[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Four Wards podcast.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Hey, what's up?
[00:00:08] Speaker A: It's Eric Brah, voice of Draven, Jerks, and Velcaz. And you're listening to the Forwards podcast.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Here to help you move forward and lead.
Hello, and welcome to episode 442 of the four Wards podcast. I'm your host, as usual. I'm Jack Solman, and I've got with me four other wards to help you move forward in League of Legends. Crush you is back this week.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: I am, in fact, the semi present.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: I don't know, semi seems a bit charitable for the past couple weeks. Either way, he's here.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: We appreciate it.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: We've also got free shooter.
[00:01:05] Speaker D: Hello. I have a new microphone, so I should be sounding less crunchy.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: He sounds very sexy. Listeners, tell us how sexy free shooter sounds with his new microphone.
We've also got Mike of many names.
[00:01:21] Speaker E: I'm at least somewhat present.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: And last but not least, he also has a new microphone. It's pillow pet.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Hello. Hopefully I don't sound crunchy.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: No, he sounds very nice.
All right, listeners, we are the Forwards podcast. We stream on Twitch. I can be found at Twitch TV Jackzoman, where it's still mostly path of exile streams for at least a couple more weeks. Crush can be found at Twitch TV. Crush, you. Free shooter can be found at Twitch TV. Free eshooter. That's right. There are three e's in free, and pillow pet can be found at Twitch TV. Pillow pet. And we haven't managed to bully Mike into actually streaming so he doesn't get plugged yet.
[00:02:06] Speaker E: We can get there eventually.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Patreon will get there.
Patreon goals? Sure.
[00:02:12] Speaker D: Mike streams once.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Other discussion topics before we get to our main topic tonight, a shout out to Codex ninja and pillow pet for supporting us at the shoutout tier. Thank you so much. We appreciate you guys. You are paying for our hosting so this podcast can stay on the Internet.
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[00:02:56] Speaker D: And it was like 20 minutes. You got a lot of bonus content this week.
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All right. With that, we've got a pair of I'm gonna call these sister topics because they're very related. These are both kind of like, uh, how to play the mid game kind of topics especially.
We're gonna kick it off. We're gonna talk about split pushing. A little bit of. It's a term you've probably heard us say a lot. If you're truly brand new, you have no idea what it is. If you've been around a little bit, you probably at least have a loose idea of what the term means, but maybe you don't know all the specifics and nuances therein. So we're going to talk about split pushing again, and we're going to kick it off with just discussing, first of all, who should even be the ones doing a split push.
[00:04:10] Speaker D: Well, 90% of the time, it's going to be mid or top lane, and more often it'll be the top laner. And that's for a couple reasons. One, they're the champions that are already in the solo lane, so they're going to be the highest XP on the map, so they're more likely to be able to hand themselves in a one v one.
You typically don't want your jungler to do it because you don't want your jungler showing on the map when there's objectives up, especially because, as we'll probably touch on, you typically want to split push away from the objectives.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:04:41] Speaker D: And then supports obviously out. And then ad carries. Some of them can. A lot of the times they can't. And you want to have them with your team for a fight.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: All right, I'm the esports nerd in me has to pause for a moment and say, you say supports obviously out. Hilla sang would like to have a word with you.
[00:05:02] Speaker D: Yeah, and I think the rest of the world wants a word with hela sang.
[00:05:07] Speaker E: Don't forget Kerria. Kerria is there, too.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:10] Speaker D: But Kerria just wants to be an ad carry.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: There are some crazy supports in pro. I just had to make fun of hylissang because it's funny because he's notorious for split pushing when it's wildly inappropriate to do so. And he plays support.
[00:05:24] Speaker D: Mm. Hmm.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: So the who is mostly solo laners.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: The only exception I can even think of. I've been trouble struggling, and I think there is an exception to support split pushing. And it's when you're doing something weird like a Tom Kench senna lane, where Tom Kench is the ones farming. Then Tom Kench can split push. Sure.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: Tom Kench is also not really the support in that context.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:53] Speaker E: So there are a couple of cheesy supports that can do it. Like, for a long time. Pantheon was a support for a while. He can sort of go into a split pushing operation.
I've seen Lee Sin supports do that. Poppy supports.
[00:06:06] Speaker D: But the other point of it is, typically you want your support with the main core of the team securing vision control.
[00:06:12] Speaker E: It's really much their job.
[00:06:13] Speaker D: While they're not the only person that does it, they have the access to the most awards at one time and.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Kind of ties into the. You mentioned the solo lanes have the most experience. Generally, you want the people split pushing to be the people who can win a one v one. The people who are the strongest people on your team in an individual environment. Because the idea is to force the enemy to send more people to deal with them than you have sent to split push.
[00:06:39] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:06:40] Speaker E: The other reason. Nope, go.
[00:06:42] Speaker C: And I think, like, that's the more important part of this, is it's not that the support can't split push, it's that the support is never able to one v one people on the enemy team.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: And if they are, you don't need to split push to win.
[00:06:55] Speaker C: Yeah. And if they can, then you don't need to be split pushing. Just go and death ball them or something. Although generally speaking, it doesn't matter what you're doing, what you could do to win. If the support's able to one v one people on the enemy team, you need to be able to one v one on the enemy team, you need to be able to push the wave, actually push the wave relatively quickly. You need to be able to take towers relatively quickly.
