In League of Legends, a kill awards gold equal to that of 15 minion kills. In other words, managing to take down only half of the minions of each wave is the gold equivalent of falling down one kill every two and a half minutes.

Last-hitting is the most crucial skill to acquire and to perfect, as it will be the one constant throughout every game scenario and will provide a meaningful advantage in every match, regardless of how anything else goes down.

So here’s a guide for practicing and mastering last-hitting minions in League! Whether you’re beginning your journey on the game, know that this area is a flaw in your gameplay, or are a seasoned player looking to sharpen your abilities and their consistency, you’ve made it to the right place.

The Basics of Last-Hitting

Starting with a preliminary section on what last-hitting is - if you already know about it, feel free to skip ahead to the next bit!

While minions give experience to all enemies in their vicinity upon dying, only a champion landing the killing blow will receive gold for their death - 14g for a caster minion, 21g for a melee one, and between 60 and 90 for cannons, scaling with game time. It is extremely important to get the last hit on the creeps rather than letting them die off to… let’s say the minion’s equivalent to natural causes.

Last-hitting is an ability that requires being turned into a habit, and then needs to be further practiced to incorporate the timings and values into the muscle memory. And after all that, it has to be assimilated to the point of being something that happens naturally while being able to put all of one’s focus onto the rest of the laning phase.

Because while always timing attacks right to get the last hit takes a fair amount of practice, being able to keep that up while handling an enemy champion (or two) is also going to take extra work - and nevermind also paying attention to the map and the game state.

The basis of last-hitting is to hold off fighting the minions until one of them gets low enough to be taken down in one hit, and to only then attack it, instead of throwing down with every minion in sight by default.

Doing the latter isn’t useful - killing the creep wave as fast as possible has its uses, but not constantly, and “pushing” the wave is something that has to be done consciously and for a reason rather than as the default. And even when attempting to get rid of the wave as quickly as possible, it remains important to not miss the minions’ gold in the process.

Now, how would one go about learning to last-hit flawlessly? Let’s dive into it!

How To Improve At Last-Hitting

The Default Exercise

There is only one way to get better at killing minions well - killing minions. But we’re going to be adding twists as we go along.

First off, the first step of the practice will be going into the Practice Tool and picking the champion of our choice. And we will then last-hit minions throughout the first six waves. That’s going to be up until the second cannon minion wave.

We can take the setup of our choosing, namely the champion, starting item, and runes that we want to use in our games. It’s a good idea to develop or strengthen those habits for the champions we already play or want to play. For the same reason, this exercise works on any lane, so we are free to pick the one we’re interested in.

So - we pick our champion, our gear, our lane, and we go through the first six minion waves trying to last-hit as many minions as we possibly can. That’ll be a total of 38 creeps, the goal is to manage to kill 36 out of the 38 minions.

Why the first six waves? Last-hitting is at its hardest at the earliest stages of the game, when we have lower AD and attack speed as well as access to fewer and less damaging abilities to accompany the wave clear. Any practice done on the lowest levels translates well to the rest of the game, while this doesn’t go the other way around.

Why not simply lock our level and go on forever? That could also work and wouldn’t be the worst idea. The Practice Tool allows for staying at level 1, and this would be the hardest form of practice.

However, going about it the normal way has two advantages. The first one is that it also gradually allows us to immediately recognize the level breakpoints, so as to always be able to expect it if our opponent is about to hit their next level within seconds. The second plus side is that challenges with a set goal and ending point tend to make for better practice, as well as allowing us to track our progress and consistency.

Adding Difficulty

Getting into a Practice Tool or custom game and killing six waves of minions while attempting to score at least 36 out of the 38 is going to be the goal each time. But we’ll add a new twist each time to make the exercise more and more challenging - and more and more rewarding in terms of developed skills!

There are 9 levels. In order to complete a level and move on to the next, we need to reach that score of 36/38 on it.

