League 201: The Specific How-Tos

[LazaHorse]

So in between reading for law school, I figured I would start this thing I've meant to do for a while (back when I was DA). Welcome to League 201! See, now that most of us have been playing for 3 years or so (some since beta), most of us know the basics of last hitting, zoning, etc. However, there are a few quirks in the game, specific things that some of us don't know. They aren't exactly common knowledge, but knowing them can make a huge difference at times. Some of these will also come as common sense to people, but for others they will be very hard to get.

 

In any case, as often as I feel compelled to (hopefully once a day), I will be explaining a specific facet of League from one champion's unique ability, an advanced from of a mechanic, or strategies for team gameplay. I hope that you will learn a bit more than you already know to build on your progress in this game that I have come to enjoy so much over the past few years. Enjoy!

 

Jayce's Acceleration Gate - Shock Blast Combo

Jayce has been a very powerful champion for a long time, ever since they "fixed" his animations shortly after his release. Part (most) of why he is so strong is that he can combo his E and Q abilities (named above in order) to deal a very powerful Aoe, long-range, poke spell. Especially in ARAMs and mid-lane on Summoner's Rift, Jayce's poke can be incredibly hard to deal with if you don't quite understand how the combo works. I'll break down the combo and explain how best to avoid it.

 

Jayce's combo relies on a technique called "smartcasting". What smartcasting does is it allows you to point and click any number of your spells (especially skillshots), and your champion will use the spells as if they were aimed and clicked in the direction of your cursor. For Jayce, most people's keybindings look similar to this:

where Q and E are smartcasted. What this does is it allows Jayce to shoot both his gate and his shock blast in the same direction in very rapid succession (or simultaneously). This means that instead of the warning that Acceleration Gate's presence gives (i.e. "Hey, Jayce is about to use Shock Blast! Get ready to dodge!") is almost completely removed. For a really good Jayce player, you can actually shoot the Q first, use the gate second, and have it "appear" just in time for it to make the shock blast larger:

However, this is very hard to pull off consistently, so don't worry too much about it. That in mind, let's approach this from the example of Jayce using his acceleration gate first and then priming it for his shock blast to come later. If Jayce points his cursor and then smartcasts his Gate, it looks something like this:

where the yellow circle indicates the general region of where is pointer probably is. It sets up the gate so that it is parallel to Jayce's chest (or perpendicular to his cannon) and centered on wherever his cursor is. If Jayce then uses Q immediately afterward, it will also shoot toward this yellow circle and come out like so:

Don't be confused by the triangle I drew, it just shows that the shock blast is going directly down the center as we expect it to. This is because the Jayce player usually leaves his cursor right where it was for his gate, and tries to shoot the blast as soon as he can so you have less time to react. Going through the gate it looks like this:

As you can see, it hits the gate dead center and starts to expand. Understanding how Jayce players work, priming a gate and then shooting the Q right through it, allows us to predict what will happen and react to it. For this case, we can predict Jayce will shoot his Q right through the center of his gate, because most people know how to smartcast. Thus, when his Q finally goes through, we can expect something like this:

Notice that while Jayce's Q gets bigger, it doesn't quite fill up the entire width of the gate. In fact, it is about a third of the width of the entire gate, allowing you a third on either side that is "safe room". In fact, if you were standing anywhere in the green rectangles, the shock blast will whizz by you and you will not be hit by either the blast itself or its impact radius.

 

And that friends, is the trick. When you see a Jayce player, you can assume that he will smartcast his Q and E as most do. Because of that, you can assume that once he uses gate, his Q will shortly follow it and will go right down the center of the gate. Because of this, and because we know how large the Q is compared to the gate, we can use the gate as a bit of a guideline of where to stand. Now, really good Jayce players can (as I said before) make predicting this very difficult, but at maximum range, the gate will still appear before the blast reaches. This gives you ample time to get in either of the safe 1/3 zones to avoid damage. So let's recap:

 

When facing Jayce players in a poke/siege situation, you can dodge Shock Gate (the nickname for the combo) by:

1. Waiting for him to use acceleration gate.

2. Positioning yourself in the left or right 1/3 of the gate's width.

3. Moving closer to Jayce to prevent the long-range that his poke-strategy relies on.

 

And that ends the first installment of League 201. I hope to come back with some more specific tips and tricks for you all to use. Thanks for reading if you read the whole thing. If you skipped to the boldfaced TL;DR, I hope that helped as well.

 

Good luck!

 

- Lazarus

[StyleeZy]

Damn, lots of work looks like it went into this, make moar.

[PerryThePlatypus]

Actually thought this was very well done. My only real problem with using the gate shockblast combo is my coordination. Very detailed information here.

[LazaHorse]

This one actually only took about a half hour to do. Some more complicated ones though may take a bit longer. I'll probably have to do videos for some of them too. Meanwhile, please vote for which of the following tricks you would like me to cover next.

 

Insec: Using a ward jump to position Lee Sin's ultimate and kick an enemy to your team

Input Buffering: Using one ability or other mechanic immediately following another (or simultaneously) to make the combo smoother

Attack Moving: Utilizing the right click movement option to "play off the ball" (so to speak) between attacks/abilities

 

I'll do whichever one you all would like to see most. They all will likely require a video to do properly so don't worry about how hard one might be over the others.

[envisioN .]

Awesome information presented very well! Would love to see Input Buffering or Attack moving next

[TheNoob]

Awesome Laz ! This really helps cause its really annoying when he plays top against me when I play garen and this really fucks up his passive easily.

[Bellows]

Welp, this is super helpful. Thanks!

[LazaHorse]

Sorry that it's been a while since i updated. Law school caught up to me fast and I ended up getting a bit behind in my readings (mostly due to grinding out Plat V in solo queue). I decided the next lesson will be on attack-moving. I think the prime examples I'll be using will probably be Udyr (probably the most attack-move dependent melee champion) and Vayne (a ranged champion that not only gets most of her DPS from auto attacks but also has some abilities that make attack moving especially useful). Problem is that I would like to do recordings for the champions myself (at least for Vayne; there's already a pretty good source for doing it as Udyr), so it will take some time.

[PerryThePlatypus]

INSEC