While everyone loves a good teamfight, sometimes it’s better to just back off before things get dicey. Let’s go over why, when, and how to disengage a potential fight in League of Legends.
When League of Legends is broken down into its simplest elements, combat against enemy champions is a fundamental part of the game and the most straightforward way to win. However, when factors like gold, items, vision, and cooldowns are taken into account, it can be incredibly difficult to determine whether or not engaging in a fight will serve to benefit yourself and your team. Depending on what point you’re at in any given match of League, making the wrong call when the enemy is getting in position for a fight and taking a fight when you should have just run away can mean losing an otherwise winnable game. The goal of this guide is to help you spot potential opportunities where instead of running into a fight only to have your hopes of securing gold or objectives shattered, you could tactically retreat so you can build up resources and take a more opportune fight sometime later in the game.
To optimistic or opportunistic players, the assertion that it is important to run away from some fights might be a controversial statement; after all, there is a chance in any given fight that even the most powerful enemies will misplay, and your team could pick up a lucky victory. However, there are many reasons why retreating can be a valuable tool that should always be on your mind before or during a fight. Let’s go over a few of the benefits of retreating.
Because you can stop the enemy from ‘snowballing’: Within the context of retreating, it is likely that if you’re considering running away from a fight, you’re already behind the enemy team in terms of gold and items. If your team takes a fight against the enemy while they’re ahead of your team and you lose, you give the enemy team an even greater advantage which they’ll only use to continue to win fights and ultimately take over the game. By retreating before you lose pivotal fights, you prevent the enemy team from gaining potentially game-ending resources.
Because you can limit enemy profits during objective trades: Suppose that you’re in a situation where both your champion and the turret that you’re defending are at low health. In this situation, it’s tempting to be stubborn and defend your turret with your life. However, if you choose to stay with your turret rather than retreating, you’ll quite often just hand over the gold from killing you along with the gold that the enemy would receive from destroying your turret, fundamentally handing them more gold for an objective that they were going to secure regardless of if you stayed to defend it or not. Instead of giving your life in vain, it is often beneficial in the long run to just recall to your base, heal up, and get back out onto the map so that you can prevent the enemy from transitioning destroying your turret into even more advantages.
Because losing an objective doesn’t always mean losing the game: While it might seem like the end of the world when you lose a turret or epic monster that you were hoping to either defend or secure for yourself, it is important to consider these losses within the greater context of the game. Unless it is your Nexus, no single structure being destroyed will cost your team the game. Similarly, unless it’s the final elemental drake, the Elder Dragon, or a late game Baron Nashor being slain, it’s unlikely that losing one epic monster to the enemy team will immediately make the game a closed case. As such, it is often not only acceptable but tactically sound to retreat from these objectives and hand them over to the enemy team rather than to fight and die for them, allowing the enemy to reap even greater rewards in the process.
While knowing why retreating is a valid tactic is great, it is simply the first step in terms of understanding how to most effectively employ your ability to run away from fights within any given game of League of Legends.Therefore, more importantly than why you would want to disengage is when you should be keeping your eyes out for an opportunity to do so. With that in mind, let’s examine a few situations when retreating should be one of the first options that you consider.
When the enemy is ahead in terms of Gold and Items: If player versus player combat is the most straightforward way to win a game of League of Legends, having more gold than the enemies that you’re fighting is in turn the easiest way to ensure that you and your team win these fights. Considering the contrapositive of this idea, if your team is behind on gold and items, your chances of winning a fight go down drastically. However, it is important that gold is relatively easy to come by in League, with minions and monsters dropping it readily upon their death. Furthermore, if the enemy team is ahead and is pushing minions towards your base, that’s just more gold that will flow towards your team as the game progresses. Therefore, if a fight is about to break out and your team is a bit behind on gold, it is often better to run away and focus on accumulating gold rather than losing a fight and offering up more resources to the enemy team as a result.
