League of Legends: League of Lessons

Sustaining in Laning

The longer you stay in your lane, the more farm you can achieve. Sustain is the key to purchasing a permanent residence in top lane. Also, you may lose to your opponent in duels, but if you are capable of recovering HP faster than your opponent, lane dominance will sway to your favor.

Certain bruisers come with skills that help in the sustain department. Champions such as Garen, Xin Zhao and Renekton have abilities and passives which provide a steady IV drip of hp that prolongs their stay at top. As a result they can forgo buying potions, opting to buy more tank-like items such as Doran’s Shield or more damage such as Doran’s Blade .

Gank Incoming!

The layout of top lane is made to be rather susceptible to ganks (i.e the act where people from other lanes or from the same lane target one person to kill them and take their gold/experience) from the enemy jungler. Always keeping a ward up in lane will foil many ganks. Some commonly placed wards are at the three points highlighted below.

Try not to let the lane opponent know that you’ve planted a ward as he will be sure to inform his jungler of the ward position. This will result in the enemy jungler selecting a different gank route so as to avoid detection. There are many gank routes that are available to at top lane; these will be covered in a future article for junglers.

Observing your opponents behaviour in lane is another key point in detecting a gank. If your lane opponent has been playing passively against you, but suddenly inches forward to try to engage you it probably something's going to happen. This is one of the telltale signs a gank is about to come. At this point, call out to your support to drop a Clairvoyance or simply back off until you know it's safe.

Bruiser Discipline

At the end, a lot of it boils down to practice. More than that though, you need to be focused in executing your plays with good timing. It sounds elementary, but one of the reasons most players are stuck at the 1400 - 1500 elo is because they are unable to use their champion's abilities efficiently. Wasting auto-attack resetting abilities such as Wukong's Crushing Blow or Shyvana's Twin Bite really pull your damage down, and every piece of damage counts. Be aware of what you are doing. In all honesty, a huge factor in tuning your game up a notch is to not "scrub" out.

Join me on the next page where I talk more about the mid-game and team fight role of the bruiser and how to itemize to unlock the best within!