Let’s talk about another subject similar to juking but with a twist. When you’re dealing with champions who must maintain vision on you for a moment to finish you off, the best escape is not always the most
Taking the tightest turns possible in the jungle, as well as aiming for brush even when it’s not directly in your path, may slow your overall escape but it may actually buy you enough time that your opponent can’t land damage or crowd controls that you’ll be able to escape. The advantage to focusing on breaking vision rather than taking the most direct path is that you may frequently be able to juke your opponent without them knowing which path you’ll take next.
Changing your maneuver and direction every few seconds can more quickly throw your opponents off. As with juking, this strongly favors more mobile champions, but every champion can and should make use of this when necessary.
Feints
Once you understand the tactics that you’ll be using, the use of deception is the final key to tactical mastery. When I introduced mental tactics, I mentioned that a key element to this was the ability to anticipate what players are thinking and react to this information in meaningful ways.
A feint is a deception, an action that appears to have one purpose but conceals another. The ultimate goal of a feint is to get your opponent to believe they want to perform an action that is not in their best interest. And though I’m including this in the tactics section, it is an enormous part of broader strategic gameplay as well.
One example of a feint is falling back towards your tower as if to retreat. If you’re injured and the player normally has kept an advantage over you, this may look entirely natural. As the moment they’re in tower range attempting to finish you off, dropping crowd controls and burst on them, alongside tower shots, can give you a devastating edge. The same goes for holding onto abilities like heals and shields until a player has engaged you at low health under a tower, using that to buy enough time to kill them. As you can guess, when you’re being pressured or zoned in a lane, suddenly moving aggressively against an opponent can be a dead giveaway that you have an ally waiting to enter the lane for a gank. But sometimes simply being unexpectedly aggressive against an opponent who doesn’t have wards may have the same benefit – they can’t take the risk of you having an ally coming in and they don’t know any better given their lack of vision.
When you want to help allies enter a lane to gank, directly engaging an opponent may draw them into a fight and keep their focus on you, especially if they feel they have the upper hand. This is a fantastic way to distract them and cut down their map awareness, and works effectively even against very skilled
One of my favorite feints to watch is pretending you’re a bad player or you’re having connection issues. As absurd as this seems, this can cause your opponents to drop their guard, and it really does lead to some good kills. Check out this Blitzcrank video for a fantastic set of examples (search “Best Trollcrank # 3” on YouTube if you can’t use the link here).
All feints rely on maintaining a knowledge advantage over your opponents. Often this is done through map vision or map awareness, such as pulling a player out of position so an ally can gank, and vision is critically important for countering them.
Other times, thse feints can stem from a precise understanding of the match-up between champions, such as knowing exactly when you’re capable of killing an opponent, but only if you can pull them towards a more desirable location (such as Vayne getting an opponent in a position where they can be condemned to a wall).
Strategy
Where tactics are specific actions with short-term benefits, strategies are larger actions with major goals and lasting consequences.
In League of Legends, there is no hard line where tactics end and strategy begins. After all, setting up an ambush with one person waiting in the brush is not much different than setting up an ambush with three, even though the three person ambush is flashier.
For the purposes of deciding how to divide this guide, I will define strategy as actions that require coordination from two or more players. In doing so, we will look at skirmishes, teamfights, and how teams can use map objectives to their advantage.
Skirmishes
Skirmishes are smaller engagements where most or all of a team does not need to be present. We’ll look at a few common strategies that work well for small groups, but keep in mind that you can also pull any of these off as part of teamfights or other full team engagements.
One thing you should keep in mind about skirmishing is that nearly all of the tactics are situational and reflexive. There will be situations where you can utilize these strictly by noticing where your allies are on the map, and as you rise up in ranks, there will be situations where you can reasonably expect your allies to respond to you to set them up. Smart pings work well in quickly coordinating these maneuvers.
Ambush
Let’s start with the simplest trick: The ambush. If you’ve lost a lot of health or your opponent otherwise considers you an easy kill, leading them into allies waiting in the fog of war can allow you to quickly turn it around on them. This tends to be harder to pull off against seasoned players.