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Dota 101: A Guide to Creep Stacking
Use this special technique to help become king of the Dota 2 jungle.
Stacking Defined
Stacking is the process of manipulating the monsters in your team’s jungle in order to extract as much gold as possible. You’d think that since junglers go off into the wilderness to fight monsters by themselves, the best junglers would be beefcake muscle heroes, but the opposite is true. Good jungle heroes in Dota tend to be fairly weak individually but have the ability to spawn small creatures that can fight under their command, allowing the hero to stand safely behind while the minions take all the hits from the monsters and the hero collects the gold. They’ll be beefcake eventually in the late game, but only if they stack their jungle properly.
Their minions are good for more than just tanking damage though. A skilled player can use them to “stack the jungle” by luring them away from their spawn location long enough to trick the game into thinking it needs to spawn another group of monsters.
In Dota 2, the neutral monsters in the jungle always respawn at the beginning of every in-game minute unless there is something or somebody within the spawn area. If you haven’t cleared a group of monsters when the clock strikes “X:00” then no new monsters will spawn. If those monsters never spawn, then obviously a player can never kill them and gain gold from their demise.
How It Works
This is where creep stacking comes in. If a player can’t clear the neutral monster camp by killing the monsters personally, they need to use other means to make sure they’re not missing out on gold. If they make the monsters in a camp follow them away from the original spawn location as the clock hits “X:00” then more monsters will spawn.
Say there are three monsters in a location. A player can send their minion in to hit one of the three monsters, attracting the attention of the group. The minion then retreats, prompting the three monsters to chase after it. As the game clock strikes “X:00,” the monsters will be outside of the spawn area, allowing a new group to spawn.
After following a certain distance, the original three monsters will give up the chase and return to their location. The two groups can both be in the same space at once so there are now six monsters there. If the player does it again, then there will be nine monsters and so on. There’s no limit to how many monsters can be in a single location as long as you execute this maneuver properly. The difficulty, however, does increase as more monsters flood the area. This allows players to continue using their hero to kill monsters, while using some of their minions to ensure they’re not missing out on chances to slay more monsters in the future.
Practice Makes Perfect
It sounds simple enough, but actually keeping up with this during the game takes years of practice. An average player can easily do this once or twice, but can you do it dozens of times a match while battling monsters, aiding your teammates, and keeping tabs on the enemy? Nope, sorry.
Stacking is particularly important when it comes to the Ancient monster locations -- home to the most powerful neutral creatures in each team’s jungle. Early in the game, no player stands a chance against these Ancients, but later in the game when the player is stronger they’ll be able to easily dispatch a dozen (or more) Ancients at once.
These monsters are worth a large amount of gold, so stacking them properly means a player can come back later in the game to kill all of those monsters at once for a massive gold influx that can turn the tide of a game in a matter of moments. Watching teams clear a stacked camp of 12+ ancients is among the most satisfying things to watch in professional Dota as a hero like Luna easily annihilates them all in an orgy of money that showers thousands of gold upon the hero.
Stacking the Ancients is the most dramatic example of creep stacking, but it’s an important skill for even the smaller, less lucrative monsters. Stacking the smaller camps won’t immediately impact the game the way a stack of Ancients can, but over time it can add up to a small advantage for the team who does a better job at stacking their jungle. And at the professional level, you need to be able to capture every edge you possibly can.
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