League of Legends Beginners Guide: Gold, Experience, and Laning

You’ve loaded into your first game of League of Legends, you know which lane to go to, but you’re still a beginner. If you don’t know what to do in lane, we can help!

Welcome back to our series of guides for beginners! For those of you brand spanking new to League of Legends, we’re here to help all beginners understand the basic concepts of League.

Previously, we did beginners guides on champions and lanes. Today, we’ll go a bit more into the actual gameplay of League of Legends. Namely, what to do in lane.

In today’s guide, we’ll break down what you’ll find in each lane and what you’ll be trying to do! If you or a friend are beginners and don’t know whether to attack or avoid that big tower thing, we’ve got you covered!

Towers

We’ll start right off with towers, which are the big objective that you’ll need to be focused on in the laning phase, as they will be the key to helping you win games later. Recall that, in order to win a game of League of Legends, you must destroy all towers (also referred to as “turrets”) in a lane. This, in turn, enables you to destroy an inhibitor, nexus towers, and the Nexus itself which wins the game.

More from League of Legends

• Bee’koz Vel’koz Skin: Splash Art, Price, Release, How to Get
• King Beegar Skin: Splash Art, Price, Release, How to Get
• EMENES retires following leave from Cloud9, cites military service
• EMENES Donezo Manifesto: Former Cloud9 Midlaner airs out grievances
• Team Heretics Perkz: European legend reportedly playing for TH

So, that first enemy tower that you see in your lane should be your primary objective. You want to destroy that tower, while at the same time keeping yours standing.

However, you can’t just walk up to the tower and hit it. Towers have heavy damage blasts that hit the first enemy that walks into their range. If that’s you, the tower will do immense damage to you and kill you before you even put a dent in its health bar.

Luckily, if you walk into tower range with a wave of your little buddies the minions (who we’ll discuss in just a moment), the tower will attack them first. As long as there is a minion left standing, the tower won’t harm you.

That is unless you decide that you’re going to attack or damage an enemy champion while inside the tower’s range. Doing so will draw the attention (also called “aggro”) of the tower and it will immediately begin to attack you even if there are still minions in range. It’s important to note that this aggro will be drawn if you do damage while you are in the tower’s range, even if the enemy you’ve damaged is not. This means that if you do longer-lasting damage abilities that do damage over a longer duration, you can draw aggro even after the enemy has fled!

At the start of the game, each tower is protected by five plates. These plates represent a portion of the tower’s health, but as you kill more of them each subsequent plate becomes harder to kill.

That effort is worth it, though, because destroying a tower plate will grant you gold that you will use to power up your character. When you destroy all the plates, the turret collapses and you’ll get a nice chunk of gold as well. In addition, if you manage to kill the first tower of the game on either team, you’ll get bonus gold, so always try to destroy your tower first if you can!