How To Deny In Dota 2

The importance of denying in Dota 2 is as significant as getting CS (aka Creep score). As such, regardless of whether you are the carry or support player, denying creeps will certainly improve your chance of winning.

What is Denying?

Commonly, denying is the forced attack on your own friendly lane creep to kill it before an opponent does. However, denying is only enabled when the creep is below a certain health threshold.

An exclamation mark, or question mark on April Fool’s Day, will appear above the denied creep after a successful deny.

While denying does not offer any gold or experience, it indirectly causes a loss in gold and experience for the opponents who did not manage to kill your creep. This is crucial in the laning phase, whereby both parties compete for last hits and denies to gain this early gold and experience lead.

How to deny creeps?

Every Dota 2 hero can deny creeps by forcibly attacking the creep when it’s below 50% health. You may perform this using hotkeys by either right-clicking or holding Ctrl + A to target the dying ally creep. While that’s the basis of denying creeps, you also need to time your deny attack accurately. After all, your opponent is competing to get that last hit for themselves, so it won’t be a breeze. While denying every creep is difficult, denying the high-value creeps is already a huge advantage than not doing it at all.

Notably, the ranged lane creep that is often at the back line, holds higher gold and experience. The ranged creep is also closer to you, which means you don’t have to be in close vicinity of your opponent to attempt a deny. Denying a Ranged Creep in some situations will offer greater value than denying melee creeps if that’s too risky.

Similarly, you can also deny allied heroes and buildings at 25% and 10% health respectively. However, there’s an additional condition to deny allied heroes, that is the hero has a health-reducing debuff over time. For instance, heroes affected by Venomancer’s ticking poison damage over time or Queen of Pain’s Shadow Strike.

While most heroes can only deny creeps when they are at sufficiently low health, there are certain Dota 2 heroes that can deny creeps without this restriction. Heroes with a skill to kill their ally creep, such as Enigma’s Demonic Summoning that converts an ally creep into eidolons. Historically, Lich had a skill that could deny a creep for mana during a previous Dota 2 patch but doesn’t have it anymore.

How to deny my hero?

In certain circumstances, there comes a time when you would want to deny yourself to prevent your death from benefiting the opponent.

You can deny yourself by letting a neutral jungle creep deal the finishing blow on your hero. Note that the game log won’t announce that you denied yourself, instead, it would show that a Neutral creep killed you. Regardless, you successfully prevented your death from giving any gold and experience to your opponent.

You can also use this method of denying yourself to quickly get back to base when you are low in health and have to walk back.

Last but not least, you can also deny items when they are on the ground, essentially destroying them. You won’t gain anything from this, but it’s a popular way for toxic players to grief if the game is going south. One iconic moment of denying item in competitive Dota 2 history is when Lee “kYxY” Kong Yang infamously denied the Aegis during the International 3 semi-finals against Natus Vincere. He accidentally miss-clicked on the Aegis when attacking Roshan. This unfortunate incident eventually led to Team Orange’s loss in that match.