Why YOU SUCK at MID LANE (And How To Fix It) - League of Legends

in this guide you're going to learn exactly why you suck at mid lane and simple easy to apply ways to fix it my name's hex I'm a multi-season challenger player that's been teaching League of Legends here at skillcap for over 10 years and if there's one thing I've learned in that time is that being good at mid lane doesn't require you to master every single detail of the game or have crazy good mechanics you can see big gains in your rank just by understanding a few simple Concepts and fixing a couple key mistakes you likely don't even know you're making so my promise to you is that if you watch this guide until the end that you will see significant rank gains how can I be so sure of that well for one a lot of the clips you'll be learning from in this guide are actually from our brand new bronze Diamond course where I document my climb from you guest it bronze to diamond with a live commentary where I teach you how to carry out of each rank as a midlaner you'll also be learning from our brand new midlane Essentials course that teaches you the A through Z of everything you need to know to rank up fast so if you end up finding this guide helpful and trust me you will then you should check out these courses after it's completely risk-free to try them out since if you don't rank up while activ L using skill Capa you'll get your money back no questions asked or even offering a discount you can only unlock through the link below to celebrate the new season so click the link in the description below or learn more at the end of this guide all right so the first mistake most midlaners make is they over complicate Wave Control in mid lane and our wave control guide in our new midlane Essentials course will perfectly explain why so besides the basics that you should already know how does Wave Control change in mid lane specifically there are two key things you really want to keep in mind one mid lane is the shortest Lane relative to top and botom this means that you have a lot less room to work with in the lane two you are in the middle of the map with quick access to almost any potential play that might occur together these problems mean that freezing and slow pushing both lose a lot of value in this Lane it's hard to build a big slow push when the lane is so short not only that but most Champions have ranged wave clear so it's doubly hard to build a big crash and freezing suffers similar problems where you don't have a lot of room to work with to hold your freeze you also don't have access to these side Lane brushes which are pretty useful for creating freezes as well not only that but you really want to be able to move around the map freely at a moment's notice while you are freezing or slow pushing you do not want to leave your lane whatsoever so it will often be annoying to try these strategies anyways for these reasons we generally recommend that you avoid freezing or slow pushing after around level six once you have your ultimate you want to enable yourself to move around the map you should probably default to fast pushing most waves at this time we're not saying that you absolutely never freeze or slow push after level six it's just you need a good reason for it like in this case aalii was winning Lane hard enough to where she can dive the enemy Corky so she builds a little slow push which will let her set up a dive even though slow pushing has a lot less value at this point the setup was too good to ignore that's really what we mean if you have a good reason you can always ignore our guidelines but in general it's just really hard to get value out of freezes and slow pushes after level six so just fast push for the most part mid lane Wave Control is pretty simple that way the actual skill to learn in mid lane in regards to Wave Control is learning your Champion specific break points for killing minions if you don't remember what a break point is it's when your specific Champion can kill the melee or caster minions a certain way every game for example already at level three with two points in or Q can use it twice to kill the backline minions the reason break points are so important for mid lane is because your wave clear is mostly based on your abilities you can't finish waves off reliably with auto attacks unlike other roles so knowing the exact sequence of spells you need to kill a wave will allow you to plan ahead for how you clear waves which could save you time Mana or precious cooldowns however at an intermediate level you only need to focus on break points for Caster minions this is because when you clear waves you don't want to walk up to hit casters which might leave you vulnerable in mid lane you're gankable from multiple angles so staying as close to your Tower as possible when last hitting is pretty important but also when you clear waves you can damage the entirety of the wave killing the casters with spells and usually finishing the melees with Auto or two there are some break points for melee minions for a lot of mids but they're very Champion specific you won't need to learn those unless you're trying to climb to extremely high elos while every midlaner has different wave clear though almost every single one of them shares common break points at level five 7 and nine for killing Caster minions which you should definitely know at level five almost every single midlaner can use the primary spell they're maxing twice on the casters to kill them at level seven with four ranks into your main spell if you use it on the casters it will typically leave them very low depending