Against strong five-man lineups, you generally need to run a strong split push if you cannot draft to contest their five-man.
Execution aside, generally it goes like this:
Five Man > Pick Offs
Pick Offs > Split Push
Split Push > Five Man
Of course, this requires both good drafts, laning and execution, but all else being equal these strategies counter each other. Some heroes fit multiple roles, for example Furion can both five-man decently and split push as well, while some are limited to one particular strat (bounty, sb). Heroes like Veno and Alch can do well in nearly all strats, which is a large part of why they are such popular competitive picks nowadays.
For example, having a fast split pusher against five-man with a hero good at holding high is one way to defeat five-man pushes. Elder Titan, Kotol, Veno are examples of good high-ground defenders, while Prophet, Lycan, AM are examples of strong split pushers. Draft accordingly and don't unnecessarily contest fights that you won't be able to win.
Don't feel too restricted by these generalizations too - a five man lineup will generally look for pick offs before mounting a push, just as how a lineup excelling in pick offs will five man once they manage to catch cores and use the opportunity to take towers. Try to keep the draft flexible so that your playstyle can adapt to the game.
Pugna+ DP + Veno + DK, that is a team that has to 5 man push. So split push is the way to beat them.
You want two heroes that have the power to take a tower solo early in the game, one that delays pushes well and a late game carry that can farm in the jungle.
Early-Mid game you trade towers while your carry farms up. As long as you are trading towers they will not get a map control and gold advantage. Late game your hard carry has a bkb, ignores their magic based teamfight and kills DP and the nether ward... then you wipe them out.
Btw, an unconventional but excellent and hard to counter way to stop pushes...
Force staff on Sand King. Max sandstorm does 100 dps to a huge area and channels for up to 80 seconds. This will completely wipe out 2 and sometimes 3 creep waves and you can do it from complete safety with Fstaff.
You cast the sandstorm in front of the tower, then Fstaff behind it. You can Fstaff as many times as you want to get farther away and keep channeling sandstorm. In a coordinated team with 2 Fstaffs its possible to set up and sand storm defense very easily with SK immediately moved back 1200 units (VS level 3 swap distance). IF that's not safe enough for you 20 sec later you can move him back even more.
Even a chen army will quickly die to max level sandstorm. And often in pubs people will not know where you are and futilely use dusts and sentries... maybe even stuns trying to find you.
80 seconds should be plenty of time for your split pusher to trade a tower in another lane.
The best way to counter is to force them back with a split push. As long as 4 man strong can hold a lane someone can be constantly pushing. I remember we lost one of our push games to a tinker defending and pushing at the same time and we were forced to back off and ended up losing late game.
Tinker, Death Prophet, Doom (with Shiva's) and a couple others all are great counters to split push strats.
On pub is like impossible to counter it when you arr againts stack that decided to push and yor team has only 5 carries :)))
Funnest game in a long while.... major push strat and annoying as hell but they couldn't kill me but nor could I stop them...
Went mid bought 3 rapiers at the shop and managed to almost get the base solo but died, bought back, got back my rapier(s) and managed to again nearly do it but in the end we let the early push do too much damage to our late game domination.
http://dotabuff.com/matches/464579247
This is the game I mentioned above that they countered our strong push with split up push from Luna while tinker defended
http://dotabuff.com/matches/455007941 it was really well played by them.
splitpush with smth like furion or balls with smth like bb/pa and a healer/support team consisting of omni/necro/aba /chen type heroes. its all about either taking down the important heroes first oooooooooor getting rid of their army of units (which is harder since its often composed of necros that are kinda op xD)
Like relentless said, stop their push with a couple guys, have a carry farm up. Those guys won't be shit once you get farmed carry with bkb. Also if you init on them they'll die pretty easily, not having enough disable. A blink tide + warlock wombo combo with some right clicks could easily take out veno before he ults and get some licks in on dp.
yea people tend to panic when they see all the summons and watch their base die...........it is a legit strat BUT it does have fairly easy counters
http://dotabuff.com/matches/467859576
I sat in the jungle and just murdered furion so he came online too late. My team was completely disorganized but I would just harass them and slow them down from pushing while our carry farmed
Get anti push heroes. It is simple as that. Elder titan is probably my favorite. The easiest time to land his stomp + ult is when the other team is beating on your tower. Glyph + a good ET initiation would stop any push. Earthshaker would be very effective versus pushers too. The more units around, the more damage his ult will do. A proper ES initiation with blink and scepter will work perfect. Tide with a blink and refresher would do the job too. You just need to properly initiate and make sure your team defends towers appropriately.
Unfortunately in pub games where you are not stacked, this is hard to do. You will most likely have to be playing the anti-push hero if you want a chance.
Thanks for the tips, I especially like the idea of having a split pusher while holding down a 4v5 for defense, now I'm excited for inhouse to give it a shot.
buy wards. If you are playing broodmother, you get shut down by wards and strong aggressive play. Recently me and my friends played a 4 man push game (brood, lechrac, np, pudge, ogre) and we pwned. They couldnt do anything. The heroes themselves are strong, but they need to work together. If they had isolated us and/or bought wards to counter and predict where we were, their reaction time would have been better and their carries (they were stronger than ours) would have pulled through.
So just dont be stingy with wards, and make sacrifices. Good sacrifices, but dont feed. If its you and your precious kd or your carry, save your carry. isolate them, and control your team. (mikes are best for this)
btw. always try to fight a 4v5 with 1 man (preferably carry) farming. Pro tactic, and it works in pubs
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Hey guys, I got a question for you: How do you beat the push strat? Now don't say get gud or outplay them, because this is something I mainly see during inhouse where everyone is skilled at dota and mistakes that cost games are rare. During inhouses, one of the best drafts are Pugna+DP+Veno+DK.
The biggest issue is that even having only 2 of those heroes usually results in a win, so you can't just ban 1 or 2 and screw up the lineup. I know Timbersaw and KOTL are great for fighting back push, but the nukers in combination with the survivability of DK and DP (if farmed) make Timber and KOTL very iffy against them, plus Timbersaw is regularly banned by people who like push strat.
So how do you beat a lineup that outpushes you, has godly teamfight power, amazing aoe damage, 3 high priority targets, and amazing presence in all lanes?