League of Legends is a game that requires a high level of focus and strategy to thrive at the top of the competition. Although your mechanics and micro decision making are crucial to execution, your awareness of the map and efficiency in translating information to advantageous decisions are more important to consistently perform in and win games. In this guide, we will discuss how to use the minimap to always make correct decisions and put yourself in situations where you can thrive in the competition by outmaneuvering your opponents.

Features of the Minimap

Some of the most important features of the minimap involve objectives, the fog of war, and team positioning. Minion positioning can also affect the decision-making process in the later stages in the game.

Objectives include towers, neutral objectives, and, on a smaller scale, jungle camps. Towers are indicated by tower icons on the map. An important thing to keep in mind is that these will also indicate the health of the tower by either emptying the tower icon as the actual tower loses health or by showing how many plates are left on the outer towers before 14 minutes. For neutral objectives, they are simply indicated by their respective icon in the pits that they reside in the river. Elemental Drakes and eventually the Elder Dragon will spawn in the lower pit while Rift Herald and Baron Nashor will spawn in the upper pit. Jungle camps also show icons where they spawn, with buffs having larger indicators to represent their greater importance.

The fog of war simply indicates information and vision your team doesn’t have and by extension what information your team does have. Four things will expand your knowledge of the fog of war: wards, team members, minion waves, and ally structures. This knowledge of fog of war is important to understand and react to what your opponents are doing either by seeing them directly or limiting the areas they could be while out of your vision.

Finally, team and minion positioning are important in deciding how exactly you need to react to the rest of the information on the map. Ally champions are simply indicated by their icon on the minimap with minions being indicated by simple blue dots.

There are also pings that are important in communicating between allies quickly and effectively without the distraction of chat. The four most common are the “danger” exclamation point, the “enemy missing” question mark, the “assist me” flag, and the “on my way” arrow.

Early Game

During the initial laning phase, your goal is to start creating your economy and set up win conditions. In order to focus on this as a laner, you will need to focus on your junglers positioning and determining where the opposing jungler is at different times using vision. It is important that you react to where your jungler is. If they are close enough to react quickly to a play in your lane then you should look to position a bit more aggressively and try to pick a fight that can be advantageous. However, if they are far, and especially if you are unsure of where the opposing jungler is, then you will want to play cautious and prioritize denying your opponents engage on you. Anytime your jungler needs assistance on your side of the map then you will need to determine quickly if you can help and rotate if you can.

This will generally involve them invading into the opposing jungle or in general fights with the opposing jungler. Finally, you need to keep track of objectives so that when you can gain priority, you are able to assist your jungler with them if he decides to use your priority for these neutral objectives. As a mid laner, Herald and Drake are both affected by your positioning while in side lanes you mostly interact with the objective nearest to you. This can change with lane swaps and rotations.

As a jungler, you will need to pay attention to the opportunities and decisions that are made available to you by your laners and opposing junglers positioning. Lane priority is indicated by your laners having forward positioning in lane with their minion wave. This controls where on the map you can be aggressive and passive. If you are looking to take a Drake while your mid laner and bot laner do not have priority then you are making a mistake since their laners will be able to rotate before or at the same time as them resulting in a likely disadvantageous fight since you are already losing resources to the Drake.

If you want to invade the opponent’s topside jungle while your top laner and mid laner just recalled or are being pushed in, then it is highly likely that you will be collapsed on and punished. However, if you want to make plays like these and your laners don’t have priority then you should look to make a play to assist them with priority and then use that extra priority to make the intended play. If the opposing bot is pushed up, look for a gank that can then allow you to rotate to Drake for benefits on top of those that you get during the gank.

Mid game

Mid game is all about tempo and objective control. You create tempo through map movements that force your opponents to respond in a certain way. In mid-game, you will generally spread your team across the map in order to sustain your economy while attempting to create and respond to pressure in ways that will create opportunities for turrets and neutral objectives to be taken.

How can you recognize tempo on the minimap though? This is generally indicated by minion waves. At this phase of the game, minion waves act as extra vision for your team and miniature objectives for your opponents. When you have a minion wave building up in a certain lane you can treat that as pressure that will eventually require an opponent’s response, or if they don’t respond will result in a small advantage to you in a vacuum. However, the hope is that you can get an opponent’s response so that you can respond cross-map and gain priority or even commit to taking an objective. When you see an opponent responding to the wave you will want to immediately act. If multiple people respond then you should be able to commit to objective plays in order to take advantage of even higher numbers advantage that is available to you.

Keep quick response methods like teleport in mind when looking for these plays as you may want to start to force a play and retreat after you force teleport. If your opponent’s minion wave is the one pushing then you have an absence of information or pressure in the side wave. This means the opponent has the tempo to make decisions. You should respect this by sending someone to catch the wave and create cross-map pressure while staying safe on the side of the map that you are looking to fight for objectives on. If you fight while your opponents have tempo and your team is responding to waves then you are risking massive losses. Once your teammate creates pressure and moves back then the tempo has swapped back into your hands.

If there are split push champions that go along with the minion waves then you need to keep in mind which side of the map they are on in relation to the next important objective, if they have teleport, and how many people are needed to respond to them. Keep in mind how they affect numbers advantage and the map pressure based on where they are pushing to, who you have responding to their push, and what objectives they can quickly respond to. If you respond with an ally at a teleport disadvantage then the opponent’s response time will be quicker for cross-map objectives but if you are in the lane adjacent to the next objective then the response time will be relatively similar.

During this fight for pressure, there should also be an effort put forward to control vision so that you can understand what your opponents are doing with their tempo without having to face check them and you can punish your opponents for overextensions when you control the tempo.

Late game

In the late-game, you still have components of tempo and split pushing that affect your ability to take objectives but you also want to control where and when to teamfight with vision and using objectives as a sort of bait.

At this point, the most important feature is your team’s and the opposing team’s positioning. You want to pay close attention to where your opponents are grouping or attempting to execute their win condition. If you see someone step out of line or make a positioning error then you need to pounce. If you need to fight a certain way then you will want to position in a way that best allows for that. If you are a back liner, then position in the safety of your team directly opposing their group. If you are a flank champion, then attempt to sneak to a position where there is a weak point in their positioning that you can exploit. If you are an engage champion, then position in a way that you can punish overextensions and set your team up to succeed.

Make sure to best utilize the most important tool in League of Legends and you will succeed in solo queue. Good Luck!