League of Legends Teamfight Tactics: 10 tips for your final ranked push

6. Build frontline and backline

The best comps have a mix of DPS and tank classes and function by fighting front to back. In other words, your units try to kill the enemy’s tank units before getting to the DPS units and vice versa.

Obviously, those rules are broken by Classes like Assassins and units like Vi, but generally speaking, you want a mix of tankiness and disruption mixed with damage. Usually, you will build your damage dealers first then mold the tank line to fit the comp. For instance, Draven is a great DPS carry, so Knights are a good tank unit because of Draven’s synergy with Darius.

On the other hand, if you’re building a “rule-breaking” traits like Assassins, Shapeshifters (who do damage and have tankiness), Dragons (ditto), or Yordles (also ditto) you can be a bit more flexible with these rules. For instance, Dragon/Knights is a great comp, but you can also make it Dragon/Guardian with Pantheon or Dragon/Sorcerers because of Sol.

7. Know when to give up on the 3-star chase

Fun fact, did you know that your odds for getting a 1g unit in your pool drops to 35% at Level 5? At Level 6, it’s just 25% and 20% at Level 7.

The point of this is, after Level 4, you are likely only going to have two 1g units in your pool each time it changes, and after Level 5 it becomes closer to one 1g unit. With only one or two of those low-tier units available, it becomes very hard to upgrade your 2-star Darius to 3-stars if you’re not already very close by Level 5.

As a general rule, don’t count on getting a 1g unit to 3-stars if you don’t already have two 2-star copies by that Level 5. For 2g units, those same breakpoints come one level later, so if you want to get a 3-star Twisted Fate, you probably need two 2-star copies by Level 6.

8. Don’t fall into the 3-star trap

You need nine copies of a given unit in Teamfight Tactics to get it to 3-stars (three copies per 2-star unit and three 2-star units to a 3-star unit). That’s hard to do for Draven, considering there are only 13 copies of that unit in any game. For Swain, Karthus, or Miss Fortune, there are only 10 copies available.

This means that if you want to get a 3-star Swain and anyone has more than one copy, or two people have Swains, you cannot get him to 3-star as long as they are in the game. In short, it is very hard to get a 4g or 5g unit to 3-stars and its likely never going to happen. Instead of wasting money trying to re-roll for another Kai’Sa copy, save your money for experience or interest.

9. Positioning matters late game

In the early game, I don’t really think there’s a lot of value looking at other player’s boards unless it’s to see if one particular unit or trait that you want to build is getting bought up by other people. You don’t know who you’ll be facing next round, so looking to see which units you might face is kind of meaningless.

However, once you’re down to four or fewer players, it does start to become imperative that you look at your enemies’ boards before every rounds to try and maximize your positioning. Put your DPS on the correct side of the board, position your tanks properly, and watch to see if they move their units, to give yourself the best advantage to win.

10. Know when to go all-in early

Sometimes, you just fall too far behind early. You got unlucky with your rolls, you didn’t get units that synergize with the items you had, or you just didn’t get any good items. In that case, you need to not play for first but play to outlast as long as you can.

Once you’re below 30 health and there are still all the players in the game, you need to throw any notion that you’re going to win this round out the window. That means no playing to hold interest and bank money, no re-rolling to try and upgrade your units to 2 or 3-stars, and no waiting to see if better item combinations will come along.

At that point, you’re better off spending all your money to level up and get better units on the field (you’ll also get more of a chance to get those better units since you leveled up) and combine your components into the best items you can given the comp on the field. The point that this point isn’t to try and win, but last as long as you can to preserve your LP.