Introduction
We will discuss on everything you need to know about Where To Place Wards In Mid Lane LoL.
Did you know that midlane vision accounts to 60% of winning your lane?
Today we are going to cover the following:
- Why mid lane vision is important for winning lane
- Where and when to place mid lane wards in early, mid and late game
- Situational scenarios and how to deal with being camped in mid lane
I believe once you get used to placing your words properly at the right time of the game you will start doing a lot better and climbing elo faster.
A lot of people tend to overlook this especially in lower elos such as iron, bronze and silver. As you go higher up the ranks you’ll see that vision is one of the most important part that a lot of times fight break about.
In professional play there will be whole battles to control vision in mid as this is what really dictates who wins the game.
If you think you do poorly or generally want to improve your vision score and win rate this is a guide for you. Even if you are not a mid lane or jungle main then I think this can benefit you as I will be talking about how this works in late game too which really affects every lane on the game.
League Of Legends Types Of Wards
Just as a quick refresher we will cover the three main types of wards that you have in League of Legends.
Sweeper Lens
This ward lets you sweep and area and detect champions hiding in bushes along with finding stealth wards so you can clear them out. It expires after a certain amount of time. It’s very useful if you are clearing vision or trying setup a trap/gank.
Stealth Ward
This is a great ward to use in lane to protect yourself from ganks, but it can also be used to have vision in objectives such as dragons and baron.
Farsight Alteration Ward
This ward is typically used by ADC’s or squishes if they are trying to escape or go to an area and can place the ward safely from distances without having to check face a bush where a trap could be residing. Use this if you are not certain about the territory you are about to enter.
Control Ward
A control ward lets you disable stealth wards but it’s always visible to the enemy so they can clear it out easier. Furthermore it lets you detect some stealth such as Shaco and other champions that have it. It’s useful late game because it’s something you can always buy and adds more vision to your inventory.
Why It Is Important To Know Where And When To Place Wards In Mid Lane
It’s very important to fully understand why it’s important to know where and when to place wards in mid lane. Below I’ve composed a list of how this may help you climb up the ranks in League of Legends and why it’s so effective. As mentioned earlier vision control is one of the most important factors of the game as you go up in ranks.
- Helps you prevent ganks from junglers
- Helps you setup ganks for your jungler
- Creates insecurity to enemy mid laner
- Creates insecurity to enemy jungler
- Allows your team to move fast in early scudle contesting
- Allows your team to secure objectives easier such as dragon and baron/herald
- Allows yourself to push lane and create pressure for enemy mid laner
- Allows yourself to go aggressive and attempt a 1v1 with the enemy mid laner should the opportunity present itself
- Prevents snowballing for early-game junglers such as Leesin, Elise, Nunu, Olaf
- Can punish late game scaling mid-layers if you play aggressive with proper vision
- Allows you to farm care free
- More forgiving if you do not have summoners such as flash
As you can see the list just for mid lane is massive. There are more reasons to this that have to do with overall macro play and strategy but we are going to focus on those in the sections below and break it down by the game phases.
Having said that lets dive into the early game phase of the game for mid lane vision control.
Where And When To Place Wards In Mid Lane – Early Game
Early game is one of the most important parts of the league of legends summoners rift gaming these days. As you know the games are now finishing a lot faster than before so the importance of getting ahead in early game is vital for you to increase your chances of winning.
With the list above we mentioned a list of reasons of how to prevent early junglers snowballing. Typically most advanced junglers will look for an opportunity to gank you. Which means a huge part of this is basically vision. Having good vision in your map can essentially kill the chances of the enemy jungler being able to gank you.
In order to understand where wards need to be placed here we need to understand one important fact. And this is where is the enemy Jungler pathing taking place. Considering you know nothing about it and have no clue which could very likely be the case if there’s no early invade or something along those lines you need to play the 50-50 game.
You will ask what is the 50-50 game and this is basically a simple concept you pick a side in your mid lane and you ward that one. Once you ward that side of your mid lane you will be playing around that until your ward expires. This could look like this if you favor laning towards the right side.
Another possibility is that if you have some information lets say that the enemy jungler is playing along the left side of the map and you are facing upwards then it would be a good idea to place a ward deep into their jungle near the crugs. This will prevent an early cheese gank from them at level 2 or even a later one if they decide to path directly into the blue side after the red side as you would know they skipped crugs.
