Beginner's Guides : Learn how to pull creeps in under 3 minutes

 

Are you supposed to pull in certain situations or whenever you can? 

All things being equal in most 2v2 situations (usually 2-1-2 games) you should almost never pull. I mainly play support, but when I do safelane farm, one of the most annoying things that can happen to your early game is a support leaving lane to pull at inappropriate times. If you aren't sure, the best course of action is to avoid the pull camp unless your carry asks you to pull. Instead concentrate on zoning and keeping the lane equilibrium. So for the certain situations where you do or don't pull:


Never pull if you're leaving your carry outnumbered. Even if it isn't a dangerous kill lane, he's probably not going to get more than half a the wave due to risk and having to avoid taking extra harass. The occasional exception to this is if the wave has gone very close to or under their tower already and carry can't farm it anyway.

Never pull if they are already pushing towards your tower, be it auto attacks, spells, or auras. If your carry is autoattacking or pushing the wave towards their tower, you probably don't want to leave him alone anyway as he is obviously new and will have no ability to appropriately judge threats in a 2v1 situation and likely to feed first blood.

Pull when the wave has become unbalanced and will push towards their tower. The main way equilibrium is lost in this way is by the ranged creep from a wave not dying. A lot of the time a wave will clear and it's only the ranged creeps left. In this situation it's super important that the enemy ranged creep aggros onto your ranged creep and does enough damage to bring it below half health so you can deny your creep - if it does NOT aggro onto your creep because you or your carry made yourselves a closer target, or picked it up because decided less creeps = good time to harass (in this situation it's terrible) then your ranged creep will live, you will have a double ranged creep wave thus the wave will push. If this is going to happen, you should probably pull, and pull soon.

A variant on this is when the offlane blocks in a way that pushes their ranged creep out front as the first target of your creep line. This is basically going to create that double ranged creep situation and if you can safely pull early to redress that, you should.

Again, you should usually always only pull in 2v1 or 3v2 situations, but in situations where your lane does outnumber the offlane, it doesn't automatically mean 'pull all the things!' What's generally far more effective is trading with the offlaner to push him off the creepwave, or in the best case scenario, underneath the tower/out of exp range. If your carry is any good at lane control, he'll freeze the wave in place so that it doesn't push anyway and he gets a level advantage over the offlaner. With a level advantage a carry can eventually solo the lane easily freeing you up as a support to stack the jungle and rotate to other lanes.

It may suck to learn a skill and rarely get to practice/employ it in a live game, but the alternative is feeding offlaners unnecessary exp, making last hitting hard for your carry, or worst case scenario, result in their death.

Generally you want to pull in the safe lane for several reasons, but know the balance so your safe lane tower doesnt fall too fast. 1) Your carry can farm in the safety of the tower 2) deny xp and gold from enemy offlane hero(s)

On the offlane, it is used to bring to creeps back to your tower so you can get xp and gold, also to avoid ganks coming from enemy jungle.

It's used to control the creep equilibrium so that your carry can get EXP and last hit easily near the tower. So you want to pull so that the wave stays just outside of tower range (if it's inside, it's tougher for a carry to last hit. If there's no friendly wave at all, the carry has to tank all of the creeps or they'll hit the tower.)

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