The Art of Warding
An Advanced Guide to Warding
Introduction
The art of warding is crucial to winning Dota 2 games. Many players understand that gaining vision through wards is important. In fact, to improve their warding, some players take the time to learn a variety of ward spots. However, knowing a variety of ward spots isn’t all you need to be good at warding. It’s important to also learn where you need vision, when to place wards, and how to do so safely.
This article focuses on warding as it relates to map vision. It does not focus on using wards to block neutral camp spawns. This is also not a ward spot guide, although I do cover several ward spots. Many good ward spots are already well-covered in many other warding guides, the most notable being team dignitas’s guide. If you feel your knowledge of specific ward spots is lacking, I highly suggest reading that guide (or other warding guides). My article will help you understand where and how you want to gain vision. However, it’s up to you to determine the best ward spot for the job.
I assume in this article that you already have at least a basic familiarity with warding. If you’re a beginner, I recommend reading this article instead.
The Challenge
When you ward and counter ward, there are three general things that you want to accomplish:
- Obtaining vision of your opponent’s heroes.
- Denying vision from your opponent.
- Controlling and/or providing vision of important areas.
However, warding is much more complicated than simply buying and placing an observer ward.
Like gold, observer wards are a limited resource. Your shop will have at most two sets of observer wards at any point. It also takes six minutes for each set to restock. Because of this, it’s important to place your wards carefully. If you waste your ward or get counter warded, you might find yourself out of wards at an important moment.
Although wards can be bought by any member of your team, warding duty is generally left to supports. As a support, you won’t always have enough gold to buy wards. Sometimes your allies will help you out and buy the wards for you. Sometimes no one will and you’ll be left without vision. Again, this makes it important to get value out of your wards.
The act of placing wards can also be troublesome. Placing wards can be dangerous; you’re an easy kill if your opponents catch you. Since wards should often give vision throughout the entire map, the act of warding often involves walking around the map accordingly. As you’re doing this, you are often losing out on experience. More importantly, you need to find time to place these wards when your team doesn’t need you for pushes, ganks, or team fights.
Objective Based Warding
Most of the time you will want to use your observer wards to obtain vision that will allow your team to accomplish an objective.
This is more easily understood with an example. One of the best examples of objective based warding occurs when a team tries to take Roshan. Here, teams will ward either the river area immediately outside of the Roshan pit or likely paths that the opposing team will take to get to the Roshan pit. This makes the team feel safe since it knows not only if there are any opponents nearby, but also where the opponent is coming from.
Of course, taking Roshan is only one objective your team might be interested in. Other common objectives include pushing towers, farming, and getting pick-offs. However, we can generalize as to where you want to place your wards:
- Place wards that give vision at or near your objective.
- Place wards that give vision of the likely paths your opponent will take to contest your objective.
For tower pushing, you might want a ward that gives you vision around your opponent’s tower. You could place a ward that will catch your opponent trying to backstab or flank you during your push. You could also place a ward behind your target tower to see incoming opponents. Any of these three wards can be useful.
You might wonder which of these three wards is the most useful. This depends on other factors, namely the current situation and what each team’s objectives are. If your opponent is already set up to defend and you find yourself in a siege-type scenario, you’ll want to get vision around the tower so you can see your opponent’s positioning. If your opponents are walking up to the tower or your team is comfortable diving heroes that are out of position, it’s probably better to place your ward behind the target tower.
At some point, your objective will be to create safe farming space for your team. However, this is often done poorly. If you are looking to ward to create safe areas for your carry to farm (typically your jungle), your goal is not to provide vision of creep camps for your carry to farm. That doesn’t help your carry farm any safer.
To better illustrate this, suppose that your team has lost all of its outer towers. Warding the uberledge in your jungle doesn’t make your jungle much safer to farm. That’s because you don’t have enough notice of incoming threats. Instead, focus on warding the paths your opponent has to take to gank your carry. These areas are usually jungle entrances and common pathways. You still won’t be completely safe, but you’ll have much more time to react when your opponents come.
In these two images, pretend that Furion and the observer wards are for Dire instead of Radiant. Note that, although not completely safe, the Dire jungle is safer in the second image. (Check the minimaps!)
