So as we all know, League of Legends is hard, and the game provides you with tactical options the entire way through. Some of them are bad, but most of them are pretty debatable. What’s fun is that most of that debatability disappears when you know exactly what your team is doing. In solo queue, this is called map awareness. In team play, this is called communication. And if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, this shouldn’t be news, this should just be summary, characterizing the question I’m about to ask: What does a shot-caller do?
Fairly obviously, a shot-caller defines the direction that the team will take, accordingly deeming certain tactical options optimal, and others awful, but piling this responsibility on one person in your team is liable to make you lose. As it turns out, making every call in a game is a huge fucking job, and there are very few people with the map awareness or multitasking skills needed to pull it off. Hence the predictable twist: There should be more than one shot-caller. Precisely, there should be three.
The Laning Phase Shot Caller
It’s you. Well, not really, but in the laning phase, where everyone is operating in their own discrete units, you are deciding worth for most of your own options. There are only four places where team play is relevant and the first one (bot lane dynamics) doesn’t count. The remaining three are ganks, invasions, and objectives, which not coincidentally all involve the jungler. Guess who should be calling the shots for those?
Once the laning phase is done and there is no longer a “default” for players to go back to, you get left with a pile of tasks that need to get done and no one with the explicit responsibility to do them (minion management is a great example here). The general’s first job is to assign these tasks to the team, to tell the mage to clear top while the rest of the team groups for dragon, to identify the areas of the map that need to be warded in a minute, etc. When the map can be managed in a timely and efficient manner, the general’s team can then be ready to contest objectives as they come up, not to mention that they are engineering opportunities for pushing towers later.
The general’s second job is to define the team’s strength. From personal experience, bad communication as a teamfight is being initiated (by either side) is a good way to lose games, even when you’re ahead, but when a Thresh hook lands, it’s pretty difficult to decide whether to cut losses and run, or dive right in. Which is why the general should decide before this ever happens. What I recommend is a rating according to the following scale:
2: Your team is way ahead, and if you play your cards right, you could dive the enemy team 5v5 under their turret.
1: You are ahead, and you would win a teamfight on open ground, but they can still use objectives like turrets or Baron to beat you.
0: As far as you can tell, you’re even. You don’t necessarily want to fight; you’re not afraid of them, but you’re better served by focusing on the map. It may not be the laning phase, but you mise well act like it. Have clumps of 3-4 people at objectives where they are not until you get ahead.
-1: You’re a little behind, and you don’t want to risk a fight. Focus on objectives and get what ward control you can on the map. You are now afraid of the enemy team, and you should fight them only if you outnumber them by at least 2 or you have a major tactical advantage.
-2: Don’t fight. You can’t win. This is now a game of picks and backdooring, so keep the ward coverage up.
Pick a rating, make sure your team knows it and knows when it changes. Your team will start dying much less for stupid reasons.
Lastly, note that unlike the other two shot callers, the general can be any member of the team, as long as they have decent map awareness.
The last place where the team needs cohesive communication is in the heat of battle. God that was dramatic. You need someone to call targets and tasks in teamfights. Alliterative, but better. The job is fairly simple: Call the target, usually the person most out of position, and call peels. The target caller should probably not be a carry role, since their highest priority is to stay alive, which tends to separate them from the center of the action. I recommend the tank or the support, but it should always be defined before the game starts.
Now of course, shot calling isn’t the only thing that can go wrong in a game; everyone needs their mechanics in order, they need to know how to lane and how to teamfight, but having a dedicated shot caller will tighten the team game in a huge way, and it will mean getting the most out of your teammates mechanical skill.
