Since League of Legends is almost 15 years old now, its community has developed League-specific concepts that may be hard to understand for new players.

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Macro

It may be important to know what macro stands for to begin with. It’s basically a collection word for all high-level decision making based gameplay which involves rotations, recall timings, tempo, etc. This is in contrast to mechanical skills (micro), which is just how well you control your character. Micro is mainly hands and macro is mainly brains.

Macro concept understanding relies heavily on experience – but it also helps to think about them, learning core concepts can help you see how League could be played. Experience helps with intuitive understanding and recognition, but cognitively going through them improves learning and may help crystallize certain ideas about the game. In a team it also helps communication and joint understanding about the game.

Macro is best played as a team, so if you are looking for players to play with, you can use our zleague app which can aid you in matching with likeminded people.

Lane Priority

Lane Priority refers to your ability to move out of the lane to help out in sidelanes or your Jungler.

If you are pushed in under a turret, you have very low priority, which is also modified by the size of the wave you are pushed in by. With a 2-3 wave slow push being shoved in under your turret you have essentially 0 lane priority. This is because you can’t trade into the opponent to force them to stay, you can’t rotate to the immediate sides — so you would have to rotate by going back and through your own jungle unless your Jungler is there. All the while you are losing out on hundreds of gold by minions dying to your turret.

Why this concept is important is that it should directly influence your decisions. For example as a Jungler deciding if you want to contest Scuttle Crabs, take objectives or invade should heavily depend on your nearby lane’s priority. Taking a Herald with no priority in top or mid is just praying that they don’t know you are taking it. If your opponents know, it is likely you die and lose Herald.

Rotations

Rotation is how you move between lanes and objectives. One very common rotation in higher level play is the support and mid laner roaming to the Herald and the ADC may follow to the mid lane to cover.

One can also use the word rotation when you rotate the botlane to mid or top after they have destroyed their bot turret. It comes down to moving the champions around to most effectively take objectives,so it is a very core macro concept.

Knowing how and when to move for objectives minimizes downtime and maximizes your resources. It is intrinsically linked with tempo, as good rotations are a large factor of team-wide tempo.

Scaling

Scaling refers to champions and team compositions growth potential over time and resources. A scaling champion grows much more powerful over time with levels and more resources. Examples are characters that become really powerful at 3+ items or at levels like 13 or 16.

Scaling just means that at later stages, resources weigh more on your champion — so you could be 5k gold down and still be stronger. It is not an easy concept to practically understand without playing a lot as you need to understand the power curves of different champions.

There are other concepts, but we felt these were the most important ones to know about as these color heavily how the macro should be played.

Key Macro Takeaways

  • Macro is an aggregation concept of essentially decision making in League of Legends
  • Lane priority refers to how much control you have over your lane
  • Playing around lane priority is key in League
  • A teams movement between lanes and objectives is called rotations and is a driving force in tempo

Scaling in League means how much you ‘scale up’ from resources and exp, the more you scale, the stronger you are in late game.


Lane manipulation is one of the crucial mechanics in League of Legends, but it took the scene several years to figure out, so it’s not entirely intuitive.

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Lane Manipulation is a crucial skill for all laners, whatever your playing style is. But many players never learn it properly or try to implement it. Here is a basic introduction to how it works.

Lane Manipulation: Key Takeaway

  • Lane manipulation is a complex macro concept
  • Few people know about it and even fewer know how to use it
  • You should know when and how you should control your wave, not just constantly hard push
  • You can set up ganks, roams, dives, vision and recalls without losing anything by controlling the wave
  • When understood, it is a very useful tool to control the lane and the game

We’ll start with some general concepts that are necessary to understand before going into specific lane manipulation. 

Focus Fire and Pulling

One wave manipulation tool is to make minions focus fire by pulling the wave, which means taking aggro and resetting it. This makes all minions focus on the same target after they reset, which will make them kill those minions very quickly and naturally start to push into you. Easiest way to force them to focus fire is to tank the minions by standing in front of them before they hit the wave and then reset by going into a bush.

Bounce and Distance

A bounce refers to the fact that when a minion wave crashes into a turret, it will naturally slow push to the other side due to being farther up in the lane. As the further up you are in lane, the more minions you need in a wave to counteract the faster reinforcements. The minions will also focus fire after killing your minions under turret. Both these factors essentially guarantee a push back.

If you are looking for a more competitive environment, players to play with or rewards for playing, take a look at our zleague app.

Fast Pushing/Hard Pushing

Fast pushing or hard pushing merely means to quickly kill the wave, getting your minions under the opponents turret. It is what people tend to do naturally. It is good if you want to keep your opponent under turret to harass them, to have priority or if  you need to quickly recall or get vision. But it is certainly overused — there is often no reason to hard push into your opponent and risk getting ganked or having your wave frozen, when instead you could let your opponent push in or hold the wave on your side of the lane.

Freezing

This is probably what you have heard about the most or you have perhaps suffered from someone doing it to you in a lane. Freezing is the act of ‘freezing’ the minion wave at a specific spot in the lane, usually done a bit in front of your own turret. This makes you very safe against ganks and makes it hard for the opponent to take cs and harass you since you and your minions will be very close to your turret.

Freezing is most easily done by leaving three caster minions alive and tanking them until your next wave arrives. But you can also thin crashing waves so as to make them have around a 3 caster advantage. The reason for 3 extra caster minions specifically is that if you have fewer, it can easily start to slowly push away from you by the fact that your wave arrives more quickly. The farther up in the lane you are trying to freeze, the more extra minions you need to keep alive to keep the freeze. You can also substitute some casters for a cannon.

The reasons for freezing is one, to make it difficult for the opponent to farm — especially for melee characters, where trying to kill ranged minions gets them almost under turret range, leaving them open to a gank as well. And two, it also puts you in a protected position as you can’t be tower dove or ganked.

The problem with freezing is that you give up lane priority — so it is not advised around objective timers or if you may need to help your team. Freezing can also be difficult to do without having control of the lane or if the opponent has strong wave-clear. It also helps to have inherent sustain when freezing as you may have to tank the minion hits.

Slow Pushing

Slow pushing refers to a slow building up of a minion wave that you can crash into the turret, which can become 2-3 waves large. The way to do this just to create a small push advantage, like through doing slightly more damage to the wave than your opponent or having the wave on your side of the map. By then not doing more damage to the wave than just last hitting, the wave pushes slowly enough that several waves will stack up. You can stack different amounts of minions in the wave depending on the distance to the enemy tower.

Why slow push? Slow pushes are relatively safe. They can start on your side of the lane and ramp up the closer you get to the opposing sides. This makes it harder to trade into you and even gank as you could potentially 1 vs 2 with 2 waves of minions. During a slow push you will also have more exp than your opponent as more of their minions have died, and at early levels you can even be two levels up when the wave crashes into the turret, giving you massive opportunities.

Slow pushes are ultimately done to either give you a longer timing window to roam, set up vision, recall or tower dive. This is due to the opponent having to clear the large wave under the turret and then the wave will bounce, so you can catch the next wave under your tower. You can also set up a slow wave ahead of time and then roam for objectives so the opponent has to choose between contesting the objectives or taking the wave. 

The downside is that slow pushes are very telegraphed so you are at risk of getting ganked when you try to get the wave under the turret as it will be on their side of the map, the opponent can also thin the wave and freeze it in front of the turret if you can’t get it to crash.

Wave manipulation is an underrated skill that is surprisingly complex and multifaceted. Even pros are negligent about it at times. As a laner, how you control the lane influences everything else — how safe you are from ganks, if your jungler can gank your lane, your roams, your priority and your farming.