Low Elo Report : Use Your Ultimate

Last week, I promised that this week would bring a breakdown of the team compositions used in IEM Hanover. I lied – IPL4 brought enough new strategies (or at least highlighted less used ones) that I’m switching the data set to IPL4… and doing it next week. Sorry! Instead, I give to you a quick PSA (as Reddit loves to say) about using your ultimate.

This post is aimed more at the middle and top lanes than the bottom lane, but can be thought about in that lane as well (to me, the solo lanes share a bit more in common with each other than with the duo lane bot). Most players treat their ultimate as a fairly sacred skill. Use it wisely, else it will be on cooldown for a minute and a half (or more) and who knows what will happen in that timeframe. And to a certain extent this is true. Ultimate abilities like Kennen’s Slicing Maelstrom or Vladimir’s Hemoplage have huge cooldowns (both are on two minute rotations) and the absence of the ultimate can be incredibly huge in a team fight.

With all that in mind, here’s my tip for you – stop worrying about it and just jam that R button. This of course comes with a large caveat; if it looks like a team fight or objective challenge (i.e., sieging a tower, taking dragon or baron) is imminent, don’t use it. But aside that somewhat obvious stipulation, try to incorporate your ultimate more often into your laning phase. More often than not, that team fights are not going to happen in the two minutes (and, in case one seems eminent, you can always try stalling until your ultimate is back up) after you hit level six and the laning phase hasn’t broken yet.

Ultimate’s have such a huge impact in the game (as befit their title), and actually using them to their full effect can be devastating in lane. Kennen’s, for example, is one of the ultimate abilities that I often see saved. However, take a look at the players who run Kennen the most (Froggen or Regibro often stream with Kennen), and you’ll see they have no qualms throwing it out in lane. With Kennen especially, a good rotation can have the enemy champion stunned two or three times, almost ensuring a kill especially with some jungle presence.

Following a simple logic progression, the kill (or pushing your opponent back to fountain) lets you push the wave to tower and grab dragon or harass another lane (it is unlikely teams will want to contest dragon a man down and even if they do, you’re still fairly dangerous without your ult) – all this is helping your team out immeasurably until the next team fight.

Try it out, and drop a comment below to tell me how it went! Thanks for reading,

Malkethos