Warding Safely
Now that we’ve taken a look at where you should be warding, let’s go over how you should be warding. There are two things that we want to focus on: warding safely and having appropriate wards up when you need them.
Let’s first look at warding safely. You’re definitely safe if there are no nearby threats to your hero. This suggests that it’s safe to ward when you know your opponents have left the area that you want to ward. It’s also safe to ward an area if your opponents are dead. In these two cases, you can just walk up, place a ward, then walk out. Sometimes, even though you don’t know where your opponents are, you can still reasonably guess that they are not nearby.
More often, you won’t know whether or not your opponents are in the area. There are a few ways to deal with this.
One option is to bring one or more teammates along with you as you ward. This way they can bail you out in case you find yourself in trouble. This option sometimes makes warding much safer, but other times doesn’t actually help at all; it depends on how many enemy heroes are nearby and whether or not you’re capable of actually deterring or winning an engagement. Another issue is that you need to pull an ally away from whatever they wanted to do (such as farm).
A variant on this option is to ward dangerous areas only when you’re near allied heroes. It takes a bit more time for them to reach you in order to help out, but doesn’t require them to explicitly leave their lane or the jungle for you to be able to ward safely.
Another option is to avoid being seen. If possible, you should often avoid showing yourself when you ward. This is done by taking advantage of terrain. If you place wards from behind trees, from behind cliffs, or from higher ground then it’s much less likely that you’ll be seen. Here are some examples of warding from positions where your opponent is less likely to have vision.
You might wonder how you could have come up with these warding positions. From now on, whenever you learn a ward spot, take a look at the nearby terrain. Ask yourself if you could abuse that terrain in any way. This might involve slightly tweaking your ward spot or cutting down trees. Also, be aware that you can’t ward everything without being seen.
There are two variants on warding without being seen. The first is to ward when you know that your opponent has no vision of the area. You usually can’t guarantee this, except at the start of the game. The second is to ward under the cover of smoke of deceit. The downside of this approach is that it will cost you a smoke, which is even more limited than observer wards. For examples of these variants in action, watch professional games. This is especially true for the games where a team drafts Chen or Enchantress. It’s fairly common that the opposing team will utilize both of these tactics—they’ll smoke at the very beginning of the game to get in and ward the Chen or Enchantress’s jungle.
If you can’t avoid being seen, try to abuse terrain. You want to be in a position that takes time for your opponent to reach, even if they can see you. Here are two examples. Note that these positions are still fairly risky if an opponent is nearby.
When To Ward
Supports don’t always have time to ward freely. This is often because you’re needed at a fight. Other times it’s too dangerous to get a ward up where you want it. Here are some techniques to help ensure that you have vision when it matters.
First, start trying to predict where you’ll need vision in the next few minutes (the lifetime of your ward). This usually means trying to guess both team’s objectives. Then, place your ward before it is actually needed. Areas often become dangerous once they become immediate objectives (again, consider the Roshan pit). However, they are often not as dangerous before then. Of course, it’s never too late to ward an area where you need vision.
It does take practice to be able to predict future objectives. Sometimes, you’ll have no idea. However, there are two things that you can always prepare for: Roshan attempts and laning phase ganks. Ganks during the laning phase are generally done by two roles: your supports and your mid. You should ward according to what you think will best spot your opponent’s gank attempts. Roshan attempts are fairly straightforward; ward paths to Roshan whenever it becomes likely that Roshan will be an objective for either team.
To make this more concrete, let’s consider an example. It’s the beginning of the game, and I want to ward to protect against laning phase ganks. In my games, it’s unlikely that mid players will gank unless they die or have a useful rune. More often, I expect the opposing supports to gank my mid player. Because of this, I place my rune ward to also protect my mid lane. (Note that this allows me to be more efficient with my rune ward.) Furthermore, I typically expect ganks to come from my opponent’s safe lane. As such, I ward to catch the ganks coming from that direction. Remember to adjust this example according to the tendencies in your games!
Second, pay attention to where your hero is. You’ll inevitably need to walk around the map during the game. Why not ward along the way? Here are some common scenarios:
- Warding Roshan as you rotate to defend a tower push.
