Priority is a commonly misunderstood, yet important macro concept. It is something that must be considered before any macro decision in the early and mid game. In this article, you’ll learn what priority is, why it’s important, and how to account for it in your macro decisions.
Priority in League of Legends is a commonly misunderstood, yet important macro concept. It's something that must be considered before any macro decision in the early and mid game. You may have heard it being thrown around by your teammates in Ranked, but not quite understood what it really means. In this article, you'll learn what it means to have priority, why it's important, and how it can impact your macro decisions.
Before defining priority, we first need to understand the behaviour and importance of minion waves. Starting at 1:05, a minion wave will spawn every 30 seconds, one for each lane (Top, Mid, Bot). Killing minions is the main source of gold income for either team, providing between 700-800 gold/minute across all 3 lanes combined. They also serve as the main source of experience (exp) for the majority of the team (top, mid, ADC, support).
If left alone in a lane, minions will fight enemy minions or die to turrets. What this really means is that minions you don't kill give up their gold and exp permanently.
With this in mind, you should realize that it is in your team's best benefit to collect as many minion waves as possible, and to deny the opponent as many minion waves as possible. If you are able to consistently collect more gold and exp than your opponent through minion waves, you'll be ahead in levels and items relative to your opponent, much the same way that an 8/0 Zed is oftentimes ahead in levels and items relative to their opponent.
Priority is a description of the state of minion waves, either in a single lane or around the whole map. To have priority means that you or your team can catch the next minion wave (collect its gold/exp) faster than the enemy. Generally, this means you can push the wave faster than the opponent. The more priority you have over the opponent, the more time you can spend on the map between minion waves before you need to go back to catch the upcoming minion wave.
For example, if you were playing Lucian vs Maokai top, Lucian would generally be able to get priority over the Maokai. This is because Lucian has more waveclear, and is stronger than Maokai in trades. By pushing in the minion wave, Lucian has a period of time where he can leave his lane without missing any gold and exp from the minions, since he already cleared them all. Meanwhile, Maokai still has to clear the minion wave that Lucian has crashed into him, or else give up their gold and exp permanently.
A common misconception is that priority is based on which champions can move to fights the fastest, regardless of minion waves. For example, Twisted Fate is sometimes viewed as a champion with high priority, simply because he can teleport near-globally using his ultimate, Destiny. Although Twisted Fate can easily arrive to skirmishes in the river or jungle due to his ultimate, he may arrive before his lane opponent and not have priority in his lane. Remember, priority is a description of the minion waves. This would mean that as Twisted Fate teleports away, he is already losing gold and exp in his lane. Conversely, if Twisted Fate teleports to a jungle skirmish when he has priority, he would be able to make the same play without losing gold and exp in his lane. Twisted Fate is a champion that excels at using priority, not necessarily getting priority.
As defined above, the ability to get priority means that you can make a proactive play where, in order for the enemy team to match, they must give up minions somewhere on the map. As a laner, knowing when you do or don't have priority will allow you to both maintain good CS and make plays on the map. A "play" in this case can mean getting vision, invading the enemy jungle, setting up for an objective, roaming to other lanes, recalling, and more. Maintaining priority also allows you to support your Jungler if they need help defending their camps, taking scuttles, neutral objectives, or invading. If you frequently look for deep vision, roam to other lanes, recall, etc. Without priority, making these same plays will set you further and further behind in gold and exp from CS deficits.
As a jungler, keeping in mind which of your lanes do and don't have priority is crucial to understanding what plays you can or can't make. You have to realize that lanes that don't have priority will have a very difficult time helping you. If your midlaner is getting repeatedly shoved into their tower by an Orianna, don't be surprised when the Orianna is first to contest you at the Scuttle crab. One of the most difficult things about Jungle is accepting the influence your lanes have over the plays you can make. If your bot and mid don't have priority, but you try to take the drake anyways, there's a good chance you get collapsed on and picked off. Conversely, if you know that your mid and bot have priority in their lanes, you can play to gain advantages on the botside of the map, by taking scuttle crabs, drakes, and even by invading the enemy jungler with your support or mid.
When it comes to taking neutral objectives in the midgame, such as drakes and baron, having priority in neighbouring lanes is an easy way to ensure stronger vision and objective control. Having priority in the midlane is undoubtedly the most impactful, as being first to move from mid lane gives you access to clear and place vision on both sides of the river; furthermore, as your minions push up midlane, they'll give you deep vision of the mid lane, so you'll see enemy champions crossing from one side of the jungle to the next. Here, DK groups mid 20 seconds before the drake to secure mid priority.
If you have champions with splitpush pressure, waiting for them to push up a sidelane before starting a neutral objective will give your sidelaner freedom to either hard splitpush, or be ready to teleport to the fight. Conversely, if you lack sidelane pressure, but the enemy team can threaten to splitpush on your team, you should push sidelanes as much as possible before contesting objectives or grouping for a fight. This way, the enemy splitpusher has to spend time pushing their wave to your tower before they can take it, while you fight elsewhere on the map.
At the end of the day, getting priority is just shoving your minion wave into the enemy. However, when you spend position aggressively and burn spells on the minions to shove it, you will often be in an overextended position that the enemy may be able to punish. So here is a list of things you may need to consider when getting priority in the early game:
● Can my lane opponent easily kill me if I overextend or waste spells? (Your priority is no good if you're dead)
● Is the enemy jungler near my lane/likely to gank me?
