The Laning Phase is an extremely important part of League of Legends as you all know, as it will determine how ahead or behind you will be in the latter half of the game! Because of this, it is important to try and always win your lane and to understand how to not fall behind. In this guide, we will discuss what the major things to be focusing on are when getting into the Laning Phase of the game! Without further ado, let’s get into the first tip!





The Right Runes For The Coming Game

The first key tip to always winning lane is to make sure that you have the most optimized Runes for your Champion and the coming match-up! For the most part, your Runes for your specific Champions will not change much, but the small changes to the pages, like Rune Stats, will have more of an effect than you might initially think.

If your matched against an AD Assassin, take the two Armor Stats rather than always going for damage if you play aggressive Champions. The point here is to take the defensive stats that you should give you the edge you will need in lane!

Always taking damage is not the best idea, as if you are not going to be able to do damage if you are not alive to deal it. Now that you have your Runes in order, it is time to take to the Rift and learn what to do in game to win lane!





Farm

The main thing to focus on in lane is Farming. Trading is important and we will get to that next, but to outfarm your opponent is to have more gold than your opponent allowing you to get ahead to trade more effectively!

Many people below Platinum elo focus much more on fighting than they do on farming and this does not pay off as much as farming does (unless there is a player with a Bounty). Keep in mind that 18 CS is worth 315 gold (assuming half are Caster Minions and half are Melee Minions), and this value is increased substantially with Siege Minions!

Now that you know the value of farming, you can use this to gain a hefty edge on your opponents! People will often focus on farming a bit more heavily in the early stages of the game and lane, but waves are worth more later in the game and lane!

With this knowledge you should want to focus on farm throughout the whole lane and game. People will often underestimate how fed someone can get on farming alone. Keep in mind, if you back with an 18 CS lead on your opponent and you are even in kills, you know that you actually have an extra kill’s worth of gold on your opponent! Use this gold for some extra items, and now that you have this lead over your enemy, you can start trading more efficiently and effectively with them.





Trade Effectively

Trading effectively is an important key to always winning your lane. This does not mean that you always have to all-in your enemy when you are looking to trade. Fighting to the death is not trading. Trading is going in to get some poke on the enemy and likely taking some damage from them as well! Continually winning trades will come from more than just having a gold advantage from farming; however, it helps a lot. But more than just the gold lead you will have from farming, keeping track of your opponent’s CDs is also important.

By knowing what abilities your opponent has up, you can prepare to trade with them when certain abilities or Summoner Spells are down. This can depend on the match-up, as some Champions just have really low CDs across the board. However, an example could be you fighting a Zed in the Mid Lane.

If you see him use his W Shadow early, you know it is down for about 20 seconds. A lot can happen in this time. You can use this to your advantage to trade with him as you know that his main escape is now on CD. This is an example of tracking someone’s CDs and using it to your advantage!

This can be referred to as your opportunity or Trade Window, as after you see your enemy use an important ability that has a decent length CD you now have a small window to trade with them at a much lower risk!

Capitalize on Enemy Mistakes

This tip kind of goes hand in hand with the previous tip but focuses more on taking advantage of your opponent’s misplays. The way this connects with the previous tips can be looking at it in the way of when you poke your enemy down and they decide to stay and greed for farm. This is an example of a misplay that can end up with you getting a kill on a greeding enemy setting them further behind than if they were to just Recall. To get a better understanding of when your enemies are misplaying, it can be useful to watch replays and try to pay close attention to the situations where either you misplayed or where the enemy misplayed and you could have capitalized on it!

Many of the mistakes you will notice in lower elo will be mispositioning. This can be capitalized on heavily and can often result in you picking up a kill if you know what to look for or are able to bait them into mispositioning. Common mispositioning in lane will consist of your opponent overextending while they try to farm up. You can get the enemy to do this by allowing your enemy to push the wave to the point just before your Turret and then freezing the wave. This will force your opponent to have to overextend to even get experience, let alone farm.

However, knowing this is not enough. You must learn to not only freeze waves but also how to break a freeze so that you do not fall victim to what you just learned. To break a freeze is quite simple; just shove the wave into the enemy Turret.

This is easier said than done, as this can be quite risky, seeing that you will have to likely overextend to do so (depending on the Champion that you are playing). You will not want to overextend to break a freeze unless you know where the enemy Jungler is so that you do not die to an enemy gank.





Ward Effectively

Warding and vision control are key elements to League of Legends that many players do not often take full advantage of. To ward effectively is to do more than just ward the nearest River or Tri-Brush near you. Many people will often just ward the nearest spot they might be ganked from by the enemy Jungler.

This is not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but you can get much more out of your wards! If you have Lane Pressure, this is a great time to try to get some deep wards in the enemy Jungle early so that you can keep track of the Jungler even when you are not getting ganked!

This is important for obvious reasons, as you can do a lot with the information that these wards will provide. You can keep track of enemy Jungle timers and even try to contest enemy buffs with your Jungler or solo, if you are far enough ahead already!

This will allow you to snowball even more in your lane while at the same time setting back another player on the enemy team! Warding effectively and focusing on your map between farming and trading with your lane opponent will give you much more of an edge than you may initially think, and it is important to use every possible edge you can to your advantage!

