League of Legends solo queue tip: the objective order of operations

Step 1: get the outer towers

Your first goal in League should always be to try and get your lane’s tower down first (or just get any lane’s tower down first if you’re the jungler) so you can get the first turret gold. If it’s been taken, though, and you’re still in “laning phase” you should prioritize getting your lane’s outer tower down as quickly as you can.

Once you’ve gotten that first outer tower down in your lane, what do you do? Rotate to another lane and help them take their outer tower. And once you’ve taken that outer turret, you move to the last lane and take the final outer tower.

In terms of which outer tower to take/rotate to, in the early game you should prioritize mid, then bot, then top. Mid opens up the map most of all, allowing you to freely rotate between lanes and ward the enemy’s jungle, while bot is close to dragon where a lot of fights are sure to occur.

Remember, turrets are standing gold on the map. Killing one grants 250 local gold plus 50 global gold. Every time you look on the map and see that lone outter tower still standing in the top lane, you should make sure that someone is going there to get that free 300 gold just sitting there.

Step 2: manage the waves

As you start taking outer turrets, you want to be sure you aren’t going to give up an advantage on the other side of the map. So, before you start to siege a tower, start a dragon or Baron fight, you need to manage the side waves.

Wave management is a much more complicated topic than we have time to cover here, but in general, you want to make sure there isn’t a big wave that will crash into your towers. This is because a big wave hitting your tower will cause you and your teammates to miss on a lot of free gold and experience that will die to the tower.

So, before you do anything else on the map after laning phase has ended (especially after the first towers have fallen) you want to make sure that big minion waves are not moving towards your tower. If they are, ping your teammates back from an objective, grab the gold and experience, before rejoining your team.