4401

Not covered is placement. If you’re on top or bottom lane you’ll want to drop the ward in either the river or the bush at the edge of the river. Gankers love to hang out in the brush there and wait for you to push past it. The reason to put it in the river over in the brush is that it may give you more warning when mid is coming up so you have more time to fall back to your tower.

Mid/late game you’ll want to ward Dragon and Baron, as well as the blue buff (golem) and the red buff (lizard).

Some other advice I have is to try to last hit only and not push a lane early, this is admittedly much harder with some champions than others as some by their nature are strong pushers while others have incentives to autoattack. Just remember you are much safer fighting near your tower than the enemies.

The other big thing is that once team fights break out to try and focus their damage dealers. A team that focuses targets down is going to do much better than a team that is all scattershot. Also you want to focus the tanky characters last in most circumstances. Even at level 30 this still tends to be a huge problem with teams.

4402

An example: let’s say you are laning top with someone else. If you like, pretend this person is trolling the game and playing Soraka, but with an AD build.

Obviously, you want to keep an eye on the two rows of bushes at the top most part of the lane. On the “outside” if you will. One of them is on your side of the lane and one is on the other side, and there’s a break between them. These bushes, however, are mostly for enhancing your harass exerpience (or making your harassment experience much worse). A gank can come from here but it’s rarer.

The river below you is where most of the ganks will come from. You are on the team on the lower left side of the map (I can’t recall the colors, I think purple is top right?). If you look at the river, you’ll notice two things:

  1. There is a bush on your tower side, right near the enterance to the path.
  2. A little below that, on the other side, is a short path that offers 3 choices: cutting into the enemy lane by the tower, heading along by the enemie’s little golem twins, or a path deeper into the jungle.

The river itself is a concern, but the bush in #1 is particularly a concern. Even if you can keep eyes on the river, someone might slip into the bush and you wouldn’t know they were there without someone using clairvoyance or one of a couple of champion abilities (hawkshot being the most notable).

So you and your partner, being the fucking n00bs you are, aggressively push the lane so that the creep clashes are happening near the enemy tower. The enemy champions are killing creeps as best they can and doing a little harass. You feel in control. Then. . . BOOM Shaco/Warwick/Nunu/Someone from Mid/God knows who else appears behind you in lane and the 3 enemy champions proceed to play trampoline on your face.

If you place a ward (a normal site ward, not a vision ward) in that bush you make it much harder for that scenario to happen. Obviously, if you don’t aggressively push the lane you also reduce the chances of this happening. Mid lane has more ground to watch over, but the danger bushes are farther from the actual laning space proper.

The site ward will not help you if a stealthy champion comes in to gank. So if you’re worried about a stealth ganker someobody will need to spend a little more on vision wards.

Also, if Rammus is the one ganking, he can actually go from the other side of the map into your face in less time that it will take you to think “that fucker came out of nowhere!”, but never mind that.

Example two: in the abvoe scenario you manage to win the lane and take thw tower, in spite of AD soraka’s efforts. You want to push towards the second tower, but it;s much more dangerous. You decide to buy 3 wards. where should you place them? Assuming your outer tower is still up. . .

  1. The river bush again is a solid idea.

  2. Remember that path on the other side of the river? It leads to that little 3 pronged bush. Place one there. It sees alot of ground.

  3. If you want to be super carful - and you should, since you just developed a completely false sense of security in winning the lane - you might place a ward in the bushes right above the mini-me golems on the enemy side of the lane.

If you do that, you won’t be sitting there poking the tower only to be surprised when half the enemy team appeared behind you in the lane and looking like they want to jump on your face.

Note, that if Rammus is on the other team he will still appear behind you. Even if you see him. . . it will be too late.

4403

here is the proper ward placement
Black mark for lane protection, and white mark for general warding location.

4404

One thing I’ll stress, when you’re new play every champion that is free during the current week.

When you’re first starting out you’ll occasionally run into some of the trickier champions who will kill you in ways that you might not understand right away. The easiest way to discover how not OP a champion is, is to simply play them and suck ass with them for a game or two.

I see a lot of people latch on to one champion during their first couple of levels and then stick with only that champion and personally I think this really stunts your knowledge of the game.