- Warding Roshan as you leave after pushing a tower.
- Warding your jungle as you move to gank or defend a tower.
- Warding your opponent’s jungle as you move to gank or push a tower.
Third, don’t be afraid to ward redundantly. If you’re in an area with a ward that will expire in the next minute or two, feel free to re-ward that area. You would do this if you feel that area will still be important when the original ward expires and you don’t know if you’ll return to the area soon. By re-warding you ensure that you won’t lose vision. Note that you don’t have to re-ward in the exact same spot.
You’ll notice that all of these techniques require the same skill: foresight. Although you might feel lost at first, you’ll improve at it if you keep practicing and regularly asking yourself where you will need vision. In this way, it’s no different from learning skills such as map awareness or carrying a TP scroll.
Lastly, there are very important times when you should not be warding. This could be when your team is trying to coordinate something for which you need to be present, such as a smoke gank or a tower push. You should also not be warding without your entire team if it’s likely that your opponent is looking for a fight or pick off. You risk delaying or preventing your team from being able to take an important objective. You could even get picked off or cause your entire team to get wiped. Always pay attention to what’s going on when you ward!
Counter Warding
So far, all of our warding considerations have largely ignored our opponent. Yes, we always consider our opponent when deciding where to ward—ideally our wards will show us where the enemy heroes are. However, our opponent is playing the same game that we are playing. They’re looking to place wards that reveal your team. They’re looking to place wards that help to accomplish their objectives. We want to stop this.
We have a tool to counter our opponent’s observer wards—the sentry ward. Of course, the main difference between observer wards and sentry wards is that observers provide normal vision whereas sentries provide true sight. However, there are three main differences when it comes to warding and counter warding.
First, sentry wards have no stock limit, although their sight radius is smaller. This means that our sentry placement must be more accurate to gain vision of our opponent’s wards. Alternatively, we need to buy more sentries (and thus have more gold) to find our opponent’s wards. It’s usually preferable to find your opponent’s ward without using multiple sentries. However, you aren’t necessarily wasting sentries if you don’t. Your sentries still give you an important piece of information: your opponent has no nearby observers. Furthermore, that sentry might spot a future ward that your opponent places.
Second, counter warding is more dangerous. You need to not only catch your opponent’s ward in your sentry’s range, but also get close enough to their ward to be able to attack it. This could take a few seconds, especially if you are missing uphill attacks. Most importantly, your opponent is almost guaranteed to have vision of you as you deward.
Third, it is harder to determine where you should be placing sentries. You usually want to place sentries that will cover multiple likely ward spots (consider counter warding the Roshan pit). However, that’s the easier part of placing your sentries. The harder part is figuring out where your opponent has wards in the first place.
Finding Wards
There are three general methods you can use to find your opponent’s wards:
- Guess where their wards are.
- Observe their actions.
- See where their wards are placed.
Guessing where your opponent’s wards are is the least reliable of these methods. However, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t effective. It’s easy to guess that your opponent is starting the game with a rune ward. It’s also reasonable to guess that your opponent has a Roshan ward. In general, the most common ward spots are good places to check.
Observing your opponent’s actions is a more reliable method of determining where your opponent has wards. Some actions are dead giveaways that your opponent has vision of you, such as being charged by Spirit Breaker or getting hit by Nature’s Prophet’s ultimate. Usually, you just need to observe when your opponent reacts to your movement. If the enemy heroes immediately make a beeline for your teammate who has just walked into your jungle, they likely have an aggressive ward somewhere. Likewise, your opponent spotted you if your gank target just backs off as you approach. Once you’ve identified where your opponent has vision, you’ll probably need to make some guesses as to exactly where their ward is.
Note that you’ll be doing some guesswork for both of these methods. You should place your sentry ward in a way that it not only catches your opponent’s most likely ward spot, but also other nearby ward spots. For example, this sentry ward captures the three most common Roshan wards. (There are observer wards at the top and bottom edges of the screen, but they are partially off screen.)
