Minion Waves - How to Improve Your Minion Farming and Lane Control
Many players have an idea of what minions are, but don't know why they behave in such a way. I'll show why in this guide.
Before we start talking about what you need to know about how to manipulate minions to your advantage against opponents, we first need to talk about minions, the minion wave, and the different terms you may be familiar with but get misconstrued. This is important because with this knowledge you will be able to use something in the game that only very few League players know and that even fewer implement in their gameplay.
It is important to know about the waves because with Season 8 bringing more importance toward the laning phase due to changes in the minions, such as the cannon minions giving significantly more gold than before, we need to teach you the basics of minions and how to use each minion to its fullest potential. You cannot learn to manipulate minions against opponents without learning the basics. Most of the time when you think you know what you are talking about, in actuality you use the wrong term in the wrong context which leads to miscommunication in the team. This guide will also help remedy this weakness in League of Legends and in eSports, in general, to be careful with terms that we may not fully understand.
Questions that you will be able to answer after reading this article are:
- What is a wave?
- What is pushing and how it is achieved?
- What are the different outcomes that happen because of different kinds of pushing?
A wave is one set of minions that spawn from the Nexus that follow a straight path to lane and consists of three melee minions and three caster minions. An exception to this is every Third wave before 20 minutes, a cannon minion that is worth more gold will appear. After 20 minutes, cannons will appear every other wave/set of minions. A set of minions throughout the game will always try to meet in the middle of the lane. When minions meet, this is what is known as a minion wave or a wave.
When one set of minions kills the other set of minions more quickly than they themselves die, then that means the wave is currently pushing towards the losing side (losing more minions more quickly than the other player, not in the common term of losing). Once taken into account champions and towers, the direction and speed of which waves get pushed vary.
As you play the game, players themselves have to decide whether they want the waves to push against the enemy or push toward themselves. Players naturally influence the waves by attacking and killing minions within the wave to get gold and experience.
Here’s an example of how players influence the wave: Right at the beginning of the game with the first set of minions if the player kills two minions that means that there are six minions on their side and four minions on the enemy’s side. This means the wave is pushing towards the enemy because the six minions the player currently has is killing the four minions the opponent has at a faster rate. The below picture is showing Twisted Fate's wave pushing towards the enemy because he and his minions are killing the other minions quicker.
This is true to an extent because a player must then acknowledge that the reinforcing wave, the next set of minions that are coming from the Nexus, may change this outcome. Whether this is a good or bad situation depends on the player themselves, the champion that they are playing, and what is going on around the map. The below picture is showing the ally reinforcing minions or the reinforcing wave.
The reinforcing wave is very important because if a player attacks the enemy minions to push the wave, they are only pushing the wave temporarily. If a player kills enemy minions but leaves left-over minions of that current wave, the wave will temporarily push towards the enemy until the reinforcing wave meets the older sets of minions. This will cause the opponent’s reinforcing minions to reach the fight first because the player himself had pushed the location of where the minions fight closer to the enemy. This is where the term push comes from. In the example below, the enemy reinforcing wave comes to the fight first to protect their tower.
Furthermore, this will cause the old minions of the enemy to stay alive for longer and will stack with the reinforcing wave, eventually leading the wave to push back towards the player. With this we can conclude that the more leftover minions there are, the faster the next incoming wave will push towards the opposite direction because the reinforcing wave will stack with the older minions, creating a bigger wave.
The next example that we will talk about in pushing a wave is what many players call shoving a wave, which in terms of newer players is to push as much of your minions as possible towards the other player’s tower. This is just pushing very quickly, but in actuality what the players are attempting to do is something called crashing your minions. Crashing is when a player pushes a wave all the way to the enemy tower, basically ramming your minions against the tower. Because the enemy tower kills the player’s wave so quickly, and as the enemy reinforcing wave approaches the fight, there will be very little or nothing blocking the minion’s path to keep going towards the middle of the lane. Eventually, both reinforcing waves will meet back into the middle and this is what is called resetting the wave. This is also called resetting a wave. In the below images, the minions are free to crash the tower. Since there are no reinforcing minions to stop them, the wave will get reset back into the middle.
This is true, however, this can be slowed or nullified by the enemy tanking the minions and stopping them in their tracks. This causes the minions to stop their push and make it so that the enemy’s minions can push back more quickly than yours. To combat this is to escort your minions to the tower, ensuring that your minions end up crashing. The process of leading your minions to the tower is called escorting. The below images first show Twisted Fate letting the enemy minions stop his own minions from crashing into the enemy tower. The other image is of Twisted Fate escorting his minions towards the enemy tower, making it so his minions crash in turn, resets the wave.
Depending on where the reinforcing wave is and how long it takes to defeat older minions of a previous wave, then what could occur is the wave pushing back towards the other direction, or bouncing back. The reason why this occurs because the waves are now meeting closer to one player’s tower, and similar to the scenario we described earlier about the wave pushing back towards the opposite direction, will cause minions to build up in the wave (a Tsunami).
Now that you have a better understanding of how minions behave and what you can do to manipulate them, you can now learn to take advantage of these exploits through different ways of manipulating the wave such as freezing and slow pushing.
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