Now I know we’ve all had those games where you have a perfect laning phase, your score is 5-0-0 with 100 cs at 15 min, you take your lane opponent’s tower and you start to rotate to other lanes to start grouping with your team. But, by then it’s too late. Your other lanes didn’t do as well as you did and your enemy is stronger than you, so they start taking objectives and slowly pushing your team down to the nexus. You wish you could’ve have done more to help your team during the early to mid game. Well, there is more you can do. There are many ways and playstyle in the game to influence the map and here highlights some of them.

SPLIT PUSHING

Split pushing is exactly how it sounds. You split away from your team and draw pressure toward your location on the map, in a lane taking towers. It can cause many things on the map. Either they send some member on the enemy team to kill you and stop you from taking their towers, which allows your team to push another lane or take an important objective such as dragon or Baron Nashor. If they send more than one person to stop you, it gets your team a numbers advantage in a team fight and they can force it on your outnumbered opponents. However, your team must be on the same page as you if you choose to split push, because if your enemies decide to just force a fight on your team and win, a team of 5 can push faster than just you splitting. Also warding is very important in split pushing because you want to be able to escape if the enemy team does come for you. You don’t want to give them a further advantage than they might already have.

TELEPORT PRESSURE

Taking the summoner spell, Teleport keeps your opponents on their toes because they will never know when you can appear on the map. They have to be aware that even if you aren’t with your team, you can appear in seconds. Taking teleport is great when combined with the split pushing tactic because you can almost instantly rejoin your team if a fight were to break out while you are in another lane. However, you need to rely on your team to place wards for you to teleport to so that you can join them if they happen to not be in a lane.

JUNGLING

Probably the most common way to influence the map, taking and learning the jungle role could be the way for you to help your team. You provide assistance to your lanes, whether that is applying lane pressure, ganking to get a kill, or handing our buffs to your team to assist them in laning or mid game team fighting. It’s perfect for players who like to watch other lanes to see where you can apply pressure because you can right click a farm and start looking around the map, because you don’t have to last hit in the jungle. An important thing to remember is that a successful gank is not always a kill. Burning summoner spells is just as good to relieve some of the pressure from your lanes and also just showing yourself in a lane so that the enemy backs up so your lanes can farm a little more safely, but appearing in lane gives your opponents map pressure on another part of the map, so use with caution. You always are the most mobile on the map during the early game, so you can place early wards and control buffs to further protect your lanes.

ROAMING

As a laner during the early game, if your lane opponent has backed to base or you just kill them, you should always push the lane in so that they lose potential gold and experience. If you still have a reasonable amount of health and mana after doing so, you can roam to other lanes and apply pressure, similar to a jungler. As a support, you can do the same, but you should be sure that your ADC can handle themselves 1v2 or they have backed so they are not in any danger. If there aren’t any lanes that you can go to, you can always use that time to ward some areas on the map. You can also collaborate with your jungle and double gank a lane to ensure a kill and even take the tower.

You can be having the best game of your life and still lose a game. Share your advantage with your team and help them win as well. Whether you’re 5-0-0 or 0-5-0, you can still help your team by influencing the map in some way.