The third method of finding wards is to see where your opponent places them. This is the most specific method, allowing you to know almost exactly where your opponent’s ward is placed. It’s not complicated to do—just watch your opponent walk somewhere, pause briefly, then walk away. You won’t be able to see their ward as it is placed. However, you can click on the opposing hero and note if they have any wards in their inventory. You can also see how many wards they have, so you’ll know whether or not they actually placed a ward. Of course, this method requires having vision of your opponent as they are warding. Note that this makes it even more important not to give your opponent vision of you as you ward, as it makes it easier for them to counter ward you.
Objective Based Counter Warding
It can be hard to find all of your opponent’s wards without a gem or necronomicon. Although it’s great if you can find all of your opponent’s wards, it’s not necessarily worth sinking a lot of your gold. Instead, you can focus on objective based counter warding. Similar to objective based warding, your goal is to deny vision of important areas from your opponent.
If you’re ahead, you want to counter ward offensively. This means determining where your opponent needs vision to feel safe and trying to counter ward there. It could also mean getting rid of vision in areas where you would like to catch your opponent unaware. It’s more effective to counter ward offensively by sweeping the map with a necronomicon or a gem.
Counter warding defensively has a similar idea. It’s crucial to do defensive counter warding when you’re behind because you’ll be very constricted without map control. You’re trying to establish safer areas for your team to move by ensuring that your opponent has no vision in those areas. The process is the same as usual; determine which area you want to protect and place sentries that will catch enemy wards in that area. The important point here is that defensive sentries are not wasted just because you didn’t find an enemy ward. That’s because the sentry is still accomplishing your objective: to ensure that your opponent has no vision of a certain area.
The Vision War
Remember that our opponent is playing the same game as us. Not only are they looking to obtain useful vision for themselves, they’re also looking to counter ward. We need to react accordingly.
Before delving into details, it’s worth mentioning that you should be warding and counter warding according to your skill level. If you’re a beginner and your opponent doesn’t have a flying courier, they probably also don’t have wards. You don’t need to worry about counter warding. If your opponent has never counter warded you, you don’t need to worry about shifting your ward spots (covered below). You can get a rough idea of how much warding and counter warding you should do by noting how much opponent is doing. Then, just go one step further.
It’s important to think and pay attention to what is going on in the vision battle. I love this part of warding; just as it’s possible to outplay and outsmart your opponent in fights, it’s also possible to outplay and outsmart your opponent when it comes to warding.
Suppose your opponent just counter warded one of your wards. This tells you that they have true sight covering where you placed your ward. Knowing this, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is placing a new ward in the exact same spot. Your opponent can still deward it! Instead, if it’s important for you to gain vision of that area, take a guess as to where they might have placed their sentry. Then, pick a ward spot in the area that isn’t covered by their sentry.
To go a step further, you might make the assumption that your opponent covered all of the common ward spots in an area. This could mean that they have several sentry wards placed. Accordingly, you’d have to dodge all the areas covered by their likely sentry wards. Alternatively, you could bring your own sentry ward to get rid of theirs. It’s likely that they’ll have a nearby observer ward as well. However, it’s still a mistake to place a new observer at the same spot as your old one. Even though your opponent can’t deward it immediately, it’s clear that they already know that you use that ward spot. Try to avoid using it for the rest of the game.
Of course, it’s possible for you and your opponent to continually adjust to one another. In practice, you won’t have to adjust forever, so don’t worry about having to always outmaneuver your opponent. You’re limited by gold and observer ward stock. Furthermore, you can’t continually shift your observer ward placement; eventually, they won’t cover your target area sufficiently. It also usually isn’t worth it to devote so many resources to getting vision of a particular area. If it is (such as getting vision of the Roshan pit), your conflict will often be settled by a team fight.
Alternative Warding
Even though the vision war can’t go on infinitely, there’s still an obvious problem whenever you get counter warded: you lose vision! The way to deal with this is to ward alternate locations. This means that you place your observer ward outside of your opponent’s likely sentry range. You’re sacrificing some vision of your desired area in order to reduce the chances of getting counter warded.
There isn’t too much to say on this topic, as it largely comes down to knowing additional ward spots. So, let’s take a look at some! Note that we’ll cover Roshan related wards in a later section.
Of course, there are many more alternative ward spots you can use. Some of these ward spots might be fantastic alternatives waiting to be discovered. It’s important to keep an open mind and remember that any ward can be a good ward if it gives you vision of what you need.
