A small aside I want to mention is too many times I see my team mates or enemy players just launch their first few sets of nukes on the middle lane structures and often times it's just to either dump the nuke or because it's the closest lane they are in. If you take a second to look at the map above and guess which lane you should focus on when you have the chance, you will probably guess either the top lane or the bottom lane and you would be correct. With Warhead Junction, the map objective does help with structure damage (if you time it right you can kill a whole minion wave with it too). Add a nuke plus a mercenary camp, and you have a lot of lane pressure you can apply.



Assisting the boss even before it's captured

Uncontested boss with all structures up

Uncontested boss with fort down and minion support

Uncontested boss with fort down and no minion support

Blackheart's Bay

Cursed Hollow

Dragon Shire





Garden of Terror

Infernal Shrines

Sky Temple

Tomb of the Spider Queen

TL;DR

1. Mercenary camps are meant to apply lane pressure while you focus on other things.

2. Identify the lanes that would gain a bigger benefit, and apply pressure to them when possible.

You either win or you learn

-Micahel Udall

Welcome to the first edition of "Why do we do this?". This is a segment I'm going to produce when possible to explain small things in the game that have big dividends in the long run and may be able to help elevate your game.Today, we are going to talk about which lanes are more beneficial to focus on during the game. You may think that all lanes benefit in some way and as long as you take down structures, it shouldn't matter what lane I push. In a basic sense you are correct, but the ability to utilize the map better than your opponents is a small factor that could help lead to a higher chance of you winning the game.We're going to focus on Warhead Junction first since this is a map that has two areas that I want to focus on.Looking at this map, I've taken the liberty of point out each camp on the map and which lane they travel down each time. You notice the lanes with the green line are the lanes that the mercenaries travel down as well as the boss. The only lane that doesn't have any mercenary pressure is the middle lane. When the top or bottom lanes are pushed in, this gives any mercenary you capture on either of those lanes more chance of applying more valuable pressure (destroying the keep). This happens in a few ways, either the enemy team has to respond to this lane of mercenaries which gives you an advantage to go either grab more mercenaries in another lane, force a team fight where you will have a numbers advantage, pressure a structure in another lane, or (if you have the keep down already in that lane) push with that mercenary camp giving you a chance to kill the core. All of these options are given to you by smart timing on grabbing mercenary camps and focusing on damaging structures in those lanes ahead of time.I've created some gifs to visually show what a boss can do in different scenarios uncontested to focus on the difference when you remove structures ahead of time versus just rely on bosses or camps to do it for you.In the second gif, you can see with the structures down ahead of time the boss alone was able to do 24% damage to the core alone uncontested. Imagine if you were able to get the fort and keep down ahead of time before you get your first boss, that comes from thinking ahead and prioritizing the lanes you want to push down ahead of time if possible.This was only one example on how to utilize lane prioritization. I took the liberty to make a lane pressure guide for most of the other maps right now to help everyone get an idea what lanes have the best chance to push to the core.And for the stat nerds, I leave you with a in-depth video from Dreadnaught discussing the power spike levels of the boss.Lane pressure is something that may not show up on the MVP screen, but it will greatly affect your chance from maybe getting a wall down to pushing core for a win.Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you liked this please give me a like or leave a comment. Feel free to leave suggestions as well.