MTG Salvation

Game theory.

The reason for this guide is to force players to rationalize why they are making the decisions they are making.

Number 1 Objective: Destroy the enemy nexus
Number 2 Objective: Destroy Nexus Turrets
Number 3 Objectives: Destroy Inhibitors/ Kill Baron without deaths
Number 4 Objective: Destroy 2nd tier turrets
Number 5 Objective: Destroy 1st tier turret/Dragon
Number 6 Objectives: Red/Blue buffs
Number 7 Objective: CS from lanes
Number 8 Objective: CS from neutral camps

This is a top down approach, the majority of people think of a bottom to top approach

To win the game, you have to take the number 1 objective, obviously to do that there are many other objectives in the way. This may seem very simple/stupid/obvious but often people forget what is most important when trying to win. EX: Fountain dives, early barons, overprioritizing dragon and many other misinterpretations of the game can easily mess up your chances at victory. If you think that the objectives should be prioritized differently, speak up because everyone on a team should have the same overall priorities.


First thing is first, there is a finite amount of gold on the map. Three lanes with minions, and neutral camps. The team with the most gold gets more stats in terms of items. More stats = stronger = win skirmishes which translates in to the ability to take objectives.



Team fights usually have Carries, peelers. and divers. Carries are the main damage dealers, divers try and kill carries and and peelers try and peel the divers off the carries. It is important for you to figure out your role in the team fight based on how much farm you have, the team comp and other roles.

A good example is leona. Many times when I am leona, I will use my ult on the enemy carry but then EWQ to peel for my carry giving both my carry and divers a good advantage on accomplishing their goals, not to mention supports don't get enough farm to actually dive effectively unless insanely fed/heavy dive comp (Leona malphite and katarina might all in on their carries per say)


How to get more gold? CS is easy and safe. Champion kills are risky.


Top lane: Normally consists of bruisers. Your role is to farm the lane for CS as safely as possible to accomplish a few different things. This lane should be played much safer than mid because if you die here, the lane can snowball very hard. Anyways the different roles for top lane are 1.) Dive the enemy carry and kill them. EX: Irelia/Riven 2.) Peel the enemy bruisers off of your carry and kill them. EX: Singed/darius 3.) Split push so the enemy has to send more than 1 person to stop you which can give you a numbers advantage elsewhere on the map. Teemo/Nidalee and finally 4.) Just do tons of aoe damage. Vlad/Rumble

Some champions can do a few different types of these roles and can switch back and forth, for example singed might try and push like a madman early game and then transition in to a diver/peeler later.

The responsibility of top lane is obviously the farm that is top, making sure you can safely farm, if you have flash/ghost up, you probably dont need a ward. If your escape summoner is down, a ward is necessary.
Next, your responsibility should be to assist in challenging the enemy buff if the jungler wants to invade, or to protect your own if their jungler invades. Finally if your laning partner roams, you must instantly react and follow, or start pressuring some other part of the map, either a tower or invading blue/red

This lane must rely on mechanically outplaying the opponent to create small advantages such as out CSing, out trading which might open up an opportunity for a kill, or lane control which will make your CSing safer and taking enemy tower to create pressure on their junglers buffs.


Next is mid lane.

Normally consists of AP carry, assassins and sometimes strong laning AD carries.

Role is to farm the lane for CS while providing general map presence to anything on the map and doing the initial burst aoe damage in team fights. A few different roles to accomplish could be 1.) Dominate your opposing lane so you can snowball early. ex: leblanc/zilean. 2.) Farm passively and carry late game. 3.) Roam and put pressure on other lanes. EX: Eve/tf.

Mid lane is responsible for pretty much everything. You are positioned in the map where you can easily get to every objective. Mid must make sure to not do anything overly stupid around the 8-14 minute mark or else the other team can easily get a free dragon. Mid should also get wards for the enemy wraiths to make sure that they can "Lean" to that side and avoid ganks.

Mechanics are very important to outplay your opponent on the front you are fighting, for example. If you are leblanc against karthus, you need to make sure that you can effectively "all in" and kill karthus repeatedly because if you dont, leblanc will fall off and you will lose late game against karthus.

Responsibilities. Farm mid, keep opposing laner in check and accounted for. All neutral buffs for invade/counter invade purposes, dragon and be present in early game team fights.


Bot lane

Bot lane consists of an AD carry and support or sometimes a combo lane.

