Hey everyone.
Falling behind is something that happens to every player who plays League.
We all know what it's like when it's the enemy's jungler who comes first, chunking us down
and putting us at a huge disadvantage.
So, we're going to take that frustration to the extreme.
One of our experts is taking on the 0 CS Nasus Challenge, and see if he can claw his way
back from a huge deficit.
And while this guide will be more oriented towards top lane players, the concepts and
mindsets we'll cover are applicable for every lane.
"Oh by the way, we make *way* more of this style of guide where we go into your elo and
show you how to escape every bracket.
These are packaged into challenger tailored courses on our site which you can sign up
and watch right now.
Anything you see on YouTube is just a taste of the system we've spent years working on
at Skill-Capped--and it's all available on our website!
If you don't significantly improve, you get a full refund."
With that in mind, let's get into it.
So, why'd we pick Nasus for this challenge?
Well, we don't want our challenger expert to just outplay people on Riven or some skill
intensive champion.
Nasus is an extremely simple champion with very little skill expression in his kit.
Therefore, you can rest assured that this isn't something you need insane mechanics
to pull off
Not only that, but he's incredibly item reliant and his kit *requires* him to last hit to
get more damage in the first place.
We've all seen the Nasus mains who ignore *everything* on the map just so they can get
more Q stacks.
Since it's such an important part of his kit, this challenge will surely prove difficult.
Alright, we've dumped Hector in around gold elo to see what he does.
We'll see if he can pull this off against a Renekton.
So, for the early part of the lane...Hector is just gonna stand there.
While we wait for him to be allowed to play, it gives us time to talk about the couple
of ground rules we placed on him.
One, he will not rely on jungle intervention to bail him out.
He needs to win the 1v1 on his own.
Two, he is not allowed to kill his opponents before they base and spend their gold advantage.
Normally, these are both potential win conditions, but would clearly diminish the validity of
this specific challenge.
For now, let's just finish watching him do nothing so you can get the feeling of exactly
what he's going through
Okay, he can start playing and last hitting now.
Unfortunately, due to rule 2, he's not allowed to start winning the lane yet.
Therefore, Hector will just farm peacefully vs Renekton until around level 8 when Renekton
*finally* bases and spends his gold.
Hector will take his base as well.
But to further prove our point, he's just going to buy a sheen and not use the other
850 gold he's earned.
On top of all the CS Hector has already missed, another 850 gold will *surely* make this a
hopeless challenge.
And to make things as fair as possible, while Hector could abuse the fact that he hit level
9 first, you can see him wait for Renekton to match his level.
Renekton hits 9...and immediately gets turned into a pair of crocodile boots.
The lane is easily snowballed afterwards, and we think you guys know what happens once
a Nasus gets out of hand.
Within minutes Hector is knocking at their inhibitor unable to be stopped.
That was ridiculously easy and required no effort on his part.
Now that we've seen how simple it is, let's break down the mindsets Hector approached
this challenge with.
Your first mindset is to remind yourself that it's never as bad as you think it is.
Falling behind in farm can feel horrible, but let's place some numbers on it to show
you exactly what we mean.
Because melee minions give 21 gold, while casters give 14, the average gold earned from
last hitting them is 17.5 gold.
If you add the cannon minion from every third wave into that equation, it becomes around
a 20 gold per minion average.
But these averages aren't entirely realistic based on what actually happens in games.
For starters, most players place extra emphasize and focus on last hitting cannon minions.
Most of us likely save an ability to ensure that we land the last hit, since it's so valuable
to get.
Then, think about how your lanes play out when you're in a losing position.
You're likely getting most of the melee minions, since you don't have to extend as far into
your opponent to grab them.
Thus, you're mostly missing caster minions when playing from behind.
When comparing CS to your opponent, you're usually just down an average of 15 to 16 gold
per CS.
So if you went down 20 creeps during the early laning phase, don't worry.
You're down around a Cloth Armor or Dagger in terms of combat stats.
That's almost completely irrelevant.
Compare this to Hector who was actually down the 20 gold per minion average, because he
didn't last hit at all.
He was down 30 CS from that start, on top of the 850 gold he didn't bother to spend.
Some quick math shows that he was down over 1400 gold worth of combat stats.
You will almost *never* be in this terrible of a situation gold wise.
Which brings us to a very important concept that Hector easily applied this game.
He made sure to not get denied any experience, which is easy since you can soak exp from
a very long range.
Knowing that it's okay to fall behind in CS now, you should always make sure you don't
get chunked out of lane.
Make sure to give up those minions that are too dangerous to last hit.
Just sitting in lane will give you over 500 gold in terms of combat stats alone.
That's over 25 creeps worth of stats by just standing in lane.
Sorry junglers.
( Let your personal hatred flow through this line Tyler.
)
So, don't feel too bad if you fall behind in your games.
On to the second mindset, so you can actually look to win the game.
