Plan out the items you’re going to buy before a game starts.
Champion build guides are pretty much shopping lists that are tailored to a specific position and play style. As you become increasingly comfortable with League’s gameplay and the nuances of your favorite champions, you should start to figure out more of this stuff on your own.
Remember the cost and availability of specific items. Usually when I’m playing as an ADC, for example, I start the game with a plan to stay in my lane until I have enough gold to buy a B.F. Sword, since that gives a nice early boost to my attack damage. Obviously, your plans often end up changing on the fly depending on how a game is going. But having even a loosely-structured plan is better than just buying whatever the hell you can afford or think looks the coolest every time you go back to shop.
Consider getting some new IRL gear, too.
If you’re serious about honing your performance in League, you might need to upgrade your gaming peripherals. A mechanical keyboard or a solid gaming mouse can make a huge difference in how well you play the game. A nice headset won’t hurt, either.
Play with friends. The right kind of friends.
League is a lot more fun when you’re playing with people you know. But not all League of Legends friends are created equally. If you’re just starting out, joining games with a friend who’s been binging on League since its beta will land you in matches with people far more experienced than you. That’s not very fun, and can end up annoying your teammates if you keep dying. So when you start talking to your fellow gamers about jumping into League, make sure that you find people who are both patient and willing to play at a more...basic level than they might be used to. Some people even create alternate “smurf” accounts for this very purpose.
Make sure you can stay at your desk for a whole game.
Most League games played on Summoner’s Rift run between 30 and 45 minutes. They can go over an hour, though. There is also no pause button. Once a game begins, you should be ready and able to commit yourself totally and completely to the task at hand for as long as it takes. Looking away from the screen or not paying attention for a few seconds can cause any number of critical mistakes.
Rid yourself of possible distractions—i.e., anything that would make you leave your desk or look away from your computer—before you get dropped into Summoner’s Rift. Put your phone on silent, run to the bathroom, and make sure any cats you might have are a safe distance from your keyboard. Don’t start a game if you know you have to leave for work (or school, or a date, or any life event) in the next hour. In general: just don’t go AFK unless you absolutely have to. Doing so might incur penalties like temporary suspensions from the game. It’s also very disrespectful to your teammates.
Try to stay alive as long as possible.
Death works in a cruel way in League of Legends. Whenever you die, the opponents who killed you get a chunk of gold and experience—assets that make them more powerful. At the same time, death forces you to sit through extended cooldowns that block you from leveling up, getting more gold and better gear, or really doing anything remotely useful. These cooldowns get longer and longer as the game goes on and you keep dying, so don’t treat death lightly. Retreat is almost always a better option than heading into some sticky situation you don’t think you’re going to survive.
Don’t let yourself become food.
The other bad thing about death in League is that repeated kills will make a game snowball out of control very quickly. If a single champion kills you two, three, or—god help you—four times, you’ve effectively “fed” them—turned them into an overpowered monster that will require an entire team to kill.
If you notice that you’re starting to feed an opponent, you should try to nip it in the bud as fast as you can. Ask your teammates for help. Stay as far away from the fed opponent as possible while farming from a safe distance. Once you have enough money, go back to your base and buy gear that will help you deal with that specific enemy.
Whenever you die, try to figure out why.
No matter what, you’re going to die a lot in League of Legends, especially in your earliest games. You’re just going to have to accept that. What you should start trying to do, however, is controlling how you respond to your character’s many deaths. Whenever you are confused by who or what killed you, click on the “death recap” option that pops up on-screen:
This will lead to an itemized list of the exact champions and their abilities that brought your demise:
You don’t have to memorize everything you see in your death recaps. But see if you can identify trends. One important thing that separates good players from bad ones is that the former are able to reflect on their actions, realize where they went wrong, and come up with ways to do better in the future.
Stay behind your minions!
This is the single-most useful piece of advice from League’s otherwise terrible tutorial. Minions are like some incredible moving cushion that will shield you from incoming damage—be it from enemy champions, towers, or even other minions. Whenever possible, do let a group of minions step into a fight before you do. They soak up tons of damage, divert the aim of enemy towers, and block special abilities opposing champions try to unleash on you.
On a related note: keep track of the health bars of the minions in your immediate vicinity. You don’t want to be left stranded if they all end up dying.
Stay out of range of towers, too.
While it’s always a good idea to stay behind your minions, the one time it is absolutely essential to do so is when you’re attacking an enemy tower. These defensive structures will take away huge chunks of your health bar with every hit, and they can’t be damaged by any of your special attacks. Don’t ever try attacking a tower, or even getting in, unless you have a solid minion buffer.
By the same token, you can lean on your closest tower for support if an opponent is pushing you backwards in your lane. Hugging a tower will give you an extra layer of defense that’ll help you kill off a wave of enemy minions and keep opposing champions at bay.
Learn how to last-hit.
Killing minions in League of Legends isn’t a simple matter of right-clicking on a target and sitting back as your champion auto-attacks them into the ground. Remember: the game is all about efficiency. Auto-attacking won’t do you much good because it’s a relatively unproductive way to take out bad guys.
