The Importance of Grouping

Drunk Rummate·1/29/2015, 3:22:41 PM·2 votes·1,657 views

All too often I see games that last entirely too long because of players who refuse to group. All too often I see teams that are ahead lose games because of players who refuse to group.

Whether it be delusions that split pushing is always better, or poor wave control, or poor vision, or simply assuming that your champion is not "team fight material" it's almost always the case that you should group with your teammates (especially past the 30 minute mark or so).

Think about it this way - as 1 or 2 you can probably accomplish some cool things. Especially if you're fed. However if you run into 3 or 4 or 5 people in that scenario, you're going to die. There's no working your way out of that. And don't base your ability to make a big play off of that either, you're still at a huge disadvantage. And if you get caught past the 30 minute mark, guess what happens? Their team groups and takes an objective, and your team as a man down cannot stop them.

Ever been on a team with 40 kills to 20 and lost? It happens more often than you'd think, because the few fed people on that 40 kill team run around solo and get picked constantly, and they lose an objective for it every time.

So here's some tips that will make grouping easier:

  1. Wards. In the later stages of the game, it's incredibly important to know the enemy team's position. This allows you to farm safely and shove out waves (tasks where it's more efficient to go alone than as a group). If you don't know the enemy's position or at least have your side of the map fully warded, you cannot risk leaving your team to shove out a wave. They either come with you, or you let that minion wave hit the turret.

  2. Wave control. Later in the game CSing loses a lot of importance, and vision and wave control starts to become a lot more important. Learn how to shove waves properly! The best thing you can do is set up a wave that will slowly build up and push on it's own. There are several ways to go about this, but the basic idea is that you want to kill some of the minions in the enemy wave so that yours is bigger, but leave a few enemy minions there so that your wave freezes in place and the next group can catch up to it and snowball to a larger size. If you get both side lanes slowly pushing like this, your team can group mid and siege while your minions do all the work. If that wave hits their turret, it may be big enough to take it on it's own. Alternatively, they may send a member to clear the wave giving your team a chance to dive them!

  3. Don't chase people! Especially mobile ones! If you leave your team's side to chase somebody around in circles, you might get caught when you are led into a trap. Your team may even lose an opportunity to take an objective because they don't have your damage or cooldowns to force enemies off of a turret or kill the objective itself.

Hope this helps you all.
-Nasreth

11 Comments

AikidoLawnNinja1/29/2015, 7:40:58 PM2 votes

Pretty much every match I've ever lost despite stomping the early game has been because of teammates who refuse to group. The single most important skill for winning in League is not mechanics, or map awareness, or counter knowledge, or anything at all like that... it's being able to persuade stubborn teammates to group up with the TEAM.

Serevas1/29/2015, 4:56:28 PM2 votes

I also agree with you in a lot of your points, in order to split push your team needs to understand the purpose and you need to be a strong split pushing champion. Even then I don't do it all the time. Split Pushing just requires a lot of you and your team and if you or they lack the knowledge and understanding of what to do in that scenario, it definitely should be avoided.

For me, I play a lot of Zed in the mid lane, which I imagine you could guess from my first post, so Zed as a champion, combined with my knowledge of his capabilities, his mobility, ease of escaping, as well as a couple little tricks for outplaying, makes my split pushing with Zed often very effective, but I've coordinated with my team a lot of the time to let them know what I'm doing and what they should do at the same time. I also won't split push if I don't have at least two items (item 3153 item 3142), sometimes not even until I finish a third and my boots. There's a lot of intricate things to know about split pushing in order to do it effectively, and I'm not saying that I know all of them, because I don't, I fail split pushes and occasionally die for nothing.

