Guide - The biggest mistake in mid ranks

Mid ranks (silver to emerald) make this mistake constantly, and it’s egregious. There is no wave control below plat. None. It almost never exists.

You can not consistently win lane without wave control, primarily the part that people refer to as “freezing” or “pulling the wave”. It’s so egregious that in my experience, most people below plat can’t even reliably win a 2v1 lane. I have hundreds of games experimenting with various 2v1 lanes, and they come down to mental more often than they come down to player skill or which lane has more people.

This is a waste of your support.

Junglers are inevitably tied to jungle camps and are overworked as it is. No matter how successful you are as a jungler, you really need to go back to farming camps throughout most of the game.

Laners are tied to waves every thirty seconds, often in more than one lane (due to the high number of deaths in solo queue).

Supports have the most freedom in the game, and they’re horribly underused in most ranks. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, the largest of which is lack of wave control, especially in bot lane.

Part of this, I suspect, is just the mmr system. If a bot lane properly understands wave control, and is consistently able to win lane, they won’t be in mid ranks for long. This is more complicated in bot lane than solo lanes, because it’s almost guaranteed that one of the two people in bot lane won’t understand how to freeze a wave.

The other issue is that people are so used to a standard way to play that one of your teammates is likely to severely tilt if you leave bot lane for too long. Apparently there’s one way a support is supposed to play the game, and if you don’t do that someone will throw their own game in order to “teach you a lesson”. In a way this is a kind of a nice filter. When I’m playing with chill people, we tend to win much more often. When I’m playing with spiteful, inflexible people, well, they filter themselves into lower ranks.

But I digress, and I’ll try to save some of these topics for other articles. Let’s get back to wave control in regards to bot lane.

There are many reasons to push the wave. Getting level 2 first can be important. Maybe you want to get in a free recall. Sometimes you want to help your jungler. Other times your wave is inevitably pushing, and you want it to reset more quickly instead of a slow push. Maybe they just have too much of a minion advantage and you need to trim the wave and/or prevent a crash. Your opponents could have much better wave clear, and you have to do what you can to try to keep the wave where you want it.

But when you don’t have one of these reasons you probably shouldn’t be pushing the wave. In fact, you should probably do your best to maintain a slight minion imbalance in favor of the enemy wave, in other words “pulling the wave”. This is your time to win the lane consistently. With your minions dying faster than the enemy minions, the enemy is going to be under more pressure to CS. This gives you more opportunities to harass (especially your support), and allows you to keep relatively safe from ganks. If you have an advantage when doing this, it’s likely that this is the time you can prevent your opponents from getting CS and maybe even XP.

People think winning bot lane looks like having a health advantage while plinking away at the enemy turret. Eventually the jungler and/or mid laner shows up, and you have to be lucky to avoid the gank. Or otherwise the enemy might just get to stall out the next 6 minutes of the game farming and scaling at their turret while absorbing your slow pressure, and maybe losing a plate or two.

This is a terrible waste.

The vast majority of the time when you’re in that “winning lane” situation, you can be winning harder by pulling the wave. Instead of using that advantage to sit under the enemy turret, use it to get yourself a normal amount of resources while completely denying the enemy of any resources at all. It’s actually possible to effectively delete a lane of resources from the map for your enemies for periods of time.

Some tips to accomplish this:

Keep in mind that if the minions are equal but they’re meeting closer to one side than the other, than that side is pushing. The closer, second wave of minions will start doing damage first.

Not all last hits are equal. If your AA does 90 damage, hitting the minion at 20 health pushes the wave less than hitting the minion at 80 health. Additionally, you can wait until caster minions have attacks in the air in order to effectively give the enemy minion additional health. If you watch the pros, they do this consistently.

Mana is a relevant resource in bot laning. If your opponents are in a situation where they’re using an ability every time they want to collect a CS, that shouldn’t last long.

10 CS is worth more than a turret plate. A level advantage is generally worth more than a turret plate. The kills you’ll get when the enemy is desperate to farm are worth more than a turret plate and get you turret plates.

A large part of the game is forcing the enemies to fight in locations where you have an advantage, and usually that isn’t under their turret.

What winning bot lane looks like to the utterly deranged:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/50d4180b-7783-4105-8113-8fff1f45f71f.webp

They have played us for absolute fools.