Farming Your Way to Glorious Victory

 

You are playing solo queue, you have been stuck in silver or gold for months and can’t seem to win consistently enough to climb the ladder into the next tier, you analyse your play style, your picks and mechanics are up to the standard needed, you get kills and you ward really well. However your farming isn’t a real strong point but that shouldn’t be an issue because you get kills and play really well right? Wrong.

This article is going to talk about how improving your ability to last hit can single handedly win you games. I will be using some examples from games I have played, mainly in top lane as this is my main role, however I will also use some examples from games where I have had to fill as well. Having gone through the tourments of Silver and Gold for a solid portion of my League career I spent a long time trying to figure why I was so bad at laning against opponents. I would always aggress early on, zone them out of XP range and get couple of kills here and there. However because my last hits weren’t as high as they should have been in the scenario I was in, the opponent would quickly catch me up and start actually pressuring me.

One of the main things that I have found increasing my win rate in lane is if you focus on farming more than aggression you tend to have a better time, this is usually why most lower level solo queue games have 10-15 minute laning phases. You will notice the more you play, the average player in mid-level silver and a lot of gold players will not be able to adequately harass and last hit efficiently at the same time, meaning you have the luxury of free farming if that is what your champ needs to do, or harass them out of the lane and exploit their desperation farming to try and keep up with you. If you can keep your last hits relatively high while keeping the enemy as out of the lane as you can you will control that lane with no problem, and if your opponent panics (which happens a lot I have found), you will be able to all in them with minion advantage as well as the gold and exp.

The first example I want to talk about is a game with Gnar where I fought against a Yasuo player that was rather aggressive for the whole laning phase; he continually attempted to push me out of exp. range by face checking me. As a result his farm early on really suffered for it, because of this I managed to punish a lot of his aggression with kiting and harass because of Gnar’s Boomerang slow and the Hyper passive meaning he had to keep his distance, I quickly followed up with my own aggression forcing him out of the lane and then I went back to farming. Meanwhile through all of this I am managing to get as many last hits on minions as I can in order to make the most of the situation, this in turn gave me an item advantage and lead to 2 solo kills during the laning phase which essentially won the lane for me. From this example we can tell that the kills didn’t tip the lane into my favour but it was instead the result of good farming, and the added harass was a bonus.

A second example is one where I actually lost the lane again as Gnar, this time against a higher level Ryze player (around mid plat). The lane started out pretty even, however due to lack of jungle pressure on my team I struggled against the Ryze’s ability to lock me down and chunk me for a considerable amount of health. So from this I quickly adjust my play style to focus on safely farming under tower and out of range of my opponent’s crowd control. Though the lane quickly became Ryze’s to control and push as much as he wanted, keeping me there and away from my team during fights he managed to gain a considerable lead against me and because of how strong Ryze was at the time, he became a massive global issue as well. Even though all this was going on, I farmed as hard as I could under tower and took the Gromp camp in jungle whenever it was up to bring my gold deficit back to a reasonable level, and through consistent farming and safe play we managed to take the game to the late game phase and took a series of well-placed fights to win the game.

League of Legends has never been a death match style game which in silver, and sometimes gold, seems to get lost in translation somewhere. Last hitting and playing for the global objectives is far more lucrative to the team as a whole and can nullify any kill advantage a team has with less effort honestly towers, Dragons especially Barons are integral to regaining a lost advantage or snowballing a small one. Keep this in mind and practice your farming and you will see, if not your match win/loss percentage, then at least your laning win/loss percentage increase. So listen to the guides that teach you ways to improve your last hitting or maybe play champions that you find it easier to last hit with, because it will seriously help you improve as a player, both mechanically and with your game knowledge which comes as a natural improvement the more you play.

I hope this little insight into my games, which have taken a massive turn for the positive since I have focused on my last hitting, have helped you gain a little idea of where you need to look to improve your gameplay. Good Luck!