LEAGUE OF LEGENDS WAVE MANAGEMENT - FULL INDEPTH GUIDE

hey everyone and welcome back to my wave control guide in this video we're going to talk about not only how to control waves but also the when and why for controlling waves then we're going to go into some of the specific openers you can do as well as the common mistakes that i see most of these will be applicable to all lanes so not just mid but bottom top as well and as always everything is time stamped below so let's get into it let's start by talking about how you control waves if you already know how to control waves feel free to skip this part first up we have a slow push so slow pushes are generally created by booting up two or three waves and then crashing it into your opponent's tower to do this you normally want a one minute advantage to begin with which will then slowly build up into a bigger minion advantage and push naturally into your opponent an easy way to do this is just to auto attack a creep a couple times at level 1 and then match your opponent's auto attack so if they order the wave you order the wave and if they don't order the wave you don't order the wave either speed up the push or to attack the wave more or to attack your opponent in order to draw a creep aggro and to slow down the push last hit as late as possible or let your opponent auto attack the wave this works well in every lane but in the side lanes you might want slightly more than one minion advantage as the lane is longer in a real game your opponent will be trying to stop you from crashing the wave so you may need to try to zone them off or just match their auto attacks in order to maintain your creep advantage next we have fast pushing fast pushing is really easy as the name suggests you want to push the wave as quickly as possible and to do this normally you just use all your cooldowns on the wave to get under the enemy tower as soon as possible if you're strong enough to fast push you may also be able to fast push the wave further up in the lane rather than waiting for the creeps to meet in the middle which can allow you to push it in around 3 or 4 seconds faster freezing is a bit more difficult you want to let your opponent have a minion advantage so the wave is constantly slow pushing to your side but do your best to stop it from actually crashing under your tower you won't be able to hold a freeze forever and it is significantly harder in mid lane compared to bot lane or top lane but a good way to keep it freeze is to pull the wave away from the tower until the next wave arrives your opponent won't always give you an opportunity to do this but it's always good to look out for you might also need to use some abilities or auto attacks in order to thin out the wave as when the wave gets really really big it's very hard to stop it from crashing lastly we have keeping the wave in the middle which actually has quite a lot of uses for this i need to show you a real game but all you really need to do is match your opponent's auto attacks and abilities and try to keep the wave in a neutral state in the middle of the lane as much as possible i will explain why this is useful in our next section that out of the way let's talk about when to control waves why to control waves and what specific types of waves do for you so starting out with slow pushing slow pushing has several advantages and also a couple of disadvantages so the first main advantage as you will see here is you will have a minion advantage because you're pushing into your opponent you have more creeps in them and that makes trading a lot easier if you ever trade minion aggro so like for example you order your opponent and they order you back they will draw aggro on more creeps just because you have more creeps than they do so that will naturally kind of make trades go in your favor another thing as you would just see here is that because their creeps are dying before yours as you actually hit level spikes earlier so you can see here i'm level three to level two and these two things in combination make trading a lot easier not only will you win trades because you have more creeps in your opponent you also win trades just because you're higher level than your opponent and as you can see in this example it allows you to deny a lot of creeps like as uh as the wave is kind of pushing in you can see creeps dying that he's unable to contest because he's a lot weaker than me and also it allows you to trade pretty easily because your opponent will have to come up um and try and see us creeps another big advantage that slow pushing has is it gives you a lot of priors so when you're slow pushing in like this you have a lot of time to go in ward or do something if you want to or when the wave actually crashes into the enemy tower you then have a lot of priority to do something like basing or roaming or something like that so there's kind of there's like two parts of the prior it's like while you're pushing in it allows you to ward and then when it actually crashes you get this huge amount of priority which you can use for basically whatever you want however there are a couple disadvantages so i'd say the two biggest disadvantages is one naturally if you're pushed up far in the lane you will be very gankable and so you can kind of manage this with good wars and good positioning and stuff like that but it's definitely worth being aware of that you're much more gankable if you're slow pushing waves especially if you're pushed up in the lane with your opponent another thing is because of your wave position you might be more vulnerable to champions that are very good at all inning or have really strong extended trades because they can chase you down the lane so that's something definitely worth thinking about is that certain champions will really benefit from having that extra space to chase you