Whether you are a League enthusiast playing for fun or a serious player looking to climb the ladder, we all want to challenge ourselves and improve to reach higher ranks. Here’s an in depth analysis on the most important resource -- Creeps -- to assist you with your climb.
How do I climb out of low elo? What am I doing wrong? What should I do to become better at the game? These are questions any ambitious League of Legends player has asked themselves, and the simplest answer is resource management, or Gold. There are many ways to earn Gold: towers, kills, assists, objectives, etc. However, I want to focus on probably the most underrated resource to most players: creeps.
Creeps are any minion, monster (jungle camps), or neutral objective (Dragon and Baron). CS stands for “Creep Score”, and refers to how many creeps you have killed throughout the duration of the game. As simple as it sounds, having higher CS nets you more gold to buy items, giving you an immediate advantage.
Good and Bad CS scores are calculated by taking your CS and dividing it by the minute of the game, to get a number in terms of “CS per minute”. “Perfect” CS is around 12.6 CS per minute, which in most if not all games, is simply not attainable (Even Pros don’t have this CS!).
So, having 10 CS per minute or above is considered perfect, and is the goal to reach when talking about CSing. Meanwhile, 9 to 10 CS per minute is excellent, and is what most professional players achieve. 7 to 9 CS is good, and you should consider learning how to CS better if you are consistently getting less than 7 CS (For anyone looking to learn how to improve your CS, there’s an article linked at the bottom about CSing).
There is a positive association between how well you can CS and rank, emphasizing the importance. Keep in mind that in higher levels, your opponent is also better, which makes laning, and by extension, CSing, harder as you climb. Smart laners will poke you and force you to back with the risk of losing minions, making CSing well even while under pressure, a great skill to have.
But enough. CS is important. So what? You might even already know that coming from experienced players. However, here are a few numbers to put things into perspective.
Before calculating just how important CS is compared to kills and income, let’s start off with a few basic facts about minion waves.
You may have noticed your Gold increasing without doing anything. This is called passive Gold, which all players get. Passive Gold gives you 20.4 Gold every 10 seconds, or 122.4 Gold per minute. This helps progress the game even if a player is behind.
Let's do some calculations about Gold now that we have all the numbers down. The average value of a minion wave before 15 minutes comes out to be 134 Gold per minute. Since Siege minions spawn once every three waves before 15 minutes, and each wave consists of 3 casters and melee minions, there would be a total of 9 melee, 9 casters, and 1 cannon minion that spawn every three waves. We calculate the average Gold per wave by dividing the total value of three waves by 3, using the following equation:
⅓[3(3)(17) + 3(3)(21) + 1(60)] = 134
This average value changes as the game progresses, since cannon minions spawn more often and are worth more gold, but for our purposes, let’s only look at waves before 15 minutes. Each wave spawns every 30 seconds, so there are two waves every minute. This means that if you CS perfectly, you would get a total of 268 Gold per minute from CS alone, not even including passive income. If we were to count passive income, then you would generate a total 390.4 Gold per minute (more than a kill which is 300!), from just CSing perfectly and playing the game.
Again, since it’s improbable that any player will have perfect CS, how do we know how much Gold a player makes from their CS per minute? Well, it turns out that the average value of a minion is about 21 Gold. We get this number by doing a similar calculation that we did to find the average value of a wave. Again, if we only examine the timeframe before 15 minutes, there would be a total of 19 minions every three waves (6+ 6 + 7). We use the following equation to find the average value of a minion:
[3(3)(17)+3(3)(21)+1(60)]/19 which comes out to be about 21 (actual value is closer to 21.16)
So, if you multiply your CS per minute by 21, you would get the amount of Gold you generate from CS, per minute.
This shows how much Gold you lose by missing minions. For example, if a Diamond player has 9.0 CS per minute, then the player would make 189 Gold per minute, not including passive income. On the other hand, if a Bronze player averages 4.5 CS per minute, they would only make 94.5 Gold per minute.
For laners, minions are an extremely safe and reliable way the map provides for Gold; it would be a mistake to not take advantage of this. In addition, even if you can’t secure a kill on an enemy champion, it could be just as detrimental for your opponent to force them to back since they will miss gold and experience. CS leads are also more relevant in higher levels of play because laners know matchups better and the game in general is played with less Gold since players are not dying as much. With all this information about lanes, let’s move onto the Jungle to see if something similar can be applied.
Unsurprisingly, the short answer is: yes. Here is a table of the value and respawn time of jungle camps.
We can roughly calculate how much Gold is generated by clearing monster camps from the table. Assuming a full clear (killing all 6 camps), Junglers make about 218.2 per minute, not including the Scuttle Crab or passive Gold. The calculations here are a bit more complicated and we have to make a few assumptions, but we can still obtain a reasonable estimate. First, jungle camps don’t spawn as uniformly as minions and can be on opposite parts of the map. Second, ganks, counter ganks, and counter jungling make it impossible to predict jungle pathing after the initial clear, meaning getting Gold from jungle camps will never be 100% efficient (camps won’t be killed on spawn). Regardless, we can still make some rough calculations using the following equation:
(85/2.25) + (95/2.25) + (131/2.25) + (90/2.25) + (100/5) + (100/5) = 218.2
The only added step here is a unit change. We divide the Gold gained from killing a certain camp by the time it takes for it to respawn, obtaining Gold per minute for each camp. The information for the value of each camp and the respawn time are provided in the graph above (Note: the equation to calculate scuttle crab’s gold is 63 + 7[LEVEL] from 1-9). Summing all these up will get our number of 218.2 (not including scuttle).
This doesn’t take into account of Junglers invading or being invaded, so the gold Junglers generate can widely vary depending on the game state. Realistically, if we leave out passive Gold, a Jungler’s Gold graph would increase in large, short bursts from clearing camps. For example, if a jungler completes a full clear at around 3:20, they would be making around 333.9 Gold per minute, which is much more than a laner. A full clear is equal to 601 Gold (85+85+131+90+100+100) and they start their clear at 1:30 (when the Red or Blue buff spawns, assuming they start there in the first place). We make this calculation by dividing the total Gold by the time passed since 1:30.
For Junglers, CS plays a different role in the game. Some junglers, such as Xin Zhao or Nocturne, prioritize ganking lanes over farming, substituting the need to farm with kills and assists. Although they have decent clear, it’s more beneficial for champions like them to be actively ganking and pressuring the map. On the other hand, a jungling champion like Master Yi is forced to farm and outscale the enemy since he has weak ganking potential without any crowd control (CC).
The importance of CS still applies to Junglers, albeit a little more loosely due to their unique role within the game, but it would still be detrimental to completely neglect farming.
Hopefully the numbers regarding jungle camps and minions have provided some insight towards how creeps are essential in the game. Try to prioritize CS in your games and see how much more Gold you have access to. Catching side waves and wave manipulation are both excellent ways to ensure you get your CS, as well as not overextending. League is not a KDA game - kills and assists may not be as important as you think. Rather, League is more similar to a resource gathering game, where each team is trying to gain an advantage on the other. A high CS score is part of any great player (including you Supports, go get those cannon minions)! So best of luck on the Rift.
