Getting the most vision from your wards

Wards are an incredibly important part of any League of Legends match and knowing where and how to place them can greatly improve your team’s vision and give much more time for them to spot enemies and react to incoming ganks – all of this will help you gain a victory.

While wards are very commonly placed by support, a lot of this guide will be useful to all lanes, even more so during mid-late game where vision can be everything and everyone on a team should be warding to either help defend their base, or assist in keeping safe while pushing lanes and getting towers as well as keep track of map objectives.

First of all however, a lot of people tend to smartcast their wards and while this is preference and completely down to how you’re used to playing, I think that not using smartcast or at least turning on range indicators (like I do) is a lot better in general. Range indicators allow you to hold the key down, see the range/cursor, and then either let the button go to cast or right click to cancel. Turning on range indicators or not smart casting your wards allow you to very easily see whether you’re about to place your ward in a brush or not.

As you can see, using this method to place wards shows that when the cursor is green your ward will fall into the brush, when blue it will not. This is very useful for simply getting accurate positions of wards as in some cases like above it may not be totally obvious if your ward would land inside the brush or not. This method is almost as fast as fully smartcasting wards so there isn't much harm in at least trying this method of placing wards.

Being able to aim your ward for a spot right on the very edge of brush can often give you much, much better vision in an area, for basically no additional work and minimal extra time spent warding. Below is a great example where just a slight position adjustment will reveal a much bigger area – giving your team more time to react to enemy movement and may help steal a crucial blue bluff.

In the images you can see only a slight change in position to the very edge of a brush can reveal a lot more area and placing a ward there really does not take much more work or time, compared to the extra vision it can gain in certain situations it really is a fairly simple yet instantly effective thing to remember.

Another spot is the “banana” brush near mid. This is an important ward spot as it can give the midlaner around 1-2 seconds more reaction time if warded correctly.
Yet again the vision gained by moving a ward just a tiny bit reveals a little more area which may not seem like an incredible difference however it is enough to help keep track of movement and possibly spot incoming ganks, once again it is almost a free amount of extra vision just by adjusting a ward slightly.

There are spots not involving brushes that can dramatically alter the amount of vision given too, one very important spot is both dragon and baron pits. While there are a couple of common ways to ward dragon the one below is definitely my favorite for how simple it is yet the balanced area of vision gained. 

This is a great ward to know as moving it from the pit entrance to just a little up in river towards mid reveals a lot more, like the path to blue as well as generally more river while still revealing and showing dragon. This extra vision once again will give everyone more time to react to enemy champions moving through river. Keeping in mind how both dragon and baron are very important map objectives this ward is a very great thing to keep in mind, any extra bonus in vision might just give you enough of an edge to outplay your enemy.

Simply taking a second or so to think about where you are placing a ward can help to sway a game entirely, I hope this guide has made you think a little, I’m sure there are a lot of ward locations that I’ve yet to find. I may make a second, updated version of this guide later if I discover any more locations like this that I see important enough, however this trick basically works on any brush - just by placing a ward right on the edge you can gain extra vision and I hope my little guide has shown you how it can be used and you start to do it in your own games too.