Hey summoners! Librarian Husky here. League of Legends can be overwhelming for beginners with so much to learn. But don’t worry! I’ve got 20 essential tips to help you get started and improve quickly. Let’s dive in and make your climb easier and more fun!

League of Legends can be an incredibly daunting game to get into as a beginner. There are over 160 champions, five different unique roles, items, and builds you have to learn. There’s a meta you’re supposed to somehow know immediately, and as a new player, it feels like everyone else has 10 years of experience on you. Well, I’ve got some good news: you’re about to learn the 20 best tips for beginners that will supercharge your improvement.

Starting the Game

The first thing you need to be aware of as a beginner are Jungler Starting Locations. Wherever a jungler starts, they’re going to be pathing to the opposite side of the map as they clear their camps. This results in them having a very predictable gank timing.

Jungler Pathing

At the same time, their camps are going to be respawning in that same order, causing them to once again path towards the same side of the map. Understanding this pattern will help you anticipate jungler movements and make better strategic decisions.

Understanding Strong Side and Weak Side

That side of the map resulting in another gank creates a concept known as the Strong Side and Weak Side. If a jungler starts on the bottom side, then the bottom half of the map is considered the weak side for that team since he’ll be ganking there less often. The top side is considered the strong side for their team since they’ll be ganking there more often.

Identifying Jungler Starting Locations

The trick you want to implement into your games is to identify the enemy jungler’s starting location. You can do this by paying attention to the side lanes at the start of every game. Whoever is last to arrive in lane usually gave their jungler a leash, letting you predict the jungler’s starting location. This helps you know if you’re on the enemy’s weak side or strong side and whether you should be anticipating ganks.

Countering the Strong Side

The simple counter to being the enemy’s strong side is to place a ward at 2 minutes and 45 seconds. This will catch all the early Gank Timings by the enemy jungler. The next thing you need to know is the Level Two Timing. Spiking level two while the opponent is still level one is by far the most common and easiest way you’re going to win or lose your lane.

Level Two Timing for Solo Laners

For Solo Laners, you’ll hit level two on the second minion wave once the first melee minion dies. For bot laners, you’re going to hit level two when you’ve killed three melee minions or two melees and one caster. When players first learn about these timings, they always make the same mistake: they wait until they hit level two and then try to go aggressive.

Playing Aggressively at Level Two

Players are just going to see you spike level two and back off and play safe. So, the skill you need to develop is to anticipate these timings and position yourself to take advantage of the level difference.

Positioning for Level Two Advantage

You want to develop Positioning yourself so you’re within Engage Range before you hit level two so you can instantly punish the enemy. Once you get better, you can even time your engage slightly before you hit level two, so you level up during the fight.

When to Fight for Level Two

Now you’re wondering if you should be fighting for level two every single time. Well, yes, but only if you’re in a ranged vs. ranged or melee vs. melee matchup. Ranged vs. melee matchups are unique and something you must learn. A super common beginner mistake is to try and fight for the push as the melee champion.

Playing as a Melee Champion

You’re going to get destroyed if you try to push as a melee champion. The fact that the ranged champion has access to a ranged auto-attack at level one while you only have access to one spell means trying to hit level two more often than not results in you losing all of your health. Instead, the default game plan if you’re the melee champion is to sit back, conserve your health, even giving up last hits if needed.

When to Go Aggressive

You then wait until the minions crash into your tower, and then once you hit level three, you’ll have all your basic abilities and a full health pool. That’s your time to start going aggressive, which works more often than not due to the enemy range champion being super pushed up the lane.

Rebounding the Wave

Now you’re probably wondering, what is the ranged champion supposed to do then? This is the next thing you need to know: rebounds. A rebound happens when you push a wave into a tower. 99% of the time, it’s going to cause the minions to then push back towards you. This is where the name comes from; it’s like you’re rebounding the minions off the tower.

Rebounding the Wave

It’s closer to that side of the map. The only time it doesn’t rebound is when the wave gets cleared before the next wave gets stuck on it. This is called a reset as the wave now goes back to neutral at the center of the lane. In a ranged vs. melee matchup, when the ranged champion crashes the wave, they can know a rebound is going to happen.

Playing Safe During Rebounds

This means it’s now their turn to play safe, giving up minions as needed as it bounces back to them to a safer position. If they got the melee champion low, they can use it to set up a kill by forcing them to overextend for last hits. Rebounds go way beyond that, as they’re basically what will let you leave lane.