down the lane so you shouldn't slow push against every champion without thinking most of the time you will still be safe because you have more creeps and it will be hard for them to all lend you into such a large amount of creeps but there are certain champions like irelia for example that are very good at using these creeps and chasing you down so just bear in mind that you do put yourself at higher risk of being all in if you're pushed up further in the way so with those reasons in mind the ideal time to slog push waves is when you want to create an initial advantage over your opponent when you guys are relatively even in strength and you want to kind of create an advantage out of nothing as we'll talk about in a bit there are better ways to create bigger advantages or to extend advantages but in terms of creating that initial advantage when you and your opponent are relatively equal in strength slow pushing is very valuable which is why it's super common in the early game and sometimes comment a bit later in the game maybe like later in the laning phase if you guys are still even at that point bass pushing has one major advantage which is that it gives you a huge amount of tempo and the quicker you push the wave the more temper you get as i said before if you can catch the wave further up in the lane you get more temper and more time to do something and that's important because you need a lot of tempo in order to do stuff like basing or committing to roams or warning the enemy jungle or stuff like that and the more temporary you get the more time you have to go and do those things now because it comes with such a massive advantage it also comes with a few disadvantages one of the most obvious disadvantages is that you have to use cooldowns and resources on the wave so for example if your opponent is in lane against you and you've just used a bunch of mana and all your cooldowns on the wave you're very vulnerable to being traded on so that's why you should be kind of careful about when you're fast pushing because your opponent can easily take advantage of you if you're not careful another thing is that the enemy mid may look to collect the wave or freeze it so whenever you fast push a wave in like this your opponent can pull it and then freeze the wave which would leave you in an awkward position or they just might collect the wave for free if you're just shoving waves into say a corki over and over and they get to collect waves just for free over and over without getting any harassment or any punishment for it obviously that's not very good that being said it's not the same versus every champion for example if you're just shoving waves over and over into a kiana a champion that doesn't want to just farm that really needs to get on the map just like shoving in waves into them over and over might actually be good bass pushing can also be really useful for harassing your opponent under tower or making it really difficult for them to farm if you can clear the way fast enough and still have cooldowns left over to harass them under tower often times your opponent will be preoccupied with trying to see us the creeps the tower will be hitting them and it'll just be very very hard for them to farm so in essence the ideal times to fast push a wave either when you want to make a play that is going to require a lot of tempo such as warding or basing or when you want to pin your opponent to their tower either to stop them from roaming or to just make it really difficult for them to farm and harass them on the tower freezing a wave gives you some massive advantages but it also comes with some pretty serious drawbacks so you really need to consider a lot of things when you're freezing a wave and it's definitely the thing that i see people mess up the most so the first thing freezing does for you is it puts the enemy champion in a very gankable position and normally it makes you fairly immune to ganks if the wave is on your side your opponent has to move up much further in the lane and puts himself in a much more vulnerable position and on the other hand normally if the wave is on your side you'll be very very difficult to gank on top of this it's really good for the 1v1 because it makes it really easy to either deny creeps or threaten all in because they will be forced to walk up so far in the lane it'll be really easy for you to just chase them down if that's what your champion is good at also look for an all end when they're forced to kind of come away from their tower and walk up to the way it can also be quite easy to deny creeps because a lot of the time they'll be trying to use cooldowns in order to crash the wave and while they are on cooldown like while they don't have their spells you can look to trade heavily on them so you'll see here that my opponent is forced to kind of come up to this wave and it's really easy for me to just force an all-in on him because he kind of he has to come up to get the farm but he's extremely gankable i have my graves on the way and there's just no way he can get the cs and i can just go back to freezing so then what are the disadvantages well the biggest one you can see right here is that you're actually giving minion advantage to your opponent as we know from before minion advantage does a lot of really good things for you especially around trading it makes it a lot easier for you to win trades now obviously if we're looking to freeze the wave we don't just want to lose trades which is why in order to freeze the wave you need to have a big enough lead but giving your opponent a minion advantage is not gonna make it so that they're able to trade successfully onto you another drawback is that when you're freezing the wave it's very difficult for you to roam to fight because if you roam to a fire and the wave crashes you lose a lot of creeps it also makes it