The laning phase is arguably the most important part of League of Legends. The way you play these first minutes of the game decides the way you have to play for the rest of the game. Messing up in the laning phase is going limit where you can move on the map, what you can do and what you can buy. Are you going to be the 400 pound gorilla that’s manhandling everything he sees? Or are you going to be a 10 year old child that’s stuck in the cage with the gorilla? Follow these tips and you’ll be leaving the laning phase as the predator, not the prey.

Analyze The Matchup

When you are sitting in that loading screen you should be deep in thought about how you plan to play out the laning phase. Unlike the other lanes you have to not only worry about the enemy, but what your own laning partner brings to the table. Think about what you can do safely in the laning phase, how dangerous are the enemy laners, if you get hit by cc will you die, can you survive a jungle gank? You may not know the answers to all these questions going into a game but don’t worry it will come with experience. You should ask yourself these questions when going into every game and eventually it will just be instinct. Let your laner know what your plan is too, a simple, “Let's play passive in this lane,” can go a long way.

Intelligent Trading

Trading in bot lane is significantly different than the other two lanes. Think of trading as a WWE tag team wrestling match. Whenever you are fighting one of your oppenents, the other one is looking for an opportunity to come up behind you and hit you with a steel chair. Basically bot lane is about who can land the biggest cheap shot on the enemy and get away with it. You always have to be on your guard and pay great attention to not only the other ADC but the support as well. Supports usually carry some kind of big cc ability that prevents you from doing anything like Thresh Hook or Alistar combo, because of this bot lane usually becomes a big mind game of baiting out enemy abilities and then looking for engages of your own.

Be careful baiting abilities with a carry like Twitch or Jinx, messing up is often times fatal with ADC’s like this. Lastly make sure to pay attention to minions. Minions are the catalyst to all trades that occur. In general you want to be positioned far away from your opponent when you have to last hit, and you want to be within auto attack range when they are trying to last hit. This of course can change based on where the support is positioned, for example if harassing the other laner puts you in the range of Leona’s Zenith Blade then you are making a horrible mistake. Trading intelligently goes hand in hand with analyzing because it gives you a better idea of what will be safe for you to do and what won’t be, or you get to learn the hard way.

Creep Management

Along with farming up yourself, your other main goal in the laning phase is to deny the enemy of as much farm as possible. Doing this boils down to two different methods, freezing and pushing. Choosing when and how to control the wave is one of the big things that separates the low and the high tier players. Most bad players tend to push the wave way too often, and often times miss a lot of cs doing so. Pushing is utilized properly in specific situations. Some champions like Sivir who have immense wave clear prefer to just hard push all the time to avoid being forced to trade, and you should always try to push against certain champions like Tristana who really struggle to last hit under their tower. Outside of those two the only real time you want to push is when your opposing laners decide to leave the lane. This will make them miss gold and even more importantly will put them at an xp deficit. Even more effective than pushing to tower is freezing.

Freezing is managing the wave so that it is always slightly pushing against you. If you are stronger than the other lane you can set up a freeze and zone them off xp range. This is actually much better than pushing because not only is it keeping you safe, the enemy has to greatly overextend to do anything. In some of my most brutal games I’ve managed to freeze the wave just outside my tower for 5+ minutes, and that alone rendered the opposing laners useless. In any situation where you can't push a wave into tower when the enemy bot lane goes to base the best course of action is to freeze the wave and back yourself, don't worry you still come out with a minion and xp lead if they don't return and get it into your tower. At low levels freezing is the most underutilized strategy ever, because they don’t realize just how devastating it can be to the enemy.

Warding

A lot of people scoff when they hear this word because it’s probably the most overused method on how to improve. Almost everyone will tell you to ward more in order to get better, and there is a good reason for this. In the laning phase wards dictate everything that you are able to do, and if you don’t keep proper vision you that horrifying monster that exists only to make your life awful called the jungler is going to pay you a visit. There are 3 places that you are required to ward in lane in order to be safe. These areas are the tri-bush, the river and the lane bush.

Surprisingly, enough people tend to forget about warding the lane bush even though that bush produces the deadliest ganks of the 3. If any of these bushes are not warded then you have to extra careful about everything you do. You should always be aware of the unwarded area and try to avoid moving into a position that would kill you if the jungler was there. Assume any aggressive move made by the enemy is with the assistance of the jungler unless you’ve spotted him on the map. Many people hate playing like this because it’s not as fun as just going all out and brawling with the enemy bot lane, but doing so is putting yourself at huge risk to being snowballed hard without wards. As boring as it is, you must be disciplined and play passive without wards.

Conclusion

Playing the laning phase correctly in League of Legends is vitally important. It sets the pace for the rest of the game and decides how how big of an impact you’ll be able to have mid to late. Making sure you go into the lane prepared and understanding exactly what you need to do is going to lead to you winning more games. Don’t leave the laning phase as the child, leave as the gorilla.

Image courtesy of utitake.deviantart.com

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