The location of this can be seen as follows.
The main idea of this also helps your jungler invade the enemy jungle and steal some of his early gold which can set or delay the enemy jungler into his pathing. Furthermore it allows you to see if he’s going to do an early scudle or attack your jungler if he’s doing the scudle himself. This gives a very good edge to yourself and your jungler.
I really think it’s worth using this word for many of the reasons mentioned above and I favor it of playing it safer and picking a lane. If I know I’m on a bad matchup then I will revert to the first option mentioned earlier.
Where And When To Place Wards In Mid Lane – Mid Game
As the game moves more into the mid landing phase you also want to shift your warding strategy. At this point you should be buying a pink/red ward in almost your bases if your gold allows it. The extra red ward will give you an edge and information that can be priceless and it’s hard to balance in terms of benefits compared to getting an item.
If you are mage or you are losing lane then it’s ok to skip it unless you are getting camped permanently and want to have some knowledge ahead of time. An example of this is that some junglers that can skip walls or like to gank you from behind and they are camping you, a good ward to place is behind your lane in your crugs.
Jungler’s such as LeeSin, Hecarim, Kayn and Talon who love to skip terrain will try to use the behind the wall gank. Sometimes even the enemy support may show up to do this. The ward you want to place in this case is the one shown below.
Besides preventing ganks you now want to start warding around your dragon pit to help your team move towards it in case the enemy jungler decides to sneak in an early dragon steal. So one of the most popular wards you’d see being placed is the one on the bush between mid lane and the dragon pit. Sometimes it goes even further into the dragon pit itself but that’s less popular as it can be visible faster from the bottom lane such as supports if they roam and check.
This can be seen in the picture below.
In the case above you can see a red ward that is being used to have control around the area. This doesn’t matter as much in the bigger picture and you can use a yellow ward as well which is invisible and can potentially last a bit longer. The difference I think which is very important to understand especially as you go up in elo is that the enemy support or the enemy jungle will try to scout the dragon pit before they start doing dragon.
It’s very rare where they will just risk and try to do this in a risky way. The importance of the red ward here is that it lets you see the enemy wards placed there too so you can attack and clear them out. So you accomplish two things here you first ruin their plans and second you deny them vision over an active objective so now they have to do something about it to re-gain their lost vision. Finally this off course gives the opportunity to you and your jungler to go there and contest dragon sometimes with the help of your bot lane.
Where And When To Place Wards In Mid Lane – Late Game
The final phase of the game is late game and this is the most important part where vision control will basically dictate who will win and who will lose if the game is balanced. More often than not especially in pro play this is the determining factor for the win.
We already provided a big list of reasons as to why proper warding is useful but for late game I just wanted to say it has one extra reason.
Some objectives particularly baron and elder dragon can change the course of the game. Since damaging the dragons and the baron is not much of a big deal who keeps vision in the area however is the one that usually takes the objective. Well unless there is the usual jungle smite steal!
In this game you want to basically focus on a mid-lane horizontal line that spans from east to west and covers both objectives. More specifically you will want to keep the middle bush at around dragon and the area around baron with a ward as shown in the picture below.
Another thing to keep in mind here is this is where the sweeping lens comes into play. As you already know this is generally the role of the support to clear them out, however assassins can make use of them aggressively to setup jungle ganks. It’s not uncommon where you’d see an Rengar sitting on a busy that he has swept waiting for an enemy squishy (adc/support) to pass by and create a team advantage.
While this may seem minor and a one off but it actually changes the tides on securing the objective be it on a baron or dragon. This is another great example of why having good vision even as a trap can win you the game.
Conclusion
If you found Where To Place Wards In Mid Lane LoL useful and you think it may have helped you please drop me a cheer below I would appreciate it.
If you have any questions, comments please post them below I check periodically and try to answer them in the priority they come in.
Also if you have any corrections please do let me know and I’ll update the article with new updates or mistakes I did.
Do you think vision is important to control your lane properly?
As I started hitting Gold and above I found vision control to be a very important part of my win success. The times where I’m denied vision control by oppressive mid laners such as Zed, Zoe and Talon I always end up getting these unexpected tanks.