After finally getting 4 friends on my team, we decided to go try those trilane setup commonly seen on tournament matches. After 3 consecutive loss using that setup, makes us wonder what is it that we are doing wrong or in what situation does a trilane is ineffective
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Our opponent is simply using the common 2-1-2 setup. The usual laning on public matches.
Is it right that our trilane compose of 2 support 1 carry?
Best Answer
Generally, you run a trilane to get guaranteed farm and protection on one hero who is very gold reliant. This way, you get him into the game more quickly than if he had to contest for farm. You don't usually want to trilane with a carry hero who needs levels to be effective like Shadowfiend or Drow, since the carry will split a lot of experience with his supports. Good carry heroes for safe trilanes are those who can all be very effective heroes in the midgame with only ~5000-6000 gold and one or two key items such as Armlet or BKB.
You can also run a defensive trilane with a very hard carry hero like Faceless Void, Spectre, or Medusa in what's called a "four protect one" strategy, but this is not very common recently because it doesn't do well in 3v3 lanes and is weak against aggression.
Priorities in a trilane (higher is more important):
A lot of new players make the mistake of thinking that a trilane is for getting kills and do things like Juggernaut trilanes to get 3-4 kills in 15 minutes. This is good, but 3-4 kills is about 20 last hits, and these new players ALWAYS miss more than that. Each lane has about 80 creeps spawns in the first 10 minutes. In a safe trilane, your carry hero should get at least 60-70 of them and should be aiming for perfection. Killing the opponent if he gets too far out of position is just a bonus. The carry player also needs to deny as much as possible to keep the creep equilibrium static- autoattacking will push the lane and give your opponent unnecessary experience and gold.
Another common mistake is that supports worry too much about harassing the opponent and not enough about the overall game. They need to stack, pull, and roam so that they secure experience and gold for themselves as well. If your enemy is contesting the lane, they should stick around until it's secured.
There are a ton of different variations of trilanes- here are the more common ones:
Finally, there's a safelane trilane against an opponent's offensive trilane, or vice versa. This is one of the most complex laning scenarios in Dota and it's very hero dependent and guaranteed to be razor's edge. Here, there are a few things you definitely need to worry about in this scenario:
My personal favorite way to run a trilane, regardless of what we're up against, is with one strong ranged disable and one strong slow- this gives the trilane the core killing potential it needs and anything else on top of that is just a bonus. Double stun lanes (one ranged and targeted to start things) also work well. Without this, punishing out of position opponents is a lot more difficult.
Some examples:
Your third hero can fit into the puzzle however you need based on how the matchup and overall team composition is looking. Depending on the strength of the lane you're up against, it can be a strong roamer, pusher, or potentially even a jungler, and if it looks like you're in for a 3v3 lane you can shore up your weaknesses there.
Finally, this is a great guide to trilaning in original DotA that helped me a ton when I was learning.