Spectators Guide to Summoner’s Rift

Many of my friends and family don't play League, and can't understand what's going on at all while I watch it. To that end, I've decided to write up a guide to watching professional level League. This is an on-going project, and I hope to eventually make it into a short video or something along those lines.

Introduction

League of Legends is one of the worlds most played video games and is a leader in eSports. The game, in its competitive form is two teams of 5 players each trying to destroy the other team's base. Players become more powerful by killing minions, enemy Champions and destroying map objectives. However, the game is a lot more complicated and there is a fair amount of League specific syntax used by commentators for professional games.

Spectators Guide to Summoner’s Rift

The Goal of the Game

There are several structures on Summoner's Rift (the map): Towers, Inhibitors and the Nexus. The game ends when one Nexus is destroyed. To destroy the Nexus, a team must first destroy at least all of the Towers in one lane, the inhibitor in that lane, and finally the two towers guarding the Nexus. While it is not necessary to destroy the other Towers and Inhibitors, it does make the winning easier.

The Lanes

On Summoner's Rift the map is divided into five subsections, Top Lane, Mid Lane, Bot Lane, the Jungle and the River. Every 30 seconds, starting at 1:30, minions (small Non-Player-Characters or NPCs) spawn and move down each lane, towards the enemy base. Without interference, they will fight the other minions and the game will very slowly progress. When a player is near a minion that dies, they receive a small amount of experience. If they killed it, they get gold. Killing minions is the most reliable way to become more powerful. Killing enemy players, or Champions, is much more rewarding, but much harder and consequently less reliable. The danger of the lanes is Fog of War. Each player can look at the minimap and see in a radius around themselves and any allied units- Towers, Inhibitors, Minions, Wards or other Champions. The rest of the map is obscured, this cloudiness is called Fog of War. Scattered around the map are Bushes- patches of tall grass. If a Champion is hiding in a bush, it acts as though they are in Fog of War. Unless the enemy has a source of vision inside the bush, they can’t be seen. As a spectator, you are able to see what BOTH teams have vision of at all times.

The Jungle

In between the Lanes is the Jungle. The Jungle is populated with neutral NPCs, broken into five groups, or camps. Two of these camps have "Buff Monsters" which give a bonus to any champion that kills them for 2 minutes. The Blue Buff regenerates mana and reduces cooldowns, allowing abilities to be used more frequently. The Red Buff makes basic attacks apply a slow and deal Damage-Over-Time (DOT). These buffs are very strong and consequently are heavily contested. Additionally, a Champion the Jungle threatens to be able to gank one of the lanes. A gank is an ambush, with several possible outcomes. They can kill the enemy Champion, force him to use long cooldown abilities, cause him to retreat, or make another enemy come over to help. With any of these outcomes, your target is weaker, which puts pressure on that part of the map for your team, which in turn drains resources from other lanes. Players can buy Wards, which are items that can be placed on the map and provide vision. This allows early warning to see if the enemy team is trying to gank.

The River

Splitting the map in half is the River. Towards the bottom half of the map, there is a pit for the Dragon. The Dragon, like the neutral NPCs of the Jungle can be killed by either team. However, when he dies, each player on the team that killed him gets a significant amount of gold. He is available at 2:30 and takes 6 minutes to respawn. He is a powerful enemy, so teams usually need several champions to kill him, and don’t even try to attempt it until 10 minutes in. Mirroring the Dragon on the top half of the map is Baron Nashor. Similarly, he can be killed by either team. When killed, he also gives each player on the killing team a large boost of gold. He also grants a large amount of Experience, and gives them a very powerful buff that lets them regenerate Health and Mana while dealing more damage with both their basic attacks and abilities.

The Power of the Champions

Each Champion has four abilities and an innate passive. They begin the game at level one, and the player can choose to rank up any one of their three basic abilities. By being near dying minions or participating in kills, the Champion accumulates experience. When they get enough experience, they level up. Each time they level up, they can rank up one of their abilities, making it more powerful. However, basic abilities cannot be ranked higher than half the level of the Champion (rounded up), requiring level nine to max any skill. At levels six, eleven and sixteen, the Champion can rank up their Ultimate. An Ultimate is often a defining ability and usually their strongest. As such, most Ultimates have a significantly longer cooldown then the other abilities. The Champion’s level is capped at eighteen, when all three basic abilities are rank five and the ultimate is at rank three.

Gold and Items

As mentioned before, Champions can earn gold by killing minions, participating in kills against enemy champions or having their team kill either the Dragon or Baron Nashor. A Champion also earns a tiny amount of gold every second and whenever their team destroys an enemy Tower. Gold is used for items, which assist in making a Champion more powerful. Items can grant Health, Mana, damage resistance, damage for basic attacks and for abilities, as well as some unique bonuses, depending on the item. A Champion is limited to 6 items at any one time.

