Tips on playing from behind

 

Ask yourself what advantages your team has that you can use

If you have a good teamfight lineup, just go fully defensive and try to find the best fight possible - wait for the enemy to push to you and always fight as 5. Don't try to defend every tower if you don't think you'll win the fight - sometimes it's better to let a T2 fall and defend on the high ground instead.


Since the enemy is ahead, they'll sometimes get cocky and either take fights that they shouldn't, or start pushing lanes with one or two heroes while the rest of their team are elsewhere. Look for those opportunities and try to get those pick-off kills where you can. Pick your battles and fight intelligently.

If you have a decent split pusher like Lycanthrope or Nature's Prophet, start split pushing those lanes - you create space to help your other heroes get back into the game, and if the enemy team commit to a fight vs the rest of your team or start pushing out of the base without TPs (which will they do alarmingly often, especially at your level) you can easily take a tower or even a set of rax.

Try to get some defensive wards up in your jungle to create safe space for your carry to farm, but avoid getting picked off at all costs - when you're behind it often only takes one key hero to be dead for 40 seconds, and that's a set of rax that you can no longer defend! Don't be afraid to ask someone to go with you to place those wards.

Don't die

That's the most important thing, most of the times you die it's because you made an avoidable mistake at some point, the mistake might have involved lack of map awareness, bad prediction of what your opponents could do, how much damage they could output, not knowing what resources they have (such as items they recently bought), overextending, bad positioning, etc.

Now, if you are careful and smart in that way, once your team does end up killing opponents who are ahead, you are going to get way more out of that than your already-ahead opponents would gain from getting kills on your team mates: the higher the level of a hero, the more experience it gives when dying, and the lower level you are the more levels you get from X experience, heroes who have any sort of killing spree will also give more gold when killed, and the higher the level the longest the respawn time, so if you are behind at some and both teams keep getting the same amount of kills from them on, that's usually not good for the ones who are ahead, and is often good for the ones who are behind. Another relatively small but significant thing: if you are behind in towers, that also means that the standing towers from your opponents that you don't have anymore are potential sources of gold that your opponents don't have the opportunity to benefit from anymore.

Don't defend or try and force a fight unless they're trying to take down your barracks

You'll probably lose all the heroes for it. When defending barracks, the towers hit enemy heroes very hard and do significant damage, and the high ground area can form a bottleneck of enemy heroes, making it easy to land team fight abilities like RP and ravage. Its also easy to retreat, heal up and fight them again (granted you didn't die). Basically, its easier for you to kill them and harder for them to accomplish objectives. (also, they miss uphill attacks 33%).

Place defensive wards

Wards on YOUR SIDE of the map so if your carry is farming the jungle, he knows when to tp out.

Smoke Ganks

You spot an enemy hero on the map farming alone? Go 5v1 him and push a tower / kill Roshan. The reason you do this is because if the enemy decides to fight you, they have to do so 4v5, giving you the upper hand.

Don’t bother with it if they are pushing as 5. If you smoke when you can’t see them and walk into their entire team you’re going to get wiped. Only try this if they are split up and you have vision. Once you get the kill, turtle back up or push a tower depending on how bad you’re losing and who you killed.

Split push

Try and dodge fights but farm lanes and keep them pushed out so they can't push as fast if your allies die.

Sack Tier 2 towers 

There’s no point in fortifying a tower or even defending a tower if you’re likely to lose it anyway and die in the process. Unless you have some sort of crazy teamfight abilities that are all off cd you should probably just hide behind your T3s.

Don’t defend by yourself 

If you lose a critical hero (and if you’re behind you probably need all 5 regardless), back up. If someone can use an ability to slow down the push from range without risk, do that for sure, but things only get worse if you have 1 or 2 people trying to defend by themselves and they go down. It becomes a vicious cycle and suddenly even being behind the tower or in the fountain is not enough.

Wait for the over-extension 

In pubs mistakes are made constantly. There so many opportunities for a comeback if you’re patient. Often they will be sieging your T3, and then one over aggressive player sees an opportunity and dives before they get the tower. The enemy team loses focus. Some are focusing the tower, others have joined the dive. You run back to the fountain. A couple of them go back to the tower; the last one to turn around is vulnerable. You get a kill on them; you heal back up in the fountain. Your team is full hp and then you can start working on picking off stragglers. Don’t chase retreating enemies too far though because they can sometimes counter initiate on you or you might be losing another lane of rax.

Re-evaluate your item choices 

You might need to save for bb, you might need a Heaven's Halberd to stop the right clicks from someone who doesn’t have Black King Bar, you might just need a Bracer, hell you might need a Divine Rapier.

Communicate with your team about who you’re trying to focus.

If multiple lanes are being pushed in let different people/carries get the farm 

It's really counter-productive for you as a Keeper of the Light to blast all the creeps unless the enemy is looking to go high ground. Remember that the carry is stuck in base, so there's nowhere else for them to get farm.