really easy for your opponent to roam because they've got the wave already pushed up and they know that you can't follow them so that's why you have to be really careful about freezing versus roaming champs so in this example here i'm considering a few things first off it's that while tf is a roaming champion right now he doesn't have flash or alt so i know he's most likely not going to roam somewhere else and also he's very vulnerable to all lens because he doesn't have flash and he's very pushed up in the wave another thing is that even though i've given him minion advantage i'm actually 3-0 so most likely i'm going to win trays anyway as long as he uses cooldowns and is pushed up far enough in the way now here the wave is going to crash very soon so i decide to thin it out a bit but he still wants to make sure it actually crashes right um so he's kind of forced to walk up in the wave once he uses gold to card on me i know he's pushed up too far in the wave and i can just look to the old end so when freezing you really do need to consider a lot of things because if you don't you can very easily freeze at a bad time and it's one of the only ways where it doesn't if you mess it up it doesn't just punish you but it actually punishes your team as well in general the way i think about freezing is that freezing is ideal for extending an advantage that you already have over your opponent so you'll probably want to do stuff like slow pushing first to build that initial advantage but then once you have an advantage freezing it is probably the best way to extend that advantage even more you can also use a freeze in a defensive wave just to keep the wave on your side at your tower it kind of makes you immune to all ends and ganks and also allows you to farm reasonably safely that being said obviously it does give quite a few advantages to your opponent so you should only be freezing in a defensive way if you absolutely can't do anything aggressive and some matchups are just like that and we'll go into some of those examples in the specific openers a bit later on keeping the wave in the middle or keeping the wave neutral kind of just keeps everything even and generally the best time to use it is when you don't want to strongly commit to one other form of wave control in any other direction so let me give you an example here i'm playing leblanc versus victor so there's a lot of things that are kind of pulling me in different directions here in this example my opponent has no flash and also he has stronger 1v1 trades than me but he's very very gankables that kind of makes you think okay maybe i should keep the wave on my side he'd be very gankable it would be super easy for me to just like freeze that wave make it difficult for him to crash it and then just kill him but the problem with that is victor has a lot better way clearer than leblanc and he could probably crash this wave into me and also because he already wins 1v1 trades over me i don't really want to give him an even bigger minion advantage because it would probably make it too hard for me to actually hold that wave there to keep the wave frozen because his trades would just be too strong so basically even though there are good reasons to freeze the wave i'm not quite strong enough to keep it there so do i want to push the wave to him well probably not leblanc is not very good at harassing people under tower it's still too early in the game for me to realistically consider roaming and this guy has no flash and i have great gank set up so i don't really want to make it safe for him by pushing it under the tower either so it's like okay it's not really great for me to push under the tower and it's also not great for me to freeze so in this situation you just do essentially nothing you just keep the wave in the middle you try and match your auto attacks keep it very even and you'll see here that i just keep the wave even for a while and then eventually this no flash victor is while he's not super pushed up in the wave we have extremely strong gangster we have leblanc zach um and eventually he just dies because he has no flash so this is like honestly sort of rare that there's like not a not one type of wave control that you can just go for but i think you guys should just be aware that they're kind of when all the other parts or when all the other options seem bad generally just keeping the wave in the middle is not bad it's like a very just all-round standard and it works decently well i know this can be quite confusing so i'll give you another example here i'm playing at zero versus carly so let's consider the pros and cons of different things we could do here i could choose to freeze the wave and the nice things about that is it would make it very difficult for akali not all in me and i'd probably have to deny her quite a few creeps if i had the wave on my side that being said it's very difficult for me to set up ganks onto akali she's extremely mobile so that's like something we kind of can't consider in our prose column and some negatives might be that ically is very very good at skirmishing and we would just be giving her kind of free reign to just leave the lane at whatever time she wants and get involved in whatever skirmishes she wants and azir is very strong especially in the 1v1 so i don't want skirmishes to happen i just want an isolated 1v1 so i don't really want to freeze in this situation because i'm going to allow her to do what she want we also don't really want to push the wave here either so while pushing the wave would do some good things for us we would be able to harass akali and potentially we could pin her to the tower we might also be opening ourselves up to getting ganked or getting all in by a colleague at this point in the lane when carly has some items and some levels she's extremely good at chasing people