on your Champion you can now finish them off with an auto attack or on many Mages you can use one of your weaker abilities to finish them off then at level 9 your primary ability should very consistently One-Shot the backline these three Caster minion break points are not Universal but they are very consistent across midlane Champions this is something you can play around yourself or perhaps try to deny from your opponents for example cnra was about to base here since she was low on health and Mana however by knowing about wave clear break points beforehand she knew she had enough Mana to cast at least two Q's so she canel her base because she could push this extra wave quickly and reliably with her level five breakpoint this is what's really important about knowing your break points in mid and why you should pay attention to them on your specific Champion it takes the guess work out of wave clearing and allows you to make consistent decisions every single game great so this is what you need to take away from that video first is that pushing is incredibly powerful in midlane since you're at the center of the map and can roam after you push and once you hit Level six from that point forward the midlaner who gets the push Advantage is likely going to be roaming around winning the game but how exactly do you get to that point it's not like the enemy mid is just going to sit back and let you do this well at its core to get to that winning position you first need to surprise surprise win your lane lucky for you it's simpler than you think I'm serious you're about to learn the only two mechanics you'll ever need to win your lane against 99% of the midlaners you face you see midlaners are incredibly rying on their abilities to either damage you or the minion wave and so to win your lane it often boils down to baiting and then punishing their cooldowns step two in our trading section in our midlane Essentials course explains why as we briefly mentioned already most midlaners are very ability focused both you and your opponent are unlikely to deal a lot of damage with auto attacks so your main source of damage will come from spells it's not a hard concept to understand if your opponent uses their spell you should be looking to trade aggressively while you have a cooldown Advantage this is because you're extremely likely to win any fight where you simply have more spells up easy enough but the actual skill is baiting or forcing your opponent to use their spells yourself the more spells you force them to waste the more often you can punish them here are some important ways to do that first you should be pressuring their CS as much as possible after our last video you should know that punishing CS is something you should actively be looking to do your opponents are obviously going to play around this though when they go for a CS your opponent has some options they can Auto it and take your damage they can also choose to concede the Cs entirely or maybe they use a spell to last hit to avoid harass this is how you force spells out of your opponent you want to be in their face during their last hits as much as possible forcing them to have to waste a spell in order to CS once you achieve that you can either punish them with a trade or establish Wave Control because they'll be forced to back off okay so the main concept to take away is not just to punish enemy lasit timings with your abilities but rather by simply threatening to contest an enemy's last hit you'll often bait them to waste an ability to get that last hit that's the cooldown timing window you can use to win your lane now some players already get this but likely the concept they're missing to take it to the next level is the idea of last hit turns for example here it would be a mistake for Ari to try and go for a trade because if you look at the minions Swain's minions are much lower in health meaning Ari will have to move in last it first compare that to AR's minions Swain won't have to last it for a while so this is Swain's turn to try and harass Ari while she has to last it you can see Swain isn't aware of this concept and so isn't going aggressive during AR's turn to last it meanwhile Ari makes sure to focus on getting her last it turn over and done with before going aggressive herself great her last hits are out of the way in this case Ari chooses not to go aggressive off Swain's last hit instead focuses down a minion to spike level two first notice how when both players have to last hit at the same time it typically means both play defensive and nothing happens now that AR's level two let's look at the minions again Swain is the one with the lasted timing baiting him to move forward despite being down a level and setting up an easy winning trade for Ari if we jump forward just a few seconds you can see the exact same concept winning Ari her Lane she takes more defensive stance getting her last HS out of the way and Swain makes the mistake of not trying to trade during that time then right after it's Swain's turn to last it and Ari immediately punishes him for it you always try to time your trades during your opponent's lasted turns and you avoid trying to go aggressive during yours as you'll be then giving up your own last hits so that's the first step to winning lane timing aggression on enemy last hits to create cooldown timing Windows while playing more defensive on your own last hit timings this should be the EB and flow of your early laning phase before you unlock that super powerful roaming at level six now you're probably thinking okay but what do I do between these last H turns well