Maximizing your gold and experience is important, but how can that be done? How about preventing your opposing lane heroes from gold and experience? If both are done correctly, one could have an overwhelming advantage with higher levels and have better items. Lane control is the way it is done.

Last Hits

You have probably noticed that when you start attacking creeps, you often do not get gold accredited to you unless you have the last hit. With this in mind, just randomly attacking creeps will not net you maximum gold per wave. Instead, it is more efficient to attack the creep when your attack will kill the creep. Experience is not a factor when last hitting the opposing creep.

Tips:

 Holding the Alt key will pop mini-health bars over heroes, units and towers on both sides. This will let you see which creep is low and when to attack for the kill.

 Understand your base damage. Some heroes have a large range in their base damage such as Chaos Knight, while others have very low base damage. Understanding how much damage you do will allow you to estimate when you should hit.

 The druid of the talons and necromancers have less hp than their melee counter parts. This often means your last hits will be a bit early and have more hp when compared to melee creeps.

 Constant random attacks will generally push your wave creeps to the enemy tower, allowing them to rack up experience if they are hiding from you. Last hits prevents the push from moving forward too quickly. Denying is immensely helpful with this aspect and is discussed next.

Denying

If you manage to get the last hit on your own creeps, no gold will splash from the corpse. When this happens, no experience will be given to the enemy team as you killed it. This also prevents the enemy from last hitting your creep and gaining gold. Creeps on your own team can only be attacked once they are below 50% hitpoints.

Tips:

 Previous tips apply

 Skills such as Lich’s Dark Ritual automatically remove one creep from battle. This should be used as soon as cooldown finishes, to maximize the amount of experience denied.

 Summons such as Engima’s conversion grant the other team gold and experience if they are killed. Conversion removes one of your own creeps and creeps three controllable units. Moving them away when they are under attack will allow you to deny the other team gold and experience.

 To force the opposing team’s creeps to push forward, you can start attacking your creeps immediately when they are below half health.

 Towers can be denied and are attackable at approximately 125 hp. This is very useful as tower gold is a big boost in gold for the other team.