So I guess I should have also put in that split pushing is ALWAYS a gamble, you can build the odds more in your favor by knowing things and having a strong comp built towards it, but it's never 100% safe to split push, but the payoffs can be entirely worth the risk. There are those times where there's no need to split push as well, your team fighting might be a lot stronger and despite the fact that Zed is better geared in a lot of cases towards a split pushing scenario, he's also exceptionally powerful in a team fight since he can dive their back lines with proper use of his shadow and ultimate and delete their carries before the fight starts. So if you don't need to pressure those outer lanes, you're steamrolling the enemy team in team fights and they keep coming at you for fights, stick with the group, no need to split if you have that kind of scenario.

I think what I'm trying to say between my two posts is that while split pushing isn't the end all tactic optimal in all cases, it's still viable and strong in many cases so it shouldn't be ignored as a possibility just because it's typically more effective to group. There are a tremendous amount of conditions to be met in order to split push effectively and it's difficult to get those conditions met in a solo queue game, but they do happen, and when they do happen you should often take advantage of that situation to harder enforce your advantage to pressure the enemy team, or to create an advantage when you're suffering.

So keep your eyes out for it, but don't do it every game, don't search too hard for it, and definitely NEVER enter into a game with the mentality of "I'm going to split push, so if you guys try to fight you're on your own." That kind of mentality is what I think you're trying to avoid people getting into, and that's something I can definitely get behind.

Nybx4life1/29/2015, 7:03:22 PM1 votes

Grouping is important, but it helps to know where their team is positioned according to where you are right there. I remember a few matches where I saw their team trying to fend a turret on the other end of the map, and I used that time to clear a turret. While it didn't end with optimal results (got caught and died right after). I did clear the turret and give my team an advantage of another turret down.

Now, I wouldn't have done so if I didn't know where they were. So I guess it goes hand in hand with what you're saying: Wards, and vision.

Serevas1/29/2015, 3:46:52 PM1 votes

I think something that contributes to this a lot, which don't get me wrong, I watch too. Is Trick2g's stream, he almost never groups, and almost always split pushes. It works a lot of the time, but you have to have a team that's strong enough to survive a 4v5, which isn't very common in the current game especially below high diamond elo.

There are however some situations where split pushing is more optimal, say the enemy team has super strong siege and can hold you off of a turret until the end of the world. You obviously don't want to be grouped as 5 with that strong of a siege on a single turret, move and get other lanes pushed, stick some damage on another turret to split their group up and damage their turrets so minions can do more work, potentially even take down a turret.

Again, don't get me wrong, if you're going to split push, you better be mobile, you better be able to escape, you better have warded to protect yourself, and you absolutely have to be able to 1v1 anyone on their team that they send. The only reason split pushing works is because when you're strong enough they have to send more than one person to deal with you. Them sending more than one person means that your team takes that 4v5 situation you created from split pushing, and turns it into a 4v3 because they sent 2 to deal with you.

This is why Zed is so strong as a split pusher. Zed is arguably the single strongest 1v1 champion in the entire game. He's even capable of taking on multiple people if he's fed enough. I can't count the number of times I've gone 1v3 against people and won. Sure I had to back because a gentle breeze would have killed me afterwards, but I just threw 3 people on 30s+ death timers. That's efficient split pushing. Grouping is not the win all solution in every situation, if you're team is getting completely bulldozed in teamfights, why would you go into teamfights? You don't want teamfights in that situation.

Split pushing is not only a viable, but in many cases an extremely powerful tactic. The important note to add to that is that it's only useful if you do it properly and in the right situation, otherwise it's a suicide mission.

Konidias2/6/2015, 9:52:42 AM1 votes

{quoted}

Whether it be delusions that split pushing is always better, or poor wave control, or poor vision, or simply assuming that your champion is not "team fight material" it's almost always the case that you should group with your teammates (especially past the 30 minute mark or so).

"Delusions"?