that's where the second mechanic you need to learn to win Lane as mid comes in spacing at its score spacing just means staying outside of the range of the enemy spells let's use Annie as an example Annie's Q ability has a range of 625 the highest range of her basic abilities if you were playing a champion like Ari against Annie good spacing would be always staying outside of that 625 range sounds simple enough stay outside of a Spell's range but the mistake everyone makes is they stand too far back you see AR's Q ability her main form of damage is 900 range so if you stand too far back sure Annie can't damage you with her spells but you won't be able to land your damage either this is why when and coaches talk about spacing they're really talking about that goldilock zone where Ari can damage Annie but Annie can't damage her back in this specific matchup that would be from 650 to 900 range this mechanic of spacing creates two Dynamics in every matchup in mid One champion has the range advantage and is looking to stay in the goldilock zone while One champion has the range disadvantage and is looking to close the distance and get out of the goldilock Zone regardless of the matchup the first technique you need to master is sitting at the opponent's Max spell range and moving either in and out or to the side let's start with the in and out technique here Ari is sitting at fizz's max e- range by moving back and forth at this range it can bait Fizz to cast his e thinking he can land it when he then misses it puts a key spell on cool down giving a timing window for Ari to land free damage so what should Fizz be doing to counter this well the same thing if he moves in and out of the range player max range it can bait them to waste spells giving him the timing window to go aggressive now you can't always sit at someone's Max spell range in every matchup that's where the second technique of moving to the side comes in here you can see Ari move forward into talia's range but Talia walked into Ari at the same time this means if Ari moves backwards she can no longer be out of range to dodge the spell and so pivots to a side movement instead essentially instead of clicking forward then back like before you click forward and then to the side you can also do back and to the side in this instance here AR clicks back as if she's running away but then preemptively clicks to the side baiting Talia to cast her W to where she was originally running to I really want to emphasize none of this is reaction time these are preemptive movements the trick is to preemptively move after your ch ion turns do sell a certain direction here Ari turns to face away selling that she's running away that's when she then clicks to the side you can see Talia hasn't even casted anything yet it's a preemptive movement to bait the enemy to missing an ability the clip before this you can see how once Ari shows her Champion running forward how she begins moving her Mouse to the side to click before she's even able to react to Talia casting an ability same thing with the original clip Ari clicks towards Fizz to get in range then clicks back hoping to bait the spell you're not reacting to a spell you're just hoping this movement baits the enemy sure enough the next time she does the technique it does bait him and same thing with the second clip it starts with the Fizz moving back and forth at max range trying to bait the spell you're not reacting to anything the movement technique itself just baits the enemy and Dodges it for you now one more advanced spacing technique you should be aware of is the fake out this is a variation of the In-N-Out so if you notice the enemy is copying your movements where you click backwards and they run forwards and then you click forwards and they run backwards what you do is Click backwards and then immediately click forward extremely fast they'll react to your backward WS click and click forward but by the time they do you've already clicked towards them this causes both of you to be running at each other momentarily closing the distance faster than they expect now I know this can be a lot to take in but really to space well you just need to remember the following whenever you enter the enemy spell range you need to be sending movement commands preemptively in a different direction for example here Talia is outside of AR's range however when Ari stands still to last at a minion Talia then enters AR's Q range so Talia needs to either preemptively move backwards or to the side you don't react to the spell being cast react to the fact that you've entered a Spell's range instead Talia makes the common mistake of thinking her reaction time will be enough to dodge it but it never will be hopefully this demystifies spacing for you it's not crazy reaction time but just preemptive movements at the edge of the enemy's range now I know you're already thinking okay so you're expecting me to learn every single range of every ability in the game that does not sound simple like if you wanted to only learn 50% of Champions that's still like 80 Champions and with three basic abilities per Champions that's 240 ability ranges you would need to memorize that's insane and totally unrealistic don't worry here are some tips that makes practicing and learning spacing way way easier firstly in mid lane you will have certain Champions you face way more often you want to focus on learning those first so for example in mid lane on the current patch if we learn the ranges of just the six most picked midlaners it would be Ari yaso qu syus yon and aelan soul congratulations you've learned 53.8% of