This is why top laners are usually the ones to do it. But there's exceptions like Ornn or Malphite don't really split push that well because they don't really wipe waves or push towers down that well. But Fiora or Yorick do it really, really well. So they love split pushing.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: All right, hear me out.
Any tank can split push fine with.
[00:07:41] Speaker E: Demolish, and it's on fire.
[00:07:46] Speaker C: The reason why Malphite specifically struggles is because he had a hard time killing the damn wave, even with AoE stuff.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: What Malphite have you been playing?
[00:07:57] Speaker E: Maybe early on, but by mid game you wipe a wave in two spells.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: It's super fast. I've been playing a fair bit of tank malphite mid, specifically as a counter pick to when the enemy team is heavy ADHD and yeah, I wipe waves and then demolish the turret. It's fine.
Pillipet, you were trying to say something?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah. The only thing I would like disagree with, even though it's correct, is you don't always have to be able to win the one v one. Yes. To survive the one v one. So a champion that has a jump like Jax or Camille or any champion that could survive the answer, your pressure is going to be good. That's where, like, tanks like Malphite can just r out or anything like that. But I would typically say, like, if you're playing malphite, you don't want to be splitting anyway because your ultimate is a game changing ability.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Yep, yep.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: And is a game changing ability like his ultimate?
[00:08:56] Speaker D: That's also why when we talk about ad carries, it's kind of Tristana excluded because Tristana has those. She's great in a one v one. She has good escape and can take towers very quickly.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Lucian also is a really good split pusher, and I know we meme on him a lot, but he is awesome at split pushing with his dash. And especially if you get. What is that Navori? It's not a meme.
[00:09:19] Speaker E: Lucian Top is probably legitimately good with how things are going. His solo lane career is back.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: He's back in mid for sure. I think Toppy struggles with a lot of the common champions in top currently.
Um, he still definitely is a gangplank counter pick. That's where the illusion top originated was as a gangplank counter pick. He still does that role super well. And in deranged top laners, he absolutely can beat the shit out of a lot of them.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: So if I see a ranged top laner, I'm locking in Darius with Ghost or malphite, and that's I'm going to make your life once I get level six.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: I was going to say malphite is very much a. I'm going to be sad until you're the one who's going to be sad.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: All right, so we've talked about who should split push. When should they split push?
[00:10:11] Speaker E: There's a couple of major answers to this one. There's actually one that I think you're not going to say and this one is when you are so far behind but the rest of your team is ahead. Go to a sideline and be alone. If you're drawing one or two people to you, your team is going to be able to win those fights and you can just slowly farm your way back into the game. You can maybe get a tower for yourself. If you're having a really bad game and the rest of your team is doing okay, get away from them and draw people to you because if there's someone taking you, they're not fighting your team.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: I have, I've had specifically jax games like that where I'm like, look, this dude is super fucking fed and he's splitting. Let me just hold him. I'll counter strike and leap strike away. Every time he tries to fight me, he might kill me. But if the strongest person on the map is killing me, that means he's not killing you guys.
[00:11:05] Speaker C: Yeah, that I agree. But that's not specifically split pushing, that's just splitting. You're not generally going to be threatening towers when you're doing it. When you're from behind.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Like that's from that. You're only threatening towers when you're only threatening towers when the enemy has teleported away. And I, you can't follow because you're too weak to do anything.
[00:11:25] Speaker C: Yeah, you're only threatening towers when they've completely bungled their macro entirely. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, typically.
[00:11:34] Speaker D: Oh, go ahead.
[00:11:35] Speaker C: It does mean that you're like sort of not sacrificing team fight, but being like even if I show up to the team fight, I'm not going to matter anyway, so I might as well get something done. And your team needs to recognize that they don't really want to take a five v four, which your team doesn't always recognize, but that's not something you can help. So just say, oh well and mute. All.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: I would say, like the most important indicator to tell you when you can split push is if you know for a fact that your team can fight in a four v five or four v four and win and do it successfully, that just opens up to where you can just take any lane you want.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Or alternately, if you know you can, one v two, any combination of two champions they have. If you are the fed one, you draw two people, you know you will at least kill one of them. Great. Now your teammates get to fight a four v three.
[00:12:33] Speaker E: Mordekaiser loves this.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yes. Mordekaiser from ahead is the nightmare scenario for enemy teams because of this.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Also make sure if you are split pushing and you team is prone to needing you, your teleports up. If it's not, try not to try to avoid the split push.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: But we'll get to that.
[00:12:57] Speaker C: So when does split push is honestly, like, the hardest part of split pushing? Like one of the. One of the other useful things to know when you're trying to decide whether there's split push or not is you need to know where the enemy team is on the map.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:13:12] Speaker C: If you don't know where anybody on the map is, you need to be pretty confident that if they send, like, everybody at you, that your team is going to get something done on the map otherwise. So a lot of this comes down to map awareness, whereas on the other hand, if you know exactly where every single member of the enemy team is on the map, then it becomes a lot safer for you to split push. It becomes a lot more obvious as to whether you can or not, if they're on the other side of the map or what have you.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: I have literally won games where I just tell my team I'm the strongest person on the map, but you guys have a fast bearing because we had like a brand jungle or something like that. And I'm like, when they send everyone to kill me, bot lane do Baron and my team actually did it. You win the fucking game. Nine times out of ten when that happens, because they get one kill and you get Barren.
