Luna is one of the most reliable hard carries in Dota 2 and because of this she has been a very consistent carry pick on the pro scene. She is a very fast farmer and she scales very well with items, which makes her a very strong late game carry.

She excels in team fights where she provides a lot of AoE damage. Luna fits pushing strategies well because of her damage aura and Moon Glaives which increase the pushing power of her team and make it very hard for the enemy team to defend.

In team strategies, Luna is picked because she is a very reliable carry with great team fight potential. She is drafted primarily because of her major strengths – high night vision, strong in team engagements and a fast flash farmer that scales well with items and transitions well into the late game.

Moreover, the hero has a large margin for error. If you don’t get a lot of farm in the laning stage, you could use your Ultimate to win a fight or push towers as a team with the help of your damage auras. Hence, you are not too item dependent. In addition, you are a fast farmer that can always catch up in terms of gold and experience after the laning stage.

It is fairly easy to execute a strategy with Luna – you seek team fights or push towers when Eclipse is up, you farm up while her ultimate is down and avoid engagements.

Luna is picked most often in 5-man pushing and team fight strategies. The reason for this is that it is relatively easy to take objectives with her on your team. Sieging Barracks with the help of Moon Glaives is also very efficient because the bouncing attacks of Luna make it very hard for enemies to stay nearby to defend their base.

Generally, you put the hero in the safe lane to allow her to get farm and levels very quickly. Luna is fairly squishy and vulnerable to initiation and ganks early on. Therefore, she needs a safe lane where she can get some core items and levels. The hero has a great late game carry potential and ensuring that she gets a lot of farm can never be a bad choice.

Luna is very good against most solo offlaners, especially melee heroes, since she can easily use her attacks and nukes to zone them out. She is also decent if the enemy team decides to contest the lane by putting an offensive lane there - with strong early game supports you can deal a large amount of damage to enemies from a safe distance thanks to Lunar Blessing.

Substitute:

Good friends to have are:

Strong Against:

Weak Against:

The skill builds of Luna are fairly versatile. The usual trade-off is between Moon Glaives and Lunar Blessing. Higher levels in the former would grant you and your team more stats during pushes and fights, while more points in the latter will help you farm faster.

At the start of the game, you usually go for 1 point in Lunar Blessing in order to boost your damage and get last hits easier. Then comes Lucent Beam for harassing. Remember that you don’t need your Moon Glaives in the early laning stage, because you will push your wave all the time. The ability becomes more useful in the later laning stage when you want to push-out the wave.

The physical DPS build is the most common one for Luna. The build transitions from cost-efficient stat and farming items into survivability items and finally late game luxuries. Building a lot of stats on Luna is great for two reasons: First, she is a squishy AGI carry, which means she needs both survivability and a DPS increase. Second, her illusions are extremely strong because they inherit Bouncing Glaives and stat items make them even stronger.

If you want to start fighting from early on as a team it is possible to rush the BKB – get it before the Manta Style. This will make you stronger in fights but it will also obviously slow down a bit your farming speed. It's also a good choice to rush the Hurricane Pike if you are playing against heroes that you can kite and you need the mobility.

This is an unconventional build that emphasizes mostly on increasing the strength of your ultimate. The items you get all give you mana pool, allowing you to go for an Aghanim’s + Refresher combo in the late game. Moreover, the Drums + Yasha in combination with your high movement speed make you extremely fast

Depending on the game and heroes you are playing against, you might need BKB earlier, but in our example we go for BKB later on. The ability to use your ultimate from a distance means you don’t have to stand in the middle of fights as much as with the standard build!

In the late game we get Skadi to make you even tankier and to increase the strength of your illusions.

Once you get your early game items and ~lvl7, you have two choices:

First, you can flash farm by out-pushing the lane and farming the jungle.

Second, you can gather with your team right away to force fights and push towers. When you have your ultimate and max level in Beam (usually lvl7), you can rotate to the enemy safe lane with your teammates. Ideally, you will win the fight with your ult, take the tower and take control of their jungle, which will let you farm it for a while.

