These next points address farming techniques that will help to increase your gold and experience. Although most useful to carries and core heroes that are expected to get farm, some of these points will be applicable to other roles as well.

Farming Patterns

A farming pattern is where you follow a routine to try to maximize your farm. This is typically done by farming both a lane and jungle camps.

One of the most basic farming patterns is to farm your lane, then rotate into the jungle to farm some camps there. Your opponent will likely push the lane back towards your tower, at which point you can then return to lane and repeat this process.

An example of this is a Radiant mid lane Shadow Fiend. Shadow Fiend can easily nuke down creeps, which he’ll typically do to clear the mid lane creep wave. This then gives him some time (until the next creep wave) to move into the Radiant jungle to farm and/or stack some camps. This allows him to get more farm than just the lane creeps he would otherwise be getting.

Nuking

Nuking creeps refers to using your AoE spells to deal damage to and quickly kill creeps. Of course, you’ll need an AoE spell in order to be able to nuke creeps. The benefit of nuking creeps is that you kill them more quickly, enabling you to rotate to another area to farm more creeps (i.e., follow a farming pattern). In this context, we include spells that aren’t typically considered nukes (such as Batrider’s Firefly).

If you have no concerns about preserving mana or having your spells on cooldown then feel free to nuke away. However, if you do have concerns about mana or cooldowns, you might not want to use nukes to farm.

Gyrocopter’s Rocket Barrage, Shadow Fiend’s Shadow Raze, and all of Leshrac’s spells are some good nukes that you would want to use to speed up your farming. You’d need to be careful with spells such as Shadow Shaman’s Ether Shock, as it consumes a lot of his mana. Of course, this isn’t as much of an issue once he gets some mana items.

Stacking

Stacking neutral camps is an effective way to increase the amount of farm on the map. Normally, any existing creeps at a neutral camp will prevent new creeps from spawning at that same camp. By stacking, you are allowing these new creeps to spawn, which increases the total amount of gold and experience available on the map.

It’s important to note that any hero can and should stack camps, provided that someone on their team is capable of killing that stack. In particular, supports should stack camps if they have nothing else to do, as this increase the farm available to their carry.

If you’re unfamiliar with stacking, the Dota 2 Wiki has some basic information here. There are also plenty of other tutorials and resources online.

Pulling

Although usually used to control lane equilibrium, pulling also allows you to farm some creeps without putting yourself in too much risk. Note that pulling isn’t something that only supports do—carries can also use pulls to get themselves some farm.

Again, you can find various tutorials online. For pulling, I recommend watching a video tutorial.

Farming Multiple Camps

Some heroes are capable of farming multiple camps simultaneously due to their AoE spells or illusions. When feasible, you should always aim to do so. Here are some examples.

Gyrocopter’s Flak Cannon allows him to attack all creeps within 1000 range that he has vision of. To utilize this, aggro a camp and walk to a different camp. The first camp will follow you. You can then activate Flak Cannon to attack both of these camps simultaneously.

Batrider’s Firefly is very effective at farming multiple creep camps at once. Activate Firefly and fly over as many camps as you can while spamming Sticky Napalm.

Any illusion based hero can farm multiple camps simultaneously. When your illusions are strong enough, just send them to go fight camps. This is important to maximize your farm on heroes such as Phantom Lancer, Naga Siren, and Terrorblade.

Farming Both Jungles

By default, all gold and experience is available roughly equally to both teams. Each team has three lanes available to farm, five jungle camps, and an ancient camp. In this way, each team is “entitled” to a certain amount of gold and experience if the balance remains in equilibrium. If, however, your team is able to farm both jungles, you are gaining gold and experience that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Additionally, you are stealing gold and experience from the other team, making them less efficient.

If you ever find your team to be behind and with little map control, you can try to get to your opponent’s jungle to farm there. If your opponents are aggressive and spending most of their time on your side of the map and/or in your jungle, their jungle will be somewhat safe to farm.

Drive-By Farming

Many times you’ll find yourself walking by an area on your way to another objective. This might include walking through the jungle after a tower push or walking back to your fountain to heal up. On your way, if you can quickly and safely farm some creeps, you should do so.

This can be an effective way to get much-needed gold for supports in the early game. If you need to head back to the fountain for any reason and you have an AoE nuke, you can probably farm your easy camp on the way back.

Creep Cutting

Usually, creep cutting is employed for tower pushes. However, if you’re a high-mobility hero that can quickly clear a creep wave, you might be able to get away with creep cutting at other points in the game.

At any given point in the game, you can learn/predict where all of the creep waves will be, provided that nothing has grabbed their aggro yet. This allows you to get to where those creeps will be, farm them, and then get out.

Creep cutting can be extremely risky, as you will often be away from your team and in enemy territory. However, it isn’t always as risky as it might seem. Creep cutting is often unexpected, so your opponents might not be able to punish you if they aren’t already in the area.