FAQs

Here is a collection on Frequently Asked Questions which you may find useful...

Q: What is KS and why are people calling me a KSer?
A: KS stands for "Kill Secure", which means that you secured a kill that would have escaped. This is the largest of all misconceptions because in other games, one such example being Maple Story, which is one of many free to play Korean MMORPG plagues, KS meant "Kill Stealing".

This is a team based game, if you want to shoot up your kill score, then go play a single player game. If you act like you're the biggest, brightest star to ever grace League of Legends, you'll only be met with negative attitudes.

If you feel that you're the most unique snowflake, that's fine. Just keep it to yourself and don't rage over somebody else finishing off a foe. You still got assist gold, shut up.

Q: What is last hitting and why should I do it?
A: Last hitting is getting the final hit on any unit's health bar, when it comes to minions only the last hitter gets gold for kills, when it comes to players the one to get the last hit gets the kill worth of gold, everybody else involved gets the assist bounty, which is 70% of how much the kill was worth divided evenly.

Q: So should I just auto attack?
A: Not-At-All, at least not until after 15 minutes. You want to keep your lane frozen at the middle of the river, only pushing back just as hard as your enemy. If your enemy is trying to keep you at tower, you can just farm at tower, but there are obvious adverse affects to this.

Q: How do I farm at tower, it keeps killing the minions!
A: As a general rule of thumb, for melee creeps, you let the tower hit them twice then auto attack them. For ranged creeps, you hit them once then let the tower hit them then hit them again.

This of course varies from role to role, some champions have very low to virtually no AD growth and wont be able to farm as explained above.

Q: What is that green circle on character portraits?
A: If the circle is grey, it means their ultimate isn't available. If the circle is green, it means that the ultimate has at least one rank invested and it's off cooldown. It wont grey out if an ally doesn't have the mana to activate it, so be careful.

Q: Why do you sometimes state that in general Harass beats Sustain as well as saying Burst beast Sustain?
A: For all intents and purposes, I use Harass and Burst as interchangable words, while they're not the exact same thing they typically do beat Sustain.

Harass is repeatable low amounts of damage that can be used safely that your opponent has a hard time trading with.

Burst is a combination of skills that do moderate to high damage in a short amount of time.

In the case of each, if you can harass an opponent more than they can sustain, you win the lane. If you can burst them down and force them back to base without being threatened by another combination that will instagib you, you win the lane. The only real counter to each is higher amounts of harass or burst as well as hard CC.

Q: If CC is so strong, why does sustain typically beat it?
A: No champion is designed to have more than 30% uptime on their Crowd Control, and the more Crowd Control they have, the less harass or burst potential they have. Just because you can stun me for a second every time I go in, doesn't mean you can out sustain me in lane, and that's typically why sustain beats CC.

Q: So then if Sustain is so powerful, why doesn't it beat Harass?
A: Sustain is generally in low amounts or in short bursts, take for example Irelia, she heals whenever she hits something through her Hiten Style. With her one hardest counter in the game, Teemo, every time she goes in to hit something, he can poison her negating the heal and dealing more damage than she can heal with his general higher attack speed.

In another case with Vladimir and his number one counter, Fiddlesticks, Vlad has short bursts of sustain with his Transfusion, while Fiddlesticks has much higher Burst, CC and Sustain he gets completely shut down.

Q: Wait, so you just said Fiddlesticks has high amounts of Burst, CC AND Sustain, isn't that completely imbalanced?
A: It is, but Fiddlesticks is countered by champions with CC almost completely. If you can stop his drain at the start of it, you shut him down for 5 seconds as a pure example. No character is uncounterable, and this is why I always advise for getting 16 champions and learning to play them all so you can do draft matches.

Q: What is a draft match?
A: While in Blind picks, you don't get to see what your opponents choose, in draft picks you take a lot longer to select champions, but you get to see what everybody picks as well as your starting position on the map.

In draft picks, you take turns picking up to 3 champions to ban, then you take turns picking champions with first and last pick each being a one champion pick and every other pick giving two champion selections per team.

In draft mode, no two players can play the exact same champion, but I'll get more in depth with draft mode in it's own sub section later.

Q: You said that there are up to 6 bans for Draft picks, what should I ban?
A: Don't ban champions you have a hard time countering. Plain and simple, unless your team gives you permission to go to your chosen lane with your chosen role and don't have any specific ban requests.

