By whalemuffin

whalemuffin

The Art of Controlling Your Creep Wave

Fri 29th Jun 2012 - 4:17pm Category: League of Legends

The ability to farm your minion wave is one of the essential tools in macromanagement towards maximizing your gold income. However, your ability to farm correlates with an understanding on how to control your minion wave. Control your minion wave and you will outfarm your opposition. Outfarm your opposition and essentially you will generate higher gold income than your opponent which in return helps your team be more ahead in mid-game heading into late-game. Here are a few tips to help maximize your creep score to help snowball and ultimately allow you to carry your team towards victory.

 

1) Freezing your lane

Freezing your lane is very essential throughout laning phase. You want to minimize attacking the minions and only attack them to last hit. By constantly attacking the minions, it drastically lowers their health overall compared to your minion wave's, ultimately causing you to push your minion wave forward. By doing so it would make your lane very prone to ganks from the jungler and forces you to overextend just to farm. By only attacking the minions to last hit, it "freezes the lane" causing your minions and the opposing team's minions to die at an equal rate which would allow you to farm closer to your tower and to safety.

If for any reason your lane opposition starts pushing lane, do not worry. Allow them to push their minion wave closer to your tower which would ultimately force them to be overextended to farm which would setup your jungler to be able to gank your lane efficiently. However, if the opposing minion wave starts to push towards your tower, don't worry. Farming under tower is very effective and leaves you almost compeltely safe from any threats.

Losing your lane? Freeze it. Freezing your lane allows you to play passively and refrains you from feeding your lane opposition. It also allows you to continuously farm and minimizes the gap of you being killed from your lane opposition.

 

2) Pushing your lane

Although freezing your lane is important, it's much more important to understand when it's time to push your lane forward and try to push your lane and destroy objectives such as the enemies' tower. Your main priority is to make sure that while you are pushing your lane forward, you meet little opposition and minimize opportunities to get ganked or die.

If you are winning your lane and your lane opposition recalls, now is a crucial time to push your lane forward towards the enemy tower. In doing so, not only are you damaging the tower in hopes of destroying it, you are also having the tower attack your minion wave, making the lane opposition lose crucial farm. Should your lane opposition recall and you are now at their tower, you should allow your minion wave to attack tower while you yourself recall. This would allow you to regenerate any missing health or mana as well as allowing you to shop and buy items to make you stronger.

It is also crucial that you push your lane forward when you know that your lane opposition is missing in action to gank other lanes, that you understand that you should either catch them outside of lane in the jungle, or to push your lane forward towards their tower. It ultimately depends on the champion that you are playing on whether or not you should attempt to leave lane and try to encounter them in jungle or to continue pushing. Many champions are extremely well at pushing their lane forward, causing the lane opposition to lose crucial farm and may even allow you to destroy the enemy turret. Such champions include, but are not limited to

  - Morgana

  - Mordekaiser

  - Jarvan IV

  - Graves

  - Karthus

  - Anivia

These champions are extremely well at punishing the lane opposition should they go missing and easily allows them to push their minion wave forward towards the enemy tower. Many champions that have great kits for pushing minion waves are those that typically have AoE spells such as Morgana's tormented soil and Karthus' defile.

                                                                

Understanding the concept of controlling your minion waves can help your individual performance in a game. With high creep score and gold income, it will help your champion to snowball into late game, and become a high threat to the enemy team. It will help be able to destroy objectives and allow you to win your lane safely with minimal deaths or danger.

Please register or login to post comments