Hey everyone, A lot of subscribers have said that they feel like they always win their
lane. they outjungle the enemy, get really fed, but then for some reason they, just,
lose, even if the entire early game went really well.
So, what exactly are you supposed to do in the mid game to not throw your lead? and when
exactly does the mid game even start?
In this video were going to be answering those questions and more as we watch some replays
of mid games.
We'll start with silver and gradually move our way up the ranks until we get to low diamond,
so make sure to keep watching.
Even if you arent in the rank thats being shown, we guarantee that these mistakes happen
even in diamond games, so it'll be relevant to you no matter where you are.
Lets get right into it.
Starting off were going to be looking at a replay from silver where we have a nocturne
vs fiddlesticks matchup Now would be a pretty decent time to explain
when mid game actually happens, we define midgame as the time when the first outer towers
begin to fall and the standard lane assignments that are top, mid and bot, start to lose meaning
while people switch around and start putting more people in different lanes.
In general this usually occurs somewhere between the first 12 to 16 minutes on average.
At this point youre usually decently high leveled, and the value that you get from experience
starts to drop off.
In the early game, farming and soaking experience is super valuable due to the fact that it
takes less experience to go from level to level, in other words, 100 xp in the early
game matters a lot more than 100 xp in the late game.
that doesnt mean that it stops being important, but players are less incentivized to catch
every wave at their tower and instead can begin to prioritize making progress on the
map in terms of towers or other objectives.
In addition, towers being down means that it takes waves longer to bounce from tower
to tower and this means a larger window where you can leave lane, impact the map, and come
back without missing that much.
The combination of these things means that overall map play becomes more important.
We often talk a lot about prioritizing the early game because it IS a very impactful
part of the game, but you need to know what to do with your lead once you get it.
In this game, rengar started the mid game by breaking the tower from before, right after
nocturne goes bot and a good fight happens for the red team.
They clean up 3 kills, get the bot lane outer tower and push another wave for free.
If you were nocturne right now what would you do?
Once you break the outer towers, its really important to now try to move your area of
control up.
By pushing waves, they essentially act as mini wards that cause someone to have to respond.
if you constantly push waves and no one responds to them, then youll get towers for free and
the enemy bleed out from missing gold and experience
If they do respond, then youre able to move into the jungle and now set up vision and
take away camps.
Once you push waves its really important that you actually do something with it.
If you dont, youre essentially just trading farm with the enemy team back and forth and
this just cause your gold lead to mean less and less due to increasing the overall amount
of gold in the game, and causing inflation.
Nocturne walks right by the camp that he could be taking away right now and doesnt counter
jungle at all.
while it may seem like a minor mistake, not taking away free gold like this adds up, especially
if there are multiple camps up, or your team is going to be pushing bot tower anyways and
they happen to get engaged on because you arent in the area.
Following this play, nocturne walks mid after clearing his wolves to protect the tower.
from here what would you look to do?
In this situation the enemy team has broken all outer towers and shoved in mid and bot
lane.
If you remember from before, this teams that they have a chance to take control of our
bot side jungle now that we have 2 people showing on mid
because of this, its impossible to retake vision in our botside jungle, and we really
dont have camps up to get anyways.
Nocturne should be headed into his topside right now because zed still hasnt pushed out
top wave and we should feel a bit safer trying to reclaim vision and take our camps there.
Or we could walk really far around to get to bot lane and try to defend the tower.
however, nocturne walks into botside to try and contest the area for little to no reason
and ends up getting picked for free.
Paying attention to when waves are crashed for both teams and either using them to do
something, or respecting that the enemy has time to punish you is really important.
Lets move on to the next replay In this game weve got a gold skarner vs kayn
Its about 23 minutes into the game and a couple of outer towers for both teams have fallen,
skarner finds a good pick in his red side jungle and his team finds another pick onto
the enemy adc, from this point what would you look to do?
Because mid wave has been pushed up a bit, we can now use this time to invade onto the
enemy top side and take away their camps and set up vision for baron, as we can clearly
see kennen and fiora on the minimap.
This way we can continue to build our lead over the enemy jungler and stop them from
reclaiming baron vision for free.
We couldave also potentially just taken the baron altogether if we keep tabs on the enemy
jungler and kennen.
instead we make a classic mistake.
Running up mid and sieging is the standard aram move, but this is summoners rift, and
we usually want to avoid that at all costs.
With easier objectives to take in baron, enemy jungle camps, or even bot tower, we shouldnt
be going for the objectives that add the most volatility into the game.
we should be spam pinging the baron and trying to move in for control.
instead, we push mid and most of our team gets picked off.
Even though this is a mistake, we need to know how to play the rest of the game, so
what should we do now?
This is definitely a bit harder of a question, but with dragon spawning a lot of players
are very tempted to contest every objective, even without numbers.
While we cant necessarily fight the enemy team, it doesnt mean that we cant take advantage
of their positioning.
If all of the enemy team is going to rotate towards bot to get take dragon, we could begin
working on getting topside vision, clearing upwards and placing pinks in baron area could
let us look for a pick.
At this point in the game, playing on your vision is very important, and making the enemy
play off of theirs is of equal value.
going to clear topside vision would force them to have to re ward the area, or risk
losing the baron for free, and its at this point that we could look for another ulti
on a high priority target.
knowing when you cant contest a play and just moving on to the next idea will help you avoid
digging your hole deeper and eventually throwing the whole game.
Even from the earlier picks, we couldave forced this kind of situation much earlier and there
wouldave been little to no risk to us.
Being scared of doing baron is a really common mistake, but most of the time doing baron
IS the safe play.
Even if youve been burned before from bad baron throws its likely due to the fact that
the setup was poor, and doesnt mean that baron in the future is a bad idea.