Role is to farm the lane for CS while providing opposition for the closest jungle buff and dragon control. The ad carry needs to get farm to do consistant damage late game and the support needs to protect the farm by warding to maintain dragon control and lane control. It is also possible for the lane to poke the opposing lane out or kill them to gain complete dragon control to do it or take the tower. The lane should consist of two champions that have synergy together. Ex: Cait/nunu. Cait can poke from long range with a free PD from nunu while nunu stops anyone from actually hard engaging by slowing with snowballs/threat of ult. Another combo would be Taric Graves. Taric stuns and takes away armor while Graves does full burst combo for easy kills on squishy targets like sona.

Support's generally have very little farm but that doesn't mean you cant get any farm. It just means that there is only gold from minions from the three lanes and then the neutral jungle camps. If your ADC is dead or buying and you can last hit without getting punished, do it but try not to endanger the lane by shoving it really hard or anything like that. Use good judgment

Later in the game the support should have wards on more important areas like around baron and places where the enemies might set up ambushes. The ADC should try and position themselves where they avoid the majority of aoe damage in team fights.


Tips and tricks: ADC will pretty much try and CS every minion. Land a stun/auto/spell/any harass as they go in for last hits. Shove the lane harder when level 5 to hit 6 before the enemy does to all in and kill them without the threat of ultimates.

Positioning: The ADC should not be within range of the random aoe damage or spells of divers before team fights starts. This means that if you are a generic AD like corki standing next to your top lane Ex: darius before a fight starts, it will be pretty bad for you. You should stand farther back and let the mage or someone else clear the minion waves if the enemy team is close. Ideally you will let the bruiser engage and when the enemy bruiser gets to the location of your bruiser, you will then be able to auto attack. This may seem like you are playing like passive or letting your teamates do the more work but the longer the fight goes and the longer the ADC survives, the more damage output they do. The majority of supports should position themselves between the ADC and bruisers to try and stop divers from killing the carries.

Jungle

The jungler is any champion that can do the following: Clear camps quickly, clear camps safely, gank effectively, easily kill dragon/baron, Has good CC/utility, has broken ultimate for team fights.

The jungler's responsibilities basically prioritizes the objectives listed earlier while trying to play a balancing act of ganking/keeping pressure on the lanes to help losing lanes recover and winning lanes snowball harder.

The jungler should keep mental notes on all small camps repspawn in 1 minute, red/blue respawn in 5, dragon 6 and baron 7. Also, if you know where the enemy started, you know that they will probably have that respawn at around 7 minutes and their 2nd by 7.5 to 8 minutes

If lanes wish for the jungler to gank, they better have the minions in a good position and have the foresight to be able to set that up and let the jungler know ahead of time. Also the laners should keep track of the wards.

Junglers should try and pick up a ward to help mid lane, if mid wards the enemy wraiths, jungler can ward the other side which will have every entrance and exit warded if mid/jungle top and bot has wards which makes it very safe for mid lane. Also someone should have a pink ward for drag/baron between the jungler or support.

If you can't assist your lanes by ganking, another great way to help them is by giving them buffs. Imagine you have a nidalee top lane against a teemo. It's impossible to fight through the mushrooms, instead give her the red buff and let her just slowly beat teemo.



Items


This will be a general item guideline. I will not be telling you that certain items are the best or items are terrible. I want you to be able to objectively rationalize why you are buying a specific item.


The first thing I want to discuss is item costs. The more expensive an item, the more stats it gives for the cost. For example the B.F. Sword costs 1550 gold and gives 45 attack damage.This means you spend around 34.4 gold per every point of attack damage that you gain from the item. Compare that to a long sword, 10 AD for 400 gold. that is easy math and 40 gold per point of AD.

The reason that this is important is you want to figure out what to build and finish a high tiered item. Having a bunch of low tier item gets you less stats for your money and could be the difference between killing an enemy and being killed. To be fair, sometimes you need some low tier items to not get completely bullied in lane. If you are saving up a ton of gold and can't effectively cs because your opponent will kill you if you try and kill the ranged minions, you should probably get some lower tier items to help you.

The next thing I will be discussing is diminishing returns.

Diminishing returns states that if you add input, you get less output per point of input.

The way that damage reduction is calculated is 100/(100+armor)

Example 1: You have 100 armor. Damage is reduced by 50%.

