Hello again, Summoners. Although I am gathering up information from both myself and fellow Summoners about each role and it's little quirks, something came up today about Junglers that a Summoner friend of mine wanted me to share here.
"I may not jungle much at all, but I think personally that you should at least have a fundamental knowledge and experience of how each lane works. Top, bot, and mid. Once you have that you'll know which lanes on average would need a gank and when it would be most beneficial You'll also know what those laners should be capable of doing and be able to work with them so they can set the enemy up for the best gank."
Good day Summoners. Sorry about the lack of updates as of late! I've been gathering ideas of what to cover, and this would happen to be one of them; wards and sightstones. These can make or break a game, I've found!
A little note about wards and sightstones - Wards can show champions not masked by any cloaking devices like ability passives or actives. They do not show other wards placed by enemies.
mochibuni:
Sightstones do not reveal stealth, Vision (pink) Wards do. Sightstone is a cost effective item that allows “infinite” sight wards. By “infinite” the Sightstone has “charges,” each charge produces one ward. They can place four wards before the Sightstone runs out of charges. In order to refresh charges, the user needs to return to the Fountain. Users can place up to two wards out a time. If the user places a 3rd ward before the others naturally die, the first ward placed will be removed.
The item is cost effective for roles such as Support where this position often requires the user to buy several wards, and sight wards are 75 gold each. Once you buy a Sightstone, you do not have to pay to use any of the charges or pay for it to refresh.
Ruby Sighstone is the upgraded version of Sightstone that allows three wards out at a time and has five charges.
In terms of ward placements, it’s actually preferable to ward tri-bush and a combination of river wards instead of warding river bush. Ganks often come through tri-bush and over walls.
All can be found and destroyed via Oracle's Elixir.
Anyway, on to some choice areas for map warding!
Light blue areas are the most important areas to ward, Summoners! Your bushes in-lane need warded so you don't waltz into a deadly trap. Warding river bush prevents ganks and easy kills for the enemy jungler. Warding dragon can prevent the enemy team from gaining a gold advantage. And also warding dear Baron around his spawn time (Maybe also around 25:00--30:00) can obviously prevent the enemy team from gaining his buff and wiping the fields with you!
The orange dots are optional but good ideas to ward, just in case the jungler knows of your wards and tries to backdoor you from tower, or if they see you're low and just an ability rush away from being dead.
As for mochibuni's comment, you can ward the bush directly up from the tower (tri-bush), and it may be ideal, but it's all completely up to whatever you feel is necessary!
I didn't mark the buffs, but warding your buffs can show you if the enemy team has slipped into your jungle for a quick power boost.
Well, I tried to keep it short and sweet! If any Summoner has anything to add, please do so! My ask box is always open. Until then, good luck, and have fun!
Hello again, Summoners. Today, I'll be talking about one of the maps that the League has.
Summoner's Rift is a very common map to play on. It pits a team of five against another team of five (Be they actual people or training bots), with three lanes and a vast jungle on each side.
Ah, the notorious three lanes! From top down, there is:
TOP (Top lane, just referred to as Top and normally consists of tanks and/or bruisers.)
MID (Middle lane, again just referred to as Mid and has a wide pool of champions to choose from, mainly APCs.)
BOT (Bottom lane, not to be confused with bot games. Bot almost always has a support and their ADC.)
I'm sorry, dear Summoners, if that seemed to insult your intelligence a bit. Everyone has to start somewhere!
This, unfortunately is prone to change, as the meta always changes when Summoners do something off the wall that might catch on. So bruisers may indeed take over mid and there could be solo bot... It seems silly but hey, it could very well happen.
Apologies for the tangent, Summoners. Now then, onto lanes' roles.
Top, in most typical PvP matches tends to have one champion in lane. At times there could be two, which is also acceptable, but it's not common in later Summoner levels and always happens in bot games. Top is a lane best described as tug-o-war between bodybuilders with barbed wire. Each side will try to pull the other in closer to wreck them and wound them enough so they can't tug as hard.
In better terms, top is a lane in which you stall and hold the other off. It is not a lane in which you should be getting kills every minute or so, but every once in a while in the early game. (Although sometimes the ADC and Solo top love to get in a kill-war on occasion, which is great fun for the side with the kills).
Mid most often has one champion in the lane, much like Solo top. This, Summoners, is League's tea party/playground lane. In early game, it is not unlike a tea party, with the two champions fighting over how many sugar cubes they both get. If one champion gets too greedy, the other will slap them. It repeats until around mid game, where one champions says 'Oh, to hell with this!' and calls the other champions in to wreck the parlor, or attempt to.
In more technical terms, it's much like Solo top's tug-o-war but without the brute force. Mid is a more cautious area because you can be flanked on both sides, not just one. Not only that, most mids aren't as tough as tops, they're far more squishy. If mid's tower goes down early enough and it's late enough in the game, champions will usually try to rush mid to get to the base faster, since mid does have the shortest walking distance.
Bot is where champions go for each other's throats and some nice folks help them sate the blood lust. Supports are too nice to their ADCs... Anywho, this is the pusher lane and a lane in which to feed your champion kills. Typically, if this lane gets an edge, it could quite possibly spell out the rest of the match for each team. This lane requires good synergy between ADC and Support to be successful. I've never seen a good bot lane where the Support and ADC bicker like an old married couple..
'But Archie', you start, 'if there's a champion in top, mid, and two bot.. Where's the fifth player?'
A good question! They're prowling the jungle, killing the creep and gaining buffs to help assist the laners when they need them the most. Jungling is tricky, since essentially both jungles are game for either side. Invades are common to try and throw the other off. It's not seen in bot games, but on occasion in lower level PvP matches. I'll elaborate more on this later, however.
Summoners must always strive to be better than their opponent in laning to try and win. However, good laning doesn't always spell victory. Laning phases always have to come to an end...
Ah, I do believe I've finished my rambling here. I hope this information has helped you in some way, Summoners. Until next time - Good luck, and have fun.
-Archie
Image credit for this post goes to Riot Games Inc.
