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

A League of Legends guide that will show how to turn those minions into gold!

Minions

As we mentioned above, minions are the little critters who pop out of your Nexus and run down the lane to help you in battle. Also called creeps these guys will attack the enemy team’s minions or towers if they are in range. They may also attack you if you hit their allied champion with basic attacks or certain abilities.

There are a lot of complicated kinds of things that you can do with minions, like building big waves, slow pushing them, and the like. But for the purposes of beginners, there are only three big things you need to know about creeps: they allow you to hit towers, they grant experience, and they grant gold.

We already mentioned gold as something you get from killing towers and turret plates, but you can also get gold from killing minions through last hitting. Last hitting means the act of killing a minion with an attack or ability so that you are the one to deal the killing blow.

For instance, say your auto attack does 50 damage. You hit a minion that has 35 health remaining, it dies because of your attack. Thus, you dealt the killing blow and are granted the gold.

However, if you attack the minion when it has 51 health remaining, you will not be granted the gold if it dies before you hit it with another attack. The minions can be killed by your own minions, your own tower, or your allies’ abilities, so always try to get the last hit on them when you can.

The number of minions that you have dealt the last hit/killing blow to is commonly referred to as your creep score or CS. This number is recorded on your scoreboard next to your kills and deaths.

Minions also grant experience (aka XP), but this does not require you to last hit the minion. You will get the XP from a minion as long as you are within a certain XP range of the minion as it dies, no matter how. Experience is critical because it allows you to level up your abilities, making them more powerful – or even granting you access to new abilities depending on which level you hit.

This experience can be split among multiple champions if you and other allies are close to the minion as it dies, but gold cannot be shared except through certain items. So, bottom line: your goal in lane should be to collect as many last hits to get as much gold as possible while making sure to gain experience from as many dying enemy minions as you can.