LoL: From Noob to Not-So-Noob: Lane Control

The laning phase is the early portion of the game, when pretty much everyone except the jungler and possibly a roamer are on their lanes, pushing and farming CS. There’s no strict timeframe on when the laning phase ends, but it’s usually over by the 20 minute mark. Why does the laning phase end then? For two reasons really, for one people have generally got their base items by this point so they feel safer going to gank and do co-ordinated pushes. Secondly, in higher level games, baron starts spawning and you’re generally getting to around the point when you can take baron or defend baron from being taken, so you want people to be within range to rush to it at the drop of a hat.

We’ve already touched on several of the main elements to laning in earlier guides, such as getting as much cs as possible, tower rules, map awareness and staying alive. These core tenents should inform how you play during the laning phase, but there’s more to it than just that.

Key to laning effectively is learning how to control the flow of your lane. This is easiest on a solo lane because you don’t have allies messing it up for you, but it’s important on any lane. Controlling the flow of your lane is essentially timing your last hits and attacks on minions so that they stay close to your tower but not within tower range. This is important because it means that you are much harder to gank from the river, and if your enemy is pushed up trying to get last hits they are very open to ganks from the side.

This can be difficult once you get past playing new players because the opposing team will be trying to do the same thing, so it’s a contest between who can control what. Two ways to stop your enemy from controlling where the minion line is are harassment and zoning. This guide will focus on these three elements: lane control, harassment and zoning.

When laning, there are three areas of your lane in terms of danger. These aren’t marked out at all so you have to keep the concept in your head. The three areas are: Safe, Sort of Safe, and Not. Safe is the area close to your tower, where even if an enemy came running out of the bushes, you’d be fine. Sort of Safe is the area between safe and up near the enemies tower, where if you have a ward down covering your bush you should probably be ok to escape. Not is the area by the enemy tower, where you can get ganked from the alternate bush/entrance to the lane which isn’t usually covered by a ward. To illustrate these I have used my impressive paint skills to create an awful diagram which will hopefully show you what I mean.

                      Top Lane:                                                                Mid Lane:

Hopefully that shows you more than just that you should never ask me to draw you anything, and lets you know where you are fine standing. When on the opposite team the areas are obviously reversed, and what is Safe for you is Not for the enemy. Essentially lane control is about keeping yourself Safe and keeping the enemy at best Sort of Safe, with the aim to bait them towards Not for a gank. To do this, you need to let the enemy push by not even hitting minions, then when they are at the right place, match whatever your enemy does. If your enemy autoattacks a minion to death, you’ll need to do one too to keep the lane even (even though that goes against the rule of don’t autoattack). Then you go back to just last hitting and getting your CS up. If your enemy managed to make you push your lane up to the tower and you’re stuck in Sort of Safe near the enemy tower, your best way of resetting it is to use aoe spells or autoattack hard in order to drive a fresh minion wave into your enemies tower, killing them quickly and hopefully resetting the lane. If you can hold your lane at the perfect place, ganks from your jungler should go a heck of a lot smoother.

Harassment is a good way of distracting your opponent from getting CS, generating fear in your opponent which stops them from getting CS or from attacking, and for softening them up ready for ganks. The key to harassing is in knowing who you should bother trying to harass, who you shouldn’t, and not getting distracted from your own CS by trying to harass. Generally you should try to harass people if you can deal more damage to them than they can to you, as long as they don’t have good regeneration skills. Learning who to harass and who not to harass is a case of learning individual champions and what they can do, and is outside of the scope of this little guide. If you don’t know, play on the cautious side, because staying alive is more important. The best time to harass is straight after you’ve last hit a minion, when the next minion is still on high health. This way you can hopefully get an attack or ability in before you need to last hit again.  If you’re getting harassed by the enemy and can’t harass back, your best options are to let yourself get pushed towards your tower and pick up CS from behind it, hopefully getting your jungler or someone else to come and gank when they can, or trying to generate a gold advantage which means you can jump on them with superior items.

