Contents

1. Introduction

"Every second that you are not getting gold and experience, you lower your chances of winning."

2. Minions: How I learned to stop worrying and love the gold.

"It’s perfectly possible to destroy the enemy Nexus without killing a single enemy champion."

3. Fragging: Under the hood of ownage.

4. Objectives: Can my Baron ride your Dragon?

5. Conclusions

"League of Legends is a game you win with your brain rather than your fingers!"

6. Sources

1. Introduction2. Minions: How I learned to stop worrying and love the gold.3. Fragging: Under the hood of ownage.4. Objectives: Can my Baron ride your Dragon?5. Conclusion6. SourcesLegendary League of Legends and Counter Logic Gaming star,George "HotshotGG" Georgallidis provided a quote that got me thinking about the optimal way to play League of Legends.Let's investigate the mechanics behind the logic and find out in more detail, how dependent earning continuous gold and experience affects your success likelihood. Let's analyse what we actually really know about the mechanics of League of Legends, and what tangibly will give one team an advantage and ultimately success.For the majority, League of Legends will be a game that is easy to pick up - that many will take to grinding their way up the solo queue day in day out. You probably read guides on the internet, you'll most definitely follow the so called ' meta ' but let's lose all preconceptions and start from the basis.Let's learn some of the mechanics behind the game that will permanently increase your changes of winning every game. Better yet, once you have the competitive mindset and logic down, you can apply it to any game - but enough with the intro, let's get down to the figures.Lets start this section with another fact:This is the main reason why competitive players play “safe”. Most pro-gamers naturally recognize the fact that in League of Legends the optimal location is near minions, and the optimal occupation is grabbing their gold. Exceptions to this are secondary objectives such as dragon and baron. Let's find out what they know, as we uncover the logic and crunch the numbers. This spreadsheet provides an overview of the bounty available through laning and last hitting up to twenty minutes. A match of LoL typically transitions from early game to mid game around this time, and objectives take a more prominent role.A comparison between the different types reveals that by prioritizing melee minion last hits over caster minion last hits, more gold will be accumulated.Even though both types gain value at an equal pace, namely point five gold per minion upgrade cycle, melee minions start off with a higher bounty, 22 gold. Caster minions trail behind with an initial value of only sixteen gold.Siege minions are uncommon and more valuable still: 27 gold. They also gain value at a higher rate, one gold per minion upgrade cycle. This makes them the most desirable targets.Players that achieve a perfect creepscore will accumulate close to 5000 gold, enough to buy a Trinity Force and then some.Soaking up all lane experience for twenty minutes also rewards 14000 experience points in a solo lane, nearly enough to hit champion level fifteen.Duo lanes receive 55%, landing them 7500 experience, sufficient for champion level 11. Observe that this is quite the bounty for simply sitting in a lane and pruning minions for their gold and experience.That covers last hitting, yet how do other methods of increasing strength compare? Let's have a look.When investigating the kill and assist system employed by League of Legends, it becomes clear that scoring a champion kill initially rewards 300 gold.If a champion is killed, this value will decrease by 9% for the first death, and then by 21% for each subsequent death, with a bottom cap of 52 gold.When a champion on a dying streak scores a kill, the value is reset to 300 gold.Conversely, when a champion begins scoring kills, the value for killing them increases by 10% per kill, up to a maximum of 500 gold. The table below provides a complete overview.The killer always receives full gold bounty. Additionally, if one or more champions score an assist, a pot is made with gold equal to 58.33% of the kill bounty. If the victim was on a killing spree, 70% of the bonus gold (i.e. any value above 300) will also go into the assist pot. This pot is evenly distributed among all participants.For example, let’s imagine Leblanc laning versus Cassiopeia mid.Leblanc is godlike (worth 500g), and Cassiopeia calls upon Rammus for help. Rammus and Cassiopeia slam-dunk Leblanc using puncturing taunt and petrifying gaze, and score the kill. Cassiopeia is the killer, and receives full kill bounty for 500g. Rammus got the assist, and will gain 58.33% of the standard 300 gold (175 gold), plus 70% of the 200 bonus gold (140 gold), for a total of 315 gold.This clearly underlines how powerful assists are in League of Legends.A different example further elaborates this point.Blue team is laning Tristana and Sona bottom lane. Purple team is laning Sivir and Taric there. The game is uneventful until minute three, when Taric leaves the bottom lane to ward. Tristana and Sona immediately engage on Sivir. However, Sivir micros very well and gets the first blood on Sona for 400 gold.Tristana then finishes off Sivir and gains 330 gold for killing her. Sona gets the assist and receives 58.33% of the 300 gold bounty (175 gold), plus 70% of the 30 bonus gold (21 gold), for a total of 196 gold. At this point Sivir is feeling pretty good about scoring first blood in a two versus one situation, but she doesn’t realize that the blue team gained a total of 496 gold, besting her first blood bounty by 96 gold.While it’s possible to argue that Sivir still made more gold than Tristana, Sivir is dead. Tristana is not, and is likely to have a nice stack of health left, as Sivir focused her damage output on Sona. This allows Tristana to do two very important things. Firstly, Tristana can happily farm away, and a quick glance at the CS chart reveals that she can gain 140 gold and close to 300 experience in the next minute.Secondly, she can push her minion wave into the enemy tower. What this accomplishes is forcing the purple tower to kill off all blue minions, while Sivir is dead or making her way from the fountain to her lane and unable to benefit from their deaths.Even very early in the game, this puts a serious gap between both teams, as Tristana effectively gains