down the lane so we don't really want to give him more space to work with so from that point of view we don't really have a good reason to freeze we also don't have a good reason to push once again this is somewhat rare but in this situation all i'm going to do is i'm going to try to keep the wave somewhat even i'm going to try match her push so she uses spells on the wave i will use spells on the wave and other than that even though i could be ordering like this melee creep here for example i'm not i'm just like trying to keep the wave here i'm harassing her when i can and i'm just like choosing lots of freezes keeping the wave perfectly in the middle so to quickly summarize the whole section slow pushing is ideal for building an initial advantage over your opponent bass pushing is ideal when you want to make a play that requires a lot of tempo or when you want to pin your opponent to the tower freezing is ideal for extending an already existing advantage over your opponent or you can defensively freeze to allow yourself a bit of safety and easy farming and finally you should keep the wave in the middle when none of the other options are particularly appealing so by now you guys should have a really solid understanding of wave control but to make it even easier for you guys i'm going to go through some specific openers and timings that you can look to take advantage of in order to win more games with wave control let's start off with some openness so the first one is our three wave crash and this is just a form of slow pushing i think slow pushing or a three wave crash or a two-way crash as i'll show you guys in a bit is a really solid way to start the game especially if you're in an even or winning matchup because it allows you to really start building up that initial advantage and a lot of the disadvantages of slow pushing such as being gankable aren't as relevant in the very early game because it's very rare um that you can gank get ganked this early as long as you hug to the correct side and as long as you kind of like take notice of where the jungler started and place wards at the right time all of which are covered in my warning guide so i would recommend checking that out as well um but yeah this should be an opener that you're thinking about a lot it's just slow pushing these first few waves um you almost always be able to deny a lot of creeps like this or at least you know have a fairly kind of like strong foundation which you can choose to do basically whatever you want with you'll see that by the time i push all three of these waves in that um i'm on i believe yeah after i finish clearing these i'm on 19 cs to my opponent's six and when you get to this point you can choose whatever you want to do you can go harass your opponent under tower you can place wards you can roam to scuttle crab fight there's so many things you can do which is why this is such a strong opener to start your games off with another variant of this is that you can actually just crash two waves instead of three so the main difference about this is that you're not going to be slow pushing in for as long but it is going to make you a bit safer from being ganked so one thing you should think about is kind of like how much gank set up your opponent's mid jungle has so here i'm vers leblanc lee sin as you can see and i'm playing lucian a very gankable champion so what i really don't want to happen is for my wave to still slow be slow pushing in when this leblanc hits level three which is why in this situation i just opt to crash two waves instead so again it's not a huge difference you will still get a lot of the same advantages although not quite as much you will still win some trades but you won't get to deny creeps for quite as long but you can see here i get some winning trades i crash two waves like this and then i can go ward which makes me safe from any kind of gank pressure i'll quickly note here that if you're playing bot lane or top lane because the lane is longer you can actually crash four waves if you want this isn't really possible in mid and i don't have any video examples of it as a result but because the lane is longer you can build those waves up more and extend that slow push even more if you want to if you do look for a three or four wave crash you can follow it up with the cheetah recall which basically means after pushing your third or fourth wave you just look to base and the reason people do cheetah recalls is so that they can just go home get a better item or you know buy their tier or door and split or whatever they want come back into lane and then have an advantage over your opponent now i think cheetah recalls and mid are generally bad but i think cheetah recalls for bot lane and top lane are quite good and the reason is the lane is longer and also there are just better items to buy early a lot of the time if you're basing this early in the game there's a mid laner the only things you can really buy like a tier or a dark seal which aren't particularly valuable but if you're playing like top or bar um generally you can get much better items like if you buy say a doran's blade it can be very very strong or even just like long sword and something like that can be really nice as well so all you have to do push in those waves um and then look to base immediately after but bear in mind it's more of a thing for top and bot rather than for mid lane another super common way to open up lanes is just to let the first few waves come to you so typically if you're in a matchup that's bad for you early which will be most melee risk range matchups it could also be range versus range matchups you just want to let the wave come to you that being said you do want to try thin it out a little bit so it doesn't just end up being like a slow pushing three wave crash for your opponent um you can see