To reap the greatest rewards (in terms of gold and experience) from your minion kills, you have to focus on dealing the killing blow. Keep a close eye on the health bars of enemy minions whenever you’re fighting a group of them, and aim your attacks accordingly so you land killing blows on the minions. You can tell you’ve landed a successful killing blow when the game makes a little jingling sound and a yellow number pops up to show how much gold you just earned:
Pay attention to your Creep Score.
Last-hitting isn’t something you perfect overnight. It takes lots of practice over the course of many, many games. You can keep track of how well you’re farming by checking your “Creep Score,” or CS, which is the League term for how many minions you’ve killed so far in a game. You can find this number by pressing tab to open up the match’s stats during a game. Or if you want to get really technical with it, you can check your CS after a game is finished by visiting your “Match History” page:
...and factor in how long the game lasted to see what your CS per minute was. It’s good to shoot for 10 CS per minute. Unless you’re amazing at last-hitting and farming, you probably won’t do that well to start. Try to at least get to 6 or 7.
Be wary of pushing lanes.
The other reason auto-attacking minions is bad is that it disrupts the natural ebb and flow of battle between each team’s NPC army. While last-hitting just steals killing blows from your minions, auto-attacking pushes an entire wave of minions forward. Since you can’t directly control your minions, this means that they’ll head farther and farther into enemy territory. If you keep following them, you’ll increase the risk of being killed.
On the bottom lane, for instance, the safest position to be in is anywhere behind the river the cuts through the middle of the map. That way, the terrain in Summoner’s Rift provides a natural barrier against enemy ambushes. If you push your minions beyond that point, you’re essentially nudging yourself into a danger zone.
...which isn’t to say you should never push your lane. Sometimes you want to, or need to push a lane in order to successfully press an attack. The point is: you should never advance along the front line of a battle in League of Legends without considering the risks that come with doing so. The worst mistake beginners make so, so often is trying to rush into every situation like they’re Rambo. That’s just going to get you killed. And probably some of your teammates, too.
Never stop farming during a game.
It’s tempting to think of minion kills as something you only need to worry about at the very beginning of the game. But you should always be farming in-between other activities. Taking out waves of enemy minions is important in the late-game phase because large groups of them can easily decimate one (or more) of your towers if your whole team is off fighting on another part of the map. Clearing a wave or two of minions to get some more gold might also be a better use of your time than making the trek over to another part of the map to join into a team battle.
Don’t buy champions with Riot Points unless you absolutely have to.
You can unlock champions to play with permanently by spending Riot Points (RP) or Influence Points (IP). While you accumulate IP over time simply by playing the game, there’s no way to acquire RP without spending real-world cash. Avoid wasting RP on unlocking champions. Particularly when you’re just starting out, there’s really no telling which champions you’ll end up preferring to play as anyways. The free weekly rotations give you a convenient way to test out groups of them at a time, so just stick to those and unlocking your favorite ones as you gather IP.
Actually, don’t buy anything with RP if you can buy it for IP.
It’s very easy to waste tons of RP (and thus lots of money) on League of Legends if you’re not careful about when and how you make purchases. A good rule of thumb to help you avoid getting suckered into Riot’s lucrative free-to-play monetization scheme is: don’t spend RP on anything that’s also available for IP. That way, you’ll only end up spending RP (i.e., real money) on optional aesthetic upgrades like champion skins. And really, you shouldn’t bother plunking down cash for those until you figure out who you really like to play as. There’s nothing more annoying than spending five or ten bucks on a rad skin only to realize a few games later that you absolutely hate the champion it goes with.
Don’t worry about runes until you reach level 20.
Speaking of things you shouldn’t be buying at the outset of your League adventures, stay away from runes. These are enhancements that beef up a character’s passive abilities and base-level stats—attack speed, critical damage, that kind of thing. Eventually, runes will become very important. They aren’t important at the beginning of the game, so save yourself an extra headache by keeping them on the backburner. Disregard the notifications the game client gives you every time you level up saying that you’ve got more rune pages. And whatever you do, do not buy Tier 1 and 2 runes. They end up being useless once Tier 3 runes become available, which happens once you reach level 20.
Do pay attention to your masteries from the start.
Mastery points are similar to character-enhancements to runes, the main difference between the two being that mastery points are only available in a finite amount (30, one for each level), and you don’t have to spend any IP to acquire them. Since they don’t cost anything, mastery points are worth spending immediately once you get access to them. Much like character builds, figuring out the best way to allocate mastery points is just a matter of finding the right guide.
Follow along with the patch notes.
Riot changes League of Legends in big ways very often. The only way to really keep track of these is by following along with the patch notes they release prior to any scheduled update. Any time you try logging on and see that the game client needs to download something, then, it’s probably a good time to check on the League website to see what’s going on. That’ll save you any unpleasant surprises if, say, your favorite character has suddenly been nerfed into the ground.
Remember: surrender is always an option.
Or, at least, once you’ve played a match for 20 minutes. Trying to salvage a game isn’t always worth the trouble it takes to muster a dispirited and bickering team back into a fight. Save yourself some time and a potential headache by moving on.
Say “GG” at the end of games.
It doesn’t matter if you think the game you just played was a spectacular failure or a stupendous victory. Type “gg” in the post-game chatroom. It’s just common courtesy. by Yannick Lejacq.
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