Warding is one of the essential strategy aspects of every MOBA game and League of Legends is no different. Some players mistakenly neglect this aspect of the game due to excuses such as “it costs too much,” “no one looks at the minimap,” and “it occupies an inventory slot.”
Well, the first thing that we’ll state is: do not let people accuse you of being a “tryhard” just for using the available in-game option that can help you win. Your opponents will use the wards to defeat you, so you might as well get better at warding and counter warding in League of Legends because it will help you and your teammates gain an edge during your matches.
How to Ward in League of Legends
In our opinion, the steps to good warding are simple:
- Make the position of the ward matter. Have it positioned in a way that it actually provides a vision that will be of great use to you and your team OR, if you are counter-warding, try to “guess” where the enemy placed their ward, or place it in a spot which you want to make sure is clear when your teammate comes to perform a gank on your lane. Or if you notice the enemy is leaving the lane to dump a ward, try to guess where is it and try to quickly remove it, for example.
- Make the timing of the ward matter. It is, most of the time at least, wasteful to ward immediately at the start of the game unless, of course, you are fishing for an enemy camping in the brush, or to ward on the opposite side of the map from where the action is happening. Unless it is ward placement on an important objective that’s bound to be visited by the enemy in the near future.
Ward items cost gold and take up an item slot, but an overall net gain for your team with a well-placed ward is that you will be preventing a lot of ganks, forcing the enemy to fall back, depriving them of the experience and gold for the kill that they would have made if the ward was not there.
We will recommend a couple of warding spots but bear in mind that there is no universal formula for this, and you might sometimes want to evade common spots that are easy to guess and easy to de-ward/counter-ward.
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For example, you won’t always plant a ward in the Nashor’s chamber or right outside of it, but far enough away from the chamber so that you pick up the info that the enemy team is moving on him, without them spotting your ward.
Instead, we will encourage you to think of the warding game as a chess game of some sort. Analyze the map and movements of you and your teammates over the course of your games, tournament, and streamer games, and you will find out that similar movement tendencies are visible in most matches. When laning, you should put the ward far enough so that it can pick up the movement of the enemy AND relay that information to you and your teammates in a timely fashion, so that the information is not late and that a proper reaction can be done. Also, if you are currently winning, ward deeper into the enemy territory, and if you are being pushed back, maintain vision control over your half of the map for better counterattack planning.