xp/gold, where Sivir effectively loses.It’s highly probable that the purple bottom lane will be forced to play passively and shun fights from this point on, simply because one small mistake was made. This is without even considering the experience being traded because of champion kills.League of Legends utilizes a system where a champion kill is worth experience equal to 75% of the experience required to go from the dying champion’s current level, to the next level. So basically, when a level seven champion is slain, the killer is rewarded 75% of the experience needed to go from level seven to level eight. The experience is evenly divided among everyone that participated in the kill. With this in mind, let’s revisit the Tristana versus Sivir scenario.At three minutes into the game, the maximum experience gained is 884. Duo lanes get 55% of this amount, good for 486 experience. So, everyone in the bottom lane is at champion level two. Sivir gets the first kill, receiving 75% of the amount of experience needed to go from level two to level three, which is 292 experience. Sivir now has a total of 778 experience, enough to hit level three.Tristana then blows up the level three Sivir, granting her 375 experience (which equals 75% of the experience needed to go from level three to level four).She splits that experience with Sona, so they each receive 188 experience. Both Tristana and Sona are now level three. At this point Sivir is ahead of Tristana by about a hundred experience, however, we previously saw that in a single minute of farming, Tristana will catch up to Sivir, and even surpass her by about 200 experience.Since minions become more valuable and death timers increase as the game progresses, dying becomes even worse in terms of experience and gold lost.Kill rewards however, stay static throughout the entire game. This means that as the game progresses, the main consequence of killing an enemy shifts away from accruing extra gold and experience for personal benefit, and more towards denying the victim gold and experience. Another implication is that fewer and fewer minion last hits are required to collect an amount of gold equal to a champion kill.At the start of the game, a champion kill (barring first blood) is valued at almost sixteen minion kills (The average gold for a minion is nineteen at the start of the game). After the three minute mark, this drops to fifteen minions.Nine minute mark, fourteen. At the 21st minute, a kill is only worth twelve minions, or two minion waves. This relationship keeps growing inversely as the game progresses.To keep up with last hitting simply by scoring frags, one would need to kill an enemy champion worth 300 gold or more every 90 seconds. Some quick math establishes that this is flat out impossible in a competitive environment, making last hitting the superior choice. Once midgame starts, scoring kills also grants your team an advantage when it comes to securing objectives, simply because a dead champion is unable to contest them.Speaking of objectives, let’s have a closer look at the Dragon, and Baron Nashor.The Dragon spawns two minutes thirty seconds into the game, and respawns six minutes after being slain. It rewards 190 gold globally to the team that kills it. The total gold award is 950 gold, plus 25 gold for the person that delivers the last hit. As of patch v1.0.0.107, it no longer rewards any global experience (down from 200). Champions that are in range receive a negligible amount of experience for killing it.The Dragon is valued at about two champion kills (300 gold from each kill plus 175 gold per assist) throughout the game. Looking at this data, we can firmly state that a jungler sacrifising himself to smite-steal the dragon for his team is always worth it. The enemy team will receive a maximum (not accounting for killstreaks) of 300 gold (for the last hit) plus 175 gold (from assists), for a maximum of 475 gold, whereas the smite steal will yield 975 gold. Something to consider next time you're contesting a Dragon.Because its reward is static, just like champion kills, the value of taking Dragon decreases when compared to last hitting minions as the game progresses, again, just like champion kills. One step up from the Dragon is Baron Nashor.Baron Nashor spawns fifteen minutes into the game, and respawns seven minutes after perishing. Baronslayers are granted 300 gold and 900 experience per player. The reward is global equals to 1500 gold and 4500 experience for the entire team.Looking at the chart reveals that this equals to fifteen minion last hits for every player when Baron first spawns, and that this number goes down as the game progresses, because the reward for Baron is of course static.In terms of champion kills, Baron is typically valued at four kills (account for assists and experience). So if a team slays baron, but then ends up getting aced by the enemy team, it is in fact behind. Champions that are alive when Nashor dies will also receive the buff "Exalted with Baron Nashor", providing massive health and mana regeneration, as well as increased ability power and attack damage. The buff expires after four minutes or on champion death, whichever comes first.A great way to get exact timing on Baron when the enemy team has killed him, is watching closely when the enemy team loses their buff, and adding three minutes to the game time when it happens. It goes without saying that ending Nashors life is the number two objective throughout the entire game, second only to destroying the enemy Nexus. Word has it, being exalted with the former vastly facilitates the latter. When push comes to shove, contesting Baron Nashor will always be extremely risky.Unearthing the details has proven that killing champions and securing objectives in League of Legends is high risk, high reward, and very high loss when things go wrong. The latter was clearly demonstrated at IEM Hannover, where multiple playoff teams threw won games out of the window because they were too hasty in their attempts to take down Baron and finish.That's why a safe play style focused on safely farming and quickly completing objectives at the right time, is highly recommended for competitive play.In doing so, players can build up their power levels without risking hardly anything.Be sure to join me next week for the second installment in this series, and find out exactly how to build a methodological 'play to win' style of play from the ground up!