the matchups you'll face you see those 240 abilities you thought you had to memorize is more like 18 and at the same time not every ability needs to be be memorized only the high threat ones for example silus is deceptively high range as a melee Champion his main poke his Q has a range of 865 and his e has a range of 950 in reality though his e gets blocked by minions so as long as you have minions protecting you you just need to memorize that 865 range you know what Champion that sounds a lot like Ari her Q range is 900 syus is 865 and AR's e range is 1,000 silas's is 950 both play similarly trying to use Q for poke and lining their e is typically going to either kill you or lose you a tra hard if it lands but both can be blocked by minions that's how you end up learning a ton of matchups really fast you start with the most popular ones such as silus and realize oh Ari is just a ranged version of silus and just like that with Ari and silus being in 23.1% of your games you've had to really only learn one range for each of them and now you'll be spacing like a god in 1/4th of every game you play Still spacing can be tough to learn and it's because visualizing the range of spells in game can be hard but there's actually a trick to this too what you want to do is use your own spells range as reference for example let's say you playing against Fizz fizz's e- range in total is 775 AR's W range is 725 so what you can do is bring up the range indicator on your W asari to remind yourself visually of approximately how far 775 range is and just stay outside of that while you Lane another example would be if you're facing Vladimir we all know how annoying Vladimir can be with his Q spam while his Q range is 600 a ton of range Champions have an auto attack around there for example the most Standard Auto Range is 550 so if we're playing Ari into Vlad well we know AR's Auto Range is 550 so you can bring up your attack range indicator and remind yourself to stand a little bit further away than the range indicator since vlad's Q range is 600 compared to our Auto attacks 550 and there you go you now have everything you need to dominate 99% of the players you're going to be facing in mid actually really quick with how heavy that last section was for the love of God do not just throw abilities out on the wave early on and do not let enemies get away with this half the time you don't even need to punish on last hits or have good spacing because of this one simple mistake reason why players make this mistake so much is that as as you can see Lux doesn't do anything to punish AR's W being on cool down however High ELO players no Auto attacks are what get you the push Advantage early on as they do more damage than a single spell so if an enemy wastes their one spell at level one trying to push well it's an easy punish with your own spell winning your lane ideally what you should be aiming for in this early leaning phase is what's called a double value spell you try to apply Auto attacks to the wave and then use your abilities to both land harass and push the wave at the same time this way you not only poke the enemy down but guarantee the push advantage to potentially set up level two spikes in allins okay great so you're now a laning God you're out there zoning the enemy getting the push Advantage as early as level one and what do you know you get ganked by an enemy jungler and you're thinking to yourself see I knew skill cap was lying well hold on the mistake here isn't pushing it's actually that you aren't placing a very simple standard Ward that keeps you safe for the early laning phase the Raptor Ward the midlane guide in our new vision course explains why as a midlaner we strongly recommend you start the game by placing a ward on the enemy Raptor camp at around 120 this is because regardless of where the enemy jungle starts that Ward will spot them 99% of the time until your team their exact route where he's headed to after Raptors and the timing of his clear in fact if you have Lane control and are pushing as mid your priority should be maintaining a trinket Ward on this Raptor Camp throughout the game as it's the most hi trffic area for the enemy jungler and will spot him the most so if we go back you can see how if AI had just placed that standard Raptor Ward she would have spotted the belth going for this early gank now there's one last thing you need to know about the early laning phase as a midlaner especially if you're someone who plays as a melee mid so listen up the worst thing you can do is what this Talon does in this game since Ari has the range Advantage it will make it easy to secure an early push lead this means as the melee Champion you have to avoid trading as even if you get what looks like on the surface is a good trade it simply won't matter as the enemy will just Spike level two on you and then you can't even capitalize on any health lead anyways and keep in mind they always have the option of then crashing that big wave they build up to set up a rebounding wave on you which means suddenly you're low in health from Trading earlier with a wave pushing away from you forcing you to overextend if you want to last it this is essentially Checkmate Talon either has to take a bad recall timing where his wave kills enemy minions denying him the golden XP or he stays in lane and Ari sets up a freeze looks to land poke and set up an Allin instead you should be playing these range vers melee matchups like this Fizz sit back give the push lead to the enemy and try to take hardly any damage once the wave crashes you'll equalize in levels and the enemy