Towers are widely regarded as some of the best objectives in the game, they open up
the map, give gold, and can help snowball a lane.
So, what if we told you that taking them was actually losing you games as well?
Now we know what youre thinking, this is an absolutely ridiculous claim, but by the end
of this video, you'll see that you probably need to put a little bit more thought into
WHEN you take towers, instead of just defaulting to it if you can.
Were not saying to never take them, but theres definitely a lot more than one case where
you don't want to.
Before we get into the video, lets ask our question of the day.
What do you think is a misunderstood part of league of legends, tempo is the obvious
answer for me, its often that players have different definitions or completely misunderstand
altogether.
let us know in the comments below how you would define it, and also your answer to our
question.
with that, lets get right into the guide.
In our first example, udyr takes the rift herald at around 11 minutes in.
And from here, hes obviously looking for a place to use it.
He goes top a few minutes later and secures the first turret.
But, what was wrong with this play?
The most obvious thing is that the top tower was extremely low when herald was used.
Shelly does anywhere from 2000-2750 true damage to towers depending on her level.
so by using herald when the top tower was lower than 1000 health, more than 1000 damage
is just wasted Rift herald should ideally be used on a tower that just about half health,
as towers have unique properties that make them tankier when they get lower, and heralds
true damage is unaffected by these resistances.
However, there are some exceptions to this.
It may be tempting to rush to get first tower, but you really need to consider the overall
state of the game first.
If we look at the minimap, we can tell that none of blue teams towers are close to being
taken down, with both top and mid towers being at 5 plates remaining, and bot tower at 3.
Additionally, every lane for blue team is ahead or relatively even, and jungle is also
winning quite hard.
There is very little danger for blue team NOT getting first turret in this game, in
fact, kennen would be likely to get first tower on his own without the help of a herald,
and we would much prefer to use it mid for not only more gold from getting plates that
are about to disappear, but also for damage on a more important structure.
Mid lane tower is by FAR the most important one in the game.
As it being destroyed opens up both sides of the map, while side lane towers only open
up one.
In terms of sheer value of vision, this makes mid lane tower twice as valuable as the other
outers, and a much higher priority in general for damage to be dealt as your snowballing
potentially will be higher.
If the overall map state was more volatile, and there was a question over if first tower
would be taken by the enemy team, using herald top would be much more okay, as getting first
tower gold is definitely nothing to scoff at
However, it presents us with a few other problems, namely that it allows the enemy team to catch
back up.
Once outer towers go down, you put yourself on a timer, similarly to how taking an inhib
too early can become a bad thing.
You need to actually use the pressure that it creates to do something, or it soon becomes
a negative For example, in this position, sidelaners
can actually freeze these waves for a very long period of time.
Tf could easily walk into the wave here, tank the minions, then drop aggro to basically
stop the enemy team from farming this wave indefinitely while getting gold for himself
This is obviously a huge issue, and in lower elos its one that goes unpunished.
A vast majority of the time, laners will walk up and just kill the wave like TF does here.
This is why most players dont know that this is a mistake, because the enemy team will
almost never capitalize.
But in higher elos, this will become a source of gold and experience that the enemy team
has to intentionally fix.
If you find yourself in TF's position, as a laner or a jungler, freeze these kinds of
waves, dont just immediately push them out.
Youll end up denying yourself every wave until the enemy inevitably comes to push again,
instead of freezing, and allows you to farm again
It requires someone to actually come all the way over to break the freeze, and if you see
where yasuo actually needs to be to do this, another glaring issue arises.
How does someone actually overextend to this point while avoiding death?
its really hard, and even harder if the mid lane tower is still up, as controlling the
enemy jungle becomes extremely hard due to the enemy being able to rotate from here relatively
safely.
Yasuo would really need his team to be putting pressure mid by shoving the wave, and have
his teammates rotate over to support him and give vision so he can break the freeze, in
solo queue however, we know that this will just never happen.