Instead, we try to contest dragon, even though losing one drake at this point would be completely
meaningless, and cause our whole team to die in the fight.
While giving up the dragon wouldnt lose the game, giving up this fight and then losing
baron certainly does.
For extra salt in the wound, we lose the dragon anyways and just make our overall situation
10 times worse.
In the previous game with nocturne, a really similar situation happened as well, in this
case they manage to get the dragon after winning a teamfight, but are all sitting on a lot
of gold.
In this scenario after you get the dragon, its really important to just leave.
You got what you came for and staying for another fight that you arent favored in both
because you havent bought and your adc is in base, is really bad.
You dont have to contest everything that the enemy throws at you, and in general, calling
fights off is a really valuable skill that a lot of people lack.
make sure that when youre fighting, its for a good reason, and on your terms, not because
the enemy team wants to.
Anyways, lets jump into a platinum replay now to look at some more mistakes.
In this game weve got a platinum hecarim vs karthus
After grabbing rift herald, hecarim uses it to grab the first tower of the game, dive
the enemy top laner, and then break the 2nd tower.
From here what should he look to do?
Just like earlier, its really hard to actually keep pushing because the other towers on the
map havent fallen.
From here its easy to walk into the enemy jungle, take control, take their camps, and
start setting up vision to potentially pressure the mid outer in the next couple of plays.
Without a wave pushing up mid and keeping someone there, its pretty difficult to actually
continue a siege on top.
Dont barrel down a lane unless theres literally no threat from the enemy team.
Breaking inhib at this point would also be bad because you cant really get anything due
to the pressure, and it would just end up denying you farm, and giving gold to the enemy
team hecarim tries to hit tower anyways, and ends
up having to blow his ult in the process, lowering his ability to snowball the game
with it on his next play, and also missing out on his chance to counter jungle the karthus
from here he makes another critical mistake.
With no ult, no nocturne ult, ahri ult or ults on his bot laners, hes going to recall.
Normally recalling is good because it gets you tempo within the game, however, in this
case, that tempo really cant be used for anything.
Theres no dragon, no rift, and no playmaking potential until our cooldowns are back up.
While some junglers have the tendency to overfarm and not help their team at all, the opposite
is also a problem.
He runs around aimlessly when he should be farming camps, and by the time his ult is
back up again, he hasnt farmed a single camp and is 2 levels behind the enemy mid and ends
up getting 1v2d.
At this point karthus has been farming his jungle the entire time and is up roughly 50
cs on hecarim.
If he was able to counter jungle the enemy topside, that would take away 8 cs from karthus
and give hecarim 8. and if he cleared his other camps he would have 20 more.
This difference in power would probably let him win this fight, and its little things
like this where you waste tons of time that ends up completely throwing games.
At this point in the game, nocturne is 5/2 and his botlane is a combined 2 and 5.
Another critical error is that he played around his losing lanes.
All that time he spent bottom getting nothing, he couldave made plays around nocturne and
they wouldave been much more likely to work out.
in mid game, you need to identify whos strong on your team and play around them.
This will allow you expand their lead as well as your own, and avoid stagnating the game
like hecarim did for the past 2 minutes.
if he was willing to play with nocturne and look for picks with him, they couldave easily
killed karthus in the enemy jungle or dove the yone to take mid tower.
For yet another example, lets look at another hecarim game, this time in diamond, and vs
a taliyah The enemy fiora solo kills our top laner for
not the first time this game, and at this point is 11 and 2, while our vayne has had
a bit of a rough game being 0-7. after this happens, our yone moves up to 1v1 the fiora
and miraculously manages to outplay her and win.
At the same time, hecarim is on botside and looking to set up dragon, what would you do
at this point? we should definitely just let yone fight 1v1
and farm camps and wait.
Were under no pressure to actually start the dragon right now.
not only is our side of the map now a 3v4 if fiora wins the 1v1 were going to lose our
inhib by stalling at dragon. once again, its important to know when to give something up
and not just contest every objective.
As you can see, even in diamond this mistake happens all too often.
If we had just waited for yone to push out and we just stall at the dragon by essentially
dancing with the enemy team, were winning.
If nothing happens, yone is taking stuff top lane for free and its important that we just
let him continue to get advantages even if it means giving something up right in front
of us.
If the enemy team sent someone to respond to yone, we could then fight the 3v3 and vayne
could walk to the fight to turn the numbers into our favor.
By doing the dragon instead, we are playing right into their hands.
Being patient and letting the enemy have to respond to pressure is really important.
Dont create the one window that they need in order to make the play not a complete loss
for them.
After the dragon, we respawn and run into top side, hecarim calls for baron.
do you think this is a good idea?
While there is a possibility that you can sneak this away and tf is bot, The fact that
we all just died means that the enemy likely has vision of it at this point.
and the fact that tf has a global ultimate that reveals everyone doesnt make this seem
very good either.
WIthout proper set up and vision, its really hard to know how to play out the fight that
is about to happen.
Hecarim is sitting on rift herald and couldave dropped it in order to make the enemy team
have to respond, simultaneously going to clear vision and push waves would mean that the
enemy has to come from a predictable place, instead of fog of war.
The resulting fight is literally the definition of a complete coinflip.
In fact this fight is probably favored to the enemy team from us taking baron damage,
and its a miracle that both vayne and yone are able to pull out the plays they did in
order to win this.
In fact, i cant think of anything worse than relying on a 0-8 vayne to win me the game,
if i wanted better odds id probably just go play
the lottery.
Thatll wrap it up for this video, let us know in the comments what you think you need to
work on the most that we highlighted in this video, and let us know what kind of content
youd like to see next.
Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.