[00:13:58] Speaker D: Yup.
[00:13:59] Speaker E: So there's another that actually brings into the. One of the other things is, depending on what your summoner spells are, that's another time to do split pushing. If you have tp, you want to be away from the big objective and pulling people to you. So if Baron is up, you want to be on the bot side pushing. If Dragon Soul is up, you want to be on top side pulling people away from you. If you don't have tp, you want to be on that opposite side, pulling someone else to you and just shoving the way down.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: Yep. This is where ignite top laners can get punished really harshly because they can't match the teleport, which means they have to hard commit to the fight in the side lane, so you can't teleport, which they may or may not be able to win, depending on how the rest of the game has gone.
For the ghost Flash Darius, that you mentioned a moment ago, pillow pet.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: When you're split pushing, it's also important to remember that you want to mirror or stay like with your team in the other lane. If you get. If they're at mid lane, at like, right in the middle split of the map, and you're at the tier one or tier two tower, or, I'm sorry, the tier two or tier three tower, either you're going to get killed and it's not going to matter whether you split or not, because the team has time to answer you. There has no pressure. There has to be pressure somewhere else on the map to make sure that your split push is successful.
[00:15:34] Speaker D: This is absolutely the most common mistake I see is the split pusher and rest of the team kind of not being in sync with each other.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:15:44] Speaker C: This is. That's. I would say this is the second most important thing when talking about when to split push. The first one is knowing where the enemy is. The second is knowing where your team is.
[00:15:52] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Like, and to be clear, like, if the your team is not able to create a pressure point to allow you to split, that means nine times out of ten, the correct play is to wipe the wave and wander over to your team.
[00:16:05] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: I say most of the time when I see someone trying to split, it's after you just take Baron without wiping the enemy team, and someone goes top lane and just pushes and dies. Yeah, I see that. The most common thing and everybody else. Yes.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: And to be clear, we're in plat and we're seeing this constantly.
[00:16:28] Speaker C: So the important thing here when we talk about where your team is, is you have to remember the point of split pushing. The point of split pushing is to apply pressure on the map at multiple places at the same time. If your team's not applying pressure and you are, you're not split pushing, you're dying.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: The point of split pushing isn't even just to apply pressure. It's to force your opponent into decisions so that they have the opportunity to make the wrong decisions.
[00:16:54] Speaker E: That's what the pressure creates in that. For a lot of solo queue, it's probably still best if you keep your yellow ward and you are putting that in strategic places. Knowing where to put your ward is really important so that you have a little bit of extravagant. You don't want it to be something that's really close to you. Like if you're pushing on top side and you're past that first tower, you don't want to put it in the little bush right by where krugs are or, uh, gromp are, because that's. You're not going to get away at all. You have no time to respond. That's not a useful ward.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:17:28] Speaker E: You want to be putting that deeper in, maybe closer towards the blue or red buff. Maybe you want to be putting it deep into the river.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: I'd say to counter that also I'd say yellow trinkets, great. Blue trinkets, better, in my opinion, when it comes to split pushing, because you get, you don't have to leave a lane to one. Drop it and it gives you an audible ping if you're not paying attention when it spots someone. Well, yellow trinket is great. You have to put yourself out of position and explore that jungle to put something, put a vision down.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: I generally agree with the caveat of you get two uses of yellow trinkethe.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: So they have trade offs. The blue one you can place further away and gives you that ping.
The yellow one, you can place two of them, which gives you more vision to know what's coming.
The yellow versus blue. The yellow will stay after someone sees it. So it'll give you an idea of is it just one person coming or is it two person coming?
Which is, which can be important. Like if you're, if you're playing somebody who can definitely one v one anybody, then you don't care. Blue is not as useful because you don't care if anybody comes. You care if more.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Everybody comes.
[00:18:47] Speaker C: Yeah, if everybody comes.
And the other thing is that yellow versus blue blue alerts the enemy team when they walk over it, which isn't that big of an ideal for split pushing. But it can be a difference. That's the difference between the wars and it's a trade off you have to.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: Take when your goal is. When your goal is to fight the one v two and win the yellow trinket. Not alerting them is really valuable because they don't know that you know they're coming.
When your goal is to, oh, they're sending multiple people. I need to back off.
The blue trinkets alert is usually better because they might also back off because they know they got spotted.
[00:19:31] Speaker C: The general case would be that if you are not confident that you can one v two, or if you're not confident you can one v one anybody, or if you think you can't really one v two people, the blue is fine. If you are going to leave as soon as anybody crosses that vision, blue is fine. Blue is better than if you're going to stick it out. Depending on who comes. The yellow is better.
But it's.
I wouldn't get hung up on this.
[00:19:55] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Speaker C: Both are fine as long as you're using them. It's better than not. It's way better than not.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: As long as using them also by control wards. God damn it. Yes, that, that little bush that Mike said earlier was like, not useful vision for you to put your yellow trinket into. It is a great place for you to put your control ward to make sure you don't get tp flanked on that.
