League of Legends Guide: Top 5 tips to win any team fight before it starts

3. Find the enemy’s power point

This could be the enemy’s most fed member, their strong engage champion like Amumu or Malphite, or great pick potential like a Blitzcrank hook. Before starting a team fight you need to think about what the enemy is going to rely on in order to win the team fight for themselves. Then, you need to determine if you can negate that advantage and how.

If the enemy has an Amumu, you need to figure out how to stop his engage, by either chunking out his health so he’s too low to go in or just find a way to bait out his ultimate. If the enemy has a fed Draven, figure out if you can pick him or if there is a fed assassin who can kill him before the team fight starts.

Figuring out how the enemy team is going to try to win the team fight is almost more important than knowing how your team wins a fight because you cannot count on your teammates in solo queue to play a fight perfectly. Instead, figure out a way to counter the enemy team’s goal before the fight even starts.

4. Know what tools you have

Once you know what the enemy is going to try and do, you need to evaluate the tools in your “toolkit” to know how you, individually, can negate it. If you have Flash up and the enemy team has a Malphite, you should be preparing to Flash that engage. If the enemy has a fed member, position in such a way that they cannot deal damage to you without putting themselves into a precarious situation.

Keep track of the enemy’s major cooldowns like their flash or ultimate so you know their effective range. If you don’t know if the enemy has a Summoner Spell or ability on cooldown or not, assume that they have it available to them. Better safe than sorry.

Finally, do not expect that your teammates will use their defensive tools properly to help you. You cannot expect for a Silver support to perfectly use Mikael’s Crucible to remove a stun or your Bronze ADC to save you with heal. Assume that only your defensive tools can save you and play safer after you have used them.

5. Make sure there’s an objective to be had

In so many games I see players fight for basically no reason other than they ran into an enemy and feel the need to fight. For instance, if Dragon isn’t spawning for another minute and you catch someone in the river, there’s no need to take a fight unless you can kill them incredibly quickly. If you can’t, you’re likely going to bait in a whole bunch of allies to help save you, make them use their big cooldowns, and not be as effective when there is an objective to contest.

Those “trickle in one-by-one” fights rarely happen in professional play because pros realize that those dragged out fights are a sure way for players to misplay and a team that’s ahead to throw their lead, so they just avoid them. Instead, they’ll just back off and wait for their team to be in position with them so they can either take an advantaged fight (by being stronger or having numbers) or contest an objective.

Nothing in League of Legends is as frustrating as when a team takes a fight, eventually wins, and realizes that they have to base afterward because they’re all either too low or nowhere close to an objective that they can take. Your goal should always be to position and try to take fights when there is a nearby objective (tower, dragon, Rift Herald, or Baron) that you can take if the fight is won.