[0:06]Hey everyone, welcome to the series on wave management. The first few episodes of this series will focus on the first four waves. Your management of the first four waves will determine which lanes get ganked, whether they succeed, and who wins the scuttle fight. At level one, you have two choices, whether to contest the wave by pushing, or whether to concede the wave by letting the opponent push. The benefits of pushing the lane are that you get a minion advantage, which allows you to get level two first and take advantageous trades. The downsides of pushing are that you need to walk past the midpoint of the lane to farm, which exposes you to all ins and ganks. The majority of players just hit the wave randomly as soon as they get into lane, which can set off a cascade of events that just result in bad things happening. In this example from NH Challenger, Twisted Fate is playing against Irelia and due to his range advantage, he attempts to take advantage of this at level one by harassing and pushing the lane. However, by pushing, it puts him in a position where he has to walk deep into the lane to farm. In a low kill threat matchup, minions will do more damage than champions at early levels, but strong early game champions with high kill threat and gap closing ability, like Irelia mid, Jace top, or Kalista bot, can overpower the minion advantage with their damage and kill you immediately if you're a weak early game champion and try to push. Even though TF is stronger at level one, he didn't take into consideration that Irelia is stronger at levels two and three. Irelia knows that TF is going for these minions and takes this moment to all-in. Even with the minion advantage, TF is getting destroyed. At this point, the lane is already lost. Even if TF survives here, the wave is pushing away due to the minion advantage, so if he wants any more farm from this point onwards, he's going to take two-thirds of his health just to farm one minion. However, Irelia ends up just finishing him off. So now, let's watch Dopa play the same match-up, but with the other strategy, which is to concede the wave. Here you can see Dopa is not touching the wave at all, except to last hit, which will cause the wave to be even. If TF attacks Irelia, minion aggro will cause the enemy minions to stop attacking his minions and attack him, which results in his wave pushing away. So he only attacks Irelia when he can drop minion aggro immediately. This means that he never stops the enemy minions from pushing, while still managing to harass Irelia. By conceding the wave, this means that TF doesn't have to over-extend into a risky position to farm, and if the last hit is too dangerous due to Irelia posturing for an engage, he can give up the minion and the wave will still push towards him. This ensures that he can last hit future minions, rather than getting zoned off the wave or die like in the previous example. Now, when Irelia goes for her all-in play, TF is staying close to the turret, which prevents Irelia from dashing onto him, and he can even trade back because Irelia is tanking all the caster minions and losing out on the trade. Since Irelia has also pushed the lane, she now triggers the other downside of pushing, which is to become susceptible to jungle ganks while trying to farm. Hecarim ganks, burning her summoners, but it becomes a one for one. The important thing to take away is that the way TF managed the wave allowed him to navigate this dangerous early period and continue scaling. When you're conceding the wave, you don't want the opponent's minion wave to get too big, because keeping too many minions alive will lock up XP inside, giving the opponent a large level advantage and minion advantage for trades. If the opponent gives you space to reduce the size of the wave without taking damage, you should do so. This is called thinning the wave. The sweet spot is to have the opponent's wave be slightly larger than yours, usually about three minions extra, so that it's not so big that you can't trade into it, but not so small that it will stop pushing towards you.
[4:06]So how do you know when to push or concede? One factor is who's stronger in your match-up from levels one to three, and the second factor is which jungler is stronger in early levels. In our previous example, TF is stronger at level one due to being ranged. However, Irelia is stronger at levels two and three when she has access to E and Q. Irelia's strong gap closing ability and high kill threat put her near the top of the pecking order for lane power. Even with the minion advantage, TF will not be able to compete, and so he shouldn't push. For champions within one bucket of distance, so for example, a high average against a low strong. The matchup is likely not so bad that they'll be able to kill you despite a minion advantage. In these cases, having a minion advantage will typically make the difference to swing the matchup in your favor, and so it's usually a good idea to push to get wave control, unless you'll be unable to avoid a jungle gank by pushing.
[5:04]So for junglers, they generally fall into two categories: farming junglers and ganking junglers. Junglers like Olaf, Karthus, Kayn, Khazix, Master Yi, etc. present relatively low threat because they typically want to complete their first clear without ganking. Even if they do gank, because they don't have hard CC, you can usually survive just by flashing. Pushing is usually not an issue in these cases as long as you hover adjacent to your ward side. Champions like Jarvan, Rek'Sai, Gragas, Elise, and others with semi-reliable long-range hard CC will usually prevent you from pushing the wave safely, even if you do ward correctly and hover to the ward side. When you have a ganking versus farming jungle mismatch, such as Kayn vs. Rek'Sai, the jungle gank will usually overpower your winning lane matchup. So you need to either avoid pushing the wave, or quickly crash the wave into the enemy turret before the ganking jungler can be out on the map. This will cause the wave to push back towards you while they're looking for a gank, which allows you to avoid it. I'll go into more specifics on this in a later episode. If you have a winning or even jungle matchup, and your lane matchup is also winning, then you can feel safe pushing and getting a minion and trade advantage, especially if you coordinate with your jungler to countergank. Whether or not you're playing the matchups correctly is not as important as having a plan for whether you're going to contest or concede level one. As long as you go into the matchup with a plan, and you're able to refine it over time, you'll be able to slowly improve the way you play the matchup based on your growing understanding of the matchup dynamics: who's stronger at level one, who's stronger at level two, who's stronger at level three, and so on. The worst thing to do is to just play level one on autopilot, not think about the jungle matchup, hit the wave, or go for trades randomly, without thinking about how it will affect the wave state, the ability to trade, or whether you'll get ganked. So thanks for watching. Please leave a comment, like and subscribe, and I'll see you next time.