[00:20:15] Speaker D: True.
[00:20:17] Speaker E: Or it's a great place for you to hide and grab someone.
[00:20:19] Speaker D: Exactly. To set up an ambush. If you do see the two people coming, though, I do think this talk does kind of segue into our next point on this pretty well. Of when you should abandon your split push.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:20:32] Speaker D: Because we're talking. If you see, you know, multiple people coming, that's like, oh, I can't fight them.
I should leave now. That's kind of the first obvious one.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: If you're split, pushing the correct way like we mentioned earlier, and pushing with your team, and you don't countenance four people on the map with your team answering their pressure, assume that anybody who's missing is coming to you. Just don't think they are. Just assume they are. Back off. Go sit in the middle of the lane, in a bush, or in a river somewhere. If you got an escape tool near a wall that you can jump over, just someplace that is safe that you can just get out. Do not sit in a bush on their side of the map.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: I literally operate on the principle of hit tab. If they are not envision they're about to jump me.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:27] Speaker E: There are only a couple of people who really just want to pull and it doesn't matter who comes to you. I'll take the fight. Even if it's three or four people. I'll push the tower instead while someone else does things. Mordekaiser is there tryndamere Sion illaoi. These are people who either can avoid death or create the one v one or they just take the tower while dying. Yeah, they have ways of still getting something almost no matter what happens to come for them. Most of the time it's better to then back off unless you are pulling so much pressure that you staying there is better.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: That's why I started banning Tryndamere when he had that brief spike of popularity. Because Chovy played a mid lane in LCK.
Because Tryndamere warps how you respond to the game. Because you can't let the wave reach your turret. He can suicide and take turret because of his ult.
[00:22:25] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: And I was experiencing multiple games repeatedly where a Tryndamere would lose lane horribly. It did not matter because he would hit two, three items and just destroy turrets, would demolish and hullbreaker and not give a fuck that he was feeding because he was getting objectives.
[00:22:47] Speaker E: That just does feeding scion the boss, the boss the balls. Yes.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: I don't think he does anymore, but he did.
[00:22:54] Speaker E: Yeah. This is warped gameplay that has changed how they have done the game because they don't want it in play anymore and he's found ways around it. This is something that isn't going to be good and will get people to be very mad at you.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: If you were wondering why Sion does reduced damage to turrets in his death form now, it's literally because of the boss and people trying to imitate the boss.
[00:23:15] Speaker D: Mm hmm.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Like I said, he was literally called.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Out in that patch. Note.
[00:23:22] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: So on abandoning your split push. So earlier, you know, we said if your team can win the four v four, four v five successfully, you're safe to split push. On the same side of that. If they can win the four v four or four v five split or successfully, you might not even have to split push. You can just add your strength to those numbers and just go, go where the team is and add to those strengths and just wipe a team.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: If your team has a 70% chance to win the team fight, even if you're not there, what does that turn into? If you are there at 80%, 90% fucking take that.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Cause then you just go right up mid take towers, you don't, there's no need to split push. And sometimes you don't have to split push. Like, that's not the answer to every game. You have to recognize the game state where your strengths are and where your team strengths are and play off that. It's, it's not an individual game, even though you're a solo laner, it's a team game. You gotta remember that.
[00:24:19] Speaker E: That's a key point there. But it's also one of those things where sometimes your opponent just has a better team fighting team and it should not be something you are trying to engage in. If there is a brand plus a bunch of other people who are really good at getting team fights going, we have Aurora who can lock everyone together in the brand, alt, etc. These are things where if you have some slip pushing styles, it may actually be worse for you to group up because you're feeding into what they want.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Yep, I have. Go ahead.
[00:24:53] Speaker D: Just to like give an example of that from one of my own games yesterday we were Warwick, yi, Cassiopeia, Zeri, Zyra and the other team had Galio Diana as the mid jungle. We, like, never want to actually team. Oh, and a Yasuo top lane as well for knock up synergy. We never want to teamfight that, like, and we ended up losing the game because we kept just trying to teamfight because the people that could split push didn't get strong enough to. But, like, you have to kind of look at that of like, hey, my team has, like, two forms of CCD against a bunch, like tanks and team fighters.
Even if it's like a, like, we. I never want to be grouped with them. I want to be splitting on the sides and trying to take fights that way in, like, smaller groups.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: So, like, adding to this, if the enemy team is able to dive your team with easy, like, it's just an engage hard enemy team, you're not going to be able to split push because the map is never going to be in a state where you can safely be in a side lane.
[00:25:58] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Without the risk of it. Like, your team just getting dove and you're forcing your team to constantly fight four v five or four v four against a heavy, engaged team. You.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: You need to be there.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Like, I know, it's. It's kind of like counterintuitive. Like, oh, we're not getting anything done. Let me go into side lane and help. But then you die. You don't get anything anyway.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Here's the way I look at it. In those situations, if you're not with your team, even if you're someone like a Yorick who is a dedicated split push champion, like, Yorick's, kind of sucks at team fighting.
In those situations where the enemy team has really strong engage and is ahead, if you try to split push, there is a 0% chance your team wins that team fight.
If you are there, maybe that becomes only 10%.
