Our hero Hector was sent to gold this week where he stomped lane and gained a 100 CS
lead by 15 minutes. Why have we made him smurf this week? Well,
because laning against ranged top laners sucks. They abuse their range advantage to not only
abuse you in lane, but then they have the nerve to out-scale you as well.
A 100 CS lead is massive and rarely happens, especially this early. For Hector, this isn’t
rare in games below diamond. To learn how he does it, we need to go back to the start.
The strategy Hector will use to initiate an early lead this game will be to abuse the
power of Corrupting Potion and Time-Warp tonic early on. The foundation of this strategy
is that you can brute force lane control by how much immediate healing you have available
to you. Depending on the match up this can clearly
be very effective at scoring kills, but that isn't the only way you can get ahead with
this strategy. There's plenty of advantages to be gained
by using all 3 charges of Corrupting Potion for immediate lane control. For example, you
could brute force a slow push and set up a big crash. This allows a free recall, which
lets you re-stock on your potions, and come back to lane to fight a worn down opponent.
Or you could chunk your lane opponent so hard with constant trading, that you could potentially
set up a freeze, recall, and teleport back to gain an experience lead.
The effectiveness and applicability will obviously always depend on the match up you're in, but
abusing the early power of Time-Warp Tonic is generally very effective against ranged
champions. They usually have long cooldowns and mediocre damage early on. They won't have
enough power to prevent you from taking early control with all your immediate sustain
Alright, let's see how Hector puts this into action.
The beginning of the lane is a bit interesting. Hector could just immediately jump on Vladimir
and begin executing the strategy we just discussed. But for this specific match up, he's actually
going to mind game Vlad and pretend that he's afraid of him.
Notice what Vlad did with that false confidence. He began autoing the wave to establish control.
This is exactly what Hector wanted, and we'll discuss why in a bit once we see the results
of his patience. Now that his objective is complete, Hector
immediately Qs in to trade. Against Vladimir specifically, always watch
for his Q. They love spamming it on the wave the second it comes up for infinite sustain.
Punishing him while it's on cooldown is pivotal to winning against Vlad
After the trade, Hector kites back, but towards the brush. Always remember to use brushes
to drop minion aggro whenever possible. Vladimir uses his Q again on the wave, and
Hector is back on him immediately. This is how abusing the early power of Time-Warp Tonic
should usually look like. Hector did make a small mistake here though.
He wasn't auto attacking the wave enough, so he didn't get level 2 in time to match
Vlad's level lead. Now he's forced to back off, because he'd tank too much damage from
Vladimir, if he tried to equalize the levels here.
This gave Vlad an unfortunate respite to regen his health, as Hector had to just sit back
and wait for his wave to get him level 2. But the second he does, he's once again immediately
on him to punish his Q cooldown. When Vlad responds with his pool to dodge
the counter strike, notice how Hector walks into the bush. Any opportunity you find to
drop minion aggro is always good Once Vlad comes out of pool, he just finishes
chasing him down and kills him. Now, there was no way of knowing he'd score
a kill at this exact moment. But remember that mind game we discussed at the beginning?
Setting up the wave to be pushing to him was exactly what Hector wanted, so that he could
snowball off his early aggression. Even if he doesn't score a kill here, Vlad still has
to base and Hector scores an easy experience lead.
In regards to the kill itself, we do have to mention that Vladimir had heal, he just
didn't use it here. But it didn't matter what summoner spell he had, thanks to the freeze
set up. If he presses heal here, instead of Q'ing
forward, Hector just kites back and Q's a minion to safety.
Then he recalls, teleports back and freezes against a super low health Vladimir.
If Vlad correctly took teleport, then....he dies just like he did. And the following still
occurs. Hector can now just clear enough minions for
a double long sword base. He's also making sure to not kill too many minions to break
his own freeze. Vladimir would've obviously tp'd here, if he had it. The only difference
would probably be that Hector couldn't stay for enough gold to buy 2 swords. Not a big
deal When he teleports back, Hector chooses to
prioritize clearing minions before looking to fight. Generally, if you can obtain a level
lead before fighting your opponent, it's obviously a good idea to do so.
Once he hits 4, he jumps on Vladimir and it's an easy kill.
