This isn’t strictly a guide on how to gain LP, although I will be telling you how to do that: this is a guide on how to not suck at League of Legends, and one of these things is not like the other. It should be mentioned that this guide, in part, assumes you already have a basic grasp of the game for the sake of terminology, as well. Although, I will be going over the terms used throughout the article anyway, so read on regardless.
League of Legends, despite popular belief, is not a team-based MOBA. It is actually a 1v1 lane-fest (yes, this applies to bot lane, too) that has its matches’ outcomes decided in consistent categories. Most of you would have heard of the 40/40/20 rule by now: 40% of the time, you lose automatically, 40% of the time you win automatically, and 20% of the time the game rests in your hands.
Roughly speaking, this rule is accurate. 40% of the time your team will lose their 1v1’s to a degree where it isn’t mathematically possible for you to overcome the power of your opponents as you move into the mid and late game. 40% of the time the inverse will be true. And 20% of the time the game will be even enough for you to take the reigns and decide the difference. That 20% is what makes or breaks LP, but not what decides who is and isn’t good at the game.
To prove this theory, I’ll suggest a common scenario: Suppose you’re in lane within the first four minutes of the game. It’s a gold ELO game, and your jungler, let’s say a Kayn, has full cleared and is now pushing into river. You, the laner, know you don’t have the prio to reliably help him contest the Lee Sin who is about to meet Kayn in a 1v1. Not only this, but your lane opponent does have the prio, and is making it obvious that they are about to collapse on your Kayn as well, turning the 1v1 into a 2v1 against your jungler.
A good player would make the correct decision here: Spam ping your Kayn to back off and, depending on your lane state, either freeze the wave to punish your lane opponent’s rotation or let the wave crash and farm the creeps under tower.
Conversely, a player who wanted to gain LP would clear as many creeps as fast as possible to even the level difference and rotate to try and clean up a kill or two.
So what’s the difference between these two players, and what is the correct decision for someone who wants to be good at the game?
First: the correct decision to either freeze or let the wave crash for the purposes of farming assumes that the Kayn will play to game theory. That is, that decision works better than the decision to fight if your Kayn doesn’t make a mistake. If you want to be good at League of Legends, play to theory.
Second: the decision to rotate and attempt to collect a kill assumes that the Kayn will make a macro mistake, as I’ve stated. But it also assumes that the enemy team is going to make enough mistakes for that to be possible in the first place. Remember, this is gold elo we’re talking about. People are not very consistent at the game at this point.
Here we have a proof of concept: The best choice, in theory, is not always the choice that will yield LP. My main concern is with what the best choices are, not the choices that capitalize on common mistakes made by the enemy team for the sake of LP.
And with that, let’s begin:
- Farm, Farm, Farm
- Wave Management
- Obtain Prio
- Cheat Your Recalls
- Ward
- Stop Dying
- Stop Teamfighting
- Bang on the Money Trees
- Become One With Your Champion
- Stop Experimenting
- Start Experimenting
- Farm, Farm, Farm
Farm, Farm, Farm
Farming is the act of killing minions and jungle camps for gold and XP. CS represents your creep score. That is, the number of minions and jungle camps you’ve slain.
If being alive is life in League, then CS is life insurance. After every single game you will ever play, there will be one consistent criticism you can always make of yourself: You could have farmed better. You can always farm better.
If you want to see a direct correlation between win rate and exactly one habit that high elo players possess, look no further than the ability to farm reliably and under both easy and oppressive conditions.
Trade your abilities, mana, and health resources for a higher CS score, and you will naturally, almost inexplicably, see better results in your games.
Wave Management
Wave management is the term used to describe how you manage waves of minions. In pragmatic and simple terms, this is almost always used to describe where your minions meet the enemy minions.
Imagine you’re playing against a champion that counters you. You really need the safety of your tower to farm reliably and to avoid being ganked. If you can manage the waves in lane such that your minions meet the enemy minions just out of range of your tower, you’ve accomplished an example of good wave management.