Level 1: The Standard Exercise

Level 1 is just what we described above. Getting into the game with the setup of our choice, no restrictions. It’s simple, but that doesn’t make it easy either. Getting 36 out of 38 is an achievement on its own, one that isn’t supposed to be completed on the first try. Even 30 out of 38 would be a very respectable showing for a first attempt.

Hence why we make the exercise short and keep track of our scores. Progression is progression even while the bar isn’t met yet.

Needing a near-perfect score forces us to stop overlooking the little mistakes that we could easily fix but instead decide to brush off in actual games, where they’re overshadowed in the grand scheme of things.

For example, having three minions get to critically low health at the same time leads to it being impossible to kill all three with basic attacks - and it’s something that naturally happens. With this challenge, we start noticing these situations and recognizing them ahead of time, because we are only allowed two mistakes (and having three minions die at the same time means burning both get out of jail free cards).

Quality of life tip: When playing on the Practice Tool, there’s a way to entirely avoid the 90 seconds of waiting for the minions to spawn and reach the center of the lane. As soon as we’re ready to go with items bought, we can use the teleport command into a bush in the lane, then double click on the “Toggle Minions Spawn” command (the first toggle removes the minions, the second one reactivates them and instantly triggers the first spawn), then hit “Fast Forward 30 seconds” once.

This will put the minions exactly in the center of the lane for side lanes and will have them start fighting in the case of mid lane. However, since the fast forward tool is slightly wonky, it may be better to avoid that step to have a more realistic lane experience. But the option is there for the people having less patience (or time) at their disposal.

Level 2: Moving Back after Last-Hits

For level 2, we’ll add a positioning twist: We want to stay out of range until a minion is ready for last-hitting.

Once that happens, we can move in to kill it. Then we move back again (unless there’s another one to immediately take down).

This takes a different meaning whether we’re playing a melee or ranged character, but the idea in either case is to be 200 units away from the range at which the minions can be reached during our “safe time”.

The goal of this step is to practice not needlessly exposing ourselves to attacks in lane. We often tend to step into danger territory at times when there is nothing to be gained from it, so we want to learn the minimum amount of time we need to be upfront for without missing any minions from it.

This level helps incorporate the minion health at which we have to start moving up in order to last-hit them while standing further away - which is trickier than it would sound.

Note: An alternative to that level is to move forward instead of back. There are many instances where we want to posture forward to bully an opponent out of the lane, and yet in doing so, it’s frequent to miss many of our own minions in the process, denying ourselves as well as the enemy.

That’s avoidable and replacing moving backwards 200 units by going forward by the same amount when there are no creeps to kill is meant to practice for that.

Level 3: Pushing and Freezing

For level 3, we are now going to add a condition on how we clear the waves.

For the first wave, we are going to take down the minions at the last possible moment, waiting until the next minion attack they’d receive would kill them (and ideally, in the case of caster minions, even waiting until their attack has been fired).

The goal is to have the minion wave push as slowly as possible, as close as we can get to how it would go if we hadn’t intervened. We still want to prioritize scoring every creep, and in the process, there will be moments when it will be impossible to wait until the last bit of health of every minion without missing one.

We’re trying to recognize and anticipate those situations, and to learn to freeze without weakening ourselves while doing so. For the second wave, instead, we’ll be trying to clear the minions as fast as possible, attacking them down from full health.

It’s common to try pushing a wave and to end up missing half of it along the way. That, too, is needless and avoidable; manipulating waves is meant to generate an advantage, and causing ourselves to lose all of it in the process isn’t what we want.

So through this step, we’re trying to get used to pushing waves as efficiently as we can while not missing any minions alongside. And we’ll then repeat those two steps for the next four waves! Freezing the third, pushing the fourth, and so on.

The Intermediate Levels

Level 4: Prepare For Trouble…

From now on, the lonesome challenges stop, and we will be adding an opponent!

We’ll be adding a bot in the opposing team upon starting the Practice Tool. As the name could indicate (I’m so sorry), the bot will always go bot lane, so we can no longer pick our lane of choice, and must go bot to match it.