Zoning is something you can do if you already have an advantage over your opponent, either in terms of vastly superior harassment ability or in items from more CS. Zoning involves keeping the enemy far back behind the creep line so that when your creeps die, they don’t get any experience from it. This serves both to make them under-levelled and to deny them from getting any gold. Zoning can generally only really be done if you are a ranged or high-sustain hero and your enemy isn’t. It can also be quite difficult to do if you are trying to get CS as the same time, as the damage you do by last hitting will slowly lead to a minion advantage on your side which will push toward their tower. If you can manage it however, zoning can be absolutely devastating to the other team’s chances of winning. To zone you stand ahead of the enemy ranged caster minion line, harassing the enemy any time they come within range. The opportunities to do this are fairly limited, and it can put you well into the Sort of Safe zone, which can lead to the embarrassing situation of getting ganked while you try to zone the enemy, netting them more exp and gold than if you had just not bothered to zone at all.

Hopefully this will help you to keep control of your lane somewhat, getting you more CS and helping you to stay alive. In the next guide, we’ll be looking at those four strangers who you have to play alongside, and how best to work with them to create victory through: Team Play

LoL: From Noob to Not-So-Noob: Champions and Archetypes

So you’ve been playing a few games by now hopefully, and you’ve got enough IP to buy a champion or two. Which should you buy, what order and when? Well, the cop out answer is that it’s entirely up to personal preference. Obviously, that would make for a pretty bad guide if I just said that, so there is some advice I can give which will hopefully help you.

Firstly, you should decide whether you want to focus on one role or style of hero, or whether you want to be flexible and have the ability to fill whatever role your team needs. There are pros and cons of each, though eventually you will probably end up doing the latter anyway.

Focusing on one type of hero will make it much easier to learn the game to begin with. You’ll get settled into doing what you’re meant to do much easier, and you’ll find it quicker to uptake new heroes within that role. On the other hand, you may end up in games where everyone picks your kind of hero, and picking that role would lead to a team composition that will most likely get stomped on. You may also find it harder later on to transfer to other roles when you’ve had hundreds of hours of gameplay focused on performing one role. You will save money on runes once you reach level 20 however (I haven’t mentioned this before, but don’t bother buying runes until level 20, it’s a waste of IP you could be spending on champions or saving for your tier 3 runes) as you will only need one or two sets of runes. Playing multiple roles can help you to know how to counter other roles, or to understand what they might be doing at any point in the game.

So, we know we can either focus on one role or multiple, but what roles are there in the game anyway? Well you can do this on multiple levels. At the broadest level, there are Ability Power heroes, Attack Damage heroes and a few hybrid heroes. As a very general rule, ability power heroes tend to be more about doing burst damage while attack damage heroes do more sustained damage. There are exceptions to this rule, but it mostly works. Focusing on just AP or AD can help to decrease the cost of runes once you hit level 20, but it does mean that if your allies all pick the same as you you could end up with a team that is very easy to counter just by building thornmail or banshee's veil.

A level deeper we can see the roles that people play within the game: AD ranged carry, AP nuke, Support, Tank, Assassins or Melee DPS (or tanky dps). You can also have junglers, who tend to be either melee dps or tanks. Choosing which roles you want to focus on really depends on your play style.

Carries and nukes can make you feel great because you get all the kills, but it’s the role which everyone tries to play every game, so you will often end up on teams of all carries and nukes with nobody to take the brunt of the damage or initiate. There's a lot more to carries and nukes than most people think however, because it's not just grabbing all damage items and right clicking or nuking to victory. Much hinges on your ability to last hit and get enough farm, as well as in your positioning and correct focus in team fights.

Tanks are great, especially if you’re focusing on staying alive, and revolve a lot around knowing how and when to initiate fights, positioning and picking off the enemy so they can’t get to your own carries (known as peeling).

Supports are one of the lesser played roles, so maining them will make teams you arrive on love you forever if they know anything about the game. A good support with some average carries can beat a better team with no support most of the time.

Melee dps is great for bridging the gap between being a squishy carry and a bolt-hard tank. You can jump on people or small groups and feel slightly more sure you’ll come out of the other side alive.

Assassins are squishier but more mobile carries and nukes. You’ll be able to dive in and out of combat and kill people in the blink of an eye, but if you jump in the wrong place at the wrong time you’ll be a smear on the tarmac before you know it.

