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
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