Example 2: You have 200 armor. Damage is reduced by 67.7%

lets say that 100 armor costs 1800 gold (2.5 * the price of chain vest which gives 40 armor)

The first 1800 gold you spend on armor gives you 50% damage reduction (assuming you can only buy in increments of 100 armor and base armor is 0) the next 1800 gold you spend gets you an additional 17.7% damage reduction. As you can see, the more armor you get, the less cost effective it is at keeping you alive.

This is true for many things in league. Armor, Magic resist, Attack speed, Crit,

I'm not saying that you shouldn't get a million armor on malphite, i just want everyone to understand that if you stack a ton of something, the cost to value becomes less.

Since were talking about armor i guess right now is a good time to talk about effective health.

Imagine you have 1,000 hp with 0 armor. That is equivalent to having 500 hp with 100 armor. Often it is much better to mix your defensive stats so you don't get wrecked by diminishing returns. Every point of health becomes more effective health with increased defensive stats.

This might be one of the reasons I personally value aegis of the legion so highly. It is super cost effective, gives you a great EHP and doesn't get destroyed by DR. It gives the user 250 hp, 20 armor, 20 MR and allies 10 armor and 10 magic resist. This totals to be 60 armor and 60 MR and 250 HP for much cheaper than other defensive items not to mention giving your teamates defensive stats when they don't have very much defensive stats during the mid game which means you get around some Diminishing Returns and get the most bang for your buck.





The next thing I will be discussing is more for AD carries but is relevant to everyone.

Autoattacks is a damage function based on multiple inputs. I believe the formula is something like this:

Autoattack dps = Attack speed X [(%chance to not crit * Attack damage)+(%Chance to crit*Attack damage)*(crit multiplier)]

Why is this important? Damage does not come from one stat. Have you ever seen a miss fortune build 4 phantom dancers? It's awful and doesn't do any damage. *Cough* Dom *Cough*

You need to increase all of the different parts of this function (also taking armor penetration in to account) to deal maximum damage.

Small example. I will be estimating and not taking diminishing returns completely in to account just to prove how inefficient doing something like only getting attack speed is. If we took DR in to account, this example would show even more how terrible of an idea stacking PDS are.

If someone has like 4 phantom dancers, they will attack something like 2 times per second with 100% crit. If the base damage is like 70, the auto attack dps will be something like 280 dps. They would have spent 11,200 gold

If that person had bought something like an infinity edge, phantom dancer and a BF sword. 1[(195*.7)+(195*.3*)2.5]=282.75 Auto attack damage. They would have spent 8,150 gold and have more effective damage.

These examples did not take armor penetration in to account. I highly suggest a last whisper after any BF sword item +PD has been purchased.



Now which items to buy? Given your situation you probably already know general item paths. If you are top lane against rumble, you may want to get an early spirit visage giving you a much more effective health pool with HP+MR.
Maybe you have to duel and kill him quickly, Hexdrinker is very good at dueling mages if you are physical. Abysal scepter if you are a mage. Use common sense and trading off your gold for the maximum relevant stats.

Most people know how to build their classes but I think that the majority of people mess up when it comes to so called "tanks"

I think there exist 2 kinds of tanks. Bruisers that have enough CC/Disruption that they don't need to do much damage, and bruisers that have to be killed or else they will just kill you later on.

Some examples of the first kind would be cho'gath and malphite. If you build them super tanky, they can disable the enemy ADC with MS slows, silences, knock ups and generally annoy them. Cho'gath gets away with just building tanky because his ult does massive true damage which just means he has to outlast his target for a little while which isn't too hard with the HP he gains from the ult passive. Champions that have hard CC like shen and rammus fit in to this category because the enemy is literally forced to have to deal with you. These champions can build some damage/tanky items if your team lacks damage. Use your judgement.

I think that the next example is tanks you can't ignore. I think amumu fits this idea because not because of his stun or ult, but because he has a lot of aoe magic damage and can drain your team if he is not focused. If amumu has a sunfire cape and an abysal scepter, the enemy team is punished for attacking him because he does have armor and magic resist, but if they don't attack him... they are also punished from despair/tantrum/random aoe magic damage. This is a good place to be for tanks if you want people to focus you.

I think that sunfire cape is the best item to exemplify this dual threat. Being punished for attacking and being punished for not attacking is exactly where you want to put the enemy team as a "tank".


Item conclusion: The way that you spend your money is always a trade off of stats. You are trying to maximize the damage you take and minimize the damage you recieve not just personally, but as a team. Balance stats among many of the inputs across the function you are trying to maximize. Get armor/mr + HP if you want to stay alive, get AS AD and crit if you want to kill people.