As a jungler you’ll be tasked with controlling buffs, securing your own jungle, possibly invading the enemies jungle if you feel you can, setting up ganks on lanes you can or which need it and generally being the “unknown” for the enemy team, keeping them on their back foot and punishing them when they are being over-aggressive. I wouldn’t solely focus on this role if you’re not playing as part of a team, simply because you only ever want one in a team and if someone else grabs smite and locks in first you’ll be in foreign territory laning with your jungle hero. This is totally do-able, most junglers do well solo top if you can’t jungle (unless you’re amumu, then you just cry), so you could do just jungle champions if you’re willing to switch it up when needed. The other possible downside is that most junglers need decent rune set-ups to jungle effectively, so you will either need to wait for level 20 to set up your runes, or limit yourself to junglers who can do it without runes (ie/ Warwick)

So, hopefully you’ve decided which role or roles you are going to focus on if you’re focusing, or you’ve decided you want to learn all the roles to make yourself as knowledgeable and flexible as possible. Now which champions should you buy? For starters, if you’re willing to drop some real money on the game, I’d highly recommend getting the Gamer’s Choice bundle. For 3900 riot points (so the $35 riot point level, with 1100 to spare for whatever you want) you get 20 champions with a good spread across all the different roles. You also get a cool skin for annie, a few runes which might reduce the hurt on your IP wallet when you hit 20, and 1380 bonus riot points for whatever you want (giving you 2480 RP total if you got the $35 pack of RP, letting you buy another 2 expensive champions and some skins, or if you hold onto it and buy things you want when they come up on sale, plenty more).

If you’re not wanting to drop any real money on the game and want to do it all using IP, I highly recommend grabbing most of the 450 IP champions. They’re cheap enough to buy with a game or two’s worth of IP and are some of the best heroes in the game even up at tournament level play. Soraka, Ashe and Annie are all great choices, would cost you a mere 1350 IP for all three and give you a support, ranged carry and AP nuke to play with. If you hit up riot on facebook and like them you can also get the riot girl tristana skin for free. When you unlock the skin via a code like this it automatically unlocks that champion for you to play for free.

Remember that you’ll need to save up for your runes when you hit level 20, so don’t go too overboard buying champions with IP. Only buy 3150 or above champions if you’ve played them on free week and really enjoy them, otherwise you might find yourself grinding games for IP when you hit level 20 to get those shiny tier 3 runes. A full page of tier 3 runes will cost you at MINIMUM 8610 IP, or if you go for all the most expensive runes you could end up spending a horrifying 28290. So make sure you hold enough back for level 20 as you’re levelling up or you could find yourself spending a long time grinding for runes.

The main thing with champions is that you enjoy playing them. There’s no use forcing yourself to learn soraka just because you feel you should know how to play a support if you find yourself absolutely bored shitless every game you play her. Work out via the free champion rotation which ones you enjoy, and focus on learning them. Make sure you have a good little selection of heroes though, there’s nothing worse than a player who can only play one hero getting to level 30, playing ranked and getting their hero banned out from underneath them.

Champions also come and go with their strength in the game. Often some champions can be seen as not actually viable to play at higher levels of the game, or can get nerfed from being strong to quite weak. Personally I'd suggest putting your enjoyment of a champion over how technically strong they are, as balance changes are happening all the time, so eventually your champion should get buffed up to being good. However, be sure to keep it in mind and check the forums and/or tier lists to see which champions are seen as underpowered, because it can lead to some disappointing playtime if you pick up a champion who is currently really bad and get stomped game after game.

Hopefully this guide will have given you some idea what to do with the huge list of champions in front of you. It should also have given you a little break from mechanics and tactics, because you’ll need your head on when we tackle our next topic: Lane Control

LoL: From Noob to Not-So-Noob: Map Awareness

Being aware of your surroundings and what is happening through a game of LoL is one of the key elements towards both staying alive and actually winning the game. The ability to understand what it going on from the minimap, as well as to keep track of where enemy champions are is paramount. Learning to keep aware of the minimap while you are focusing on all the elements of the game such as laning, last hitting and staying alive against your enemy on lane can be incredibly difficult as a new player, however it is probably the most important skill you can learn.