We aren’t trying to kill the bot. We’re aiming to repeat our challenge while taking as little damage as possible. And if we do attack the bot because they’re relentlessly trying to chase us down, we must still aim to not miss last-hits while doing so (and must also be wary of the fact that the challenge is lost if we die).

This level can be done in isolation, especially in order to get used to it. The ideal objective here, however, is to combine all four levels we’ve had so far.

Level 5: No Abilities

This level is simple enough - we’re redoing the same, but without abilities. As in, we’re combining the first four levels without using our abilities. The main changes this will mean are as follows:

• If three minions are going to die at once, we can’t use an ability to deal with that, and we must instead weaken two of them ahead of time to desync their deaths so that all three can be taken with basic attacks.
• Abilities can no longer bail us out if we move back towards the minions from our safety zone too late.
• As for pushing, we need to leverage our basic attack cooldown to still clear the wave as fast as possible without putting a minion too dangerously low while our attack is unavailable.
• If we’re looking to fight the opponent back, we only have basic attacks to do so.

Level 6: No Runes, No Items

Exactly the same as with level 5, but we’re also going to take out our setup on top of not skilling our spells!

Obviously, it isn’t possible to play without runes. So we’re just going for a rune page that provides us with nothing of value for this challenge. There are many options, and here’s one for example:

This is going to be more annoying than it may sound. The first consequence we expect is that last-hitting will get tighter, and easier to miss. No runes or items means losing a part of our AD and attack speed, and thus less of a last-hitting window as well as a longer minimum delay to plan for between two last-hits.

However, there is also a second consequence, considering that we’re still facing another champion. Losing our runes, Doran’s blade, and potion means that we have much less room for carelessness when it comes to how much damage we decide to withstand from them.

Note: The combination of all these restrictions leads to a stark combined difficulty. Combining all of these challenges without adding a bot against us remains good and very worthwhile practice.

Attempting and completing this challenge without the bot to get used to it before adding the opponent in again should be helpful as a middle step - splitting the difficulty into two parts is a much more efficient way to get the hang of it than staying stuck.

The Most Advanced Exercises

Level 7: And Make It Double!

Facing one bot has been fun, hasn’t it? So why stop there when we could make it two!

In order to face two champions in lane, we’ll have to leave the Practice Tool and move to regular custom games instead. In order to have two opponents on our lane, we need to add a minimum of 4 bots to the enemy team (going for 5 works as well, it makes no difference), and to go bot lane again. They’ll always have a duo lane there from 4 champions onwards.

Facing two bots is hard. As a matter of fact, adding up all 7 levels together has been impossible for 10 years now, ever since one round of bot AI update from all the way back in 2014.

And while I would gladly be proven wrong, this level is meant to be done in isolation. Items and runes are back on, abilities are fair game again, we no longer care about wave manipulation, all that matters is getting 36 minions one way or another. And as for the positioning exercises… well, they will probably need to be used in order to succeed.

Level 8: Looking for Attack Opportunities and Paying Attention to Our Own Minions

From now on, we’re going to be looking into advanced things, and in order to be able to do that, we’ll also have to take a step back. So we’re removing the bots, exploring the top laners' experience by going on our own island once more.

Level 8 is going to be theory work and makes more sense to visualize for ranged characters (despite being applicable to all champions).

We’re once again just going to be farming our waves and trying to get our 36 minions. But this time, we want to use our brain for different things instead of focusing on the last-hitting.

Namely, we want to think about how and when we can harass our lane opponent without taking damage in return, and that means paying attention to when our minions are about to die.

Whenever one of our minions is low on health, the opponent will try to finish it off. And that’s our cue to sneak in one attack onto them as they do so. This will force them to either forgo getting their creep in order to fight back, or to take one attack for free if they opt to commit for that minion.

The health of the allied minions is information that we tend to less keenly pay attention to, and our mind does not do it automatically as well as it does for that of the opposing wave. And yet it is very beneficial to be wary of - not only for chip damage opportunities, but also to anticipate the opponents’ level ups and not be caught by surprise by them.