Typically, you'll want to ban champions that exert a large amount of pressure, which is usually Junglers such as Rammus, Shaco and Skarner if you're second pick. If you're first pick, you want to ban potential counters to champions your allies want to play. Other great potential ban choices are the current flavor of the month, such as Ahri seeing a large amount of bans just because of how powerful she is.

Q: What is red buff and why is it so important?
A: It's technically the blessing of the lizard elder, which is granted for getting the last hit on the lizard elder or a champion that currently has the buff. It's denoted by red plates hovering around the champion.

What it does is that it makes your basic attacks apply the debuff, which slows their movement speed and deals true damage over 2 seconds, based on level and ticking once per second.

As a general rule of thumb, Red Buff will win any lane if donated or lost early, but has the highest significance on the solo top role where there typically isn't a babysitter and it out damages Wriggle's sustain.

Both red and blue buffs last 150 seconds, 180 with the increased buff duration in the utility tree. The default spawn timer on the Blue Golem and Lizard Elder is 5 minutes, one of each camp spawns on each side of the map.

Q: What is blue buff and why is it so important?
A: It's technically the crest of the blue golem, it's importance is that it adds a large amount of MP5, Energy Regen/5 and 20% cooldown reduction.

This buff allows players to spam their spells or skills more often and is a benefit to almost every champion, whether they use mana or not, but should be prioritized to AP carries after the first spawn which is typically taken by junglers.

Since the buffs are passed on through champion on champion kills, it's possible to keep both buffs active on every player, but just not probable. If you already have blue or red buff when you kill an enemy, it resets the duration to the max and doesn't add the full duration to it's current duration.

Blue Buff is symbolized by blue plates floating around the character.

Q: What is Baron Nashor for?
A: If you kill Baron Nashor, he'll give your team 300 gold a piece as well as a large sum of experience. For every living champion on your side of the team, he'll give them the blessing, which gives you AD and AP based on champion level, as well as MP5 and HP5 based on max MP and HP respectively. The buff is not passed on through death and is defaulted to lasting 4 minutes, an additional 48 seconds added with increased buff duration in the utility tree.

Baron spawns every seven minutes.

Q: What about the buffs in Twisted Treeline?
A: The Dragon adds a flat increased damage buff to every allied champion that doesn't pass on through death.

Then randomly, on each side of the map on top, wolves or ghosts will spawn which each have their own significance. Wolves are useful, Wraiths not so much.

On the bottom side of the map, there's the Lizard Elder in the middle.

There is no blue buff or blessing of Baron Nashor on Twisted Treeline.

Q: What is dueling?
A: Something that you don't do.

Q: Okay, so what is it?
A: Okay, dueling is fighting against another champion 1v1. Sounds simple, but every champion has an advantage over another. This revolves more around snowballing and I'll get more in depth with it in it's own sub section devoted to dueling.

As a general rule of thumb, you don't Duel. It's noob baiting for the most part and it prevents player growth. In every fight, one person has an advantage over another and in more advanced play, it requires ingenuity to get the kills other than meeting each other in the middle of the lane and duking it out.

But to put it simply, if you duel and lose and give the opponent a kill, you typically wont win a duel against them ever again.

Q: How free to play is this game?
A: Completely free to play. It just gets easier to play with the more money you spend. No, you can't buy your way to success, but you can unlock more champions sooner as well as purchase IP boosts. As stated by the president of Riot (code named Tryndamere), less than 10% of the players purchase RP.

Q: What is Smartcasting?
A: It removes the requirement of clicking on a target after activating a skill and will instantly cast a spell at your target that you're moused over. It allows you to chain multiple spells without adding the difficulty of human failure, i.e. having to click to select a target.

You can change smartcast default keys in your keybinding section, I typically change items 1 and 2 (leaving 3 and 4 for potions and wards) to smartcast as well as Q, W, E and R default skills. Summoner spells are also very effective on D and F as default smartcasts. Just remember that you can rebind any key that you wish, so these aren't set in stone.

If you don't believe me that smartcasting is amazing, just playing a champion 3 times will get you used to it's default range (unless you have horrible memory), smartcasting AoE effects start with the center of the radius at your mouse. As an additional note, it's impossible to play some champions to their full potential without smartcasting, i.e. Tristana with her w, e and ignite all before she lands and pops her q to auto attack them to death.

Q: Did you write this guide from the bottom up?
A: Uh-oh, busted~ Yes, I did. The person that I had proof read it for quality asked this question. I don't know why I wrote it from the bottom up, but I did write it over the course of two weeks, that's why some areas have obvious repeated statements. I can't keep a train of thought for the life of me.