As a super complex MOBA, League of Legends can prove to be very hard to play well. Some players remain stuck in Bronze even after playing this game for years. However, it is always very easy to improve if you can simply work on your fundamentals and do better in small steps.
If you are often losing games where you or your teammates die a bunch of times at the start of the game, chances are that you need to learn how to bring yourself back into a comfortable position after falling behind early in the game.
There are some simple rules for every role that you can follow when playing at a disadvantage in League of Legends, and following these guidelines will help you maximise your chances of winning when you have fallen behind.
What Qualifies as Falling Behind?
Believe it or not but almost all the time, you win League of Legends matches because of gold or experience leads of your team, and not your crazy mechanical skill expression (looking at you keyblading Yasuos and double casting Rivens).
As such, gold and experience leads and trails are the most important things to look for in every match. If your enemies gain either of these leads, you are in a lot of trouble, and need to play a lot more carefully to have a shot at winning.
But you do not need to worry too much, because this guide will tell you precisely how you can work your way around such an unfortunate situation, and salvage a game that you think you will lose.
Falling Behind in Gold:
The enemy team will gain a gold lead on you by either farming creeps more efficiently than you, or taking objectives like towers and baron while you lose out on their gold. Kills, ofcourse, also give them a lot of gold and laning phase kills will give them huge gold leads on you.
Falling Behind in Experience:
If you are not close enough to minions when they die, which may be because you have recalled to base or are roaming to other lanes, you will fall behind in experience. This will allow the enemy to have a level advantage on you.
Usually this means that the enemy will have better stats than you, and also unlock abilities faster at early levels and maxing them out before you later on.
How to Recover When Behind?
There are a lot of ways in which you can recover your lack of gold or experience in a League match. Employing one or two of these techniques will surely help you win more games than you might otherwise consider unwinnable.
1. Farm Minions Under Tower:
The most generally applicable advice to playing when behind is to simply farm minions while staying under the protection of your turret. Minions will give you both gold and experience, and if you do this for long enough, you will be able to build enough items and have enough levels to contest objectives for your team.
If you plan on doing this, however, you should make sure that the enemy does not freeze the minion wave under their tower. If that is the case, doing this will make you lose even more gold and experience because the minions will be dying so far away from your turret.
1. Avoid Fights:
You can considerably improve your chances of winning when the enemy has a lead if you simply avoid taking unnecessary fights. Usually, taking a fight when behind will allow your enemy to stat-check you and just run you down because of their higher level and better items.
If you avoid fights and instead focus on farming up and getting objectives, you will only be fighting when absolutely necessary, and prevent your enemy from snowballing harder than they already are, because you will be denying them some kills.
2. Go to a Sidelane:
An amazingly effective strategy to make yourself relevant again in the game is to take up the sidelanes. Best done after the tier one turret has fallen, this method simply relies on you farming up whatever minions you can get in the top or bot lane when teams are grouping in the midlane or around the drake or baron pit.
This works even better if you are playing a strong duelist or a splitpush champ, and if you can splitpush well enough, you can create an insane amount of pressure on the enemies, and even win some games off of it alone.
With the addition of Objective Bounties and Hullbreaker, this strategy is stronger than ever, and taking down turrets will quickly allow you to negate enemy gold leads and focus other objectives while they clear the waves you pushed.
3. Do Not Tilt:
The best League players are those with the strongest mental abilities. If you do not tilt, you already have a great chance of winning. Tilting makes you make stupid mistakes that increase the gap between you and your enemy team.
Tilting has also caused players to break their peripherals and int on purpose, which has gotten them banned for unhealthy behaviour. So it is best if you steer very clear of this trait. Remember, do not tilt!
At the end of the day, League of Legends is just a game and one loss will not even matter in the grand scheme of things. Oh, pessimism!
4. Work Around Your Champion’s Strengths:
Most late game champions have a rough time in the early game, and you might end up losing a lot of minions to your laner. However, you need to keep in mind that if you are playing a scaling champion into an early game powerhouse, that is how it is almost always going to be!
But you can take your revenge once you have reached your powerspike, at which point your late game champion should be able to take down every early game champion if you did not int way too hard.
If you are playing an early game champ, you need to abuse the first 10 minutes of the game, and make sure that you generate a lead instead of falling behind during this time. That is the only way to win on your own.
Final Thoughts:
Losses in League of Legends can be very frustrating for the best of us, and a bad game can easily ruin your mood. But employing these strategies to turn games that appear lost into victories will help you enjoy League of Legends a lot more.
Let us know in the comments below how you cope with a bad start to your games, and how you play when at a disadvantage. With all that said, best of luck on the Rift!