will be overextended vulnerable to traits and that rebound off your tower now turns into a slow push for yourself so if the enemy makes the mistake of overextending during this time well that will make for easy trade Tres for you and setting up once again that Checkmate position where they can't recall without giving up a big wave baiting them to stay and usually getting you free kills and finally the last thing you need to understand in order to win your lane in mid is recall timings the combination of mid being a short Lane meaning you can get back to it faster than other lanes after you recall and wave clear means knowing recall timings is absolutely key but don't worry there's just a couple simple rules you need to follow first if an enemy recalls 99% of the time you should be looking to match their recall with your own let me explain here you can see the enemy Fizz gets a great trade on cadan this forces cidan to have to take a bad recall timing by the way this is considered a bad recall timing because cidan hasn't pushed out and farmed the wave first before he recalled so he's going to lose out on all these minions while he's in base so fizy cidan took a bad recall timing so what should he do well he has two options since the wave is pushing into him he could just recall as caston's minions will just kill a bunch of his minions toy cast it and farm while giving him a nice big wave to come back to or he could do what he did in this game push the wave into the tower to to set up his own recall timing the problem he doesn't actually recall after the push when this happens the enemy just gets to come back with full health and mana on top of an item Advantage so now Fizz is completely screwed he can't recall without losing a bunch of Cs but if he stays in Lane he's either going to die or not be able to react to anything on the map you can see how literally just this one mistake of not matching recall ends with Casten being able to outplay a jungle gank 1v2 killing Fizz and then getting away here's another example cidan tries to push out his Lane to create a recall timing but was just a bit too slow Ari does well recognizing to push the wave to punish casden for this recall however again makes that mistake of staying instead of matching recalls after a lot of the times players get baited by the turret plates so what do you know cidan gets back has an item advantage and full resources and starts dominating Lane with it so when a fight happen shortly after AR's completely useless and cadan once again gets fed here's a really good clean standard example of how matching recalls should look so Talia Lost Lane early and is forced to take a bad recall great Ari punishes by pushing the way first to set up her own recall this forces Talia to have to use teleport to get back to Lane at this point if you're Ari you can either choose to walk back to Lane since Talia actually can't push the wave into your Tower to deny minions in time before you would get back or you can use teleport if you want to continue to maintain your lane pressure the choice is yours you can also use recall timings offensively to create your own Advantage for those of you that don't know before 15 minutes every third wave that spawns will be a Siege minion wave so on the wave right before a Siege minion wave spawns in other words the second wave you can look to clear it super fast this forces the opponent to stay and finish clearing the wave letting you recall then since the next wave has a Siege minion it's both very hard for the enemy to clear that fast enough to push into your Tower with how tanky Siege minions are and at the same time if they are able to push that wave into the tower well Siege minions can tank up to eight turret shots this basically always gives you the time needed to get back to Lane without really missing minions in this case you can see how Karma wasn't able to push that Siege W fast enough so now Ari is back in Lane with a health mana and item Advantage all of this achieved with a simple recall timing great now you have an effective game plan to win in and snowball your lane next is using that advantage to roam and impact the map the roaming section of our new midlane Essentials course serves as a great introduction welcome to the roaming section of our skillcapped midlane essential course mid lane is by far the lane that has the most map impact given that you're right in the middle of the map meaning you can go to any fight you want to take over the game but at the same time this is why you might find yourself getting camped every single game in any game of League if you just shut down the midlaner you completely win the early game if you know when and how to Ro as a midlaner you can completely blow open the map and take over the game but at the same time if you don't know when to actually Roam and take bad roam timings instead well you'll completely screw yourself over and fall behind shooting yourself in the foot that's why we'll be teaching you all the ins and outs of roaming first we'll teach you how to identify a game-winning timer to RAM and then how to execute on that Ram properly then later on in this section we'll teach you how to deal with the most frustrating scenarios you might run into such as meeting the enemy jungler and dying in the river or maybe your roams never seem to work out while the enemy mids roams have a 100% success rate for absolutely no reason and the first step to roaming is always going to be shoving out the midwave the whole reason why roaming can put you behind if you do it wrong is because if you roam on a bad timing you lose