Unless you are confident that your team will actually concede objectives and disengage, take that 10%. It's better than zero.
[00:26:54] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Like, just straight up. As frustrating as that can be, going into a fight that you know you should lose nine times out of ten, that one time out of ten exists and your team is going to fight it. Your team is going to fight it whether or not you're there. So be there.
[00:27:14] Speaker D: It happens a lot with, like, I'll be in a game where the enemy top laner is playing riven and comes out of lane with like ten kills and, you know, we'll try and, like two or three person gank her and die. Like, it literally takes four of us to kill this riven, but she just stays in a side lane and, like, the mid laner goes and just clears waves against her. She never joins her team, and we win the team fight. Whereas if she had been in that team fight, we would have lost, like, hundred percent. We would have lost. But because she was not group, she did not recognize that she was the team fight win condition for her team.
[00:27:50] Speaker E: This sort of brings up, and it sort of goes into the next part of our point, is how to deal with an enemy split push. And that riven was someone who was just doing a split push. And you, if you know that someone is ahead in the split push and they're there, one of the best ways to do it is to just gank them. Get as many people as you can get, either. If you can get a flank war to get a TPN on them or something, get a large quantity of people, preferably with some Cc, and just hammer them quickly in and out. Because if they keep you there for a long time, they've kind of won because the rest of their team gets the chance to do whatever, like you would.
[00:28:28] Speaker D: Yeah. With that, it depends what else is up on the map. Like, if you doing this means you're pulling your entire team off Baron, then, yeah, like Mike said, they've won. But if it's, you know, dragon spawns in a minute, Baron spawns in two. And they're at your tier three tower.
Yeah, they're out of position.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: Punish it the other way to handle enemy, split push. A lot of the time you mentioned the mid laner clearing waves doesn't necessarily have to be the mid laner, but answer them with someone who is high wave clear and has ways to survive. Getting dove champions like Lissandra and Malzahar, not good. Split pushers are great champions. To answer split push. Because if the enemy tries to split push, they nuke the wave. If the enemy tries to dive them, they have tools to say, oh, you've pulled tura aggro. Well, extra. Fuck you.
[00:29:24] Speaker E: A lot of the control mages are very good into split push. They're not good to split, except for Ziggs, of course, but he's sort of his own thing.
[00:29:34] Speaker B: He's special. He should never split push, but he has incredible turret take.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Another good way to counter the split push is if you have someone on your team that can just one ability wipe away.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: You just wait for that wave to get pushed. Wipe the wave. Now they gotta wait 30 some seconds for their next wave to get there. Then you have plenty of time to answer however you need to on the enemy team.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: One of the classics for this is Anivia, because her all has effectively no cooldown, slows the wave and wipes it as they walk in. And she does it from too far away to engage on most of the time.
[00:30:10] Speaker E: There is a reason why Sivir is in all of the longest games in history.
[00:30:14] Speaker D: True.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: Yeah. The important thing with those when it comes to a control mage or other mage or other person who can wipe away is you wipe the wave and leave immediately because they will likely be able to dive you if you step up too far.
They mentioned Anivia and Sivir Malzahar is another one in the same group of throws an ability from outside of engage range and leaves. Like, he just throws his e.
I.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: Mean, he casts W and Eq as well as he's walking away.
[00:30:49] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like, ew. And then it's like he may or may not need the q, but he's gone.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: It softens up the melees so he can wipe them easier.
[00:30:58] Speaker C: Yeah, he's nowhere near. He's nowhere near the wave. You can't ever engage on him. Doesn't matter who you are.
Same concept, wipe the wave. Don't be in an engage range. Don't walk into the wave to clear it. That you're just gonna get jumped on.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Yep. If they've already got the wave crashed a turret and they're smacking turret, it's too late. You've lost that turret.
[00:31:18] Speaker C: Generally, yeah.
[00:31:20] Speaker E: Unless you were bringing the whole squad to go take them down, you've lost it.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:31:24] Speaker C: Yeah, you have. You have to keep the wave off of the turret. This is true.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: Like, personal experience. I had a game just the other. Like, it's been a couple weeks now. I want to get to trundle. Trundle loves to split, push because he can take towers in 2 seconds.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: He has two different steroids that help him take turrets.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: I played a psion. I hold the tower or I hold the wave outside a tower. I queue it, and I walk away. And he cannot. He can't. He couldn't dive me. And I answered his every split. He tried, I answered it, and I went with my team. I went back to my team, and.
[00:32:02] Speaker E: I'm surprised he didn't dive you.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Well, I was building. He counts on his r to just be able to murder you. But if you build a couple, like a root kern, you can kind of just negate his whole r into him as a tank is really nice.
[00:32:20] Speaker B: Sion also has the tools to actually, like, play keep away with trundle, which a lot of tanks don't have.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I ran phase rush, and I just, I just outran him. And if you interrupt, it's the phase.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: Rush, specifically, you have to run phase rush against Trundle as sion.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: If you run, like, if you interrupt silence, queue it just immediately, like, it doesn't go on cooldown, he just gets it right back. So you just can reuse it, reposition, reuse it, and once he's done that.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: That means he's burned pillar. He can't stop your ult anymore.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: We're talking about, you know what, when to how to answer the enemy split push. It's important to know that, like, if they've got your, what is it? Tier three tower, and you have an open end, you might as well just. If you cannot answer the split push, let them take the inhib. Don't die for it. Like, there's no way to stop it because you don't have no tower safety.
