This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while but just haven’t quite had the words or experience to force me to do so. I finally had that moment though, so here’s the post.

League of Legends is a unique game in a lot of ways. While most competitive games try to level the playing field as much as possible, games like LoL reward players who get kills and penalize those who die, creating a snowball situation that can heavily favor those who play well in the early game. I’ve been a part of countless games in a which what appears to be a better picked or much more skilled team loses because of mistakes in the early game. I know, it sounds like a “duh” kind of situation, but I think I have a decent way of describing the situation for newer players to understand.

There are a lot of factors that affect the outcome of a fight, not the least of which is farm. If you play your cards right early, though, you can make the late game much more agreeable.

Here’s your situation: early game your damage is limited by both your spell rank and your mana/energy/cooldowns. As the game progresses, your damage is capped only by your cooldowns in most situations. Because of this, you need to pick your targets wisely in early fights. Choose targets with low health over higher health, even if they may be significantly more difficult to kill when you account for escape skills. When you blow your entire damage pool and your target lives you’re in a very bad position early game. If that target saved you a little love, they will put you in a hole.

The issue here is that the tankier toons, even if they’re the closest target, will only get tankier as the game goes on. If you miss the kill on them early game, they probably do enough damage to kill you. If you miss the kill on them late game, there isn’t much they can do unless they are a toon with a lot of CC. It’s crucial to keep extra gold away from the tanks as much as possible in the early game. Try to focus on ganks you know you can get early, and it will make your life late game so much easier.

The two friends that got me interested in League of Legends weren’t Dota players. We had known each other through mutual friends and eventually through WoW and it was just something they decided to pick up. Over the past month or so we’ve been playing together more often, but it was just the other night that one had his epiphany, that moment where you realize something about the game you’ve been trying to put into words for days, even weeks: stages.

We had talked before about the importance of managing what most consider the three stages of the game: early, mid, and late. That was easy enough. The revelation had more to do with individual heroes. If you’re new to the game you may be struggling with the difference between characters – some can gank early, some take a while to farm up, some take a lot of work to be viable at every stage of the game. It’s a simple thing to conceptualize but much more difficult to put into practice.

Consider a toon like Nunu. As far as difficulty, he’s pretty low on the scale. You run in, you snowball, you hit a few times, you snowball again, you see friends, you blow Absolute Zero, you watch your team mop up your kills. Nunu is great at harassing early, largely because of his crazy health pool. Try that with Yi, though, and you’re going to get rocked by creep aggro and likely die several painful deaths early on. He requires more farm before he’s truly dangerous, and even then he’s pretty smushy.

The point is this – every hero has a different game cycle and it’s something you need to weigh heavily when strategizing against the other team. Take your time to farm properly if you’re a late gamer or a mage. Harass hard if you have the HP to do so to keep the other team underleveled. Gank heavily mid-game so your farm toon can have a solid late game. And by all means, change your strategy for each toon. The variety of playstyles is part of the beauty of this game. Play to your individual character’s strengths and you’ll be able to increase that gap between your wins and losses.

I couldn’t sleep last night so I decided to jump into a game of LoL to relax. I’ve been on a bit of a losing streak recently so I took my own advice, working the basics to try to sneak a win. Lo and behold, I was farming well, racking up some assists, and slowly turning my TF into a nuking machine.

And for once, it was a fairly even match. We had myself as TF, Malphite, Alistar, Veigar, and Annie – a little low on the phys dps side of things but we were playing well. The other side was Twitch, Blitzcrank, Katarina, Annie and one other I can’t seem to remember. My team struggled early, but we picked things up around 14 and starting pushing towers. For the most part we were fine – our Malphite and Alistar were coordinating well and DPS was focusing targets. We did have one problem, though: Twitch.

Despite my constant begging, our tanks just would notbuy an elixir. Sure, there was my ultimate, and I was blowing it for every team fight, but Twitch soon got wise, would flash in and invis out. By the end of the game we were all yelling at each other, everyone blamed for not focusing Twitch. Meanwhile, he continued to get double and triple kills and BD every tower we had.

The point of this story is that the late-game is completely dependent on how you play your opponent. By 45 minutes or so, you should be heavily farmed, so it really starts to come down to strategy versus the other team. Make sure you stop to think, “what else could I be doing to help win those team fights?” More often than not, it isn’t about DPS. It’s about controlling abilities – the enemies’ – saving stuns to interrupt ultimates, focusing targets that have big AOE damage, and shutting down the invis players that turn a 3v3 you could normally win into a massacre the other way.