● Do I have enough mana to push this wave? (Especially for mages, if you're low on mana you will push the wave much slower)
● Who has stronger waveclear, my opponent or I? (If you're a pre-level 6 Kayle vs a Karma, chances are you can't get priority)
●How far am I from the minion wave right now? (Perhaps you're walking to lane from the river or from the fountain)
As is likely obvious to you, there are a lot of champions that are simply better at getting priority than other champions. Lane bullies, such as Darius, Renekton, Caitlyn, Draven, Syndra and Fizz are examples of champions that often have priority, not because they have the strongest waveclear, but because they can threaten to kill their lane opponent. Orianna, Anivia, Singed, Sion, Tristana, Ryze and Lucian are champions with strong midgame waveclear, ideal for maintaining mid and sidelane priority before objectives.
Conversely, many champions are simply bad at getting priority due to low waveclear and weak laning. Kayle, Kassadin, Katarina, Nasus, Vladimir are all very bad at clearing waves in the early game.
As a jungler, you can almost never expect low priority champions to be available to help you on an early scuttle. However, should you need priority, a well-timed gank can help you get the priority you need. For example, if you are playing Rek'Sai and you know your midlaner won't have priority for the first scuttle at 3:15, you can gank mid at 2:50-3:00 to punish the (likely overextended) enemy mid. Even if you don't get a kill, you can stick around and push the minion wave in to force priority, then move to the crab with your mid. This is a common strategy employed by high elo junglers to force priority in a lane when they need it, especially before taking the first Drake, or early scuttle crabs.
Priority in the mid-late game is much more of a team effort. Ideally, you can allocate champions to push out each lane roughly a minute before an important objective spawns. But what your team needs to do to prep varies greatly from game to game, depending on the gold difference, team compositions, importance of the objective, etc. Thus, it's difficult to set general guides for when and where you need mid-late game priority.
In this first example, Blaber is able to secure the scuttle crab over Elyoya because Fudge uses his priority to help Blaber. Pay attention to Fudge's wave on the minimap.
Fudge crashes a stacked minion wave into Armut's tower, giving him plenty of time to recall or move on the map. Seeing that Blaber needs help on the botside scuttle crab, he uses his Teleport to force Elyoya to either give the crab or take a 2v1 fight. While this is happening, the minion wave topside is slowpushing back to Fudge, meaning that as long as he makes it back to his wave before Armut can crash it into the tower, he will have missed very few cs.
If Armut noticed that Fudge Teleported to the bot river and tried to use his Teleport to join the fight, he would have missed all of the cs in the massive wave Fudge just pushed into him, which likely would have been worth more than the Scuttle crab alone.
In this example, Cryin moves from his lane without priority to potentially collapse on Canyon.
By looking at the minimap, we can see that ShowMaker has shoved in the mid wave when Cryin starts moving. After Canyon flashes to safety, he immediately goes back mid to catch the wave, but only gets 2/6 CS. Although he didn't incur a huge loss, if he were to repeat this mistake multiple times over the course of the game, he would passively bleed several minion waves.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Cryin made a mistake. Had there been a skirmish in the river, Cryin would have been invaluable in swinging the fight. He weighed the risk vs reward, and made a decision. Being mindful of priority in your decision making will help you improve your macro gameplay.
In this example, Xiaohu gets top priority before an important baron fight, leaving the wave in an optimal position for him to take the top tower afterwards.
Xiaohu shoves in the top wave 40 seconds before Drake and Baron spawn
RNG wins the fight and takes the Baron, meanwhile because Xiaohu shoved in top, the wave is still by DK's tower
So after taking the Baron, Xiaohu is able to go back to the top wave and take the tower, made possible only because the minion wave is already at their tower.
If Khan was the last one to shove the top wave before grouping for Baron or Drake, Xiaohu would have had to walk the minion wave from his side of the map to DK's tower. By then, Khan would have arrived to defend it, reducing the efficacy of RNG's Baron.
Watch this play here:
In this example, Canyon punishes the overextended RNG botlane, then uses the resulting bot priority to secure the infernal drake.
This is a great example of how laners can get punished when getting priority, as well as how jungle ganks can force priority in a lane. RNG's botlane was trying to get priority by pushing in a stacked wave, most likely so they could recall. However, they had to overextend to push, and get ganked as a result. Canyon then immediately starts the infernal drake, knowing that Wei is topside, ShowMaker has priority over Cryin, and due to his gank, his botlane has priority.
What's especially important to note is that even if DK didn't get any kills off of this play, Canyon's gank still forces RNG's botlane to give up priority over the wave, allowing Canyon to freely take the infernal drake. If Canyon instead just ran straight to the infernal drake without making this gank, RNG's botlane could have used their priority to contest Canyon at the drake.
Priority is one of the most useful macro concepts to understand, no matter what role you play. To recap, we discussed the value of minions, and their importance as a source of gold and exp. We defined priority as collecting a minion wave before your opponent does, ie. pushing a wave into your opponent. Having priority allows you and your teammates more flexibility to impact the map, by maintaining vision and river control, roaming, or contesting objectives. Knowing how priority influences your team's options is absolutely critical to make optimal macro decisions. Next time you're playing some solo queue, or watching a pro game, pay attention to how priority can dictate the decisions you make.
Good luck on the Rift!
