League of Legends tips

Evelon277

I'm thinking of trying out League of Legends for the first time and I see that you guys play it. Any tips for a noob? I'm not sure I'll even like it, but as with every other game I'm assuming that it will be more fun if I have a little bit of an idea of what I'm doing.

Winfrey

Have you played Defense of the Ancients (DotA) or any other moba style game before?

First thing you should do is probably try some games vs. bots to get familiar with the interface and the game's mechanics. When you first start out it's a good idea to stick with a hero to play several times so that you figure out the subtleties to their game play. The most important thing to learn during your games vs. bots is what items to buy, what skills to level up, what role you play on the team and probably most importantly how to last hit. It's one of the most important and basic skills to the game, basically you wait behind your minions as they fight the enemy minions and when the enemy minion is low enough to kill in one hit you then "last hit" it for money.

Last hitting does 2 very important things for you.
1) it gives you money, unless you are the last hit on the minion you get no money and you need money to buy items and make your hero more boss

2) it stops the lane from pushing which makes you safer from ganks because you are closer to your tower for safety and it keeps you steady on minion farming.

Play a few games with bots if you like it come back and let us know. Check out guides for different heroes at www.mobafire.com and you can even find basic information on how to play at sites like those as well.

Evelon277

Great, thanks! It's just about finished updating, I'll get back to you after a few games.

Tushon

Mobafire is awesome once you know how to play them (I LOVE their abbreviated style that is mandatory in the guide), but I liked leaguecraft for explaining the "how" of champions. You can sort the guides by rating on both sites and make sure you tune the age to fresh (moba) or a recent patch (league) so that you are getting pretty current data. There are a ton of different play styles across the characters, but they boil down to basics: tank (in lane), tank (jungle), dps (carries fall under this, consistent damage over time), burst (can be carries if played well, critical strikes, big damage spike, but not sustainable typically), and support (healing/other regen, empowering your team/disabling the enemy team). It is ideal to get good at all play styles, but that can come later.

I'd find a playstyle or two that you like and learn several champions that fall within it (and that are available to you). If you are wanting to drop some cash, I'd buy XP and IP boosts before champions. Learning a new champion later is trivial, but the amount of IP you'll need to earn to get runes is a grind and you'll want to get to level 20 ASAP as that opens up the top tier of runes (don't buy any before level 20)

Playing a bot game WITH someone who knows the play styles is going to help you a lot.

Evelon277

Well, I just played a bot game as Garen/tank and wow, that was a lot of fun. Probably the most fun I've had playing a video game if a long time... although that's not surprising, as I've only been playing BF3 these past couple months. I did not expect a game to be that long, I mean, I knew nothing about the game to begin with, but wow, that was much longer than I expected. Not to say that's a bad thing, it got a lot more fun as I leveled up and got new/better items.
Thanks for the tips, guys, it really helped me out.

RahnalH102

The only real downside there is to LoL, if you like the style of game in the first place, is that some other players can get rather snippy about how "YUR DOIN IT WRONG!!" but if your playing with friends then you really have nothing to worry about. Not to scare you away or anything (doubt it) just letting you know before hand.

Other then that welcome to the League!

Tushon

Other people WILL get snippy and ragey and all that jazz. You just gotta take what you can learn from them and ignore the rage. Tribunal is getting better at punishing ragers/other bullshit, so don't fall into troll traps (because they can punish you, too). Make sure you understand the "summoner's code of conduct" and stick pretty close to it.

Expect each game to last either 20 mins (one team surrenders) or ~45 mins (up to 75, but more than 45-50 is rare). Dominion is a much faster play-style, ~20-25 mins should be over. It also entails playing characters somewhat differently and there are a lot of characters who are ill-suited to that play style.