Roshan Wards
Roshan can be a critical part of a Dota 2 game. However, the three most common ward spots for spotting the entrance to Roshan are unsurprisingly known by most players. This makes them easy to deward. Here are some alternatives to spot the area near the Roshan pit entrance.
If you know your opponent isn’t nearby, you don’t actually need vision of the area immediately outside of the Roshan pit. Instead, get vision of the paths your opponent will take. The following wards are somewhat common, but do the job well.
Now, a small puzzle. Suppose you’re Radiant, and Dire has just counter warded your Roshan ward. You know that the entire Dire team is near, or possibly inside, the Roshan pit. They might be doing Roshan, or they might be baiting. Your entire team is nearby, on your side of the river, but you’re afraid to head out without vision. Your vision might look something like this:
The question is, where can you place a ward that will give you enough vision? You need as much vision near the pit entrance and across the river as possible. If you step out into the river, you might die. Your opponent probably already has true sight of the common ward spots, given that they just counter warded you. And, to make things more troublesome, you don’t have any true sight of your own. If you don’t act soon, your opponents might just take Roshan. Where do you ward?
Surprisingly, I would ward here. At first glance, this goes against everything mentioned up to this point. Your opponent clearly knows how to counter ward, and probably already has true sight of this ward. It might even be the same ward that they just dewarded! So why this ward?
Take a look at where Furion is standing. This is about how close a ranged hero would have to be to deward our new ward. If an enemy hero walks this far out into the river alone, they’re probably out of position and your team has a decent chance of being able to pick them off. Even if a few enemy heroes walk out together, you still might be able to get a favorable enough initiation to start and win a fight.
Remember, however, that this is a fairly general example. If the opposing team had a Venomancer, Beastmaster, or Sniper (among other things), this could be a very poor ward (because your opponent can deward it without endangering their heroes). You’ll need to assess your situation and respond accordingly. (As an additional note, the second image was taken during daytime. However, the vision you would get from the observer ward is roughly similar to what is shown.)
Emergency Wards
The above example isn’t limited to Roshan, although that’s the most common scenario. You can always find yourself without enough vision before a possible team fight, despite your hero vision. This might be because there are a lot of trees, a lot of different terrain heights, or because it’s nighttime.
Your response should be to immediately place down an observer ward. It doesn’t matter too much where you put it. If you can quickly and (somewhat) safely put your ward in a slightly better position, you can try for it. An important point to remember here is that you’ll need to have an observer ward on hand. Remember that you don’t have to place all of your observer wards immediately after you buy them—it might be prudent to save one.
A somewhat common example of this is when your team is defending a tower at night. Your vision changes dramatically:
You probably won’t need to utilize these emergency-type wards often. However, it’s something useful to keep in your toolkit. In case the above images aren’t enough to convince you, pro teams do this as well. I’ve seen Na’vi place an emergency ward to gain vision in a team fight during the enemy Night Stalker’s Darkness. (Sorry, but I don’t remember the exact game.)
Parting Shots
Although I hope you learned something new, I don’t think the ideas and concepts here are particularly remarkable. If anything, I hope that I’ve communicated that one of the most critical aspects of warding is assessing and reacting to both the current game situation and how your opponent has been playing.
Even though I included everything I know and remember, I’m sure that there are aspects about warding that I haven’t thought of or forgot to include. Aside from doing a lot of warding, a lot of my knowledge comes from watching and thinking about the warding in professional games. If you’re interested in improving further, I recommend you do the same.
Lastly, some scenarios for you to consider. There’s no single right answer for these, especially since they’re vague. Still, where and/or when would you ward if:
- it’s the beginning of the game?
- it’s the first night time?
- it’s the second day time?
- the laning phase is coming to a close?
- your carry has already been ganked twice?
- the other team has an Ursa?
- the other team has a Pudge?
- your team has a Night Stalker?
- you want to make it safer for your Nature’s Prophet to split push?
- your team has lost (only) its tier 1 and tier 2 safe lane towers?
- the enemy team has a Chen or an Enchantress?
- you need to find a pick off?