After a while of playing it should become second nature to keep one eye on the minimap, but as a starting player you will have to force yourself to keep glancing at the bottom right of your screen every few seconds to keep updated. The main thing you are looking for is the enemy icons, as you want to keep track of if a person is still on their lane. If they aren’t on their lane then there’s every chance they could be coming to your lane to try and kill you, or they could be in any piece of bush you might want to walk in. A couple of the riot guys made a  semi-pisstake video explaining the concept of “dude potential”. The concept is great to keep in mind and will help a load when you are a new player if you train yourself to keep it in mind.

Original link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_qxqKjkuug (couldn't embed from there , sorry riot)

Other things you want to keep an eye on when it comes to the minimap are how other lanes are doing. If the little symbols are really close to your own tower a lot of the time then it often means a lane is struggling, so if you can spare time from your own lane it could be worth popping up and trying to gank one of the enemies on their lane. If the little dots are often close to the enemy tower, your teammates may be winning the lane, but it also often means they are overextended. If your teammates (or yourself, keep this in mind too) are constantly close to the enemy tower, it is incredibly easy for an enemy to come from one of the bushes off to the side and kill you. As such, if your teammates are often in this position, make sure that whenever an enemy goes missing for a little while you ping their lane to retreat, just in case. You mostly want to focus on saving your own hide, but if you can help your teammates not to give away easy kills to the enemy team then all the better.

The next topic for the subject of map awareness is one that 99% of new players don’t do, and 80% of older players still don’t do, but which is massively important and can save lives. That is placing wards for your team. Wards are consumable items from the shop which you can place down and will reveal an area for three minutes. They are invisible, so unless an enemy gets an oracles they won’t be able to get rid of them. Wards are very, very cheap at 75g a pop for the basic ones and 125g for wards which can see invisible units (more on those in a bit). They may only provide sight for 3 minutes, which doesn’t seem like too long a time, but keeping a good ward presence around the map can help massively with not dying, as well as for catching opponents who are thinking they are being sneaky off guard. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as watching an enemy sit in a bush thinking they’re going to be able to gank you and then jumping him and watching him cry.

So buying wards is often a great investment. Doing it in your beginner games may seem like a bit of a waste of money if nobody else helps you do it, but for one it’s a great habit to get into, and secondly even if you are slightly behind on gold from getting wards, this should be more impetus to last hit better and get more gold, so it should train you to be a better player.

Where to place wards is a decent topic, and one which I will cover more in depth in a later guide. For now, the best advice I can give is to place them in bushes that are coming towards your lane, where you might be ganked from.

The final issue to do with map awareness is buff control. I will keep this short and go over it in more detail when I do jungling, but for now be aware that buffs respawn on set timers from when they were killed. If you were present when they were killed, or walk into the spot where they should be after they were killed, the jungle dot will disappear. This dot will reappear when the buff respawns. This is most important for controlling dragon, which will be your main job any time you are on bottom lane or in the jungle. Any time dragon comes back up you should try and get your team in the area to take it down, because the 190 gold per person really adds up and leads to a good advantage for your team.

So to summarise all that into one sentence: Pay attention to what’s going on you muppet. This includes noticing when a teamfight is about to start which might benefit from your presence. One of the main errors I see new players make is for one engaging in team fights 3v5 or 4v5, and secondly, not noticing that their team is being engaged 5v4 and sitting in the jungle farming creeps pointlessly while the rest of their team gets whipped. Remember that you need to be aware of what is happening, and more importantly what could happen in the next few moments. If all five of the enemy team are on one lane killing minions, chances are they are going to try and push the next tower on that lane, so you should probably get yourself there to defend it (or be sneaky and take one of their towers while they’re distracted).