In solo Q, split pushing is almost always the right choice. Period. I literally just got done with a game where I was Quinn top. I won my lane, pushed top lane hard, had 40% attack speed on my BotRK, and I also had Youmuu's with an additional 40% attack speed... AND I also had my ultimate with crazy move speed and attack speed buffs... I made it pretty clear that I was going to be pushing lanes most of the game. I ask my team "please don't engage in a team fight when I'm not there". I then go to push the enemy top inhib turret while the entire enemy team is around mid near the river. My team is right there also, and of course instead of backing off to mid turret, they split off through our bot jungle for some reason... Then the enemy team catches my team, and they all team fight. My team gets WIPED. Meanwhile, I've taken the top inhib turret and the top inhib. But because my team wiped, the enemy team pushed the bot turret and inhib.

Had my team just DEFENDED near base, we would have had a free inhib and nobody would have died on our team. Instead, they teamfight 4v5, get wiped, then blame me for not grouping. Makes me want to pull my hair out.

We ended up winning a few minutes later SOLELY BECAUSE I TOOK THAT INHIB. But do I get any credit? Nope. I only took like 5 turrets and an inhibitor... but to my team I was the guy who refused to group. Even though Quinn is pretty lousy in team fights and I was getting heavily focused every time multiple enemies were nearby.

For God's sake... just let the person split push. If they are doing a good job at it, just BACK OFF and defend!

I feel like a lot of people in this game just have this bloodlust and all they know is "group and team fight". Like seriously... there are many strategies to this game... and not every one of them involves grouping up. Why take a risky team fight when we have the option of taking FREE objectives while the enemy dances around wasting time? Is that not a safer and more effective strategy?

If we group and get aced, it's 100% game over. If I take the enemy inhib while my team pokes and defends, maybe we lose one or two people... but now the enemy can't possible keep teamfighting and has to retreat to defend their base.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or something... like isn't the point of the game to take the nexus? Winning team fights means NOTHING. Especially when nothing comes of them. Had I been in our jungle with my team, we MAYBE had a 30% chance to win the fight. Best case scenario, we ace the enemy team and have 1-2 people alive after... But those people are super low, and are in our own side of the map. What good is that? You just traded some kills and got NOWHERE.

Grouping and team fighting can be the absolute WORST decision to make late game. It's not a guaranteed instant win just because the team groups. For starters, maybe the comp is just not great. Maybe 1 or more people on the team aren't really great at team fighting to begin with. Maybe the enemy is just farther ahead and it wouldn't be wise to engage them.

So many possible ways to throw the game. But guess what? If my team just DEFENDS safely then there is little chance they will end up in a 4v5 fight. If it happens and my team gets aced... how much difference would it have made if I had been there?

So yeah, it's extremely frustrating when I get the stubborn, bull-headed potato teammates who refuse to back down and just let me split push for a safe win. They don't want safe. They want a #LCSBIGPLAYS teamfight and want to slap some enemies around and then take the nexus as 5 while saying "gg wp" and spamming CTRL+4

BluePolarizer2/6/2015, 4:57:25 PM1 votes

Even when grouping and teamfighting, its not just mass as a blob of 5 and run into their blob of 5. That's how Yasuo, Malphite, Jinx, Gnar or Katarina pentakills happen. Instead sometimes "grouping" means ADC/support/someone else hang out in the lane, while mid, top or jungle flank the enemy team or are hiding in bushes that may be pretty far away (like a Fiddle hiding at top red bush near purple while blue side is pushing up towards inner tower, ready to run to wraiths and initiate from there into blue team). This is especially true if you have assassins or squishy but high impact initiators, like Annie/Fiddlesticks/Lissandra/Yi/Kha'Zix.

wwwdots2/10/2015, 2:45:38 AM1 votes

grouping of 5 isn't always the key juts because u have a man down doesn't really put u in disadvanatge, its depends on the champ. and team set up. if u hav a fast wave clear mid u don't need group of 5 as much. if u entire team is made of team fight champs then mid rush is the way. other wise 5 people sitting in mid ur not getting anything done. if ur losing in mid of a 4v5 scenario highly likely ur team is caught out which that's ur problem not a 5 man being problem. mid needs to know how to stall and split pusher has to have high mobility and fast wave clear