Which option is better depends on your team strategy and the enemy hero composition:

Sometimes, going to the enemy safe lane to fight could actually be the safer option - this way you will be close to your allies and you will not be vulnerable to enemy gankers - often the enemy space creators will try to invade your jungle to stop you from farming

In other games, if the enemy team cannot pressure you and your allies are doing fine 4v5, you can use this opportunity to flash-farm your own jungle and skyrocket your GPM.

Logically, if you intend to fight you need to take the max Beam build, while if you intend to focus only on flash-farming you can go for the greedy Glaives build.

Even though her attack animation is slow, last-hitting is easy with Luna because of Lunar Blessing and you should be able to find farm even if your lane opponents are contesting last hits. Moreover, her low cd, long-ranged, low mana cost Lucent beam could be used to secure the ranged creep in desperate situations.

When you get your Glaives in the late laning stage, you will start pushing out the waves a bit with every hit. If you want to control the creep equilibrium, you will need to hit enemy creeps as little as possible and deny and hit ally creeps as much as possible. More often than not, however, you would want to start killing creeps quickly: pushing out the wave with auto attacks and Glaives will give you the time to start farming the nearby jungle camps.

Active Harass: 

Luna can use her Lucent beam almost on cooldown to harass enemies from afar in the lane. You would usually need a mana regen item like Ring of Aquila and possibly Raindrops to sustain your mana, though. Start harassing the enemy when you get some levels in Lucent beam (at hero level 3 or 5). Using the spell at early levels will quickly drain your mana pool and won’t really damage the opponent since the damage is low on lvl1. 

Passive Harass: 

Due to her very fast movement speed, Luna can run in to auto-attack enemies even though she doesn’t have a high attack range. The damage aura makes her physical attacks quite strong in the laning stage. Much more importantly, your allies get the damage from the aura, which means that the passive harass from your long range supports becomes much stronger.

Luna deals a high amount of damage with her auto-attacks and has a long-ranged nuke (Lucent Beam) but she lacks any disable and can only kill with the help of her supports. You give surrounding friendly heroes a damage boost thanks to your Lunar blessing aura; the effective damage of you and your lane partners gets increased by a lot. The most important thing you need from your lane partners in order to become dangerous are disables. That being said, when you play a lane with Luna your focus should fall on maximizing your farm in the lane and jungle rather than attempting kills.

Once you get your Eclipse, you can easily get a solo kill against an opponent without an escape mechanism. If there are no creeps or units around the enemy, you can cast Eclipse and use your high movement speed to run after him/her. Bear in mind that the range of your ultimate is not that high and that you have a casting animation to consider. You need to make sure that the enemy remains within the range of Eclipse after you cast it. If he is still alive after your ult, you can always use a long-ranged Lucent Beam to secure the kill.

On lvl 7 with this combo, you can do 5x300 + 300 damage, which is a total of 1800 magical damage before reductions - realistically enough to kill off any hero even from full HP. The tricky part is the positioning.

Luna has no kill-combo with any hero, but she provides allies with a damage aura which can be very powerful especially on range supports. A good lane partner will be a support with a disable to make up for what Luna lacks. Any ranged support can work, however, because the aura will make them good at passive harassing. Needless to say, the aura works best with supports who are already good at passive harass because of high damage (SS) or good attack animation (WR, Dazzle).

Paparazi is playing Luna in the safe lane against Mineski.

First, he decides not to contest the bounty rune when he notices two Radiant heroes there. Luna is not particularly strong in fights early on (unless her whole team is with her to benefit from the aura), and for this reason, dodging the fight is the right choice – fighting for the rune will deplete his regen and will make the laning stage much harder for him. Moreover, Luna + AA don’t have a disable to guarantee they will actually get the rune.

He prioritizes getting every single last hit – he even uses his Beam to secure the ranged creep (02:20; 07:10) when it is far away from him and the big jungle camp creep (05:45). Paparazi helps his AA harass the Pango occasionally, but he only does it when he knows it will not disrupt his farm.

Notice that once he gets his Mask of Death he starts out-pushing the wave and farming the jungle. Io helps him farm faster than usual, but you can do this without you without a problem.