Or even for the fact that the enemy may try to cast a skillshot just as our would-be-protecting minion is about to die (a known trick for hook champions, or for Illaoi players among others).

So, integrating these bits of information into what we look for is not a task to overlook.

Note: This level can be done while mentally focusing on other elements as well. The minimap, for example. One way to do that is to have a click track playing a sound every 3-5 seconds, and to quickly glance at the map every time it does.

The goal of this level is to be able to maximize the amount that we can look at and actively think about during the laning phase. Because we don’t want to mishandle the lane or be caught by avoidable ganks due to focusing too hard on farming, and we also don’t want to be missing minions because we’re trying to think about the other aspects of the game.

So, this is a level focused on theory, but it is a vital one and one to take seriously. And then, it’s also possible to re-do it while once again adding some or all of the previous restrictions back in.

Level 9: Alternating Minion Deaths

The final level! And a hard one at that (well, this is a final level after all).

For level 9, we’ll take the direction of the previous step, and put it into practice. We are going to attack the minions to ensure that allied and enemy minions never die at the same time - to alternate between allied and enemy minion deaths.

More precisely, we want to always have our basic attack ready when an allied minion is dying or about to die. Level 8 had as its goal to help us focus on when our minions would die in order to spot windows of opportunity in which we can sneak in an unpunishable attack. Level 9 aims to manually create such windows.

If we can make it so that we never have a minion to direct our attack to while one of ours is getting last-hit, then that means 6 opportunities to get a free hit on our lane opponent for each wave.

Obviously, in practice, that will never work as well or as smoothly. The opponent is also playing, meaning that they’ll also do their thing with the wave, and that they will at some point find ways to fight back instead of just idly taking it. On top of that, the time window during which an allied minion is low on health is much higher in the Practice Tool where it will have a “natural minion death” than against a real opponent, who is likely to immediately attack it once its health drops to the double digits.

Which is why we’re looking to obtain the best results possible while we are in the optimal conditions, so that we can obtain something tangible out of that practice in real games.

So, for this level, we want to make it so that our attack is available as often as possible as one of our minions is dying while still getting at least 36 of the 38 enemy creeps.

There is no quantitative goal for that other aspect. This is the final level, and a technique that it’s just important to “get better at” more so than one that gets mastered - plus, again, the situation won’t be the exact same in actual games. This is about understanding this aspect of the lane and getting used to it to be able to best work with it against an opponent.

The best way to gauge whether our attack would be ready in time and to count how many hits we would be able to get in is to use the Practice Tool commands to place an enemy dummy near the minion wave, and to try attacking it whenever we can.

This is still relatively impractical, though, as the dummy may draw minion aggro based on its placement and may need to be despawned and recreated somewhere else whenever that happens. But it’s the best option there is.

For a ranged champion, the training dummy can be placed on that spot to have low chances of being targeted by minions.

Note: As the use of the training dummy will show, this technique will draw the aggro of the enemy wave. This is another thing to leverage, as we obviously don’t want to be taking even more damage in return when our objective is to deal damage “for free”. Attacking from just outside a bush, then moving back in it; or immediately moving back after attacking are the two ways of ensuring we don’t turn a good play into something negative.

While many players are able to focus on something else while handling their minion wave, quite few use their remaining headspace to put themselves in their opponent’s shoes, and much, much fewer are aware of this level’s technique - let alone use it.

Mastering it is very worthwhile and will give a clear advantage in and of itself, on top of the ability to last-hit smoothly and efficiently, and of the other skills practiced through these exercises.

Closing Out

And there you have it, your step-by-step method to practice your last-hitting, as well as your other lane techniques along the way!

Don’t hesitate to take your own spin on it. It’s best to follow these steps in order and to not give in to the temptation of skipping one that’s too challenging (once you skip one, you’ll start wanting to skip the others you’ll struggle on instead of pushing through by improving); however, there is nothing preventing you from adding more levels or more conditions in there.

Got another laning element to improve on? Want to combine aspects that weren’t combined in this method? In the end, this is a template that you’re free to add anything you want to!