So, if you make the decision to break these outer tier 1's, you need to make sure that
the tier 1 mid tower is quick to follow, or your side laners will start losing CS very
quickly, or die trying.
Even with mid tower broken in this game, laners do a very poor job with knowing when to overextend
and when not to, so they'll often be punished like yasuo is here.
This is a large reason why laners in lower elos will often have decent CS throughout
laning phase, but afterwards, youll see side waves never be touched sometimes for 10 plus
minutes, and that's not even an exaggeration.
So now that we understand a few of the problems that arise after taking the tower lets rewind
a bit back to when udyr actually decided to rift top and talk about a few more.
At this point, udyr is already quite ahead of the curve, while kennen is pretty much
even.
Udyr has already hit his major spikes with gold and experience, while kennen has not.
in a spot like this, sharing gold is often not the best idea.
For example, putting 300 or so gold on both udyr and kennen can be fine if it helps udyr
reach a specific item before a dragon fight or some other important timing, but in general,
having gold isolated onto one player early game is much more impactful since full item
completions are where big spikes happen.
getting 600 plus gold onto kennen can mean that he has his zhonyas, or deathcap WAY before
the enemy expect, and can completely turn the tide of a fight.
Think about who scales better with gold, or who can use it immediately to snowball, and
put your gold on that player.
Supports often make this mistake by taking tower plating with their ADC when its often
more ideal to let them get the solo gold, and reset instead.
Another example that will come up quite often is when junglers rift bot tower at relatively
high health and stay afterwards to hit plates Towers have another unique property that makes
them tankier the more players that are around, this gives large diminishing returns when
more than 2 players are hitting a tower at once.
Not only because it takes much longer to kill the plates, but also because youll be sharing
plates among 3 or more people, which as we just explained, can really reduce the overall
value of the influx of gold.
It can often be much better for the jungler and support to use their priority that they
gain to instead take time to invade on a camp, securing 100+ gold as well as experience,
and distributing the gold more efficiently.
Lets look at another example to talk about more reasons why leaving a tower up can be
beneficial.
Riven absolutely demolishes her top lane matchup vs akali, scoring several solo kills and going
up quite a bit in gold and experience.
Riven realizes how far ahead she is and opts to freeze the wave.
when the freeze breaks, she slow pushes, building a huge wave, and dives the akali easily.
Akali quite literally didnt farm for over 3 minutes, and riven can basically on repeat
do this exact same tactic over and over again UNTIL the tower goes down.
This denies akali HUGE amounts of experience as well as gold, and helps riven to extend
her lead by a monumental amount.
Unfortunately, riven completely spoils her lead by greeding for first tower in a game
where none of her towers are threatened at all.
Not only dying in the process, giving up her 3 level advantage, and shrinking it to just
1 level, but by also allowing akali to break this cycle by crashing a wave all the way
to rivens tower, getting plates herself, and equalizing the lead by quite a bit
Lots of junglers here would rift top and ruin this as well, so this advice applies to a
lot of roles.
Just dont take this tower at all, theres quite literally zero reason to, as rift is already
down, so opening up top side of the map is relatively useless, and instead, allowing
riven to even proxy farm between the top two towers while vi invades, would result in akali
getting literally zero XP and gold for the next segment of the game until minions kill
the tower Riven now has to overextend quite a bit onto
the enemy side of the map in order to get her next waves to crash
She gets ganked by 3 people and fortunately manages to outplay at least part of it, but
not being results based and claiming that that makes this a good play here is quite
important.
I think its quite easy to see how this couldave gone badly very quickly, and it akali couldave
potentially gotten this kill and then frozen this wave for a few minutes
These are just a few examples of why taking towers in early game can cost you massive
advantages, league is a game where there are infinite possibilities, so it would be impossible
to actually lay out every single scenario that you shouldnt take a tower.
We just hope that this video has made you a think a bit harder about WHY you want to
take them, and made you consider at least a few of the consequences.
If you want more guides just like this, make sure to check out our website, skill-capped.com.
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