all of your minions and fall behind in items and levels so to eliminate that risk you should always shove before you leave Lane if the enemy wave is still alive it means you have unfinished business you need to still attend to the best way to shove in the early game until you reach around level five is by using slow pushing why it's because the more minions you build up before you crash to Tower the longer the amount of time you have to roam and get things done before you need to get back to your lane to farm this puts your opponent in an awkward spot where if they follow your roam they'll Miss so many minions to Tower and lose Lane so you've effectively created a win-win situation for yourself at the same time you'll get back to the minion wave around the time your opponent finishes shoving out during your RAM timer and if you're not exactly sure of what we mean by slow push we recommend you check out our Wave Control section of this course to get you up to speed every Champion can slow push but there are different ways to accomplish this Mages would just play for shove advantage using their ranged attacks and abilities whereas melee Champions would threaten trades while the wave is still on their side of the lane so if you were to crash just a single wave of six minions without slow pushing you'd probably only have about 10 to 15 seconds to get something done before you start losing out on a lot of Minions on the other hand if you crash a huge wave you'll probably have around 2 to 25 seconds to get something done on the map before you need to walk back mid and bonus points if there's a cannon minion in the mix these minions will buy you about another 5 Seconds of time because of how long they can tank Towers so try your hardest to facilitate that slow push to get as huge of a window as possible this is the first and most important step to roaming and something that's just as important as how you start your roam is how you're picking up the minions after your RAM what happens during your RAM after you've crashed a wave into the tower is the enemy minions will meet your big wave at the tower because they meet there instead of at the normal spot in the center of the lane the enemy wave will actually start to slow push into you while you're off doing doing things on the map this makes it perfect for you to pick up those minions once you recall or walk back to Lane this whole sequence is what we call a rebound and timing your roams off your own slow push into collecting waves on the enemy rebound is the strongest skill you can develop for roaming although we emphasized the importance of slow pushing so far sometimes you won't have to slow push and can instead fast shove if you're level seven or higher and during this time you want to roam you can fast shove in most scenarios this is because at level seven Champions just do so much damage to minion waves with their abilities that not only can you shove quicker your enemy can also collect minions under Tower faster at the same time we recommend actually buying upgraded boots such as Sorcerers Merk Treads or ionian shoes if your main focus in game is to roam your increased Mobility will allow you to reach your roam destinations faster and at the same time you get back to your own lane quicker to minimize minion loss before we move on though we want to highlight that there is also one exception where you don't need to shove before roaming if there is a team fight immediately happening and you're both guaranteed to arrive first and it's close enough to mid lane draw a circle from your mid Tower to Drake and and that's the distance that you're allowed to roam without shoving in first in this case you can take the fight because arriving first heavily swings the odds in your favor so it could be worth losing a few minions to explode the game if the fight is way too far from mid lane or if your opponent has stacked a huge wave though do not do this it can really come back to bite you and make your game unplayable now if you want to learn more our midlan course has another four guides in the roaming section covering everything you need it has an entire macro section after to teach you the mid to late game along with Team fighting all from the midlaners perspective comine that with our brand new bronze to Diamond course where I'll teach you how to carry out of each rank as a midlaner and then you can top it off with our new season 14 course on countering overpowered midlane Champions you can try all of this out risk-free if you don't rank up while actively using skill Capa you'll get your money back no questions asked you can access all of this through the exclusive discount you can only unlock through the link below so what are you waiting for click the link in the description below to get the rank you've always wanted all right and that will do it for this one we here at skillcapped want to thank you for watching and we'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Skill Capped Challenger LoL Guides

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Keywords: league of legends, league of legends guide, lol guides, league of legends tips, league of legends coaching, how to get better at league of legends, skill capped, lol tips, lol tips and tricks, lol coaching, skill-capped, league of legends season 14, lol s14, lol season 14, mid lane guide, how to mid lane, lol mid lane, lol mid lane tips, lol mid lane fundamentals, mid lane fundamentals, mid lane coaching, mid lane macro, mid lane wave control, mid lane guide season 14

Id: rhxsbf_amdE

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024