Basic Strategies

For the past few years, the general strategy of teams has been to have five distinct roles. The first role is the AD Carry. They are ranged and rely on their auto-attacks to deal damage. Early game, they are often weak, but late game they can deal massive damage consistently, but don’t have good defenses. Because of their weak early game, they are often paired with the Support. Supports are there to protect the AD Carry in the early game, by harassing the other team and placing wards. In the late game, they provide utility in the form of Crowd Control (CC), which are abilities that limit the movements or actions of enemy champions or Buffs, which are abilities that improve the movements or actions of allied champions. This pair is normally located in the Bot Lane, so they can keep an eye out on Dragon. In the Mid Lane is the AP Carry, which is usually a Champion that has a high amount of initial damage (or Burst), that tapers off as the fight continues. They rely on their abilities to do damage. They are located in the Mid Lane because it is shorter, and therefore safer for a solo-laner than Top or Bot lane. As the game goes later, their goal is to kill the enemy AD Carry before that Champion can do too much damage. The Top Laner is, unsurprisingly, in the Top Lane. They are usually somewhat resilient to damage (or “Tanky”) or can dodge ganks with high mobility. Because of this survivability, they are better suited to the Top Lane than the Mid Lane. The Top Laner is often a Champion who can begin fights or initiator. Finally, the Jungler spends a lot of their time in the Jungle, and moving from lane to lane attempting ganks. Junglers often have good CC so that their ganks are more likely to be successful. Late game, they, and the Top Laner, usually present the front line of battle and try to keep the enemy Carries from getting to their Carries.

Alternate Strategies

Sometimes, a team will move their duo lane (AD Carry and Support) to lane against one of the solo lanes, AP Carry (Mid) or Top Laner (Top) and move the displaced laner to the Bot Lane. This allows them to apply a lot of extra pressure to the solo lane, and potentially gain an early advantage.

 In other cases, after the first clear of a Jungle, the Jungler will stay in a lane, to provide extra pressure. While this rewards the team with lane pressure, they can potentially lose experience and gold that would normally be claimed from the Jungle as well as losing the threat of having ganks.

Phases of the Game

Picks and Bans

The game begins with each team picking their Champions. As of this writing, there are 115 Champions available to be played. Going back and forth each team picks one Champion to be banned, neither team can pick it, until each team has banned three Champions. The team that banned first then gets to pick first, and selects one Champion. The second team then selects two champions, the first team selects two and so forth, until both teams have picked their full roster of five Champions each. While the team that picks first gets the first opportunity to select powerful Champions, the other team can choose Champions that are favorably matched against what their opponents selected. This is called counter-picking, as your choice weakens, or counters, their selection. Another tactic in Picks and Bans is to focus ban. By knowing what Champions a particular opponent likes to play, a team can ban that player’s Champions and force them to play something they are less comfortable playing.

Level One

At Level One, both teams spawn at their base and buy their items. The usually proceed to do one of three things.

1. Invade: They try to sneak into the enemy’s Jungle to be able to kill a Buff monster (either Red or Blue) that ‘belongs’ to their enemies.
2. Scout: They try to sneak into the enemy’s Jungle to place wards so they can figure out where the Jungler will be and when, so they can defend against ganks and have theirs sneak past their enemies defenses.
3. Defend: They try to defend their Jungle, by placing wards and standing guard at the borders.

Early Game

Once any invasions at level one play out, the Early Game begins. This is a fairly simple time in the game with only a few things happening.

1. Farming: This is the term used when players are simply killing minions, trying to get as much gold and experience as they can.
2. Harass: This means that they are trying to deal damage to their enemy in their lane so that it is easier to farm. This can also be called ‘Poke’ or ‘Trading’. Sometimes Harass evolves into a fight.
3. Ganks: As mentioned above, an ambush, with the goal of denying resources or killing the enemy.
4. All-in: Sometimes, when a team believes they have the advantage (possibly because of the early damage output or CC their champion or champions have) they will go in and begin a fight without any harass. Sometimes, they will even attack under Towers, which deal massive amounts of damage, especially in the early game.

Mid Game

It is difficult to pin down when the Mid Game begins, but when the following are happening, the game has probably reached that point.

1. Pushing: As players level up, they are able to kill Minions faster. If they do so, they ‘Push’ the minion group (or minion wave) closer to the enemy’s defenses, allowing them to attack the Tower with more safety.
2. Roaming: If a player has pushed their lane, it can be dangerous because they are so far away from the safety of their Towers. A player might go to another lane (or Roam) to try to gank. Also, they aren’t losing minion kills to their tower, so they aren’t losing old.
3. Dragon Fights: The Mid Game is usually heralded with a fight around Dragon. Killing the Dragon is worth about as much as two kills, so being able to safely kill it is definitely worth the risk.

Late Game

It is also pretty hard to pin down when the Late Game begins, but you usually stop seeing players moving about the map on their own.

1. Team Fights: Later in the game, engagements around objectives (such as Towers, Buffs, Dragon or Baron) turn into full fledged 5v5 fights.
2. Split-Pushing: With four powerful members in one lane, sometimes a team will send their last player to another lane to push that lane too. That Champion usually has some way of getting back to his or her team quickly- such as a teleport ability and can either defeat or run away from any single Champion on the enemy team. If the team’s enemies send more than one person to deal with the threat, it becomes a 4v3, allowing them to claim objectives.
3. Siege: When a team can’t Split-Push safely, they’ll group up and push a lane as a team. They send in as much poke and harass as they can, while trying to whittle down their enemy’s Towers. The Team sieging is usually stronger than the defending team (otherwise the defenders would be more aggressive) but the defenders have the advantage of the Tower, which will help them deal damage.
4. Baron: The buff that a team receives from Baron is very powerful. So powerful, in fact, that over 80% of teams that get it first win their game in competitive play. However, Baron himself is very dangerous and if a team is caught fighting him, they could very easily lose the fight.