There exists a plethora of guides which direct you proper wave control in League of Legends, and many will tout the advantages of freezing your wave near your tower in order to leverage pressure over your enemy laner. However, there exist many circumstances in which it's better to be pushing the wave in order to help support your team, or pressure the enemy elsewhere on the map. Colloquially, movement subsequent to pushing a wave is known as "priority" or "move", and is underutilized in lower ladder ranks, where laners will exclusively prioritize freezing the wave in order to gain miniscule advantages over the enemy laner. While freezing is definitely valuable, pushing is definitely undervalued in these ranks.

This guide will be split into two sections: When to push the wave, and good choices to make with the resulting priority. Additionally, these sections will be further divided into specific scenarios where pushing is the best action to choose.

When to Push Your Wave

1. Your Jungler Is Invading

A common folly of low elo laners is failing to secure priority prior to an allied jungle invade when they are capable to. By securing priority, you're creating a difficult choice in the enemy laner's mind: should I rotate to assist my jungler and lose out on the wave, or should I secure the gold/exp from the wave and let my jungler fall behind? In either choice, he loses out on something, whether that be the jungle camp his own team is losing or the wave he loses in order to support his jungler.

Additionally, pushing the wave limits the enemy laner's access to his own jungle and denies routes of rotation, which in turn become open to you. This increases the predictability of the angle of attack the enemy laner will take if he does choose to rotate, which is extremely valuable in order to adjust your positioning to stay safe from the combined threat of the enemy jungler and the enemy laner in a resulting jungle skirmish. Higher elo junglers will be capable of assessing invade timers in coordination with their own laners, but in lower elo, it's typically just better to push the wave if you think your jungler will invade or if the game state is favorable for an invade: it's significantly more guess-work, but it's something important to keep in mind.

2. You Are Stronger Than Both the Enemy Laner and the Enemy Jungler

While freezing creates pressure in itself by forcing the enemy to walk further way from their tower to secure gold and experience, pushing can create pressure in a different regard. A simple dichotomy to keep in mind would be freezing slows down the game, while pushing speeds up the game. Freezing is useful for growing your own advantage independent of your team for yourself, while pushing can allow you to radiate your advantage to elsewhere on the map and create advantages for your team. Also, freezing is great when you need to stay safe from the enemy jungler's aggression in order to secure your own lead, but if you're not afraid of the enemy jungler, the scales tip in favor of pushing more often than not.

This is particularly useful information if your champion gets outscaled and begins with an advantage inherent to their own kit, such as Pantheon. While there are situations where freezing is useful, it's more important to exert pressure onto the enemy team by pushing and roaming as opposed to attempting to gain a "selfish lead" by freezing and only setting behind your lane opponent. Judgment is important in these sorts of situations, but gaining an advantage for your team is almost always better than gaining an advantage for yourself, unless you are playing a champion which can carry independently against the enemy team. As stated before, judgment is key in this regard.

3. A Neutral Objective Is About to Spawn

Priority around neutral objectives is invaluable: without it, placing vision, clearing enemy vision, or even just fighting the objective itself becomes exponentially more difficult. The same decision applies here as mentioned before: either lose the wave and take chip damage on the tower, or support the team in fight that could go either way. No matter which decision they make, the opposing laner is going to lose out on something. Additionally, by pushing the wave, the enemy loses vision of which route you take to rotate unless they have placed wards in close proximity to the lane you're pushing in advanced. This lack of vision creates a "riskiness" in entering the river, as they are uncertain of your angle of attack.

Dragon, Baron, and Scuttle aren't the only neutral objectives that spawn either; in 2017, NA LCS team TSM's strategy would frequently include setting up an invade onto the enemy blue buff around the second spawning at 7 minutes. Mid laner Bjergsen, alongside the bottom lane Doublelift and Biofrost, would push their waves in order to coordinate an invade to steal away the enemy's blue buff to great success. Pushing waves allows you to contest all sorts of resources on the map, as long as you know when to time your push. Getting first rotation on the first spawning of Scuttle Crab is important too right before 3 minutes, as there is no worse feeling in the world than your laner pushing before you, rotating first, and killing your jungler at Scuttle, acquiring both first blood and double buffs.

