Every solo laner has had the misfortune of being in a losing lane. This can happen for any number of reasons: you have a low-clear jungler, the other solo laner just out-clears you, and the buffs were not leashed properly. For whatever reason, you currently find yourself in a situation that is less than favorable. This article will hopefully turn your losing lane into a winning game for your team.

Stay Positive



Source: Smite Gamepedia

This is easier said than done, but staying in a positive frame of mind is critical to effectively losing lane. When you start to beat yourself up about losing lane, your own decision making becomes impaired, and this will translate into a losing game for your entire team. A negative attitude is contagious, and if it does infect your team, then not only will the game become a losing effort, but it will become a drag and lose whatever fun it once had. Remember that it is supposed to be a game, and you are supposed to have fun with it. Everyone loses lane once in a while, but remember to still have fun and stay positive.

Farming Effectively

Source: SMITECentral

This is something that requires more attention when you are behind. Be sure to prioritize your minion wave. As you are losing lane, you wave will be getting pushed under your tower, resulting in a bit of lost gold. The way to maximize gold that you get as a wave is pushed under tower is to prioritize the archers, as they are the last minions that will be targeted by the tower and have the lowest HP, making them relatively easy to last-hit, giving you bonus gold. The way to prioritize the melee minions is by attacking the ones that are not targeted by the tower. The brute minion will be the one tanking the majority of the tower damage, and if you can clear the archers quickly, you can then get last-hits on melee minions before the tower can hit them, resulting in you losing less gold.

This becomes significantly more difficult if the opposing solo laner decides to freeze the wave, letting the minions kill each other while zoning you out of getting any experience from them. If this happens, you may be able to pressure into the enemy jungle, which is very important due to the return of the speed buff. If you and your jungler can combine to steal away one or both of these while the wave is being frozen, then you will slowly begin to edge your way back into contention as far as the lane is concerned.

By rotating and splitting camps with your jungler, you not only help to secure your buffs, but also gain gold and experience without the risk of soloing the camps, as well as gain jungle pressure across the map. Losing lane means that you are getting less farm from lane than your lane partner, which means that you need to make up the difference elsewhere. The jungle is the easiest, and usually the only practical, way of doing this. It will not make up for the gold you are losing in lane, but it helps to keep you in the game, being less behind than if you had just been sitting in lane.

Building Tanky

Source: Smite Gamepedia

In this meta, the solo lane tends to be ahead of the rest of your team, meaning that, even if you are losing lane, you will probably still be more farmed than both your teammates and some of the enemy players. The standard start for solo lane is to build Warrior Tabi, to get the extra power to help you to clear wave, followed by Breastplate of Valor for the physical protections, mana and cooldown reduction. If you are against a magical damage dealer in lane, you build may change, but that is the general idea. Instead of building Jotunn’s Wrath for the cap of cooldown reduction, as well as mana and penetration, building more protections would be a good idea, in order to take more damage than your lane partner. However, if you are falling behind in lane, then your damage may be irrelevant anyways, meaning your primary use will be to take as much damage as you can without dying, allowing your teammates to deal the damage. This would make Jotunn’s a less useful item than other possibilities.

Other items to consider depend largely on the team composition that the opposing team has, and what type of damage the primary damage dealers put out. If the team you are facing is running double hunter, it may be a good idea to pick up a Hide of the Nemean Lion to reflect some of their auto attack damage back, or a Runic Shield in order to slow down their attack speed. In a more standard composition, with a mage in the mid lane, building something like Genji’s Guard or Oni-Hunter’s Garb can help you considerably on your rotations, as it will allow you to take more damage from the mid-lane mage. Keep in mind that, if you build Oni Hunter’s Garb, your cooldowns will not be maxed, as only Genji’s Guard has Cooldown Reduction on it.

Knowing how to build “tanky” is something that required a knowledge of not only the enemy team, but of your own god. Gods like Hercules, Vamana and Sun Wukong, who have a percentage based heal, can justify building items that give large amounts of health, providing they have an extensive knowledge of their character. Items like Mail of Renewal, which also gives part of the cooldown percentage you are missing from Jotunn’s Wrath, Midgardian mail, which has an attack speed reduction that stacks with Runic Shield as well as physical protection, and Gauntlet of Thebes, which provides a 20% increase to healing received, as well as 350 health. Adjusting your build to fit the opposing team is a huge way to change a losing laning phase and turn it into a successful team-fighting phase.

Crowd Control is, and will always be, Crowd Control.



Source: SmiteFire

No matter how far behind the opposing solo laner you get, your Crowd Control will always be useful to a fight, particularly hard CCs like stuns and knock-ups. A well-timed Fearless from Tyr or Ox form from Sun Wukong will always be able to change the flow of a team fight, particularly knock-ups as they do not suffer from diminishing returns, allowing you to chain them without losing their effectiveness. This is not to devalue other forms of CC, such as S un Wukong’s Master’s Will, which gives a 30% slow, or the reduced damage and then stun from Osiris’ Judgement Tether, which can also swing a team fight, giving a boxing advantage to your hunter. Properly utilizing the CC on your god gives you the potential to swing a team fight no matter how far behind you fall.





Conclusion

Every solo laner has had to face the fact that they have lost lane. Losing a tower at the 10-minute point happens to everyone, and abandoning your lane to a degree can have positive effects on the game as a whole, even if you lose your tower first. Securing a kill on your mid laner and helping them get ahead, securing an early gold fury, and swinging a team fight are all valid things to lose your tower for, as in the end SMITE is a team game, and no matter how far ahead the solo laner gets, there are still 4 other players that need to win too. If you falling behind means that you can be of more use later in the game, then a lost lane is well worth it.

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