If, in this same scenario, your minions meet the enemy minions just out of range of your opponent’s tower, you’ve faultered to an example of poor wave management. In this example, farming minions requires that you leave the safety of your tower and expose your self to ganks or all-ins by your opponent whom counters you.
Additionally, proper wave management opens up opportunities to generate extra effective gold for your team. Freezing a wave, for example, allows you to let your minions die whilst farming the enemy minions. If your lane opponent has backed or isn’t in lane for some reason, this means that they will be losing XP. And if your opponent is down one or two levels, they are behind in at least 500 gold worth of stats and value out of ability increases.
It’s very hard to exaggerate the value gained from proper wave management. And as stated, the majority of League of Legends games are decided as 1v1’s in the laning phase (yes, this applies to bot lane, too). So keep focused on the wave and manage it in a way that best allows you to farm.
Obtain Prio
Prio, or priority, is a term that’s used to describe having the priority in a lane to make a low-cost or cost-free decision. For example, if your minions are shoving into your opponent’s tower, said opponent has to stay under their tower and farm if they know what’s good for them, which means you have the first priority in deciding to help your jungler, for example.
This also extends to obtaining priority by using your lead to freeze a wave. If you freeze a wave and mange its state such that its slowly pushing into your tower, you have the priority to step out of lane and help your jungler. Again, if your opponent knows what’s best for themselves, they’ll be forced to hard shove the wave into your tower. If you help your jungler in a timely manner, you’ll likely win an objective with them while being back to your lane in time to catch the wave.
These are two examples of prio. Obtain it as often as possible and do something with the extra time afforded by your wave management.
Cheat your Recalls
One of the most powerful strategies in League of Legends is the “cheater recall”. This is when you shove a wave under your opponents tower (gain prio) and use the time afforded to you to back and spend the gold you’ve gained for extra stats and a resource replenish. Your opponent, who is stuck under tower, will be forced to either recall after farming and teleport back to lane (if they can) or stay in lane after farming and suffer a slow push back into an opponent who now has extra items and resources.
Either way, you’ve gained tempo on your opponent and have the upper hand. Aside from farming properly, this is arguably the strongest piece of advice anyone can take away from this article: Cheat your recalls, and cheat them often.
Ward
This isn’t DOTA 2. You have wards and they’re free. Use them, and use them aggressively. Place one at the start of the match at key choke-points or to track the enemy jungler. Place one on your junglers non-starting camp to give them peace of mind, or place one in the river early to gain information on any potential level-1 invades.
Ward, and ward some more.
Stop Dying
This one’s simple to understand and extremely difficult to execute: Stop dying.
Dying not only gives your opponents XP and gold, but it robs you of CS, surrenders your prio, and takes all of the agency away from your decision making, even when you’re alive again. Stop Dying.
If you watch the masters of solo-queue, like Dopa Apdo, you’ll notice that even in chaotic environments, they simply do everything they can to avoid dying unless it will trade for a play that directly wins them the game. Even if you have to abandon your lane and walk back to tower (any tower) and surrender wave after wave to avoid ganks or dives, do not die in League of Legends.
I cannot stress this enough, do not, under any circumstances that won’t directly win you the game, greed for any reason that will result in your death.
Keep your death counter low and your CS high and your LP will mysteriously increase.
Stop Teamfighting
Teamfighting is when two teams fight. In League of Legends, this occurs most often when contesting objectives like towers, dragons, or Baron. And you, who is trying to not suck at the game, should stop doing it.
First, Teamfights introduce too many variables to be considered a reliable way to play the game properly in solo-queue. Is your Leona going to hit her R? Is your Cassiopeia going to flash-r in the wrong direction? Is getting 4% more armor and magic resist really worth giving a kill or two over to the enemy Vayne?
