How to Position and Get Kills: An Advanced Fighting Guide

Welcome to our Fighting Skill Decompilation! Revisit our other Decompilations if you’d like to learn about Aggression, Farming, Teamplay, Toughness, or Vision.

The End Point

Every single action and decision you make on Summoner’s Rift leads to one thing – the fight. It’s the culmination of all other skills, the one that truly matters when the game is on the line.

Think about it. The gold and experience you collect fuels a constant arms race. The vision control you place and deny only sets the stage for the real action that follows.

The fight is a complex dance composed of diving, peeling, and shielding – where champion design and decision-making collide. Every auto-attack and skill shot you land or miss makes a difference.

Fighting tests your mental mettle. Do you stay composed in the chaos? Or do you give in to tunnel vision and lose sight of your goals and purposes?

At the end of the day, you must prevail over your enemies and destroy their Nexus. If you want to dominate the battlefield with your prowess alone, you’ve come to the right place.

Calculating your Fighting scores

Duels

• Who doesn’t love the thrill of 1v1 combat? It’s classic. Duels evaluates your success in these situations – just one player and one enemy.
• This score is especially important if your champion pool includes assassins and duelists. If you’re not performing well here, you may want to consider changing toward team-oriented play.

Picks

• Have you ever pushed up just a little too far in your lane without vision and then ambushed by multiple enemies? You were a victim of a pick!
• Picks evaluate your success in situations where your side has two or more players and you attempt to kill one lone enemy. Failure is defined by if your side takes a death even with such a big advantage.

Skirmishes

• Some fights are messy and unorganized – think guerilla warfare with hit-and-run tactics. We classify these instances as Skirmishes.
• Skirmishes count as any fight that doesn’t have a minimum of three players on each side (2v2, 2v3, 2v4, 2v5).

Teamfights

• The largest form of fighting in LoL is the teamfight – this is the big party that everything else leads to and can often decide the game.
• Teamfights involve at least three players from each team (3v3, 5v4, 5v3, etc).

Stat Contribution

• Every champion subclass has different roles and responsibilities that they should strive for in a fight.
• This score evaluates how good you are at your job by highlighting stats that are important for the champion you play.
• Examples:
  • Marksmen (Kills, Damage per minute (DPM)
  • Warden (Damage Absorbed, Crowd Control)
  • Fighter (DPM, Damage Absorbed, Crowd Control)

Keep your blades sharp, your mind sharper

Ready to improve your Fighting skills? These advice pieces were curated by our in-house analyst, Hewitt “prohibit” Benson. Add these techniques, principles, and mentalities to your game to bring your climb to the next level.

Fighting Knowledge

Evaluate the team versus team matchup

• Knowing how your team comp matches up with the enemy’s will help you define your approach. This will vary depending on the two comps, but the general rule of thumb is to maximize your strengths while striving to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses.
  • For example, if you’re a mobile team with assassins playing into an AoE-centric comp with a strong frontline, you’ll want to avoid 5v5 team fights and instead, look for isolated picks and divided skirmishes.
  • Revisit our Teamplay Decompilation to brush up your knowledge on team compositions.

 Know your role beforehand

• To optimize the effectiveness of your champion and team comp, know your job before the fight begins.
  • Are you the primary initiator? Or should you save your CC for follow-up?
  • Should you dive the enemy carries? Or would it better serve your team to peel for your carries?
• Once you know your role, think about the nuances of how you’re going to fulfill it.
  • For example, a Janna in a hyper-carry comp will know that her job is to protect the Kog’maw from initiators such as Zac. In order to do this, she should know to hold her Howling Gale or Monsoon until Zac attempts a dive with Elastic Slingshot to deny him and best protect Kog.

Master the potential of your champion

• Learn the intricacies of your champion’s capabilities through practice and study.
  • Advanced techniques such as combos and animation cancels should be second-nature. Here are some examples:
    • Yasuo’s Beyblade
    • Leona’s auto-Q-auto Ward clear
    • Camille’s combos with Tiamat items
    • Bard’s portal capabilities
  • Observe the professionals and one-tricks who use your champions and take notes! Always look to add new things to your game. Here are a few examples from Riot’s Pocket Picks (an amazing series).
    • Doublelift’s Lucian
    • Dardoch’s Lee Sin
    • Froggen’s Anivia
    • Sneaky’s Jhin

How to utilize positioning

Emphasize fighting from favorable positions

• It pays off to only engage when your team has an advantage. Here are some examples:
  • Vision dominance
    • Draw the the enemy into fights where they have must enter blind spots with no vision, such as by baiting Baron or Dragon.
  • Guerilla tactics
    • Commit to quick fights when the enemy isn’t grouped/organized and you have a numbers advantage.
  • Home Court Advantage
    • Allied turrets give obvious advantages, but don’t forget your base walls! Fighting near your walls can give you the edge since you have the mobility of an extra entrance. This comes in handy for defensive flanking during an enemy siege.

Utilize Mid Priority

• Above is a great explanation of Mid Priority by MarkZ
  • Use this dominating position to take control of the map and create opportunities for favorable fights.
  • It forces the enemy team to make a rushed choice since the mid lane minions are applying pressure while they decide what to do.
  • It not only helps you win fights, but it will help you gain more from your victories since you’ll be able to easily rotate to objectives and other parts of the map.

Use the terrain

• Fights are won and lost depending on where you’re fighting.
  • Always keep in mind your movement options and the potential flanks around you.
  • Games are often thrown at objectives because the team that commits to taking one becomes immobile and surrounded by choke points.
    • Be aware of your escape plan if you’re attempting an objective. Recognize when you need to retreat before things get ugly.
    • If your team is contesting an objective, cut off all escape angles. Even if they take the objective, you’ll have a chance of wiping their entire team.

Know when to commit or hold

• Think of your team’s positioning like a battle formation.
  • Step too far forward, and you may get picked off before your team reaches the fight. If you’re too lagging far behind, you may miss out on the action entirely.
  • Hold your formation until the fight is in your favor. Once you see an opening commit on the opportunity.

Battlefield Mentalities

Fight with a purpose and remember it!

• Your fights must have a purpose since every battle is inherently risky.
  • If your team achieves victory by slaying two or more enemies, look to take an objective or establish map control instead of chasing down extra kills (a good rule of thumb is never chase for more than five seconds).
  • Once you accomplish your intentions, regroup, Recall and figure out your next move. Never linger for too long in limbo.

Consider your timing

• Always ask yourself, “Do we need to fight right now? After all, when you fight is just as important as where you fight.
  • Does your team still need more time to scale?
    • Wait until you hit those item and power spikes!
  • Did your teammates recently die?
    • Be patient! Let them come back from fountain before you look to fight.
  • Is a key objective spawning soon?
    • Make sure you’re likely to win if you engage because you may be giving away a free Baron if you lose.

 Make valuable trades

• The battlefield is messy and unpredictable – sometimes you just have to take what you can get. Like trading pieces in chess, look to make valuable exchanges that offer long-term gain.
  • Every kill trade has comparative value that changes depending on role, time of game, and their performance. Always keep in mind the +/- gains and losses that would result from a victory or defeat.
    • If you think you’ll get the better end of the deal, keep pushing. If things look to be turning for the worse, consider cutting your losses and getting out with what you can.
    • When you fall behind, you may need to gamble to catch up. Likewise, if you’re ahead, consider avoiding risky fights and maintaining the status quo.

Wise Words from the Pros 

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Revisit our other Decompilations if you’d like to learn more about Aggression, Farming, Teamplay, Toughness, or Vision.