With the information you gather with the vision you have, you will also be able to roam more efficiently and effectively, as there will be times you need to know when not to roam or when to follow your Lane opponent.





Knowing When to Roam

Roaming is very important to winning Lane as you can not only help yourself to snowball, but to also assist your teammates in getting ahead in their lanes as well! However, there are times when roaming is not the most opportune decision. This tip is to help you decide when you should roam and when you should remain in Lane gaining farm as well as pushing Lane to deny your opponent farm. If you are unable to fight your Lane opponent, then following their roam will likely yield little benefit.

Now, if you were to remain in lane and farm and maybe get some Turret Plating, then you would benefit a lot more than if you were to follow the roam. You would of course want to alert your team to the fact that your lane opponent is roaming and that they should watch out for a gank from them, but then it is up to them to avoid the gank.

Unless you know you can counter their roam, it is likely not worth it to follow them, and you will benefit more from catching up by shoving the minion wave into their Turret. Now, if you have a lead on your opponent, then shoving them under their Turret and then roaming can be a great decision.

You can start to apply pressure across the map while furthering your lead allowing you to return to lane even stronger than you were. This gives you more of an edge against your lane opponent allowing you to more effectively fight them and take them down allowing you to win lane. But there is more to winning a lane than just killing your lane opponent. You must also focus objectives.

Early Objective Focus

It is possible to win Lane while just going 0/0/0. Granted, this is not very common, but it is better than losing the lane. By outfarming your opponents and forcing down their tower while denying them kills you can gain a very substantial lead over them!

Focusing early objectives, like Turrets, is extremely important and is a key component to winning Lane every time. If you can focus the enemy Turret for some early Turret Plating you will be able to get a significant gold lead against your opponent.

Keep in mind, a solo Turret Plate is worth 160 gold and it is very possible to secure two Plates at a time if your opponent is roaming or just recalled. This helps you to snowball and gain a lead, so long as you do not allow the enemy to get solo Plates in return!

Keep in mind that if you have a lead, you can also look to get some early Dragons or Rift Herald if you have enough pressure! These can be comeback mechanics for the enemy team. Don’t let them be. Use your pressure to get these early and powerful objectives to secure the lead you have or to force yourself into the lead if you are not already.

Taking these objectives can help you get ahead in your lane and dominate the game! Keep in mind that the Rift Herald is an extremely powerful objective that will de-spawn at 19:45 (19:55 if in combat) into the game and should be secured before then, and it spawns at 10:00 so be on the lookout for this objective to win your Lane!





Know Your Champion Front and Back

This tip kind of seems like it should always go without saying… but it needs to be said. Do not first time Champions in Ranked. If you want to win lane, you need to know your Champion! Practice your Champion before taking them into a Ranked game and understand their CDs and synergies, strengths and weaknesses, and how to play to their advantages!

You can get a feel for their kit in the Practice Tool before taking them into a Normal Game if you would like. You will be able to see what items work best with them and in what situations you might want to build certain items.

Once you get a strong feel for your Champion, you can start taking them into Ranked to dominate your lane! But knowing your Champion is not always enough! You need to know the Champion you are facing as well, which brings up to our next tip!





Understand Match Ups

Before getting into your game, if you do not know the Champion you are facing all that well look them up and see what their kit does. This makes it easier to play around them and capitalize on their mistakes. By looking at their abilities you can also see the CDs on their abilities, so you will be better informed on when to trade with them as well!

If you know your Champion well and the enemy Champion well, then you will understand if the coming lane will be easy, neutral, or hard. This will determine how to best approach the lane, and whether you will need to play safe or maybe go on the aggressive.

When you know the match-ups, you will also know how to build around the enemy as well, which is important as certain items might straight up just counter the enemy Champion that you are playing against!





Build Accordingly [Don't Auto-Pilot Your Builds]

Each game you load into is different, and as a result, it should not be a surprise that your builds will vary each game as well! Each Champion you play will have core items that you really should build all the time, but there are other items that you should build after that as well depending on the game!

For example, if you are an AP Mage playing against a Zed, maybe you normally build Luden’s Echo first every game, but since you are playing against Zed, this would not be the best choice. Zhonya’s Hourglass would be a better first item, as the active on the item counters Zed’s Ultimate completely!

Maybe the team has massive amounts of CC and you normally always build Berserker’s Greaves in the Bot Lane, change it up and get Mercury’s Treads that game instead! It would benefit you more to have CC reduction than it would to have that extra attack speed!

These are just two of many examples of when your build should be adjusted according to the game you are playing. Keep in mind that you will still want to build your core items, but you will have to prioritize your build based on the game.

Maybe you are super ahead and you really do not need to build as accordingly and you can just build items that allow you to hyper-carry! But this is not always going to be the case, and if you want to win the Lane you are matched against, then you will have to build the items that are best against your opponent!

Hopefully these 10 Tips are able to assist you in winning Lanes and ultimately your games! Take these tips into your next games and see how they work out for you, and hopefully you will start consistently winning your Lanes! Good Luck in your coming games Summoner’s and we hope to see you out there on Summoner’s Rift!

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