Other things I’d throw out:

-If you’re low and have no way to heal then go back to base.
-If you do find yourself warping back a lot, try buying a healing potion/mana potion or two every time you go back. They’re cheap and give you more laning presence.
-Don’t over extend. In other words don’t push a minion wave past the “river” if you don’t know where the other enemy champions are.
-Ward locations: there’s 4 spots along the river where the enemy can enter your jungle, warding these will help a lot. If you’re the only one warding then at least ward the mid point of each river (baron and dragon). Also warding the bush south of your lane is generally good as well.

4405

Oh yeah, most of this advice is for 5v5 games which are I think considered to be the heart of the game.

The 3v3 map is really a different animal.

4406

just played through the tutorial, my summoner name is bycan if that’s all you need to find me. I’ll be up for noob games tonight.

4407

Hey Tom, can you come to the EU servers and play with us? We do voice chat on mumble and it really is a lot of fun.

I learned everything I know about this game (sadly very little) by playing with higher level team mates who were very patient and took lots of time to explain things to me. And now the student has surpassed his masters. Haha not really. I suck at this game.

Anyway, come play with us Tom. The game is really ten times more fun when you play with team mates you know and use voice chat. If you play with us (EU servers) then you will see that. I have more fun losing with teammates than winning with randoms. And that is good because I currently have 40 more losses than wins.

4408

This is mostly true but keep in mind that you will sometimes go up against smurfs (alt accounts). I use a smurf account sometimes when trying to help out a new player. The number of kills I get in these games is obscene :)

4409

Why are you not playing with us? Normal games from level 1-20 are full of people who don’t understand that the way that enemies move through the map are the same ways that you move through the map.

This is one of those games where you constantly have to ask “what would I do if I were the enemy in this situation?” so that you can react.

Also, all those tips on ward placement that people just gave you… mean all of jack and shit if you don’t look at the minimap every 5 seconds. The minimap is GOD. Countless times I’ve seen pubbies curse out during the game because they didn’t notice what should be obvious by looking at the minimap.

4410

We miss you too, jelly.

4411

Cool, come on the US mumble Tom!

4412

Yeah come to the US mumble and play with ripplez!

You’ll be pro in no time.

4413

Yeah. The Euro mumble server is really friendly. I recommend it.

4414

I’ll gladly join you guys when you stop scaring me with all this hardcorps talk. :) Peacedog’s post is 50% helpful and 50% discouraging for making me realize how much I’m in over my head.

Seriously, though, I’m on as “tomchick”. Friend me and I’ll gladly hop into a game with you folks who are better than me. It’s like playing tennis, right? Where you play better when everyone else is better than you?

 -Tom
4415

FYI, I banned Ripplez last week. Well, Therlun did, because I haven’t heart to ban anyone. :(

4416

aww, where did s/he come from anyway, since i never saw him in the forums.

4417

How can you ban someone?

I constantly see dipwads who drop half way into the game, or who just park back at the base, I presume getting match xp/ip even though they’re doing nothing. I just had a game this afternoon where someone had 15 deaths and no kills, most of which seemed like they were at the hands of a particular enemy character. The guys in the chat channel suggested he was deliberately “feeding” kills to the other team. Which won, natch.

And I see that Riot has the idea of instituting a player-driven “griefing tribunal”. Seems like League of Legends is really vulnerable to exploits and bad sportsmanship.

 -Tom
4418

That’s because every piece of advice in LoL is designed to make you understand that you don’t understand the danger.

Nobody does. It takes many games to get your head right. A frequent rookie mistake is over aggression. Like many games, all the advice you get won’t make as much sense at first because a lot of it becomes muscle memory (so to speak) once you’ve done it awhile. And I can’t stress this enough, you have to play 100, 150, 200. . . games to advance your skills and properly grasp all of this stuff. I can’t stress that part enough.

But seriously, the other good advice is trying free champions. Don’t feel like you need to look up good builds on them, though a little reading might be helpful (as is a practice game to get a feel for skills; it won’t teach you to properly use them but getting use to the range like range and such for a few minutes isn’t a bad idea). The other biggest hangup you’ll encounter in LoL is that other champions will seem unpossible. Learning how they works helps you counter them. Because then it will stop feeling like Sivir is throwing that ginormous spinnign thing at you every 3 seconds (really, it’ll be every 8 to 10).

4419

He meant banned from Mumble, you can’t do much against other players besides reporting them after the match is over.

4420

yeah, US mumble have the friendliest player!!!

AKA ME!!!