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The Only Roaming You’ll Ever Need

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Hello guys. It’s Librarian Husky here today, going to League Of Legends here. Roaming is by far one of the most potent tools at your disposal to carry games. Regardless of your role, you cannot only snowball yourself from the gold you earn through kills but also make sure that your teammates win their lanes.

However, we often find players too eager to roam without understanding its fundamentals, leading to disastrous results. This guide will delve deep into the most important things you need to know to make your roaming consistently successful in winning more games! Let’s get into it.

Wave

The wave is one simple but fundamental concept you must never forget before every roam. Handling the wave can improve your roam’s effectiveness, even if you score a kill. The reason why is simple. You’ll often hear how important it is to farm minions, as it’s the most consistent way of earning gold in the game. Ideally, it would help if you didn’t sacrifice a ton of minions for roaming.

The best action for Wave

Therefore, the best action you should take every single time before roaming is to push your wave into the enemy’s tower. If you’ve paid attention to previous guides, you should know that this creates a bounce back. Now the enemy wave will naturally slowly push back toward you.

This bounce-back is incredibly important for dealing with the number one issue you’ll encounter when roaming. It’s completely unpredictable what will happen when you move from the lane. Your opponent could kill your teammates before you get there, or your team could kill them. You could be walking through wards, or your opponents may decide to randomly back off.

Sion vs Nasus

Well, let’s take a look at an example of that happening. Here we have a Sion vs. Nasus match-up. Sadly for the Sion, he’s being pushed out of lane, so he looks to recall. Keep in mind that he hasn’t pushed the wave, and it’s pushing toward his tower right now. Take a look at the total gold on both sides. There’s only a 300 gold lead for Nasus as of right now. The enemy jungle could be waiting to counter-gank you, or maybe your opponents have a teleport ready to counter you.

  • It’s impossible to be 100% certain of what will occur every time you roam. And that’s precisely why you push the wave first.
  • This creates a positive or neutral outcome, regardless of what happens. If you roam and don’t get a kill, you just come back to a wave pushing towards you, having missed the tiny farm. An utterly neutral outcome.
  • If you get a kill off your roam, you’ll also come back to a wave to farm in your lane, which is the positive outcome, as you should be ahead in gold that way. But what happens if you don’t push the wave before roaming?

Sion of his recall

Sion, off his recall, decides to roam toward the middle. As he does so, Nasus begins wailing on his tower, getting a ton of farm and turret plates. Meanwhile, Sion doesn’t accomplish anything midway and walks back to the top. Compares the gold total of both players.

  • Nasus is 900 gold ahead of Sion, 600 gold more than before. This is why we’re heavily emphasizing the importance of pushing your wave before roaming.
  • If you don’t, you’ll generally get either a negative or neutral at best outcome.

Not getting a roam kill

By not getting a kill when you roam, your opponent is free to deny you waves by crashing them into your tower and taking turret plates. And even if you DO get a kill, you rarely come out ahead. You go neutral at best. To have gone just neutral against Nasus at this point, Sion would have needed to get two kills to offset the 600 gold he lost by conceding so many waves and turret plates.

Hopefully, you recognize just how important it is to push the wave. If you do, then there’s just one thing left to understand. You have to learn how to balance how long the roam will take relative to how long your opponent will take to crash their wave into your tower.

Players rarely think about how much time their roam will require, so we’ll break that down for you precisely. We’re about to cover a lot of data which may seem daunting and complicated but don’t worry. We’ll simplify and make things easier for you afterward.

Champions Move Speed

It also helps to know how much time it takes to get from the fountain back to your lane. For mid-laners, starting right here and walking back to your tower, it’s exactly 22 seconds without boots. This means that with essential and completed boots, those times are the same as before.

  • Most champions, on average, have around 335 to 340 base movement speed. We’ll be using the average here for the following speeds. To walk from the middle of the central lane to the middle of the top lane takes about 22 seconds.
  • This is the same as going backward. And since the map is pretty symmetrical, it should go without saying that it’s almost the same going from mid to bot. With the essential boots, this process takes about 20.5 seconds to complete.
  • And with fully upgraded boots, you can finish the trip in about 19 seconds.

getting back to the top or bottom will take 27 seconds without boots, 25 seconds with essential boots, and 23 seconds with your completed boots. We are not asking you to remember all those numbers. We just charted them down, so you can understand where we got these averages. It’ll take about 20 seconds to get from mid to either side lane and vice versa. From base to mid, it’s also about 20 seconds.

