Transcription
Your teammates keep getting caught out, and it's costing you so many games. This happens to literally everyone. But if you want to fix it, you have to understand not only why it keeps happening, but also the solution. But keep in mind, it's likely what I'm teaching you today you haven't really heard before, which can make it quite hard to execute. But I guarantee if you can apply the knowledge from this video into your own gameplay, that tilt you feel every time your teammates get caught out won't be so soul-crushing to understand exactly how to prevent it from happening the next time.
So why does this keep happening? To simplify it, someone getting caught out is either they're playing too aggressive at the wrong time, or the guy dying is actually playing correctly. I know that may seem very hard to believe, but in that situation, even though he's making the right play, his teammates are slow and not ready. They're not slow on the head, they're just slow to the play. This is very important to realize because I guarantee you've found this frustration before. I'm so strong. If this guy just waited for me, we would dumpster this fight. We've all been tilted from this, myself included.
But you need to realize if your teammates are getting caught at important moments without tune, in most cases, it's actually your mistake. This is the brutal truth that you need to accept. However, if you can accept it, you'll be a much better player in the long run. The reality is, no matter how high your rank or which role you play, your teammates will get caught. Even in my recent game with Gumusi, the old AD carry, he was getting caught in mid pretty often. However, I made sure that he never got caught at the most important moments of that game. I was always there, ready to fight at the right place, right times. However, I was also willing to let him and potentially our other teammates die when it wasn't during a key moment of that game. There is such a big difference between your teammates getting caught out at random moments in that game and them getting caught out just before a major objective fight. Not every single pick is equally weighted in a game.
Now, if you want to make sure that you're in the right place, right time in your games, there are two important things that you need to keep track of. The first one being the objective timer, which everyone knows, but the second one is the body language of both teams. My students always ask me, "How long before the objective do I need to be grouped up?" But to be honest, that's not really the important thing. The timer is just a timer. It roughly lets you know when a fight may happen. It could be 1 minute before it spawns, but it could also be 1 minute after it spawns. It really depends on the situation, which means the objective timer can actually lie to you. But body language never lies. The way both teams are moving on the map, their positioning, how ready they are to contest the objective. This tells you exactly when you need to be there. Therefore, if you learn to read the body language, you will always be there on time. So, not only will you be ready to protect your team from getting caught, you can also make your own picks on the enemy team.
But what do I even mean by body language? Essentially, what that means is it's the way your teammate and the enemy team are moving on the map. So, an easy way to visualize it is if dragon's up in 45 seconds, a very common time to group, but your jungler is heading towards his Gromp. His body language is telling you he's not ready to group and fight right now, which lets you know you have time to push one extra wave or sneak off a reset for your item before you're needed to be grouped. Although, you need to make sure you're not taking this as you're just sitting there with your feet up waiting patiently for all four of your teammates to group properly. You should be utilizing pings to get people on the same page. But as we all know from experience in solo Q, it is very rare that all five of you are ready at the exact same time, regardless of how good your comms are. Therefore, the best approach is to communicate your intention to fight the objective ahead of time and then adapt to the body language of your teammates. This will let you know exactly when you're needed to group.
However, in my opinion, for this one, it's better just to show you. So, this example here highlights exactly what I'm talking about. How I read the body language of my teammates to know exactly how many waves I was allowed to push before grouping. Now, as you can see, this is a relatively close game, and the next objective spawning is dragon in a minute 10. I desperately want to play for this fight. I'm going to have double summoner spells up. I'm spiked. I'm as strong as I'm going to be in this game. I really want this team fight, but I'm also the top laner. I have that responsibility to push out the opposite side of the next objective. Now, if we were to play purely off the objective timer after this base, I would go to dragon right away. That's what I wanted to do. That's where I'm pathing right now. Dragon spawning in 30. But if we combine it with the body language, right now my strong jungler is not ready to fight. In an ideal world where his name was T1 owner, he'd already be at the dragon ready to fight with me. But that's not reality. So I use his timer to answer top. Imagine I went to dragon right now and Zed started hitting top tier two. What would actually happen would be my 9 kill Leblanc would answer that Zed, leaving me in a situation where I have to take a team fight without her. But because I read the body language of my teammates, I fixed one wave top and I was able to make it to this team fight on time without that opportunity for the enemy team to create pressure in the top lane.