The most interesting thing in this example is his skill build: he was saving his skill points after he got three levels in Beam and one level in Lunar Blessing. He noticed that the enemy team isn’t pressuring him, which means he will not have to fight for a while. Because of this he decides to maximize his farm and invests all saved points in Moon Glaives. This helps him maximize his farming speed – on the 10-minute mark he has 83 last hits. This is 43 more than the enemy carry and 38 more than the enemy mid!

The first important timing for Luna would be when you get to level 7. At this point, you will have maxed Lucent Beam and your ultimate’s will deal maximum damage per hit. This means you have a choice – use this timing to force a fight to with your ult and win map control for your team OR continue passively farming your jungle with your Glaives and your HP sustain item (Madness). Forcing fights without BKB is risky if your opponents have decent magic nukes and disables, so usually you want to play passively until you get your core items. Nonetheless, in some games you will have the opportunity to be aggressive and you shouldn’t miss it.

The next important timing for Luna, as mentioned, is her Black King Bar – the item allows her to team fight much more safely. With BKB you can position yourself aggressively to cast your spells and to attack without worrying about getting disabled or burst down. You want to use this timing to force fights and take objectives.

The third timing for Luna is when she gets her luxury DPS items – usually first Manta, second - Butterfly and third - Satanic. Manta allows for more efficient sieging and split-pushing. Butterfly and Satanic allow you to man-fight other farmed carries in the late game – at this point you usually want to break the enemy base.

If the laning stage didn’t go well, Luna will usually have to rush BKB in order to be able to fight enemies. You will need to play as defensively as possible and avoid getting picked off before you get the item.

A great way to come back fast into the game is to utilize stacks. Even if you have a bad laning stage (e.g. you are playing against a strong offensive lane), if your supports stack a lot for you, you can recover very quickly by farming the stacks (needless to say it is vital that your opponents don’t take the stacks instead).

After getting BKB you should smoke gank with your team and try to win engagements. This will win you some gold and map control - you can use the newly created space to farm up and get back into the game (you can catch-up to enemies thanks to your flash-farming potential).

Sadly, split-pushing your way to victory is hard to do with Luna because she is not elusive and if you are behind entering enemy territory to split-push will most probably cost you your life. You usually want to out-push the wave as fast as possible and go into the jungle where enemies don’t have vision of you.

Luna is a very position-dependent hero in team fights. You are not one of those carries that run in and use their abilities. Rather, you wait for allies to initiate and lock down targets and then you come in with your ultimate and attacks.

You need to choose when you use your Eclipse. At the later stages of the game, enemy heroes will have BKB’s and using your ultimate will be a waste. You should wait with your ultimate and use it after their magic immunity wears off. Still, if allies manage to lock down a target that didn’t use his BKB in time, you can use Eclipse and try to burst him/her down while disabled before he/she managed to activate the BKB.

Use Lucent Beam on cooldown on the target you and your teammates are focusing unless you are very farmed and you deal much more damage with attacks. In this case use Beam only on heroes outside of your attack range or if you need to cancel important channeling abilities (such as Bane’s Grip or Enigma’s Black Hole).

You have no disable or a way to stick to targets although you are a fast hero. You should, therefore, attack units that were CCed by your allies or enemies attacking you.

You are generally weak in a 1vs1 situation against most hard carries because you deal more AoE than single target damage. Try to be around your allies in a fight, don’t get isolated in a 1vs1 combat. Keep in mind that Moon Glaives allow you to damage opponents that are a lot further away from you. Therefore, you can just attack the closest possible hero around you to make sure that you keep your Glaives bouncing in the team fight. This means that you need to spend less time repositioning yourself to attack the right target.

Example:

A very chaotic fight where Luna performed really well:

• First, the enemy team manages to deal a lot of damage to her from a distance. To deal with this she pushes herself forward with Pike and activates BKB + Satanic, which quickly refills her HP and allows her to push the enemy team back.
  
• Once her defensive items are on CD, the enemy Ursa tries to focus her down. She, however, has a Refresher Shard, which allows her to use her defensive CDs again. Aeon Disk saves her and BKB, ult and Satanic allow her to chase and finish the enemy Ursa off.
  

