Master the League #2: Your First Game

Hello Summoner! If you have the first article in this series, you already know the in and outs of the League of Legends client, and have chosen a champion to delve into your first game with. Picking up right where we left off, today we will be covering the very basics of playing a game on Summoner's Rift!

Loading Into The Game

When you first load into the game, you and 4 teammates will be standing on a platform emblazoned with blue runes. This platform provides regeneration for health and mana, as well as a place to spawn after death. If you look to the north side of the platform, you will a small dwarf-like creature known as the shop-keeper. By right-clicking this man, you gain access to the shop, from which you can buy items.

Depending on what character you are playing, you will need to build different items throughout the game to stay relevant in damage and other important stats. I will not be going into specific builds in today's article, but you should be able to find a beginner 's guide to almost any champion on YouTube that will you give you an idea of what you need to buy.

 

Skills

Shift your gaze down towards the bottom of your screen. You will see your health, mana, and skill bar. If you followed the steps in the previous article in this series, you would have read through the skills of the champion you chose to play before the game started, and as such, will be a bit familiar with what they do. You can put points into these skills either by clicking the "+" icon above the skill, or by holding CTRL and clicking the key the skill is bound to. Every level, you gain the ability to either learn a spell, or rank one up a tier. At level 6, 11, and 16, you have the chance to level up your ultimate skill (natively bound to the "R" key).
 

But when and why should you use your spells? Typically spells that are natively bound to your Q, W, and E keys (we'll call these spells your "normal spells") will be on a shortish cooldown, and can be used to farm, or trade damage with your lane opponent. Depending on the champion, you might want to save your mana by not casting a lot, or the opposite of that. You should save your ultimate (the R key spell) for when you fight with enemy champions, as it is on a rather long cooldown in comparison to your other spells, and you need every advantage you can get when going toe to toe with real players!

The Nexus and Inhibitors

Take a look around your team's base. You will see a very big structure guarded by two towers, and farther out from that, a smaller structure almost identical to the larger one guarded by a single tower at the beginning of every lane, but still inside your base. The larger structure, the Nexus, is what your team needs to guard the most. Whichever team destroys their enemies Nexus first wins the game.

 

The smaller structures are called Inhibitors. When a team destroys an inhibitor, their team starts to spawn significantly stronger minions in that lane, that are very hard to kill. It is safe to say that you do not want the enemy team to do this, and if they do, you will need to spend a lot of time defending that lane until it respawns.

 

Towers

Notice I talked about the towers earlier and that several were placed inside your base. If you take a look at your mini map, you'll see that there are also 6 more outside of your base, 2 in each lane. There is always a steady flow of minions in the groups commonly referred as "waves" coming from your nexus and the enemy's nexus. Killing the enemies wave will push your lane more towards your enemy's tower.

 

If an enemy walks in range of a tower, the tower will start to auto-attack them. Each attack builds in strength on top of the last one, until the attacks are broken by moving out of range. However, the tower will not attack enemy champions if enemy minions are in range to take the damage instead. This is instantly nullified if an enemy champion attacks a champion on your team while he or she is under one of your towers, and vice versa.

Gold, how do you get it?!

Previously in this article, I mentioned going back to the shop to buy items throughout the game to get stronger. But how do you save up enough money for those high priced items? Well, there are several ways. The most basic and important way to save up gold, is to last hit minions.

You only get the gold if you are the person to get the kill for the minion. It may not seem like much to get around 20 gold for last hitting a minion, but once you've practiced a bit, it becomes second nature to not miss any of the minions in a wave. This gold adds up over time significantly. Killing an enemy champion awards a significant amount of gold over a minion kill, but as it is a lot harder and riskier, you should only attempt to kill an enemy champion when you know that you will not be killed in the process, as they will get the same gold rewards if you die. Killing towers awards 150 gold each.

 

Summary

You should now know the basic mechanics of League of Legends, enough so that you will have a huge advantage over anyone your level that is new to the game. Go into your first game with the confidence that you understand how to win, knowing your goals. You could even share of your knowledge in the chat before the game starts if anyone nicely asks for your help!

I will continue to update this series weekly so that you can continue to be ahead of opponents of your level, knowledge and skill-wise. Look next week for a more in depth installment featuring steps to team-fight, where to ward, and what to do throughout the different stages of the game. This has been Theorie, and as always, thanks for reading!