When the enemy has reached a temporary ‘power spike’: Oftentimes, what separates a player who is good during the laning phase from a player who is great during the laning phase is their knowledge of when certain champions are at their strongest and their capability to employ this understanding so that they can effectively engage or retreat as necessary. The latter of these instances is pivotal for this guide, as the power that having a level up over one’s opponent during the laning phase grants is easy to overlook yet important to understand if you want to know when to disengage effectively. Especially at and before level three, having a level advantage over your opponent can mean having access to more reliable and impactful damage, crowd control, and otherwise powerful abilities. Taking a small step back in your lane when you see that the enemy has an advantage over you in terms of level can mean the difference between winning and losing a lane after it has only just begun.
When you’re in a position where you can afford to lose an objective: Building upon the previously mentioned ideas, there are often situations wherein losing an objective doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll lose the game. What makes this advice worth repeating and elaborating on is that it is important to consider even when you believe that your team is ahead or otherwise in a position to eventually win the game. Whether you’re ahead or behind, losing a teamfight and handing over several kills worth of gold just for the enemy team to also take objectives is fundamentally a worst-case scenario. Even if the enemy team is behind, if they’re postured effectively to secure an objective, it can often be the right decision to just let it go and move on.
When you don’t have the appropriate amount of vision to play confidently: Vision, as per usual, is a tool thats value is difficult to quantify and yet it holds perhaps some of the most power that any player can access in League of Legends. Within the context of this article, having vision is important because it means that you can know when fights are going to be in your favour as a result of knowing where every enemy is. Inversely, if you don’t know where enemy champions are, it can be incredibly difficult to do anything on the map due to the fact that the enemy team could overwhelm you by surprise at any moment. Therefore, if you don’t have a sufficient number of wards on the map, it might be a good time to retreat, double back, and ensure that you don’t get caught off guard.
Once you’re able to identify when it’s prime time to run away from a fight, the last step in the process is knowing how to do so effectively. Whether you’re trying to just get yourself out of a fight or you’re hoping to get your entire team out alive, let’s look at how you can best disengage from an unfavourable fight.
Employing mobility defensively: While abilities that provide a champion with some form of mobility are often intended to be used offensively so that you can engage upon enemy champions, many of these abilities are also incredibly useful for running away from enemies if a fight starts going south. Whether you’re using an ability that grants everyone on your team the ability to move quickly like Sivir’s On the Hunt or Kled’s Chaaaaaaaarge!!!, or personal mobility boosts like Camille’s Hookshot or Sion’s Unstoppable Onslaught, you’ll be able to use typically offensive tools to ensure that you deny the enemy kills and gold.
Zoning out enemies with your abilities: Shifting away from using offensive abilities defensively, it obviously follows that defensive abilities are going to do a great job of allowing your team to retreat from a fight. It is noteworthy how many ways in which this can happen, as there are several effects that an ability can have which allow it to meaningfully dissuade enemies from approaching your team. On one hand, damaging abilities with soft crowd control like Rumble’s The Equalizer or Cassiopeia’s Miasma which stay in an area, constantly damaging and slowing enemies, make it so that any enemy who wants to approach their team has to go out of their way to do so. On the other hand, many abilities which apply long-range immobilizing crowd control like Leona’s Solar Flare or abilities which shove enemies away like Janna’s Monsoon are both excellent at either forcing enemies to stay in place or undoing the progress that engaging enemies have made. Overall, both are effective at getting out of a tricky situation wherein the enemy could obtain an advantage.
Conclusion
From the above, it should be clear that even though teamfighting is a fun and effective way of winning games, there are many situations in which the best choice is to swallow your pride and run away. Doing so not only gives you the opportunity to win the game later, but also denies your enemy the opportunity to snowball the game and press their advantage even further. If there is one key takeaway from this, it should be to not let the goal of winning get in the way of actually achieving that goal. Just because you want to win as quickly and dominantly as possible doesn’t mean that the best or only path to get there is the direct one which involves outplays and brute force. Sometimes, choosing flight over fight can be the secret to winning games from behind, and knowing that will hopefully make your games as winnable as possible!