5-man Pushing:

Luna is a great 5-man pushing hero for two reasons. First, her aura gives a lot of damage to allies, which increases the team’s overall damage output. This is especially noticeable in early-mid game pushes. Second, her bouncing Glaives in the mid-and-late game start to deal a lot of damage to enemies and effectively zone them out when you are hitting buildings; this makes defending and stalling pushes extremely hard. When pushing with your team, you should simply attack buildings – your glaives will bounce and will still deal a lot of damage to your targets. If the enemy team commits to a defense, of course, you can focus a hero which is close to you to kill it off faster.

If the enemy team is alive and you are afraid of their initiation, you can simply slow-push the enemy base by sending your Manta illusions with the creep wave to chip away at the tower. This strategy is extremely strong if you have Shadow Demon on your team – he can create his own more powerful Luna illusions by disrupting one of the Manta illusions.

Because of the bouncing Moon Glaives, Lion doesn’t even manage to reach the fight: he needs to back-off or he will die.

Split-Pushing:

Luna can be a decent split-pusher in the mid and late game mainly thanks to Manta. The Manta illusion inherit the Glaives effect, meaning they will out-push the waves efficiently and can even damage towers. You can pop your Manta and use only your illusions to push the wave towards the enemy tower without overextending and risking your life – you are not an elusive hero.

Usually you want to stick close to your team to participate in fights, but if you are not in position to team fight and if there is a good split-pushing opportunity (the whole enemy team is visible and away from your position) you should take it. You clear waves very fast. This will allow you to reach the enemy tower very fast and force a reaction by the enemy team. Don’t overstay your welcome – you are vulnerable to ganks, so when a dangerous hero goes out of vision run backwards to safety (or TP away). Since you are very fast, your opponents are unlikely to catch up to you, especially if you have some MS items. You will find yourself much more often in this split push scenario when (and if) you buy your BoTs as they will open a lot of split push opportunities for you in the very late game.

Luna is not a good ganker because she doesn’t have any mobility spells or a lockdown for her targets. Because of this ganking is rarely something you want to do as Luna.

That being said, as any damage dealer Luna can participate in smoke ganks with her teammates. You should use the extra night vision given from her aura to get kills during the night time. Walk close to your initiating allies to give them vision on the enemy positioning. Afterwards follow up on their initiation with attacks and spells. If you are ganking an important and tanky target, use Eclipse to burst the target down before he/she has the opportunity to activate BKB or another defensive mechanism.

Luna’s extra night vision allows her team to be in an advantageous position during night time. You should seek offensive fights at night, when Eclipse is off cooldown and when the enemy team will be at a vision (and hopefully initiation) disadvantage. After winning an engagement, you can start taking map control by pushing towers or taking Roshan.

It is a good habit to think about vision obstructions. Standing on a high ground before a team fight could give your team the initiation advantage and could prevent enemy heroes from hiding away from vision near the fight location. Don’t get carried away in your function as an Observer ward, however, because you need to be on the frontline of the fight to deal damage.

You always want to lead your opponents in terms of net worth – you are one of the fastest flash-farmers in the game and you need to use this potential.  Moreover, you scale very well with items and an item lead over the enemy cores will most likely secure you the game.

You should not feel pressured to force fights if you have the needed space to flash-farm.

If you are not fighting or taking objectives, farming with Luna is pretty straightforward – you kill the creeps in the lanes and then go into the jungle, moving from camp to camp.

Once you get your Manta you can send the illusions to split-push while you are safely farming your jungle (or another pushed-in lane).

The important thing you need to consider is that Luna excels at farming stacked camps due to her Moon Glaive. In the early and mid game it is worth it to stack jungle camps before you farm them. In the later stages you can finish off a camp before the spawn timing comes, so stacking jungle camps with your hero becomes less important. Stacking Ancients, however, is key in all stages of the game. You should always ask your teammates to stack them. Afterwards you can farm the stack with Glaives and an HP sustain item, which will give you a huge income boost – you can use this to finish important items like your BKB faster than expected.

Don’t forget that a stacked Ancient camp is a very important source of income for your team and if your opponents manage to steal it this will be a big blow to your item progression and a boost to theirs. Always try to have vision there to protect the stack.

Finally, if you have a Dominator you can use the creep to stack the Ancients yourself – a great strategy in pubs where you cannot count on your supports to consistently provide stacks (even if they do, you can simply stack another camp).