Averages LoL

And from the fountain to either side lane, it’s about 25. You want these averages to estimate how long your roam will take relative to how quickly your opponent can clear the wave you’ve shoved into their tower and the next one after.

  • It would take 20 seconds to get there, 5 to 10 seconds to make the scam happen; then you might need to recall, which is another 8 seconds, heal for another 5 seconds, and then run back to the lane is an extra 25 seconds.
  • That’s about 65 seconds total to make that hustle happen. Meanwhile, let’s say your lane opponent was a Tristana.
  • It only took her 40 seconds to clear the wave you pushed into her tower, then the one afterward.
  • This means she had 25 seconds to hit your tower for some turret plates freely.
  • Yours roam better have been worth it in that case, or you’ll have fallen behind.

Ideally, you want to be back before that time so you don’t miss any farm, and they can’t damage your tower. Imagine a situation where you want to roam to mid-lane as an ADC.

Lining

As we said at the start, please don’t think you have to do some crazy math to make a successful roam. No one does that. We just wanted to review those numbers to get you to realize just how long it takes to make a roam happen. This means you want as much time as possible to ensure you can get back in time before you miss any farm. And there are two things to look out for when doing so.

One, how big your crash was. And two, how strong your opponent’s wave is apparent. The bigger the crash and the less clear they have, the more extended your roam can take. Let’s look at a bunch of examples and show you precisely what you need to look out for.

Math skills are required

You’ll see that you don’t need math skills to pull off a good roam. Here we have a Camille amassing a giant wave to crash into Shen’s tower. Remember those 2 points we just talked about?

  • Shen has a shallow wave clear early on.
  • This is a massive crash, which will take him a while to clear. Camille leaves the lane at 6 and 20 seconds to go off and roam.
  • She can’t find any kill opportunities as she gets to mid, so she walks back to the top.

She arrives a whole minute later, and Shen still hasn’t crashed the wave into her tower. This is a perfect example of a neutral roam done well. Camille couldn’t make anything happen on the map, but it was at no risk to her since she missed nothing by attempting the roam.

Same mid situation

Let’s check out another example. In this one, we have almost the same situation happening in mid, except this time it’s a Kassadin crashing a big wave into Diana’s tower. Diana has some of the best early wave clear in the game, with her passive, Q, and W all working together. As she clears the wave, Kassadin attempts a roam, but by the time he’s down there, Diana has already fully cleared the wave at her tower AND the next wave.

The strategy of Kassadin roam

She’s now freed up to either push for turret plates during this horrific Kassadin roams, or better yet, she uses her teleport to counter the fraud and turn things around favorably. This is precisely why you must think about your opponent’s wave before committing to a roam.

  • One of the best wave clearers in the game makes the roam horrible and easy to punish. It would help if you also remembered that the enemy team could easily exploit the time it takes for you to get back to the lane.
  • Take a look at this Bard to roam, for example. He opts to roam towards the top lane while letting his Ashe go both alone.

This is a very lackluster roam, as trying to trick a Tryndamere with ult near his tower will never work. Unfortunately for Bard’s Ashe, showing himself in the top lane gives the enemy Qiyana a ton of information. Remember how long it takes for someone to return to their appropriate lane. Bard must recall and walk down here, which will probably take at least 30 seconds.

Finish

Generally, as a jungle, you have to be afraid of being counter-ganked every time you go to a lane. But in this case, Qiyana knows that even if the enemy jungle is a bot, it’ll be a guaranteed 3v2 since there’s no way Khazix is here. Poor Ashe was entirely alone and died an easily avoidable death due to Bard’s terrible roam timing. Hopefully, you see a straightforward pattern.

  • He gets down there, takes the kill rightfully, and walks back in the middle.

Roaming is very simple once you think about these fundamentals. Let’s finish things off with an example of a perfect roam. Galio, after returning from the base, pushes a cannon wave into a Leblanc, who is not only a horrible wave clear champion but also running low on mana. Galio now cuts through the enemy jungle to look for a flank on the unsuspecting enemy bot.

Leblanc

In that short time, Leblanc could not fully crash the wave into Galio’s tower, so he’s missed nothing by committing to the roam and is appropriately ahead of the enemy Leblanc. As long as you follow these fundamentals, we promise you will become infinitely more successful.

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