Let that inhib go down. He's going to go to another way lane, and then you can retry. It's not worth your team dying or you dying to save an inhib, or try to save an inhib.
[00:33:29] Speaker E: You have an influx of gold that's coming in every single wave. If you have the capacity, you feed that money to whoever needs it most, either to just max out your ad carry as strong as they can get, max out a mid laner and assassin as strong as they can get, or you have someone there who can just hold it forever.
That's a lot of money coming in, and it will always come in. There's no way of losing that money. That super minion will push that in.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:33:57] Speaker E: That's why taking in him really early is sometimes to a detriment, because you are making sure you are giving the enemy quite a bit of money.
[00:34:05] Speaker C: There's a debate as to whether you should even take it and hit before 20 minutes.
[00:34:09] Speaker D: Yeah, a lot of times it's worse, too, because of what Mike just outlined.
[00:34:16] Speaker C: Unless you can come back. Mechanics in league, that's one of them.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: If your team can end the game at the 20 minutes mark, that's when it's safe. But if not, it's normally not safe.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: It's if your team can use the pressure of taking an inhib to get Baron before the inhib responds, it's usually worth.
But getting Baron at 20 to 24 minutes requires you to be very far.
[00:34:41] Speaker D: Ahead, typically in multiple lanes and that's why it's like you're getting in here at that point.
[00:34:50] Speaker E: Or your t one. Yeah, I was going ahead in a ton.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Inattention from your enemy. If they're just not paying attention, sometimes you can sneak it shockingly early, even if you're not all that strong.
[00:35:04] Speaker D: Yeah, there are times, too where, because we were talking about like, oh, who should answer the split push. There's times when, you know, it's solo queue. You don't have perfect communication with your team. A lot of times you're like, you're going to look at the map and be like, wait, you're here. Then who's answering him at our in him? Like, sometimes you need to be a little bit more aware of, like, what your teammates are doing when there's a head enemy split pusher. Cause sometimes you either need to, like, ping people, be like, hey, you, person, go answer this wave. Or if you're someone that can safely farm it off the turret, just be like, okay, I need to go answer this. Because otherwise we're losing three towers.
[00:35:56] Speaker C: It's very rare for that to work, but it's worth trying every time. Like the seeing that one person on your team is not where they need to be and you know where they should be, and you have time to actually tell them where to go. It doesn't happen often, but every so often, they actually listen and they go that way. And amazing happens after that, because they did what they're supposed to. Finally.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: I know pillow pet will feel the pain when I say this. The most frustrating feeling in the world is when you take Baron and there's still two people dead on the enemy team, and your whole team is healthy, and there's like tier one turrets you could take and three people just recall.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Oh, it's, it's, it's mind blowing that they think that it's urgent that they back right then and there. When we got all three waves are pushed and it's like, okay, we could easily just go take three towers and get what, how much global gold would that be? Just depending on.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: It's like a whole full second barona.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: And you could go back. Yeah, you can go get a whole, like, extra half of an item. But especially when you, like, won the.
[00:37:07] Speaker D: Fight in the Baron pit.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: It's like, all right, mister jungle, you just backed and now you're clearing raptors.
Let's like, I don't, I just don't understand. Like, there is no urgency to back right away after a baron. If you just wipe them at the baron, there's no urgency in it. There's only urgency.
[00:37:26] Speaker E: And it's to spend your money or to heal.
And if you can't do either of those things, or it's not beneficial to do either of things, those things don't.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: There's. If you have a TP, that. That might make it work. That might make sense. Like, you can make a tp play onto a tower that's getting aggroed by a minion, and that helps your team take that. I don't know. But just don't back. It's just not worth it. If you can take a tower.
[00:37:51] Speaker D: There is a third reason you're the support and you need to refill your wards.
[00:37:54] Speaker E: That is. That is a good one.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: You.
[00:37:55] Speaker E: You do need to have the ward refilled. That's true.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: Most likely the support's not going to be needed to take the tower anyways. Luckily, yeah.
So supports, you're off the hook.
But if there's a dragon up, support roam to the dragon still, like, after the baron, like, just go to the dragon. You don't have to back then. Go to the dragon.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: When dragons just get given over as trades for baron. When you could have gotten both.
I hate it.
All right.
We had a whole second topic, but we talked about split pushing way longer than we expected. So we'll save that second topic for the next time. We don't know what the fuck to talk about.
[00:38:33] Speaker C: Sure. It'll be soon.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Which means we're going to do a trinket tip and get over to some listener questions before we wrap this show up. And our trinket tip is real straightforward. But it is a reminder that if someone on your team brings a sweeper at level one, or if you're all grouped up when the ward gets placed, but the sweeper is the reliable way to do it. If your team goes to kill a ward, as long as no more than three people are hitting that ward, and one or two of those people are the solo laners, the split experience for killing the ward will be enough for the solo laners to level up on six minion kills, or just the first wave. Instead of having to kill a melee of the second wave to level up, there is a breakpoint for bot lane as well. For level three, I believe, where this speeds it up. But the big impact is getting level two a minion early is like, you win the lane if you play the lane, right?
