What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
So the long awaited sandbox mode is finally launching with Patch 7.3 and is being rolled
out across the regions, and it will hopefully provide players with the perfect and long
awaited practice tool that they were hoping for.
There’s a lot of different settings and options to allow you to tweak the tool to
best serve your purposes, so with that in mind we wanted to show off some of the specific
things that are ideal to practice for the average player in sandbox mode.
We’ll talk about what exactly you should be practicing, how you can set it up and of
course why it’s important to practice them in the first place!
When it comes to your average game of League of Legends, there’s one thing that you will
do throughout the entire game unless you’re playing support - and that’s cs’ing!
Farming is one of the most important things to do in game, because it’s your main source
of gold and therefore power.
As you reach the higher levels, picking up items makes it easier to farm since your abilities
and basic attacks do so much damage that clearing waves is a breeze for most champions.
It all starts at Level 1 though, when last hitting is at it’s most difficult - and
most important.
Even a small CS lead over your opponent can be impactful - say you both recall at the
same time, and you have a 4 minion advantage.
That could be the difference between being able to buy a B.F Sword, or being stuck with
a Pickaxe - it’s a huge difference in power.
To get set up for some serious CS practice, start off by picking up your starter item,
teleporting to your lane and start CSing.
Once you’ve farmed to level 4, check how many creeps you managed to kill and then simply
reset the game and start over.
You could also choose to lock your level at 1 if you want to practice cs’ing that extremely
important first wave for a fast level 2.
You could also add a bit more variety by restricting yourself to only attack on the very last hit
to freeze the lane, or doing a fast push to the tower.
Another great thing to practice is jungle clears and different jungle routes.
Although this is definitely going to be more useful for jungler players than anyone else,
it’s actually
a really good thing for people that play lanes because it can help get you familiar with
things like where a jungler is likely to be at a certain time.
Practicing your clears in the sandbox mode is super easy because you don’t really need
to change any settings, just hop into the game and start clearing.
Once you’ve done a clear, you can either reset the game or just force the jungle to
respawn, and spend some time practicing different routes and figure out your favorite way to
clear and the best route to take with whatever champion you’re practicing.
With a bit of imagination, you can train yourself to have a really detailed plan of what you’ll
be doing when you actually start jungling in a game again, because you’ll know what
your route is and what the best times for you to gank would be.
One of the best ways to learn to beat something is to play it yourself because you’ll became
really aware of the limits of the champion, so spending some time trying out a jungler
in the practice tool could make you a way better mid or top laner for example - because
you know how that jungle champion is likely to clear and go for ganks.
The next thing you should think about practicing are champion-specific mechanics.
These obviously come down to the champion, so if you’re playing Ezreal for example
you might want to focus on landing his skillshots or wall hopping.
A really good example here is Riven, a champion with a kit that has a reasonably low skill
floor but an insane skill ceiling because of all the gap closers and animation cancels
and stuff like that.
The sandbox mode is the perfect place to practice hopping walls and seeing the limits of her
Broken Wings ability, along with learning to perfectly animation cancel her auto-attacks
with her other abilities in order to maximise your damage output.
Most champions in the game have some kind of animation cancelling that you can learn
to do, and the sandbox mode gives you an awesome place to practice this.
Most champions also have tons of awesome tricks high ELO players use, such as Riven’s ‘fast
combo’ where she cancels animations with movement commands.
To get these tricks down you just gotta load up the sandbox, set cooldowns to instantly
refresh, give yourself infinite mana and then load up your favorite combo tutorial for whatever
champion you’re using, and just go nuts with practicing it!
If it’s a combo aiming to deal a big amount of damage, it could be really good to spawn
a practice dummy and attack that, and just time how long it takes you to finish the combo.
Whatever your main champion or the champion you want to learn is, there’s a ton of resources
out there to teach you the animation cancels or combos you might not know about - and the
practice tool is the perfect place to unlock the power of those tricks for yourself!
One thing that will be especially useful to players that are less familiar with the game
is getting used to the tower’s aggro range - or how close you have to be before it will
lock onto you.
To practice this, simply set up your hp to auto-refresh and spawn a target dummy under
the tower.
Then you can practice your tower diving positioning by seeing how close you can get before taking
damage from the tower.
If you are playing divers and want to practice tower dives, unlock your health and just practice
diving the target dummy - if you die it’s no problem at all since you can simply revive
and try again!
There is actually a pretty cool trick that you can test out here too, which is harassing
an enemy that is hiding under his tower.
If you time it perfectly you can actually walk into tower range, attack an enemy then
retreat from under the tower without taking damage.
This is because towers have a set attack speed, so if you do your attack and leave the aggro
range before it has time to shoot again, you can deal damage to an enemy without taking
tower shots for it.
Just wait until the second the tower starts to shoot a minion, walk forward and attack
your enemy, then retreat backwards outside of the tower’s range again.
Obviously this works best with ranged champions and abilities, and sometimes the tower will
make the lock-on sound, but if you leave it’s range quickly you will still avoid taking
a shot.
The last thing we’d really recommend trying out is soloing dragons with different setups
- whether it’s with different champions, or at different stages of the game when you
have certain items.
It’s super useful to know the limits of jungle champions, and some of them have the
potential to solo kill dragons way earlier than others - such as Fiddlesticks or Shaco
for example.
This can definitely vary between patches and even between the specific dragons, but it’s
still good to know when you can expect to sneak a dragon away in the early game from
right under the nose of the enemy team, just because they wouldn’t expect it to happen
so early!
It can also be useful to do these tests with non-jungle champions, like fighting top laners
or ADCs, just to learn at what point you have enough damage and survivability from items
to do your team a favor and pick up a dragon buff.
This isn’t to say you should just be trying Level 1 Dragons though, just practice figuring
out at what time during the game you could theoretically take it down by yourself.
This is a great bit of information to learn, especially if there’s just one particular
jungler you love to play, and it could really help set your team ahead if you know exactly
when you have enough power to solo it.
Anyway that’s just about everything on the practice tool for today, here’s one last
parting tip - make sure you learn the sandbox command hotkeys if there’s a particular
kind of training you do a lot, it can really help you maximise your efficiency.
Make sure you leave us a comment and let us know how your training goes if you use our
tips, or maybe share some ideas of your own.
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like,
subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time.