We’ve looked at some basics mechanics and ideas behind playing the game, and hopefully you have a few games under your belt with a few different champions. You should have saved up your IP so far and you might have enough to buy a hero or two by now. But which should you buy, what’s the best type of hero to play and do you need to start splashing out real money to get the champions you want? All this and more will be covered in the next guide: Champions and Archetypes

LoL: From Noob to Not-So-Noob: Staying Alive

You may have thought that learning to play LoL would focus on how to kill other players and get to the enemies nexus to win the game. However, that all comes with time and you won’t get much time to learn how to do all that if you can’t stay alive. Staying alive lets you get more gold and experience, as well as spend more time per game getting used to your champion, the enemies’ champions and the game as a whole. So that’s where you should start.

Saying that, staying alive as a brand new player can be easier said than done in the big bad world full of enemy players trying to kill you, monsters lurking in the jungle, a world of hurt from those towers that are in your way and those pesky minions on lanes which seem to do way more damage than you expect. What can you do to help ensure you die as little as possible? Well this will involve our first little delve into some game mechanics. I’ll keep it simple for the moment and expand on them in later parts, so try not to be too scared.

Firstly, focus on getting a high creep score (CS) above getting kills. Kills are nice and all well and good, but as you’ll see in a later guide on laning you are far better off focusing on creep kills, especially early game. You may be wondering what a creep is, well that’s a nice simple question with a nice simple answer. Creeps are another name for the enemy minions on your lane (and technically also the monsters in the jungle, but we’ll leave that for later). Now, you only get a creep kill if you get the killing blow on a minion, it doesn’t matter how much damage you did to it, just that final blow. As such, one of the primary things to focus on is last-hitting. This is a big area of mechanical practice and requires knowing your specific champion and their animations to do to its best. Very good players can aim to get around 70 CS in 10 minutes, but that requires a lot of practice. Nobody is perfect at last hitting, especially when being harassed by an enemy, and it is something you will be working on for your entire LoL career, so it’s best to get started early! You may be tempted as a beginner to just right click a minion and auto-attack it to death, but as I’ll show later on in the laning guide that’s not a good thing to do. You are much better off letting your minions (or lane ally) do most of the work and then just pop in with a final auto-attack or ability to finish it off. This way you can stay back more (especially if you are a melee hero), your lane doesn’t end up in the enemy teams tower where you can get shot by big painful balls of tower hurt and you aren’t stood in one place attacking for a long time, so you can stay on your toes and dodge things.

This handily leads to my next point, keep moving. You don’t have to move far, but you want to keep on the ball and be moving about behind your creep line quite a lot. This makes it harder for the enemy to hit you with their abilities and generally makes you less predictable, which is always a good thing.

Thirdly I want to talk about towers. Those big things in your lane that you have to both destroy and protect. Towers are one of the leading causes of fatalities among noobs, so it’s well worth knowing how they work. Enemy towers will target you if you get in range without any of your minions in range of it. Early game, and all game to squishy champions, towers can hurt you a heck of a lot, so try to judge how far the towers range is and stay outside of that as much as possible. Now obviously you don’t want to do that all the time or you’ll never take a tower. Towers will attack minions with priority over you, unless (and this is an important one) you have dealt damage to an enemy champion while in range of the tower. If you hurt an enemy champion while in range of a tower, it will switch to you, unless one of your allies has already drawn its attention. Drawing aggro from towers is generally a bad thing, though you can do it on purpose sometimes if you are a tank wanting to let a squishy dps hero kill someone, known as tower diving.

Towers are also important for your own protection. New players especially tend to try and attack you underneath your own tower, and can often be baited into getting them killed if you keep a stun or a slow (or the summoner spell exhaust) on hand and hit them with it once the tower starts attacking them. If the enemy team is playing aggressively and pushing your lane, the best way to stay alive is often to tower hug: stick parallel to or slightly behind the tower and attempt to get last hits on minions from there once they have pushed the lane to your tower. This can be difficult because the tower will hit the minions hard and often throw off your last hitting. As a general rule of thumb, if nothing else is attacking a minion except your tower, you should let the tower hit melee creeps twice before attacking to get the last hit, or attack then let the tower hit once then attack again to get last hits on ranged creeps under the tower. You will often get thrown off by minion damage or allies auto-attacking, and you may want to just clear them with auto-attacks if your tower is taking too much damage.