Leaving Lane and Recalling

Need to recall? Push the wave, which sets up a rebound. Now you can recall, and as you head back to lane, the wave is bouncing back to you, so you miss practically no minions. Want to roam? Push the wave first, go off and roam, and then head back to lane with the wave pushing back to you, missing very few minions.

Turn-Based Rebounding

Now you might be thinking, does that mean each person is just taking turns rebounding waves to one another? Well, honestly, yeah, a lot of lanes do end up feeling turn-based like that. But there is one exception: Freezing.

Understanding Freezing

Freezing is one of the most misunderstood things in League. At its core, it is simple. You just make sure the enemy has around four to five more minions than your wave, and you can just permanently keep the wave frozen in front of your tower. What new players get wrong when they first learn this is they try to freeze as a way to keep themselves safe. This is impossible.

When to Freeze the Wave

If you’re losing, the enemy is just going to be able to walk up, push the wave, and you can’t fight them. Freezing is done only when you’re the one with the lead. This forces the enemy to overextend to last hit minions, at which point you can fight them with your lead, often killing them. If they don’t extend, they just lose a lot of farm over time to the freeze.

Understanding Dead Time

Speaking of fighting, a beginner mistake players make is fighting way too much. The concept you need to know to fix this is called Dead Time. Dead Time is the period when either all your jungle camps are dead, or the minions in lane are dead, and you’re waiting for the next wave to arrive. This is the most efficient time for you to fight since you’re not giving up any gold or experience from those minions or monsters.

Value of Farming

I know it feels like if you don’t react to a fight, you’re going to fall behind from the enemy getting kills, but this is a misconception. In the early game, simply Farming one wave and one turret plate is nearly worth the same as a kill. In the mid to late game, if someone leaves an inner turret undefended, that’s 700 gold from the tower, and just two waves on top of that equals 300 gold. So suddenly, simply pushing two waves and taking a tower is worth more than getting three kills worth of gold.

Spending Unspent Gold

As a beginner, you really shouldn’t be fighting outside of your Dead Time. You’ll learn exceptions to the rule as you get better. Another mistake to avoid is staying on the map for too long when you have unspent gold. It’s easy to make this mistake since you’ll be on the map getting a ton of kills and feel like you’re stronger than the enemy, but unless you spend that gold, you’re actually weaker. By killing them, they got to go back to base and spend their gold, getting a stat advantage by purchasing items. A good rule of thumb to follow is to start planning.

Planning Your Recall

Your recall once you pass 1,000 gold. A lot of items are around that amount like Faded Ashes and Serrated Dirk, for example. As you get more experience, you want to identify your next item spike and recall once you pass that amount. For a lot of mid mages, that would be Lost Chapter at 1,200 gold, for example, or Hextech Alternator at 1,100. For a lot of bruisers, that can be Tiamat at 1,200.

Avoiding Turret Plate Bait

Another mistake to look out for when it comes to Recalling is getting baited by turret plates early on. A lot of the time, when newer players find out turret plates give 125 gold each, they end up throwing their whole lane trying to get one. This happens most often after you get a kill on your lane opponent. You might think, “Hey, they’re dead,” and despite sitting on a lot of gold and being low on resources like health and mana, you’ll mistakenly think you have enough time to take that turret plate and then recall after.

Death Timers and Home Guards

Death timers are very short early on, and when you die, you get home guards which gets you back to lane really fast. So by staying for that plate, you’ll end up low on resources, stuck in lane, or having to recall at a bad time. Now our final tip in the laning phase is that speed really matters in League.

Optimizing Jungle Clear

When they both arrive top, Taliyah is an entire level up from that extra camp. This not only denies Master Yi a gank on top but also gets him low, while then giving Taliyah the Scuttle, which ends up turning into an easy kill. All of this was made possible simply due to the fact that Taliyah spent time optimizing her clear and was just faster.

Saving Time in Lane

There are many ways you can save time in League though, it’s not just jungle clears. For example, if your champion can one-shot the caster minions with an ability, it can often be better to move as far up the lane as you can to then cast the ability on the melee minions. Once the wave meets, you can hit the entire wave, clearing it all at once. This will then give you extra time between waves you can use to roam, recall, or pressure towers faster.

Efficient Decision-Making

One of the best ways to be faster isn’t mechanical but actually with Decision-Making. For example, Taliyah is reacting to a possible fight but by recognizing and accepting the fight is lost early on, it means she’s pivoting to her next source of gold way faster than if she was tunneling on the fight and trying to get a kill, thus generating more gold per second.

