A thought occurred to me when I saw that a streamer, Janne "Gorgc" Stefanovski, was playing Dota 2 and started ranting about how kill gold almost felt random. You kill the enemy farmed carry, and get 200 gold for the kill, then you kill the random support and get 500 gold instead. It just wasn't adding up. This is a top 100 EU ranked player. Among the best players, and arguably the biggest Dota 2 streamer currently. And he still didn't understand how kills reward and punish players.
So if one of the top players doesn't understand how it works, how many of the average Dota players don't understand it? So I thought I would try to outline the key aspects of it and what information you can glean from it.
I'm going to try having some TL;DR's scattered around at the end of some sections, and a big TL;DR to summarize the whole thing at the end. Skip to the bottom if you just want the basic information.
So this one is fairly straight-forward. Any kill will give a base of 110 gold along with gold that scales with the enemy hero's level.
Also, if the enemy that you killed had killed 3 heroes or more without dying, then you will get 60 gold for every kill streak from 3 - 10 kills. You can visualize it by subtracting the streak by 2 and multiplying it by 60. eg. If the streak is 5 kills, 60 x (5-2) = 180 gold bonus.
If you kill a higher leveled hero, you'll get more gold. If you kill a hero with a big kill streak, you'll get more gold.
But this is fairly simple, it's only when assist gold comes into play that things start to become confusing.
Oh boy...So here's where we get into the complexities. It would be difficult to analyze the whole formula at once, so let's take a glance at the one section first.
First of all, "Base Gold" is a flat amount of gold that each assisting hero will get. The amount is 126/63/31.5/22.5/18 depending on how many heroes there are. If you kill someone alone, the base gold will be 126. If all 5 heroes are present, then it will be 18.
Next, the multiplier for the Victim Level will be reduced for every hero present for the assist gold. A solo kill will make this multiplier 4.5, and 5 heroes will make it 0.9.
So what we can see from the information in the charts above is that if you want the most individual gold, you have to get solo kills. But if you're interested in injecting the most gold to your team as a whole, then having 2 teammates participate in a kill is the best way to do so no matter what level the enemy is.
What is also interesting is that having 3 killers will also be worth more total team gold than solo kills once the enemy reaches level 9 and above.
Get solo kills if you want the most individual gold. While having two or three teammates soak up assist gold will maximize the team gold gained from a kill. Four or five teammates sharing the assist will create the worst value both for each individual and for the team as a whole.
It's pretty insane that everything up to now hasn't even taken into consideration how much gold and what items the enemy has. It's only getting more confusing from this point, unfortunately.
So VictimNW is a total value accumulated on the dead hero from their gold bank, non-consumable items in their inventory, Moon Shard buff, and Alchemist Aghs buff. Basically, the more items and gold the victim has, the more he gives away.
NWPF stands for NetWorthPoorFactor. Basically, all of the enemy heroes get ranked based on their net worth compared to the rest of their team. The NWPF will be 1.2 for the most valuable hero and 0.6 for the least valuable hero.
And finally, there is the NWRF, or NetWorthRankingFactor. This number will determine how the total assist gold will be shared among the killers. Heroes with less net worth will get a larger cut of the pool, while wealthy heroes will get a smaller share.
So enemies with lots of items and gold will give away more when they die. Enemies with the more net worth compared to the rest of their team will give away more gold when they die. And the poorer you are compared to the rest of your team, the more gold you will be given from an assist.
Dying is a far simpler calculation though.
If you have more value on your hero, you will lose more gold upon death. Mind you, you can only lose unreliable gold. Unreliable gold comes from creeps, neutrals, and bounties primarily. Whereas kills, towers, Roshan bounty, and the like are all reliable gold that can't be lost.
There are some misconceptions as to how this whole thing works, so here are some of them:
