Synergising with your jungler helps to prevent miscommunication and ensures that plays are more likely to succeed. This guide will go over information that will help laners to play better with their jungler.
League of Legends is a team-based game, which is why it is important to have good synergy with your teammates. But sometimes you will find that laners and junglers do not understand each other’s objectives and fail to communicate their intentions to the rest of the team. Eventually, the lack of communication and understanding of each other’s roles leads to a bad play that puts their team at a disadvantage.
The goal of this guide will be to help laners understand the jungle role a little more, as well as giving tips and information on how they should be playing with their jungler.
Firstly, it is important to understand that your jungler is a member of your team as well. You should not look at them as someone who is only there to gank lanes and press Smite on objectives. Helping your jungler gain leads will allow them to influence the rest of the map, which in turn leads to the rest of the team gaining leads. Giving your jungler leads does not always mean giving them kills, minions or turret plating gold.
One way you can help your jungler gain leads is by wasting the enemy jungler’s time. For example, it is common for the enemy jungler to look for ganks if you are pushed up and exerting lots of pressure on your lane opponent. They want to do this because doing so may net them advantages by either killing you or forcing you to use your summoner spells, which relieves pressure from your lane opponent at the same time. But if you happen to spot the enemy jungler through wards in this scenario, you could try wasting their time rather than backing off or trying to outplay them in a 1v2. Immediately backing off will tell the enemy jungler that you are aware of their presence, this allows them to leave quickly without losing much time or resources. Going for the outplay is extremely risky as you might end up dying without getting a kill. Instead, you could try positioning yourself in a way where you are far up enough in the lane that the enemy jungler is interested to stay. But it is also important to make sure that you are far back enough that the enemy jungler will not immediately gank you.
The main objective in this scenario is to waste as much time as possible. While you are wasting their time, your jungler can gain leads by farming camps, counter-jungling or ganking other lanes. Even if you do not have vision of the enemy jungler, you are still exerting a lot of pressure on your lane opponent. This will eventually force a roam or gank from the opponents in order to relieve pressure, which is why it is important to position yourself in this way even when you do not have vision or information regarding the whereabouts of the opposing jungler.
Another way you can help your jungler is by directing them away from your lane when you are losing. Sometimes junglers might feel the need to gank losing lanes in order to alleviate some pressure and help their laner get back into the game. Most of us have probably had moments where we ask for ganks when behind in lane, but this is usually not the right decision in many cases. Most players have probably also experienced moments where things go wrong when the jungler comes to help a losing lane. The gank ends up becoming a disaster as the fed enemy laner outplays your team and scores multiple kills for themselves; this could easily cause your lane to be completely over if your lane opponent gets a jungle buff from killing your jungler. If you find yourself in a situation where you are losing lane or know that your matchup is incredibly tough, you should tell your jungler to leave your lane alone and try ganking other lanes. Even if things go well and you manage to score a kill, that will only put you back on even footing at best. However, if other lanes get ganks, that will put them ahead and give that lane an opportunity to snowball their lead. Asking for help in a losing situation puts you and your team at a greater risk of falling behind even further; it ends up wasting time and resources while giving advantages to the enemy.
It is important to learn how to lose gracefully and accept that you are no longer the win condition. You should instead try to play as safe as possible while collecting as many resources as possible. The enemy jungler might also try to gank your lane in order to give your lane opponent a bigger lead. In situations like this, your objective should be to soak up as much pressure as possible while keeping yourself safe. As counterintuitive as it may sound, sometimes you want to get ganked as many times as possible. If you are able to constantly attract the enemy jungler to your lane and consistently survive their ganks, this will give your own jungler many opportunities to look for plays on the other side of the map. Although you may end up slightly behind in gold and experience, multiple members of your team should be able to gain leads if your jungler makes plays on the other side of the map while you are getting ganked.
Ganking is one of the most powerful tools that junglers have, but some laners do not understand the jungle role very well and end up frustrated when things do not go their way. It is important to know that a successful gank requires good setup and communication.
It is unlikely for a gank to be successful if you have a small minion wave while the enemy is under their turret. Setting up waves to be in favourable positions in the lane is important if you want a gank to be meaningful. You can communicate to your jungler that you are going to freeze the wave near your turret, so that they are aware of any potential gank opportunities. Your lane opponent then has to choose to either stand back and lose gold or make themselves vulnerable by walking up to break the freeze. You could also slow push and stack a big wave that will later crash into the enemy’s turret, this will give an opportunity for you and your jungler to turret dive.
The most important thing is making sure that you and your jungler are on the same page. The last thing you want is for your jungler to be on the other side of the map when your minion wave is in the perfect position for a gank. Communicating your intentions early on will help avoid situations where golden opportunities go to waste.
Another key factor to consider is the team composition and types of champions that are in the game. Sometimes it is not enough to only know the identity of your own champion, understanding how other champions want to play will benefit you in multiple aspects of the game. For example, if you have a strong early game jungler such as Lee Sin, you can communicate and ask for a gank in the first few levels. You can then look to trade heavily with your lane opponent to deplete their resources and expend their cooldowns. By the time Lee Sin arrives, it will most likely result in an easy kill and advantage for your team.
On the other hand, you might want to be more passive early on if you have a weak early game jungler such as Evelynn. This is because Evelynn wants to get level six as quickly as possible to start threatening the enemy team and getting yourself in trouble could potentially delay that powerspike if your lane requires a gank to relieve pressure.
A possible exception to this is if you are playing a strong early game champion into a weak early game champion. In those scenarios, it is possible for you to bully your lane opponent and maybe even score a 1v2 outplay on the enemy team when they come to gank you. But with that being said, you may still die if you misplay or if the enemy team has a strong early game jungler. Keeping yourself safe while obtaining as many resources as possible is a good guideline to follow in unfamiliar matchups.
Playing around cooldowns is also extremely important, keeping track of your opponent’s cooldowns allows you to know when they are the most vulnerable. Getting low mobility champions to burn their Flash makes them a prime target for ganks. Against high mobility champions like Zed, try to bait out their mobility skills so that they will not be able to escape easily during ganks. This is why going for heavy trades just before your jungler arrives can help to secure kills easily. Once the trade ends, your opponent is likely to be low on health, and their skills are also probably on cooldown. In most cases, your jungler should be able to swoop in and grab an easy kill while the enemy laner is defenseless.
While keeping track of the enemy’s cooldown is important, you should also be mindful of your own. Throwing out all your skills when your jungler arrives is not a very efficient way of securing a kill. If your jungler has some sort of slow or stun, wait for them to use it so that you have a higher chance of landing your skills. If that is not possible, you could simply hold on to your skills until the very last moment. Players tend to walk in zigzag motions in order to avoid getting hit by skillshots; this is slower than walking in a straight line, which gives you the opportunity to land more auto attacks while you wait for a good moment to throw out your abilities.
To conclude, League of Legends is a team game which requires everyone to work towards the benefit of the entire team. Sometimes you need to help your jungler in order for them to gain enough resources to help you. Helping your jungler gain advantages could be as simple as making yourself as big of a target as possible. You do not always have to be the player on the team with all the resources and leads, sometimes you are just having a bad day, or the matchup is just incredibly hard. In those situations, absorbing pressure allows your team to make plays and gain leads elsewhere.
Understanding how your jungler wants to play is also extremely important, this helps the both of you to be on the same page. Communicating and understanding each other’s role in the game is essential for successful ganks and making good plays.