Focusing on Guaranteed Gold

Honestly, if you just go for guaranteed gold while focusing on being faster at doing it, you’re going to be miles ahead of your opponents. Now let’s get into Mechanics. There are five Mechanics as a beginner you must know.

Clicking Closer to Your Champion

First is that in League, clicking closer to your champion gives you a big edge over your opponent. This is because when a skill shot is thrown at you, your mouse has to move less distance to then send a movement command in a different direction. Compare this to when you’re clicking far away and you can see how much more distance your mouse has to cover and how hard it is to dodge abilities.

Optimizing Movement Commands

If you have to auto-attack or cast a spell further away, that’s fine, but for movement commands, you typically want to keep them close to your champion. The next mechanic you need to be using is sending movement commands between auto-attacks.

Understanding Auto-Attack Animation

Your auto-attack has two parts to its animation: the wind-up and the wind-down. The animation up until the projectile releases is the wind-up, or for melee champions, up until you do damage to the enemy. It’s really bad to send a movement command during this time since it’s going to cancel your auto-attack and do no damage.

Canceling Wind-Down Animation

The animation that plays after the projectile releases or the damage is applied as a melee champion is the wind-down animation. This can be canceled with a movement command, and by moving between auto-attacks, we make ourselves very hard to hit and can cover a lot more distance if we’re either chasing or kiting.

Using the Attack Move Command

In addition to this, you absolutely must use what’s called the Attack Move command. This is essential since if you don’t use it, if you misclick the ground beside an enemy, you’re going to be walking into them. Attack moving makes your champion attack the nearest enemy even if you misclick on the ground beside them.

Settings for Attack Move

There are a few settings you need to use for this to work properly. First, enable Attack Move on cursor. This makes you attack the nearest target to your cursor instead of your champion. This is way better since if you don’t have this enabled and try to attack an enemy behind someone, well, you might end up attacking the wrong target.

Attack Move and Range Indicators

You’re just going to be hitting the closest target to your champion instead. Next is to show attack range; this will show you a circle around your champion of your attack range every time you press the default Attack Move bind of “A” on your keyboard. This is really helpful since it lets you know how you should be Positioning. You can use other Attack Move binds, but that’s outside the scope of this guide. We’ve created more in-depth guides on that. For now, just enable those settings and use the “A” hotkey, and then left-click to send Attack Move commands if you’re new to this mechanic.

Quick Casting

The next setting you need to be aware of is Quick Casting. This gives you such a huge advantage as it makes you cast your spells way faster since as soon as you press your spell key, it’s going to immediately fire. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Well, then I can’t actually aim my ability.” Here’s the trick that players use: they bind their normal cast to shift plus that ability, so shift plus Q, shift plus W, shift plus E, shift plus R. This way, if you need to combo fast, you can just press your abilities as normal, but if you need to line up a skill shot, you can press shift and the ability to aim it.

Warding and Aim Indicators

You’ll also need this backup shift bind for Warding. This is because you need the aim indicator to know when it’s being placed in a brush since it will turn green. At the same time, the circle is going to let you know how far the ward sees, so you know you’re actually covering choke points.

Unlocking Your Camera

The final mechanic you need is to unlock your camera. For a lot of players, this can feel awkward, but it gives you a big advantage since you can pan your camera to see way more information when you’re fighting while at the same time staying aware of your surroundings.

Unlocking Your Camera

It lets you see more angles you can expect enemies to come from, so you can react sooner. There are some really simple exercises to get yourself used to this mechanic. Head into practice mode and start by nudging your camera so that your champion always stays on the edge of your screen. After this, practice moving in straight lines where you click around the center of your screen and edge your camera to keep your champion close to the edge.

Practicing Camera Control

Once you master this, head into the river. You’re right-clicking around the halfway point of your screen, then nudge your camera up, spam right-click, then left, spam right-click, and repeat. You then want to go back down the river the other way. Nudge your camera down, spam right-click, then right, spam right-click, and repeat.

Mid to Late Game Strategy

Great, now let’s talk about what you need to know in the mid to late game. The mid game starts around 14 minutes when turret plates fall. That’s when players can start moving around the map more. The late game is usually around 25 to 30 minutes when things like Dragon Soul become a threat for a team to take.

Understanding Gold Inflation

During this time in the game, you should be aware of a concept called Gold Inflation. In League, having early gold leads is much more impactful because they represent a larger percentage of the total gold in the game. For example, if someone has 6K gold and you have 3K gold, they have a 3K gold lead on you at 10 minutes. That means they’re 100% more powerful than you are in terms of items.