here that i've thinned out the wave enough that it doesn't quite crash into the tower and it's still in a reasonably safe spot but i'm not allowing my opponent to do anything with it you should also consider this if you have really strong ganks up early because a lot of the time you can just set up ganks onto your opponent really easily like this but yeah it's just a really solid way to open up especially if you're weaker than your opponent in those first three levels because after that a lot of the time you will be stronger than your opponent and can start looking to trade the last opener i'll talk about doesn't happen that often i think it's most common in melee versus melee matchups but can sometimes happen elsewhere if you're in a match up where you're so much stronger than your opponent early you can kind of just skip slow pushing all together and go straight to freezing because you already have an advantage so take victories corki for example normally if we're in kind of a regular rangeless range matchup we would want to slow push early to start building up our advantage but we are already as victor so much stronger than corki that we can just freeze the wave to begin with and make it extremely hard for him to to fund the wave so you'll see here basically what i do is i just let this wave kind of freeze from the very start i'm not trying to slow push it into him and i can just walk in between him and the creeps and he has no way of trading back with me as you can see so um essentially the kind of way to think about this is if you're so much stronger than your opponent um that you kind of already have the advantage you don't need to build that initial advantage then you can just skip straight to the step of extending your advantage and freezing the wave on your side looking to trade um and not waste time kind of slow pushing waves into them and allowing them to get some extra free farm now we're gonna move on to some timing so this is one we've talked about before but it's really good to freeze a wave in order to facilitate a gank if you have gank set up of your own or you know your opponent is really gankable because they don't have flash or dash or you know something it can be a really good idea just to set up a gank onto them so in this situation here we're against the no flash solution we have a hecarim it's just very very easy to gank him so i freeze the wave i force him to come up and it's just a free kill another timing that you're probably already aware of if you've watched my roaming guide is fast pushing on cannon waves and looking to roam so canon waves are the best time to roam because one your opponent will have to take a long time to clear them if you fast push it under the tower and two the lane you're roaming to the cannon's going to tank the wave for a long time and your opponent is more likely to stay in order to get that cannon and also on top of that if they lose the cannon they lose a lot more gold so essentially like if you're looking for to roam uh fast pushing a cannon wave is the best timing for it for a number of reasons again this is covered more in my roaming guides i would recommend checking that out these next few techniques are going to be pretty advanced but they're also going to be really rewarding so here my opponent is very low i go for a trade on them and i force out their flash so i know my opponent's going to base here so when your opponent's going to base there's a couple ways you can deny creeps you can either push in the wave and then they kind of the wave dies under the tower while they're basing or the more advanced way is you can actually freeze and then base on your own so here it's like okay i could clear this wave and push into my opponent but why do i not want to do that well it wouldn't deny as many creeps as if i just freeze the wave um pushing here would just mean that the next wave she would be able to farm for free after she gets back to lane but what i can actually do is i can just start my base here and because she is forced to base like we know that she's really really low i end up coming back she's lost this entire wave here and then the wave is still frozen so it's still in a really good spot for me so if you can look for the opportunity to freeze before you base uh it can be really really valuable because you deny a huge amount of creeps and you maintain that really good weight position as you get higher yellow though there can be some mind games around this so here the stylus is extremely low and he wants the base now i don't have much mana and my opponent has tp which means i need to actually match base with him right now i need to go base in here but now the problem with this is that if your opponent is smart and knows that you're going to recall what they might do is actually choose to stay so you need to be careful that you don't base too early because like for example if i had completed this base and stylus just shoves in this wave now even though i'm the one that's ahead i'm the one that would be losing the wave so when you're doing this when you're doing these freezes before basing or if you're not pushing the wave before basing you might want to stay just a couple seconds longer before starting a recall to make sure your opponent doesn't go for something cheesy and try to fix the wave like this if they do go for this and you manage to catch them on it you get a really big advantage as well so it's really really valuable as long as you don't get mind game one last time you guys might be able to abuse is having tp versus no tp so in this example here i'm versus an ignite vex and i have tp now what tp does is it means you can always just get back to the lane um and you have a second health bar so you can take trades that are somewhat stupid um as long as you don't die because you're always going to be able to