[00:39:25] Speaker D: Yeah. And I do know in bot lane, if only two people hit the wards like you and your support, you need one less caster minion to hit level two. So if it's like the waves crash before you cleared the first wave and there's four casters, you can still just clear the three and you'll hit level two. First three, melee.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: So, yeah, don't split the wards five ways. There's no benefit to that. Split them three ways or less so you can level up sooner.
[00:39:52] Speaker E: So this is a. This is an actual question for me because I'm not 100% sure about this. How does that work when there's only three health on a ward?
If an attack is in the air, does that count as giving the XP over wards?
[00:40:04] Speaker B: Give experience based on proximity, not based on who dealt damage to them.
[00:40:07] Speaker C: Just like minions.
It is just like a minion dying for experience purposes.
[00:40:13] Speaker E: Yes.
[00:40:15] Speaker C: Money is a little weird.
All wards have a bounty associated with them that they give out when they're killed. However, when you hit a ward or ping it, it takes five gold away from that bounty and gives it to you. But the remaining bounty is still there.
You'll get that bounty when you kill the ward. Or if someone else is giving vision of the ward so that you can kill it via sweeper or a control ward, they get the gold, too. So if you can ever have the person revealing the ward not be the one killing the ward, that's beneficial because you get extra gold.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: Yep.
All right, let's get to some listener questions. This comes in from Fuzzy Panda Punch, who writes, been playing Senna support, but my team will normally start to fall apart. I was suggested to try out a tank to have more teamfight sustain, but I often feel like we are bullied early game, and when lanes crash, I am too far behind to matter. What is your advice for someone like nautilus engaging early?
Ps, pillow pet, if we play soon, will you play bots so we can work on this?
[00:41:29] Speaker E: Um, I think I'm the support main around this group, or the one who plays support the most often.
Let me play some of the most.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: Let me throw in a little bit more information to maybe help guide the answer. He. He is, uh, someone I know, and he is currently trying to get out of iron, so he's dealing with lower Elo people with weak mindsets.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:41:57] Speaker E: So the main goal, if you are playing on an engaging support or a tank support, is you are not really, for the most part, a passive person in the lane. You need to be out in front, unlike the senate, and you need to be the one who is sort of the front line. If you have someone who's duo queuing with you. This is preferable because then you can talk to them and they will come with you. If you notice consistently that that person is not coming with you when you are doing engages, your goal has shifted from engaging to saving their life.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Yep, that's, that's where I was gonna go with that is when you have the dumb ad carry that won't follow up, your God hooks, your job transitions to okay, stand near them and anyone who tries to jump on them auto attack them to root them and then hook them to hold them in place for the maximum amount of time to hope that the idiot manages to either run away or kill them.
[00:42:54] Speaker E: If you're a new player, I don't know how much blue essence you're going to have.
So another really, really good support. If you're like in the lower elo, someone who can be offensive and very defensive, Braum is great to start with. He gives you some engage. He gives you peel. He's very good at saving your ad carry.
[00:43:15] Speaker D: Leona is also very good right now, but that's because she's just so damn tanky at early levels. Like your w gives you so many stats, you can enq someone w and just walk away and lose like 200 health.
[00:43:29] Speaker C: So being, being an engaged support, playing the lane is very different and you're going to be playing it differently from levels one to three after that.
Most of the time, an engaged support will need all of their skills. They need to be level three before they can do anything. Alistair's a really good example of this. Alistar never, ever, ever, ever wants to go in before he has all three of his skills.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: Nautilus needs headbutt, pulverize.
[00:43:58] Speaker C: He doesn't necessarily needs level two at least absolutely 100% Nautilus can do it at level one. Nautilus is one of the ones that can actually go in at level one. And it's because he has so much cc that he can, that he can make do with it anyway. And I think his passive even does extra damage while it's on cooldown on a champion, if I remember right.
[00:44:17] Speaker E: I believe it's a little bit, it's.
[00:44:19] Speaker C: Like a little bit similar to Braum.
It's why Braum can also do it at level one.
Most engaged champions need at least to be level two because they need two skills. Leona, for example, needs her e and her q, her zenith blade and her whatever the shield is named.
Daybreak shield, I think. I don't know. It's the name of her shield and Alistar needs to be level two to have headbutt and pulverize. One or the other doesn't do anything.
And a lot of engage supports want to have all three abilities because they become very tanky or very good at sticking on you at that point.
So you actually don't want to be out front until you know that you can engage successfully. You want to stand back and wait for the levels to come in.
This is the most common reason that engage supports have problems, is that they stand up too far and they get poked down before they get to level two or three that they need.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:45:15] Speaker C: And then when they try to engage, they just go poof.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: Help get your lane to two first. Help get the minions lower health so your ad carry can kill them. Especially if you're. If you're an iron right now. Fuzzy panda punch. I guarantee the enemy support is afraid to touch the minions cause they have been yelled at by an ad carry for touching their cs. Do not last hit. Just when they're full health, start whittling them down so your ad carry can last hit them. You'll hit two first, which means you'll get to be useful first.
And as long as you're not taking the cs you're to carry shouldn't throw a fit.
