go forward again, the string gets looser and goes back to its original position.

That is what kiting is. You move away from the enemy hero if they get close to you, and you move towards them when they move away from you, while keeping the same distance between you two. Also, if you have a larger attack range then your opponent, then you might even get a couple hits of harass onto them while kiting.

Harassing

If you do not know what harassing is, it is the concept of going into another players attack range and hitting them a couple of times, depleting their health a bit so they will stay out of the lane for a while, depending on if they have regen, or if they have to go back to base.

Ganking

You want to stay out of sight when you are ganking enemy heroes. So, some spots are better than others to gank. Usually these spots are either on the highground, where you can see them but they can't see you, or hiding in the fog of war (usually abusing the tree line), where you have sight of them either by ward, creep, tower or ally hero.

Teamfights

If you are a durable hero that deals a lot of autoattack damage, then you should be on the front lines of a fight. However, if you are a squishy support that deals most of his damage by spells, you should stay on the outer edges of the fight, backing off the instant your spells are on cooldown, since you can't do anything without your spells. Not only do you have a smaller chance of dying in the teamfight, you are helping your team win the fight.

Dynamic Positioning

Dynamic Positioning is a lot harder concept than Static Positioning, and a lot more important too. It is the skill to guess where the enemy team is so you put your hero in a better position. For example, I am a Bristleback offlane that is farming a lot more than the enemy carry, and gotten one or two kills off of the enemy support. I glance at the minimap, and notice that Pudge is missing from midlane. I then look at the scoreboard and notice that he is level 7. I will play passively since the enemy carry and support probably requested a gank, and Pudge is capable of killing me. I back off into the safest place possible while still being in experience range.

Dynamic Positioning combines a couple of skills, including map awareness and static positioning. Map awareness is checking the map, checking on every enemy hero and keeping a tab on which ones are missing. They key to mastering dynamic positioning is to have game sense. Game sense is knowledge about the game and how to play it, which you will develop by playing more.

You will eventually develop a sense about dynamic positioning over time, but here's how to get started

Throughout the game, I constantly ask myself two questions. If the enemies are missing I ask myself "If I was them, what would I do?". For example, I am playing Lina mid against a Shadow Fiend. Since Lina is a counter to Shadow Fiend, he will probably get harassed out of lane and become severely underfarmed. If he's missing, I will ask myself, "If I was Shadow Fiend in this situation, what would I be doing?". Knowing Shadow Fiend's farming capability, especially if he's on the Radiant side, he is probably stacking and razing jungle camps. Then, with my team's support, we would smoke gank in their jungle to kill Shadow Fiend. That is the basis of map awareness and dynamic positioning.

The other question I ask myself is "How would I die in this situation?". Once you find a way you could die, fix it immediately. For example, you're a Lion support, a very squishy hero, that is solo pushing and overextending a lane while the rest of your team is farming, when the whole enemy team is missing. Then, you would ask yourself, "How would I die in this situation?". I would say that the enemy team might teleport in, or they might come from behind or from the sides and gank you easily. I would immediately back out and maybe even teleport into another lane. After asking this question to yourself many times, you will automatically put yourself into a better position the first time.




In this situation, I am playing Anti-Mage. Now let's pretend the Pudge on the enemy team is missing, and I was a safelane Anti-Mage that teleported mid because Lion asked for help. Last time Pudge was seen, he was full health and heading towards top rune. Now let's ask the first question. If I was Pudge, what would I be doing right now? Now, maybe the Pudge wasn't heading towards top rune, maybe he was heading towards top lane to gank, since he is a ganking hero. Maybe he got invisibility, haste or double damage and plans to gank middle.

Now the next question, how can I die in this situation? Well, if Pudge got a double damage rune, or maybe no rune at all, he might go on the highground behind me and Meat Hook me (just like shown in the diagram below), and ending up killing me, so I would fix that by going to the right or maybe even closer to the creeps.

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In the same game, our top lane calls for help because there was 4 top. Now, there's only 1 top, and 3 heroes are missing. Me, still playing Anti-Mage, I start heading towards top. If I were playing as the 3 missing heroes, where would I be right now? Well, honestly, I would still be in the lane, maybe hiding in the jungle, waiting for our team to push up. However, they might've started moving to a different lane, maybe to gank me because they saw me.

How can I die in this situation? Well, as I said, they might be moving to midlane to gank me, so I might meet them at rune and be at various spots, as shown in the diagram below.

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4 minutes into the game, I started jungling in the enemy's jungle. First of all, this is a horrible place to be since you should not jungle in the enemy's jungle unless you have complete map control, and as you see on the minimap, all the towers are still up, so no team has map control advantage currently. Also, 4 enemy heroes are missing. What would I do if I was playing those 4 heroes? It is 4 minutes into the game, and there's no Ursa, so Roshan is out of the equation. I would either be heading back to my lane or jungling. How would I die in this situation? If any enemy hero enters the jungle and sees me, I'm basically dead. The solution: get out of the jungle.

Conclusion

I hope this guide helped a lot of people raise their MMR :)

Tell me if I should add anything or make a video guide about this.

Thank you for taking your time reading this.