The answer to all of these questions is a dice-rolled maybe. But do you know what isn’t a dice roll? The advantages you’ll gain by just shoving your lane in and taking towers.
Firstly, the enemy team is likely going to send someone to counter your shove. This means that your team, who is likely contesting an objective of some sort, will be in a 4v4, and to no disadvantage caused by your not teamfighting.
Secondly, if the enemy team doesn’t send a rotation to counter your shove, they will almost assuredly secure the objective, but will lose towers and 2-3 waves of minions in doing so, all while you gain upwards of 700 gold and plenty of XP to bring back into the skirmishes later.
Look, I’m not saying never teamfight, but if you want to be good at League of Legends, you should learn to stop moving, like a moth to flame, towards fights that are dice rolls. Instead, communicate your intentions to hard-shove with pings and focus on collecting the assured gold and experience that is associated with taking towers and clearing waves.
Eventually, this strategy will lead you to consistently taking inhibitors, which spawn super-minions, which in turn leads to the threat of your influence in a lane without you needing to be there, effectively putting everything your enemies do on a timer. That is to say, you gain a macro sort of prio with everything you do.
Stop taking teamfights and the teamfights that you do take will be more consistent.
Bang on the Money Trees
Bang on the Money Trees that are towers.
In the early game, gaining a plate or two gains you so much gold that won’t be available later, that in the contest between freezing waves and crashing them early for extra tower damage, crashing waves almost always wins out.
Taking first turret and, subsequently, taking a Tier 2 tower will yield so much gold for your champion that if you manage the feat in a timely manner, you’ll likely be able to squeeze out an entire extra item over your opponent. At that point, the game becomes a 20%, which is to say that the win is in your hands.
A lesser appreciated fact about tower destroying is that you need your minions under opponents’ towers to do so, which means while you’re shoving waves and banging on the Money Trees, your opponent is likely losing some CS and XP, which tilts the effective gold generation further in your direction.
Bang on the Money Trees, win more games.
Become One With your Champion
Ideally, you would have heard of this advice within the first 5 seconds of learning to play this game: pick one champion and stick with it. Learn all of its combos, skill orders, itemization, synergies, counters, and reliable strategies.
There are over 160 champions in League of Legends, and each one, no matter how simple, takes at least 6-12 months to truly master. We can count on two hands (maybe only one) the amount of people on earth capable of mastering every champion in the game before their life comes to a natural end.
YOU cannot jump around between champions for fun and expect to get better at the game as your focus will be split between relearning the fundamentals of each new champion you roll out with and other aspects of the game. Pick one champion to main and respect the choice for at least a couple years.
Ideally, you’ll have a couple of backup champions that you can bring out into a composition in case your main gets banned or played by someone else. But other than those scenarios, stick to your main and you’ll be rewarded with LP and deep understanding of their mechanics and ideal itemization.
Stop Experimenting
Trying out different builds isn’t going to magically yield better results in game. Figure out the ideal build path for your champion and focus on changing, at most, one item for the sake of optimization against the enemy composition.
Start Experimenting
Once you’ve gained a solid understanding of your champion’s build path and role within a team, you can flip the script and begin theorizing alternate build paths or skill orders.
Gwen mains, at one point, recognized that her passive damage and sustain was strong enough to warrant building tankier. So, naturally, the better Gwen mains among us managed to find a niche but useful build path that was unorthodox but yielded good results against certain compositions.
The amount of experience it takes to do such a thing takes time and study to obtain, but at a certain point, you will need to learn how to theorize and implement obscure changes to your champion if for no other reason than to understand why certain things don’t work.
Farm, Farm, Farm
At the tail end of League of Legends theory you find yourself at the start again. It can be overwhelming to focus on so many aspects of the game while keeping the fundamentals in mind, but it’s worth remembering that farm is everything, so pay attention to it.
Farm safer, farm more often, and when you do farm, farm more efficiently and you will win more games. It really is that simple.
GLHF,
-E
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