[0:06]Hey everyone, welcome back to the series on early wave management. In the last episode, we saw that after forcing the opponent off the wave, you can choose to push it fast or slow. In the early game, if you push one wave fast and crash it into the turret, you gain about 5 seconds of time to take macro actions, like leaving the lane to ward, helping your jungler, recalling, roaming, and some others. However, if you stack a wave by slow pushing and then crash it into the turret, the opponent's time to clear can increase to 15 seconds or more. The spare time from an opponent being forced to do something, such as clearing the wave, having to recall or dying, is called tempo, and it's measured in seconds. The 15 seconds of tempo generated from stacking, rather than fast pushing, can be used to do many things, which I'll cover in this video.
[1:01]The first application of stacking is to win pre-six fights in the jungle, such as a jungle buff contest, a scuttle fight, or in some niche cases, to gank another lane. If you're in a position where you have control of the wave, by only last hitting and slow pushing, you'll be able to stack a large minion wave. When this wave is crashed into the turret at exactly the scuttle spawn timing, Catarina is in a lose-lose situation. If Catarina leaves to make it a 2v2, she'll still be level 3 and will have to give up a lot of minions, which will put her behind in XP and gold. If her jungler Rek'sai contests the scuttle, TF and Fiddle are already in the river first and have a positioning advantage in a 2v1. In Solo Q, crashing the wave on the crab timing is even more important because many junglers refuse to give up the crab, even if it will cause a bad fight and lose their team the game. Many laners don't realize that they can create a massive advantage in the scuttle fight by stacking and crashing a wave on the timing and instead just coin flip the scuttle or just blame their jungler. Here, I'm playing Sylas, and I've stacked the wave so that I can crash it right when the scuttle spawns. This lets me move first with a level advantage by pinning Catarina under the turret. If Catarina moves right now to match me, she'll be lower level and will have to give up minions. By pinging on the wave, I can give my jungler confidence in taking a fight, knowing that I'll get there first. Even though Udyr is level 4 to Khazix's level 3, I'm ahead of Catarina both in levels and in tempo, which lets me swing the fight in our favor. If I didn't stack the wave and crash it on this timing, Khazix either would have died or gotten double scuttled, which would make the game incredibly difficult. Instead, we get a free for one and gain a significant advantage. Now, let's consider a scenario where the wave was not being stacked and these minions were all dead. Firstly, Catarina would be able to fight me for control of the wave because we'd both be level 3 and she has ignite advantage. Secondly, if a fight were to break out right now in top river, I wouldn't have a level advantage, and Catarina wouldn't have to make a choice between farming the minion wave and helping the fight. She could just follow me and arrive at the same time. She also wouldn't lose minions because my wave is the same size as hers, and therefore, my wave won't crash into the turret. By stacking the wave, I can create a level advantage, keep control of the wave, and prevent her from all-inning me due to the minion size. The takeaway here is to use this simple wave management technique to swing early fights in your favor, especially if you have an even lane or jungle matchup or better. The second thing you can do off a stacked wave is to push the wave into the turret and use the 20 seconds of tempo created while your wave gets cleared out to tempo recall for an item without missing any minions. A tempo recall off a stacked wave is effective without teleport because you get to recall without losing minions. But tempo recalls after pushing the wave are especially effective when you do take teleport, because the opponent has to last hit while you recall, and then you can teleport back to trap the opponent in lane with no resources while you have an item advantage. At that point, the opponent will be desperately trying to find an opportunity to recall, while you can just bully them with your item and resource advantage and generate game-winning lane advantages. Here, because Vlad doesn't have teleport to match Ariana, he cannot fight her. But recalling will also lose him a lot of minions because his wave is pushing away and killing Ariana's minions. Stacking a wave, crashing it, and then using the tempo created to recall and teleport back to lane, allows Ariana to create a massive lane advantage. The third use for a stacked wave is a dive, and it's the most devastating. If we return to our previous example with Bin on Jacks, he successfully pushed Renekton back, which allows him to stack the wave. Diving with the stacked wave is very effective because it creates a level differential and a minion buff to tank the turret that makes it very difficult for the defender to survive the dive. If the defender has been chunked beforehand, surviving is very difficult, even with the Kanye gank. As the minions crash a tower and soak turret aggro, the dive should be executed immediately. If you wait too long, it'll buy enough time for minions to die and allow the defenders to level up, which will give them a burst of health and an extra ability, which could cause the dive to fail. In this example, the dive goes off almost immediately. Despite Renekton leveling up, the dive still succeeds and Suning was able to snowball this into a crushing top side advantage and eventually win the game.
[5:44]The final thing to mention is to defend yourself from ganks while stacking the wave. While you're in the process of stacking the first three waves, unlike waves at higher levels, the minion advantage is not large enough to let you fight 1v2 with the minions and survive a gank. While stacking, you'll spend some time past the halfway point, and an opponent can adapt their jungle path to level 2 or three camp gank you if they notice you stacking. In this example, O'Laf knows that Yone is going to stack the wave against Gragas, so instead of doing his full clear, he adapts his path to three camp gank top side. Even though he's warded, Yone is simply too far up the lane to be able to escape, and it results in his death. If you've decided that you're going to stack, especially in a long lane like top or bot, you need to know how you're going to survive the gank, whether by calling for a counter gank, warding deeper so you have more time to react, or crashing the wave before a jungle timing like in the previous episode. So thanks for watching. Please leave a comment, like and subscribe, and I'll see you next time.