[00:45:48] Speaker D: And make sure you use your charges on the melee minions does not matter anymore in those first waves, okay?
[00:45:54] Speaker C: First waves, yes. For, yeah, it doesn't matter for gold anymore, but it matters for doing as much damage as you can to the wave.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:46:01] Speaker C: The other thing you can do at levels one and two while you're still waiting to level up and get all your skills, go hide in a bush.
Like, engage supports in a bush is scary. It means that your threat range has changed from a circle around your model to a circle around the bush. It's.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: Even if they know you're there.
[00:46:18] Speaker C: Yeah, even if they know you're there.
Doesn't matter. And like, especially, I find in really lower elos where they don't understand this concept of a threat range. They could just walk into you. Like, they just forget that you're in the bush. It's happened. Like, they just forget you. They're there. You're not on their screen, so you don't exist anymore. Object permanence is a thing.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Crush, crush, you say? Even. Especially in lower elos.
[00:46:43] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, no, I just watched everywhere.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: I just watched g two mad lions today where pros face checked into a support they knew was in the bush and died to the tank support who didn't have to burn their dash to get onto them initially.
[00:46:58] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it doesn't matter. Like, it happens everywhere. And being and giving your opponent the ability to make that kind of an easy to capitalize on mistake is how you play engage supports. At least early game, late game, it becomes more of a, you have to find the right engage. You have to know when you can't, when you can engage successfully what a good team fight setup looks like.
[00:47:23] Speaker E: The other. The other point, this is a good one. Since you are in a lower elo, narrow your focus on which champions you're doing this on. You want to be doing this with two to three of these engaged supports and focusing on what you can and can't do with them. The biggest problem a lot of people know is they don't know their own limits. With a champion, you can go a lot farther with Leona than you can with, say, braum, because she just doesn't die to things that will absolutely kill other supports.
[00:47:58] Speaker C: I would say as well, in extremely low elos, like iron and so forth, you can play anything as support.
Oh, yeah. I actually really prefer to have Senna support in that kind of situation because a, games are going to go longer, b, you can't trust your ad carry to do damage. So if you're playing nautilus, and Nautilus does not do enough damage on his own to kill people. He doesn't. It's not like he doesn't do any damage, but he does. Not enough Senna does. Senna will kill people by herself.
Senna. Senna's a very versatile support champion and is capable of carrying a game if allowed to. If you get a bunch of kills, it's actually fine on Senna. Like, it's actually. That's a good thing. It means you're even stronger now. As strong as ad carry. Getting a bunch of kills on nautilus, not so great.
[00:48:51] Speaker D: And something important to remember too, because we haven't said it yet. Not every fight needs to be a fight to the death. If you land that nautilus hook, get the CC on them, you know, hit them with all your abilities, and your ad carry is either not following up or has been jumped on by the other support.
You can, like, start walking away and disengage the fight.
If they keep chasing you, you can continue the fight there. And like, now they're overextended and getting hit by your minions and taking more damage. But it doesn't have to be because you land the hook. One of us is dying.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: Yep. I would say with nautilus, probably seven or eight times out of ten, landing the hook into auto, hitting your riptide, putting your shield up and getting that auto. You've done everything on that target. Walking back to your carry to peel whoever tried to stop you from killing the person you hooked is almost always correct.
[00:49:46] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:49:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:49:49] Speaker D: Because your passive route is a per target cooldown.
[00:49:52] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:49:54] Speaker E: Thinking of Senna again, though, you're an iron as a Senna player, there's a lot of farm that's gonna just be not taken by other people. Senna's very good at just going to get that farm and becoming another ad carry.
[00:50:10] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:50:11] Speaker E: If you like playing Sana, you can still just play Sana and carry games by giving the ad carry all the initial farm and then picking up the farm that's left over by everyone else.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Even though you're an iron there. We talked about this a few weeks ago with a question that we answered. Uh, don't underestimate your opponent's skill level because of the resources that are out there that they might have watched. Uh, so don't just assume that everyone is going to be the same. Um, just, just play cautiously because there are plenty of Iron ADC's that already know how to auto attack and walk at the same time. The orb walking, that's just. Just be mindful to not underestimate because of a low Elo status.
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Imma be honest, when I play with listeners, I still try to treat it as if I'm playing against people in my solo queue games as far as like, what do I expect out of my opponents? Even though a lot of the times I'm two to three full leagues above the average MMR of this normal game.
But because when I try to play disrespectfully, like, oh, I'm better than these people is when I fuck up and feed and have a bad game.
[00:51:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
All right.
I think the other. The last thing I want to say about, like, the reason why I like Senna so much is that it really enables, like, someone else on your team to take lucian top and then you can go up with them and have the wife wife combo for even better winning new game.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: Perfect.
All right. With that, this has been episode 442 of the Forwards podcast. I've been Jack Soman for crush you for free shooter Mike of many names and pillow pet. Have a great night.
[00:52:20] Speaker A: Bye.
[00:52:21] Speaker E: Ta ta.
[00:52:26] Speaker D: Thanks for listening to the Forewords podcast. If you want to support the show directly, consider checking out our
[email protected]. the four Wards podcast. And, of course, send your questions to the four wardspodcastmail.com so we can answer them live on the show. That's the four wardspodcastmail.com.