4. Miscellaneous

In addition to the before mentioned situations, there are countless additional situations where it's important to push your wave. Even if you're behind, if your champion has the waveclear advantage in the match-up, it's oftentimes worth it to push the wave in preparation of a cheater recall, provided the enemy cannot set up a freeze afterwards. You can find an entire guide on cheater recalls here. It can be useful to push waves in preparation of a jungle gank too, which may seem counter-intuitive, but by "fast farming" the wave, it will allow you to retreat closer to your tower. There's a lot of discretion at play here, but the more you improve at League of Legends, the better your judgment will become.

What to Do with Your Priority

Beyond the basic things like "rotate to objectives", or "hover around your jungler in anticipation of a skirmish" there are a lot of other actions a player can take after pushing a wave.

1. Place Vision

This one is a no-brainer, but people will frequently neglect to wait until their lane opponent has recalled or pushed sufficiently in order to place down necessary vision in order to continue their push or facilitate safe trading with their lane opponent. Vision is an effective deterrent to enemy jungle aggression and allows you to further utilize your priority in subsequent pushes. Vision allows you to roam safely, increases your effectiveness while invading, and lends you greater control of objectives. Often neglected is the placement of vision; especially by solo laners & ADCs, but pushing the lane to facilitate the placement of vision is vital to creating and pushing advantages.

A full guide on good ward placement can be found here. Warding effectively is a different matter entirely, as certain wards are more effective than others, but one should aim to prioritize neutral objectives, particularly enemy jungle camps in order to track the enemy jungler and prevent him from getting his team ahead.

2. Roaming Elsewhere on the Map

Pushing before roaming presents several obvious advantages: you receive all of the resources from the incoming wave, so you are on a longer timer before you begin sacrificing resources in order to roam elsewhere, the enemy will lose vision of your roam due to them not having a wave in close proximity to you, and pushing the wave allows you multiple routes to leave the lane, potentially allowing for you to go into the enemy jungle in order to evade river vision. Roaming to other lanes falls into the before established dichotomy of "speeding up" the game and spreading your advantages elsewhere: it's a form of controlled chaos. This sort of maneuver is invaluable against teams that will inevitably outscale you, and using your early game priority in order to assert an advantage that sort of team composition is essential. You must end the game before the enemy has a chance to play it and this is an easy way to do so.

3. Taking a Recall, or Spending Gold

Pushing the lane before basing is obvious, and just common instinct. What's less obvious though, is the use of asymmetric or "cheater recalls". Often when one player recalls, the other will quickly follow and they will return to lane around the same time. However, a player can push a wave fast enough, recall, and then return before the opponent has a chance to do so. Upon returning, the player who initiated the recall is at a massive advantage, having freshly spent their gold while the opponent still has unspent gold in their pocket. This tactic is important for winning certain lane match-ups, particularly as a control mage with a waveclear advantage facing off against an assassin with inferior wave clear. If executed properly, the one taking the cheater recall has lost next to nothing by taking this base and spending their gold as their opponent struggles to push the wave back out.

4. Miscellaneous

As mentioned before in section 1, there are a variety of other uses of priority, not limited to: hovering your jungler, countering a dive, following an opponent who is roaming off of base, and taking enemy jungle camps yourself, amongst others. The proper use of what you should be doing once you push your wave is on a case-by-case basis, and it can take time to learn the proper move. Be patient with yourself and realize that using priority is just one piece in the great puzzle that is League of Legends.

Whether to freeze or push is a fundamental choice laners need to make while playing at any point: sometimes it's impossible to push, and sometimes it's impossible to freeze. Recognising what your options are in the game itself is another skill that requires honing. The intention of this guide is not to tell you to only push, rather, it's an argument against the zeitgeist that seems frequently perpetuated in guides about wave control; that freezing is the best thing to do with your wave. In a game so complicated such as League of Legends, this is rarely the case.

While freezing may be the safest thing to do with your wave, it's very common to see players playing too safe and only keeping their wave close to their tower. On the contrary, learning to utilize priority and push advantages is essential to climbing the ladder. The only real way to learn is to first make the mistakes, and don't be swindled in the idea that freezing is the ultimate objective of wave management. Trust me, your jungler will thank you.