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.
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
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