The importance of keeping and maintaining timers in League of Legends
We discuss the importance of keeping and maintaing timers for neutral objectives, summoner spells, and buffs.
We discuss the importance of keeping and maintaing timers for neutral objectives, summoner spells, and buffs.
In League of Legends, there are many different ways to win games. One of the best ways to win games is to keep timers of objectives or summoner spells. Information like that will allow you to create advantages all over the map as long as you effectively communicate your plans to your team.
Team Impulse's Rush keeping timers in solo queue.
Before we go into why you should keep timers, lets quickly go over what the cooldown and spawn timers are.
- Baron (7 minute respawn)
- Dragon (6 minute respawn)
- Blue buff or Red buff (5 minute respawn)
- Flash (5 minute cooldown)
- Teleport (5 minute cooldown if used on something other than a turret. If used on a turret, 4 minute cooldown. If cancelled, 3 minute and 20 seconds cooldown.)
- Ghost (3 minute and 30 second cooldown)
These are the main timers that you should keep track of.
So why should you keep timers? Having knowledge on when something spawns or when a summoner spell is off cooldown allows you to make in-game plans accordingly.
For example, if you had no vision of dragon but heard the noise which signifies the death of dragon, you can quickly calculate that dragon is spawning 6 minutes after you heard the noise. Knowing when it spawns allows you to communicate with your team to have every member of your team come to dragon to contest the next one. In this case, you can get vision control around the area and even potentially acquire a pick, allowing for a free dragon.
Another example of keeping timers is maintaining timers for summoner spell cooldowns. If you're a laner, try to keep track of when your enemy laner uses something critical like flash or teleport. You can then communicate this information to your jungler and potentially take advantage of an overly aggressive enemy laner or even set up a dive.
Having information on when the enemy acquired blue buff is also incredibly useful since you can set up a play around the blue buff when it's spawning. For example, if you know that the enemy took their blue buff at 2:30~, you can set up wards in the area and kill the unsuspecting jungler as they walk towards the blue buff around the 7:25-7:30~ mark.
Now, how do you effectively keep timers? We'll talk about how to acquire and keep timers for each specific objective.
For baron, you have two options. Maintain vision in or around the baron pit so you can either get the notification ("The enemy team has slain Baron Nashor!") or see them walk out of the pit the moment they get baron. The only issue with this is that it's possible for the enemy team to clear the vision in the area. The other option is to look at the enemy team's buff bar and look at the baron buff.
Baron buff lasts 3 minutes. If it's halfway done, that means that baron was acquired 1 minute and 30 seconds ago. That means that if you look at the buff and it's halfway expired at 21:30, they acquired baron at 20 minutes and baron will respawn at 27 minutes.
Dragon timer is a little bit easier to acquire. You have three main options. 1) Maintain vision in the dragon pit or around the dragon pit to either get the notification ('The enemy team has slain the Dragon!") or see them walk out of the pit. You can also periodically press tab to see when a tick appears in their dragon symbol in the scoreboard (the tab menu). If you play with sounds on, you can also hear the global sound dragon makes when it dies to acquire a timer. Just remember to add on 6 minutes whenever you hear the sound. So, as an example, if dragon dies at 23:00, it respawns at 29:00.
Blue buff or red buff are a little odd in the sense that it's more on you to keep the timers since there's no notification in chat when the buffs die (though, if you do see the buff die, you do acquire a timer in your scoreboard menu). Maintain vision control in that area or pay special attention to laners who'd potentially be acquiring the buffs. If you're mid lane and your lane opponent leaves lane and comes back about 15 seconds later with blue buff, you can make a vague blue buff timer. For example, if he leaves lane at 7:30 and comes back at 7:45, it's safe to assume that blue buff died around 7:40~. You can then type in chat "12:40 TB" (TB means their blue). With this information, you can potentially organize a play with your teammates to deny the next blue or to acquire a pick. Another method of getting the exact timer is to look at the buff on the enemy. Blue buff and red buff last 2 minutes assuming that the enemy doesn't have the mastery in the utility tree. If it's halfway done at 11:30, that means that they acquired the buff at 10:30. If they acquired the buff at 10:30, the buff is respawning at 15:30.
Timers for summoner spells are much easier since you just need someone on your team to witness them. Just refer to the timers above to know how to calculate when the summoner spell is back off CD.
How do you maintain timers?
What I like to do is type out a specific timer (e.g. flash timer of a laner) and then press "Cntrl + A" which is the select all command then "Cntrl + C" which is copy. I then "Cntrl + V" that text periodically and add on as I acquire new timers. An example would look like this though I wouldn't recommend spamming it as much as I did in this image.
Other methods that I know some people like to use is to write the timers down on a notepad by their computer. Other then that, you can try to just memorize the timers but that can be a little overwhelming.
Thanks for reading everyone and I hope I've managed to convince you all on the importance of keeping timers!