League of Legends: Laning

Hello everyone again. It’s that day every other week where I rant about League of Legends and maybe throw a coherent thought or two in there. IEM Hannover is coming this week and with it the chance to see the top LoL teams in the nation go head to head. Tune in to learn from the strategies the pros bring to play. Good luck to them all!

I plan to finish talking about the early game with this post. Now that we’ve covered the moments leading up to the game along with the first 3 minutes of a game, I’m going to talk about the next phase: early game (or laning phase). This includes aspects farming and zoning.

Farming

Farming itself means killing minions to get gold to get better items. Last hitting is the approach to farming where you only damage the minions once rather than pummeling them the moment you are able to. Think of the minions in each wave as a pool of damage. Since the pools from both sides are the same size, they will nullify each other. The minion waves, without any other input, will stay in the center of the lane. Of course, there are other factors, such as if the minions decide that they will focus their attacks, but the lane will generally not move. That’s where last hitting comes in. Each iota of damage you add to the pool will push the wave towards the enemy side. Therefore, you add damage only when necessary in order to preserve the “natural” state of the lane. Exceptions arise when lanes are purposefully pushed to go gank another lane, to get dragon or buffs, or to take a tower.

Minions in mid lane.

Last hitting is important to not overextend. Overextending without wards leaves you open to ganks from the jungler or from enemy lanes. Thus you are less safe when farming and have the chance of dying. Dying means that you can’t get more gold and have given your opponent gold and experience. On the other hand, overextending presents the benefit of pressuring a lane. Many people have trouble farming under tower and, if you push the lane up to their tower, they may miss last hits to the tower, thus creating a gold advantage for you. Another advantage of lane pressure is that it forces the jungler to reveal himself in order to relieve pressure on that lane. Since the jungler can’t be two places at once, the jungler appearing in your lane allows other lanes to play aggressively because it eliminates a threat. Speaking of playing aggressively…

Zoning

Spare time in between last hits can be spent interacting with your opponent. This leads to another benefit of last hitting: it allows you room to zone your opponent. Zoning is purposefully keeping your opponent from last hitting and out of experience range. This allows you to gain an immense advantage if done correctly. So if your lane is in its “natural” orientation, you are able to stand between the minions and the tower. Pushing the lane to the tower gives you no room to zone without taking large amounts of damage.

Lux is sad :'(

Zoning is effective because you present a threat. That is, when your opponent tries to get close to the minions, you hit them so hard that they are afraid to go back in (“harassing” your opponent). Harassment can also come in small bits of damage, or “pokes”. This is meant to wear your enemy down and hopefully, once they are low enough, kill them. So another reason why you wouldn’t want to push the wave to tower is that it makes it difficult to kill your opponent. You would have to tower dive and we know that thing does quite a bit of damage early in the game. So keeping the minion waves in the middle of the lane allows you to zone your opponent with the threat of killing them.

An important part of the zoning and harassment game for bottom lane is brush control. It doesn’t matter as much for mid or top lane because those are solo lanes. However, the duo bot lane set up allows the one champion to farm the lane while the other sits in the brush. This means that the enemy team does not definitively know where your team is on the map and cannot target you. This allows you to use the sight advantage to pop in and out of the brush to poke at your opponents without them being able to retaliate. This also presents a threat to your opponents if you are a support that has some form of cc, such as Alistar or Taric. If you are able to land your stun or knockup, you may have given your carry the time to kill the enemy. Brush control enables zoning because, rather than staying away from just you, your opponent must now be wary of the entire brush.

Sort of makes my point.

Conclusion

I didn’t really talk much about jungle ganks even though that is a large part of early game because that would take another LARGE post and because I have minimal experience in that area (most of my experience comes from bottom lane). I guess if there is enough interest, I could talk about how to gank effectively and how to avoid ganks. Other than that, I’d like to summarize my post real fast:

Last hit. Last hit. Last hit.

Last hitting allows you to:
 

1) Get money

2) Not overextend

3) Zone

4) Harass

Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment if you so desire!

Kathy Chen