Introduction

Hello again wonderful winners! This newest installment will make sure you never lose your lane again. And that's not even the best part! It's my great pleasure to announce that from this week onwards, your favourite guide to kicking ass in League of Legends comes with high quality video material! None other than the fantastic Matt 'WhatTheMoose' McDermott will be working in tandem with me to bring alive the theory contained in Playing to Win.Furthermore, the usual walls of text will be split up into different pages for your convenience. For easy navigation and quick look-ups, each page will start with an index just like the one at the top of this page!In the Lulu and Hecarim patches, games tend to snowball pretty hard. A direct consequence of this is that the laning phase has a very large influence on the outcome of the rest of the game. Flat rather than scaling stat bonuses are very dominant, Doran is making a fortune selling rings and blades, and everyone is down at the Bellagio grinding out the gold without risking too much. AP and AD carries typically optimize their pre-game builds to deal more damage to minions than to Champions, while mitigating as much damage as possible from the latter. Defensive Summoner Spells triumph over aggressive ones. I'm looking straight at you flat AD and flat MR runes. You know you're guilty Summoner Heal.Riot Games is not exactly happy with this situation, so they decided to take affirmative action by readjusting the value of numerous runes and changing the Champion kill experience system. However, these changes will go only part of the way towards decreasing the amount of turtling going on in lanes. So, the various ways to abuse the laning phase that I'm about to show you are still quite relevant in the latest patch. Enjoy.