If most professional players look like headless chickens during their games, then what does
that say about the random gold to diamond player you're up against?
This mindset is even more prevalent the lower the elo bracket you're playing in is
In low elo, even when you fall terribly behind, you can still consider yourself to be on even
footing with your opponent, if not ahead of them in terms of combat power.
Let's explain our reasoning here.
Low elo players tend to have terrible set-ups to begin with making them much weaker than
they should be.
Imagine your opponent is playing Jax.
Maybe they took domination runes as their secondary tree, instead of the usual inspiration
tree.
This means they're missing key combat power in the early game by not having Time-Warp
Tonic.
Then let's say they rush Sheen because they like to see big numbers on their screen.
Again, this is just much weaker than rushing Tiamat for more reasons than we can spend
on here.
Low elo players even tend to be behind on proper skill order.
We still see the majority of Jax players max Q second over E.
Not having E max after W makes that Jax much weaker than he should be.
On top of most low elo players having bad set ups, they usually outright suck at playing
their champions most of the time.
They don't know how to combo correctly, know when to trade, how to animation cancel, etc.
Even if you fall behind like 1000 gold, you can always abuse your opponent's incompetence,
especially in low elo.
So, how did Hector use this mindset to utterly stomp this lane?
In this particular example, Hector will just punish Renekton's complete misunderstanding
of how this match up plays out
Let's look at when Hector teleports back to lane, and notice Renekton's items.
He's building Black Cleaver.
Not only that, but he took Conqueror as well.
This means that he wants extended fights to make use of that combination.
Now Nasus may be a *dog* champion, but he does happen to be one of the strongest duelists
in the game because of how much value his ultimate provides during all-ins.
So despite being so far behind, since Hector played to his all-in win condition, all he
had to do was right click and mash his Q button.
This clearly shows that Renekton didn't understand the match up.
If he had, he would have built Tiamat and Executioner's calling with the gold he had
instead.
This plays to his strengths of finding burst trades, rather than all-ins.
Executioner's calling would also deny Nasus's precious life steal healing, making the damage
from the burst trades stick even more.
Running Press the Attack instead of Conqueror to compliment that play style, would also
be a better fit.
Even in the dream scenario where Renekton was smart enough to be aware of this build
path, Hector still has options to deal with being so far behind.
He'd just punish any of the other mistakes Renekton made.
For example, Vi had 2 solid opportunities to gank, which Hector had to troll a bit because
he wanted to solo kill Renekton for this challenge.
Renekton was constantly mismanaging the wave, and overextending, making himself vulnerable
to easy ganks.
Or, since Renekton was mindlessly shoving the entire laning phase, Hector could find
opportunities to farm the Krug camp to catch back up on Q stacks and gold.
And honestly, Hector's easiest win condition was to just keep playing safe.
Renekton wasn't getting anything done, and Nasus *giga* outscales this lane.
If the lane kept going at this pace, Hector would've taken over naturally in like 5 minutes.
Now stop right there.
Don't you dare finish writing that comment.
Yes, Renekton sucked.
That's the point of our second mindset.
But to prove this wasn't just a 1 of, we *coerced* Hector to re-do this challenge on his day
off.
This time he finds himself vs an Urgot.
Just like before, he doesn't CS until the 5 minute mark putting himself extremely behind.
Instead of Sheen he buys Ninja Tabi this game to counter Urgot.
They're incredibly efficient against ranged top laners, as they help you close the gap
and chase them down.
Much like Renekton, this guy is misplaying horribly.
He just watches as Nasus casually walks up, and by then it's too late since he can't out-run
the boots disadvantage.
The game after that he finds himself against a Mordekaiser.
Again, no CS at 5 minutes.
This one was particularly easy, because the Mordekaiser was running Glacial Augment and
rushing Hextech Gunblade.
A cool build, but totally worthless.
Honestly, the biggest challenge about this challenge was Hector being bombarded with
ganks.
Apparently, everyone in low elo ganks for their losing Nasus lanes.
Hector not wanting to completely troll his junglers lost many good replays this way,
forcing him to play even more on his day off.
Oh, and lastly this isn't just a Nasus gimmick.
In fact, doing this *versus* a Nasus is even easier.
This game the enemy Nasus even gets a free kill, so when he comes back to lane he has
a full Sheen advantage.
What does Hector do?
He simply punishes Nasus for overextending in lane, and easily manages to land enough
poke to set up a dive.
Just...avoid wasting your flash and dooming yourself as well.
That's not a play we'd recommend.
So, what was the point of all of this?
Well, players are usually inclined to AFK or troll whenever something goes wrong during
their game.
But if you're truly the better player, you should just remain positive.
If you enjoyed this, please consider signing up at Skill-Capped.
You can input your rank and see which rank we think you'll hit while using our website.
If you don't improve, you get refunded!
Well guys, that's gonna wrap up this video.
Thanks for watching, and see ya soon.