Okay, punishing this Vladimir wasn't too difficult. Plenty of you guys could've done that. But
let's touch on the main topic of this guide, which is snowballing a lead. At this point,
Jax has 2 options to look to snowball. Hector could look to buy Tiamat and constantly
shove Vladimir in. This would give him the priority needed to farm a ton of jungle camps
to really accelerate his lead. Or, he could play more of a denial strategy
and set up freezes to try and keep killing Vladimir.
Which do you think is the correct choice? Both of these options have merit, but Skill-Capped's
choice would be to continue setting up freezes. To understand why, let's break down why we
don't think Tiamat power farming is correct here.
Let's look at a game where Hector *did* opt to Tiamat power farm. The whole point of it
is to pump a lot of gold into yourself by constantly shoving in waves. The resulting
minion damage can lead to occasional turret plates,
it also makes sure you can clear every wave possible, with the main point being the counter
jungling. But he made quite a few mistakes this game.
The first being a silly death, where he didn't press his R in response to Velkoz's damage.
Malphite was really far behind at this point, and this allowed him to catch up.
Then there was the arrogant over chase into enemy towers, which results in another death
due to him misplaying his getaway. Yet those 2 mistakes didn't matter. Malphite
got quickly out-scaled regardless, and this game was easily won.
Let's think of a different match up. Let's imagine you're playing Renekton and you've
gotten a lead vs a Fiora. Would you Tiamat power farm in that situation? The correct
answer would be no, and it's because Fiora outscales.
Think of it like this. Would you rather have a 1000 gold lead over the Fiora at level 5,
or a 3000 gold lead over Fiora at level 14. You'd always pick the 1000 gold lead. A 3
item Fiora curb stomps a 4 item Renekton in the side lane anyways.
This is the main point that you should consider whenever enacting Tiamat power farming. You're
accelerating the pace of the economy in top lane, because you're gaining so much gold.
This also causes you to likely get a kill bounty for yourself
And because you're not laning against your opponent anymore, they're free farming, and
can potentially shut you down, if you happen to make a mistake.
All this extra available gold accelerates how fast both top laners scale, and allows
them to reach their mid and late game status faster.
Therefore, in that previous Renekton example, you would want to prioritize denying Fiora
in lane as much as possible to delay how fast she scales and make her irrelevant
This is why Hector chose to freeze in this match up. Yes, he's Jax and he scales pretty
well. But so does Vlad. If he resorted to Tiamat farming, Vladimir would just be free
farming in top lane. Then if Hector made 1 of his classic mistakes and died, that Vladimir
is that much closer to getting his Deathcap and 1v9ing the game. Also, it isn't like you
aren't getting a huge lead by freezing anyways. The lead is just more about shutting your
opponent down, rather than accelerating yourself. Once Vladimir gets back to lane, Hector just
immediately jumps on him, and that guy is already crawling back to his base. And back
to freezing we go. Let's just skip ahead to when Vladimir gets
back again. Hector does make a small mistake in this freeze.
He's hitting the minions a bit too much. This makes it so that when he goes on Vladimir,
he pulls these 3 caster creeps, and that's the final straw that causes him to break his
own freeze This realization clearly tilts him and causes
him to do....whatever that was. At this point his only option is to crash
the wave and look for a recall timing But Vladimir decides to troll and lose his
entire health bar. Therefore, once the wave crashes, Hector can
look for a third strike W onto Vlad and instantly kills him.
Clearly, he hoped to live by Q'ing out in time, he just miscalcualted.
In the short term, this may seem bad. Giving a shut down to Vladimir contradicts everything
we recently discussed, but long term, it actually plays into Hector's favor. Remember, crashing
waves always bounce back the other way. In other words, Hector will have a freeze waiting
for him when he gets back to lane and he can continue to bully Vladimir Lastly, take note
on how he didn't buy Tiamat with his gold either. If you're freezing, you obviously
don't want auto pushing that you can't control. As both of them get back to lane, he uses
the freeze to his advantage, since Vlad has to walk up. This lets him force 2 solid trades
The trades did cause the freeze to be broken, but if you're trading correctly that shouldn't
matter. Killing your opponent is undoubtedly a much better way of denying them gold anyways
At this point, the ease at which he can just kill Vladimir is quite brutal
And this is exactly how we arrived at the 15 minute Flame Horizon. Not through greed,
but rather a systematic shut down preventing Vladimir from ever farming for more than a
few seconds Hopefully, you now see the importance of how you should snowball relative to the
scaling of the champion you're up against. It can make a huge difference in how the game
plays out and will definitely increase your success. Thanks for watching