What you can learn from Minions

Minions

Minions in League of Legends play a vital role in the game. They can help you secure kills, siege towers, sometimes even give you vision! But what can we learn from them? That's what I'm going to go into here.

Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/fb0ntrV.jpg

As you can see, minions are sectioned into three rows. Front line, middle of the fight, and back line. As well as three different kinds of minions! (Excluding super minions, which I'll go into later) Melee, Cannon, and Caster.

In the image I showed above, I colored a number of the minions based on their position and goal. Lets get into the basics of their positioning, working our way backwards from the front.

The Front Line (Colored in Yellow) The front line is composed of Melee Minions, who have quite a bit of health but deal little damage. They tank the damage for the higher priority targets and distract the enemy focus in the fight. You can classify these guys as the Tanks, such as Leona, Maokai, Braum, Sion, etc.

Middle of The Fight (Colored in Green) Technically the cannon minion has a lot of health AND deals a lot of damage, so we'll classify him as a Bruiser (I'm using this term VERY loosely). Bruisers can be in the front or the middle, they have a decent amount of health and deal plenty of damage. Their job is to deal the big damage that lowers the effort for the tanks. Generally they find themselves in the middle (depending on the champ) because they are a high priority in the team-fight, both keeping the back line safe, and the enemy front line dead. These are champions like Jayce, Diana, Gangplank, Swain, etc.

The Back Line (Colored in Blue) The Caster Minions! These little guys die so quickly, but they dish out most of the big damage. They're ranged, cute and small but mighty (Kinda like Veigar ;D). These guys melt the melee minions up front and seek to make the enemy's job an uphill battle. They're in the back because they have so little health! They can get killed pretty easily, so they're being protected by 2 entire other layers! Best examples of the back line can be the ADC, support, long range mages.. On terms of champions I'd say Caitlyn, Xerath, Sona, Tristana, Lux, etc.

The Assassin (Colored in Red) Now I know that assassins do a lot of damage and that melee minion in red doesn't do that, but for all intents and purposes.. He's an assassin.. for a number of reasons. The minion colored in red has one goal: To get to the back line and delete them, much like a real assassin. They want to get rid of the highest damage as soon as possible, so that EVERYTHING becomes easier. Like hitting the tower, getting inhib, or kicking at a champion's heels! Unlike the melee minion, real assassins have little health, but a whole lot of burst damage (as opposed to sustained, constant damage). Once their abilities are on cooldown, they can't do much. So they gotta get in, kill, get out. Examples include LeBlanc, Ahri, Shaco, Rengar, Kassadin, etc.

Super Minions Super minions is the fed person who just kills er'body :P That's it.

Final Thoughts Unlike a real team-fight, a minion fight is over a pretty long period of time, and it's easy to analyze. In a real team-fight, where you are may seem insignificant since it's condensed into just a few seconds.. But your positioning makes a world of difference.

That's it! If you have any questions, comments, concerns, leave a reply below. Thanks!