completely refill your health bar so what i do here is i actually go for some pretty psychotic trays that aren't particularly worth it for me i get very low but he loses a lot as well and now here because the wave is in an awkward spot for him it's sort of difficult for him to base so what i do is i decide to base i spend my gold and i tp back to lane with an item advantage now here because he has ignite he kind of has to base right um and he can't tp back here very easily so all i have to do is pull this wave and if i can find and stop his base then it's even better and now he's completely screwed because the wave is pushing to me and i have an item advantage so it's very difficult for him to base and i'm just going to be able to train him whenever i want so for our last section today i'm going to cover some of the common mistakes i see people make with wave control and one of those big ones is not adjusting to having no flash and no vision now in this situation in the 1v1 i want to fast push these waves but if you look at the map do i feel safe fast pushing these waves probably not i'm against the silas so he has reasonably strong gang set up i have no flash and i have no vision around mid so if i look to push right now it can be very very risky on top of that i don't see their support in bot lane so even though i would like to fast push this wave unfortunately i just can't you see here that i'm playing reasonably safe i'm allowing stars free access to the wave which sucks i don't want to do this but i have no choice if i'm to push aggressively here there's a high chance i die and you'll see that here it ends up there after i walk in here i actually get uh engaged on by the enemy team there janna and wukong were around mid the entire time and if i had looked um to play aggressive during this time i most likely would have died and instead we end up winning the game here just pretty much straight up i get two kills our team gets three kills in total and now the game is basically over if i had pushed aggressively here been called out pushing with no flash and no vision and then died before this fight it's very possible instead of winning the game right here my team might have taken a fight in the herald and we could have lost the game right here instead another really really common mistake is just spam pushing waves and not doing anything with them so as we said earlier in the video if you do push waves they give you a lot of advantages but if you don't do anything with them you're just giving free gold to your opponent so that's why it's really important that when you do decide to push a wave that you're you've got something planned or you know you're gonna be able to do something with it here i'm playing corki vs irelia so a very rough matchup right but this irelia is just over and over pushing waves to me and i'm just able to free farm in my tower she's looking for all ins on me but it would be much easier for her to look for all ends if the wave was just on her side and every time she pushes a wave in like this and doesn't get anything off it she doesn't ward she doesn't roam she doesn't get a kill on me i just get further and further ahead relative to her because i outscale her mega mega hard i see this time and time again in my coaching session so make sure you're not just pushing waves for no reason and that you actually have a plan for what you're going to use that way for the last one that i see very very often is people not pulling waves so it's really really common that i will see this situation here where your opponent has pushed a wave um they're too low to stay or they shouldn't be able to contest the wave if they do and instead people just let the wave crash under their tower if you do that well you need to stop in this situation you can just pull the wave up and you can pull it as far as you want you can see here that my wave isn't even at my tier two tower yet but it doesn't matter it's only two creeps right i can just pop a potion i can pull this wave as far as i need to um and he can't stop me and then the wave will be frozen so i see this literally all the time um and the main reason i think that people do it is they're just scared to take too much damage from the creeps or they're scared that their opponent would trade on them but if you do pull the wave in this banner it guarantees that you get a freeze and also it might stop your opponent from basing um just because they don't want the wave to be frozen against them so it's really really good if you can get into the habit of seeing these little opportunities or these windows in order to pull the wave like this so guys that is going to be it for my guide to wave control hopefully now you know everything you need to know and if you still have any questions or anything like that please leave them in the comment section below i've also recently moved my coaching over to metaphy so i will have a link to that in the pinned comment below if you are interested in getting individual coaching from me i also have examples of my coaching sessions on my shop coaching channel so i would recommend checking that out as well but thanks for watching everyone if you did like the video go ahead and like and subscribe for more content like this and i will see you guys next

Channel: Shok

Views: 93,030

Keywords: Wave Control Guide, Wave Management Guide, LoL Wave Control, LoL wave managment, How to control waves LoL, Mid Lane Wave control, Challenger wave control, mid lane fundamentals, Wave Control fundamentals, How to freeze LoL, cheater recall LoL, when to freeze LoL, how to manage waves LoL, Wave Control Season 13, Wave Management Season 13, How to control waves season 12, Mid lane waves season 13, top lane waves season 12, bot lane wave management season 13

Id: g4kK9Xg0Llc

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022