So now you see how I make sure I'm grouped at the right times. But what about the wrong times? Because even if you're ready for the important fights of the game, your teammates will still very likely take random fights between those moments when you're not even ready. So what's the solution? Should we just AAM every time? Not at all. I'll show you exactly what to do with this hair example. Now, this next one was definitely a very difficult decision for me to make, and I know a lot of players really struggle to make similar choices because they're scared of getting flamed by their teammate, but not me. I'm not scared of these nerds whatsoever. In this game right now, I make the call, we are not fighting this dragon. The two main reasons why my champion can't really fight at the moment: no ulti, no ghost, and the body language is abysmal for my jungle support. The two roles that should be at the objective early getting control are extremely late. So, not only does the enemy team have full control of the area, they have a momentary numbers advantage, which they can use to make picks on my team, exactly like they did here. And I communicated it very well. I ping strongly and in advance, and my teammates decided not to listen. They all go in and die.
Now, does that mean my decision was wrong? Because the choice I made led to my teammates all dying? Not at all. This was not the right time for our team to fight objectively. It would have been much better to give the dragon trade for topside resources, exactly like I'm doing now, and set up around the Baron. Just because your teammates don't listen to the correct call doesn't mean you'd need to adapt the next game and just group as a no-ulti life and throw it away. It's much better to sacrifice some short-term when the fight most likely would have been losing anyway and then carry later on with the resources you're gaining from trading them off.
So now we're seeing that if you actually combine that objective timer with the body language from both teams, you'll know exactly when you need to be ready for those key fights. However, League isn't that simple. You can't just group up at those three to four objectives and automatically win the game. There is always going to be random little skirmishes in between, and you're not going to be able to join all of it, just like we saw in that example. But you still want to be as ready as possible for these golden opportunities that will present themselves. How many times have you been just 10 seconds late to a fight, and you know that if your team just waited for you, or a better way to say it, if you were just there on time, you would have completely wiped the floor with them. 99% of the time I see a student late to a fight, it's because they killed their tempo in the previous sequence.
Now, I know a lot of people love to throw that word "tempo" around just as a bit of a buzzword to try to sound smart. So, we're not going to get too nerdy with it. Instead, I'll teach you exactly how you can maintain good tempo individually, even if you don't understand it to a high level. Because if you have good tempo, you're going to have the option to be first at every single play. The key word being "option" here, because even with good tempo, that random mid-fight might not even look that tempting. But if you're on the map ready, even if you decide not to join that fight, you still gain a big timer which can be used to deny waves, eat jungle camps, or even eat some tasty tower plate. You don't always need to use that timer just for that team fight. In terms of tempo, all you really need to know about it is having good tempo equals being on the map first, ready to make a play before the enemy. However, if your tempo's bad, the reverse is also true. That means the enemy team gets a chance to make plays or make picks on your teammates, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you're behind in tempo, you lose that option to either join the fight or exchange your teammates' lives to make yourself strong. It's just a straight net loss to you and your teammates.
Therefore, I created a rule to help fix this problem for you regardless of your role or elo bracket. And the rule is simple: Once the play is done, we base or go back to farming as soon as possible. It sounds so simple on paper, but every single player I've ever seen below Challenger doesn't do this correctly. Most players' first instinct after winning a fight is not actually to recall. It's to get as much as possible to collect a big reward for winning that team fight. So, they'll either do the dragon, push out waves, eat camps, and worst of all, waste a bunch of time trying to kill that mid tower. Every single one of these plays are examples of things that can completely kill your tempo. But you need to realize you're choosing short-term dopamine even though it's going to hurt you more in the long run. Having good tempo is just like investing. If you take the small wins over a long period of time, you'll pretty much always come out ahead. But if you get greedy for the biggest win possible in one shot, it can all come crashing down.