Minions are the next source of unwanted damage I’ll talk about. Early to mid game taking minion damage can be the deciding factor in a fight. Minions will attack other minions and be happy doing just that unless you auto-attack an enemy champion nearby. Note that this is only auto-attacks (or on-hit abilities), using spells on enemy champions does not draw minion aggression, so feel free to annoy them with spells. If you are going to try to kill an enemy champion during the laning phase of the game, try to do it when you have more friendly minions around than enemy ones. Often this can bait the enemy into taking much more damage from minions than they expect.

Jungle monsters will mostly be left for a later jungling guide, but I will briefly go over the four big buff monsters in terms of surviving them. There are two kinds of buff monsters in the basic jungle, a blue golem and a red lizard. The former gives a mana and cooldown bonus to you, and the red one makes your attack slow and do damage over time. Both are very useful to have, but for a laning hero I would not recommend attempting to kill them before at least level 6 unless your hero has a good amount of lifesteal. The other two forms of buff monster are the dragon and Baron Nashor. For now, only take these on if with your full team, and don’t take on Baron Nashor even with your team unless you are about level 16.

So, we’ve covered all the sources of possible death in the game except for one, and this is possibly the biggest one: the enemy champions. As a beginner you should generally be wary of any champion until you have worked out what their capabilities are. Even if they look small and squishy, try to watch their abilities and what they do. If you’re feeling like a reading marathon, check out the learning centre on the league of legends website and read what each champions’ abilities do. Knowing your enemy is half the battle, the other half is not sucking, but we’ll work on that.

There is one more topic related to staying alive, which is so big and so related to success in the game in general that it will be the topic of the next guide in this series: Map Awareness. 

LoL: From Noob to Not-So-Noob: Introduction

So you’ve decided to join the fun yet scary world of League of Legends, good on you! There’s plenty of others who have made the same choice and have been through the same pain and hardsh- I mean fun and excitement of learning the game and getting to grips with the huge amount of stuff you need to learn. I was one of them. So I’ve decided to make this guide to try and help new players and hopefully make your starting experience in LoL an easier one.

The first thing to realise with LoL, is that due to the competitive nature of the game and the rpg elements being relatively minor, with the focus being almost entirely on personal skill, you will suck at this game to start with. If you’ve played other MOBAs like DotA or HoN in the past you might suck less, but you’ll still suck. This is why this guide isn’t a ‘from noob to pro’ guide. I’m not a pro myself, I don’t get paid to play the game, and I don’t doubt that I still make many stupid mistakes within the game. My aim isn’t to make you one of the best LoL players in the world, it’s a beginners course to lessen the pain of learning the huge roster of heroes, the multitude of items, the confusion of runes and masteries and to help you get to grips with general game mechanics and tactics which new players may not find directly obvious. By the end of the guide, you should be well on your way to at least knowing WHY you aren’t amazing at the game and should hopefully know what you can do to improve.

At the same time, I don’t want to bore you stupid by expecting you to read through pages and pages of text. The fun is in the playing, and I’ll be focusing at first on getting you into the game playing more than the cerebral background behind the game. That’ll come later on in this series of guides. I’m writing these in a series of relatively small chunks with the intent that you’ll play a game or two between each one. Whether you do that, read them all at once or just read the bits you want is of course entirely up to you.

So, let’s get into the game. As a starting point I’m going to assume you have been through all the tutorials on offer. If you haven’t, do those now as it will explain the core of the game and what you’re doing.

One of your first thoughts when looking at information on the game may be that there are a lot of champions to choose from, and you may be wondering which you should buy first. For now, don’t worry about that too much and just try out whatever champions are on this week’s roster of free champions. This should get you to grips with a variety of different champions, as well as teaching you what each one does for when you happen to come up against one on the other team. We’ll go through champions and buying them later on, but for now I want to focus on getting you into some games and getting some experience (and IP) behind your belt.

One big benefit of LoL compared to its older counterpart DotA is that it has a proper matchmaking system. As such, your first games should be against other fairly new players, though thanks to some players being lovely people you are almost guaranteed to play against some very experienced players on alt accounts. Don’t worry too much, for your starting levels winning isn’t as important as trying to get to grips with the game and your first few champions , as well as the following core principle which will be your main focus while you are learning, that is : Staying Alive