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.