But let's compare two examples of exactly what your games will look like depending on how good or how bad you let your tempo be. We're going to start off with the bad example so that you can see in real time the consequences of this tempo-killing mistake. So, we can see we get an amazing play off mid. Our team gets a bunch of kills, and we're in a very good position. If every member of my team pressed that magic B button right now, we'd be in an amazing spot for the next sequence as well because we'd be coming onto the map when the enemy team is still 20 seconds left in the graveyard. But, of course, our jungler had other plans in mind. She decides to stay, not just to try and make a pick in the bot jungle, but to eat bot camps, the bot wave. And that's not all. She also went and ate her bot jungle camps as well. This is tempo suicide of the highest order. This is tempo back-flipping off a 10-story building because now, even though we killed everyone on their team, they're on the map before her. They're here, ready to make a play in the topside jungle, ready to get full control of Baron and make a pick on anyone that makes a mistake. Now, was that anyone me? Of course it was. But you can just see as an example, even in high Cha lobbies, making a greedy play and overstaying for a couple scraps of CS can lead to your teammates all getting killed and potentially losing Baron if the game wasn't so in our favor.
For this next one, I really wanted to showcase an example from a difficult game. So, as you can see here, not only are the majority of my teammates behind, but my jungler is down three levels. But despite all that, because I was able to maintain good tempo again and again, we were able to win this one. So, as you can see, we get a favorable play around mid. We get a pick on the AD carry. Now, could I have played this team fight better? 100%. But let's not worry about that today. We're mainly worried about the tempo. So, pretty much the second this fight was done, I hit the recall button. Even during this fight right now, I'm not hovering around tossing axes, sitting on my hands doing nothing. I need to base. So, I base as soon as possible. They're still fighting, and I'm already playing for the next sequence. I'm already hitting bottom, one step ahead of everyone else in this game. So you can see I push in the wave all the way and I'm already looking for the next one. I'm already looking for another pick onto mid. That play wasn't even finished when I was already preparing for the next one. But you can see because my tempo was so good, I'm mid before their jungler, their top, anyone, and I'm able to make a pick on their team yet again and further snowball our team back into victory.
So what does this mean exactly? The point of all this is if you truly want to improve and climb in solo queue, you need to accept that some of your teammates' inting is likely caused by your own decision-making. And yes, just because you have bad tempo doesn't mean your team has to die, but they just will. Especially in those losing or those super close games, the ones that are needed to win if you want to climb to the next rank. You need to be the difference-maker. We want to be the bus driver, not the bus passenger, hoping our driver doesn't drive us into a wall. Therefore, if every time you make a play, you're basing as soon as possible, and the times you don't need a base, you're going straight back to pushing waves or eating camps with very minimal wasted time, you're giving yourself the best odds possible for whatever happens in the next sequence.
Let's even think about this from a jungle mate's point of view. As much as we love to bully junglers here for trading off their children for a few jungle camps, the reality is they need to farm. The difference is the best junglers are very quick at reading when the play is done and getting their camps cleared as soon as possible. This way they maintain good tempo. So they're on the map with their camps already cleared, ready to pressure as soon as possible. The same applies for the three laning roles: top, mid, and AD carry. Base or go push out your waves instantly, as soon as the play is done. You have a job to do with your waves. The faster you get it done, the better your tempo. The exception being support. You will have no excuse for having bad tempo. Just base instantly every single time the play is done, even if you don't need a heal, because you need to refresh your wards, or else you're going to find yourself basing at the wrong time when everyone else is on the map ready to get stuck in. Wasting time and being on the map late for whatever reason, including dying unnecessarily, gives the enemy team a massive timer to punish your teammates, making it feel like they're the ones always getting caught with no counterplay. But that's just because you're not on the map in time. This is actually a big reason why a lot of Challenger players will just tell you to review your deaths. It's not the gold given away that they're worried about. It's the massive opportunity and tempo cost given from that time spent there.
Therefore, if we combine the two principles talked about in this video, reading body language while maintaining good tempo, you give yourself the best possible chance every single time to counter the enemy's players or even proactively make your own ones.
All right team, that's it for today. If you enjoyed the video and gained some value from it, I cover a lot of very similar topics in my Fundamentals Course over in the Top Lane Academy. It's the best way to support me on top of gaining some coaching and content along the way.