How to Farm Like a Pro in League of Legends

Farming is one of the most important aspects of any match-up in League of Legends. In order to gain the experience necessary to climb the rank ladder or get the gold needed to upgrade your champion and acquire new skills, you need to be good at farming. This guide is comprehensive enough to cover all the important aspects of farming minions in the game and covers some of the most essential lexicon used in game. Learn everything about how to farm like a pro in league of legends down below.

The guide below covers in depth how to farm minions in lane.

1. When the game begins, your team’s minions and the enemy minions are going to meet directly in the middle of each lane. The amount of time it takes for them to arrive varies from game to game, so be sure to be at your tower in 1 minute latest.
2. Once the minions have met and started fighting each other, you have to resist the temptation to start killing the enemy minions right off the bat. The best course of action would be to wait for your minions to deal some damage to the enemy minions. Stay a safe distance away, too, so they don’t begin to attack you.
3. Once the enemy’s health is sufficiently low, place yourself in a position such that you can auto-attack the enemy. The auto-attack range also varies from champion to champion and may need a bit of trial and error before you can get it right.
4. If the minion is nearly dead, attack and kill them to receive your gold.
5. Since you can only receive gold as a result of a last hit, you should see a burst of coins from the minion after they drop dead. If not, you likely didn’t land the decisive blow – they either died before you attacked or an ally minion has slain it on your behalf. If so, tough luck, go on to the next one and try again.
6. After the minion is dead, rinse and repeat.

A fair bit of advice: farming minions isn’t all about wildly clicking on them until they are dead. It takes loads of practice to be good. Initially, don’t be frustrated if you miss a lot of your kills. It’s often taken for granted later on, and many people who are good at it don’t remember where they came from. However, once you’ve mastered this little aspect of the game, you’re well on your way to earning humongous amounts of gold.

The Good Stuff

What is Farming?

Farming is a term used to describe killing minions so you gain gold and experience. It’s a repetitive process, hence the use of the term. Normally, the term is used to describe the action of killing lane minions, but can also be generously extended to the action of killing jungle creeps. These are minions that normally don’t move out into the lanes, but are much tougher.

Additionally, it should probably be mentioned that the number of minions you kill throughout the game is going to be tracked through a number usually in the upper right corner of the screen. This is usually referred to as Creep Score (CS). It’s a useful metric that you can use to determine how effective a player is at farming. Despite just being a metric to track the number of minions you’ve killed, you can also track your efficiency as the number of minions you’ve farmed per second. Divide the total kill count by the amount of time the game lasted. A good place to be should be around 12.

There are lots of ways of earning gold in League of Legends, but for all intents and purposes, and since it’s out of the scope of this guide, we shan’t cover them all. We shall instead examine some of the most common ways of obtaining gold in Summoner’s rift.

The different kind of minions

In League of Legends, your most likely primary source of gold regardless of the position you play in the game is going to be slaying minions. Minions spawn from the nexus in waves every minute and 15 seconds. Each of these waves is usually composed of 3 caster minions, 3 melee minions. The other two kind of minions – siege minions and super minions – spawn during specific time periods in the game. These minions also offer different amounts of gold.

• Melee minions: These are the ones that lead every minion wave and will initially give 19.8 gold when slain. This amount increases by .2 every 90 seconds from the start of the game.
• Caster minions: These minions trail each minion wave and are worth 14.8 gold at the beginning of each wave. The amount of gold yielded also increases at a rate of .2 every 90 seconds.
• Siege minions: Also known as cannon minions, these are most prevalent in the middle of each minion wave and are the most valuable of them all. However, they only spawn after every third wave for the first twenty minutes. After the twenty minute mark, they start spawning randomly in different waves. Initially, they are worth 40 gold, but this amount increases by .5 every 90 seconds.
• Super minions: These are a special kind of minion that only appear after an inhibitor has been destroyed. As compared to the other kind of minions, though, these are incredibly difficult to kill. They are also worth approximately the same as siege minions.

A thing to note about minion waves: the first standart wave can give you as much as 105 gold if you slay every minion. This number shoots up to 145 for waves that include the siege minion, basing the gold value on the first rates. With some quick math, taking into account the sporadic spawning of siege minions, you could gain as much as 240 gold/min from farming alone. This is 3 times as much as someone who goes around killing fellow champions. In the League of Legends world, that small discrepancy can make an extremely huge difference.

Basics on how to Farm

Farming, being such an important part of the game, is one of the core things any player who seeks to be a great player some day should concentrate on. Despite the significance the game has, it’s fairly simple to master at the end of the day. All it takes is a bit of patience and lots of practice and you’ll be okay.

The very first step to farming is getting in lane behind your minions as they begin to attack the opponents’ incoming minion wave. There is usually a red and blue bar above every minion’s head as below. The blue bar represents the health of your own minions while the red represents the health of the enemy minions.

Once the brawl between the two fleet of minions begins, the tedious farming stage has now begun. Resist the urge to jump right into the fray and attempt to cut down as many of them as you can at a time. An easy way to stop your champion from moving while you start playing the long game of patience is hitting the ‘S’ key. You may prefer to explore different options, such as moving around to avoid potential skill shots and even intimidate the enemy. Do whatever you must to avoid getting into the battle before the time is right. The real fun begins with the next portion of the stake out.

The red glowing around the champion above is a good example of low health. Once the enemy minions’ health looks similar to the above, it’s time to go in for the kill. This part is very important since it will be what sets apart a real kill that earns you gold and experience from wasted effort. If your champion is a melee class, for instance, make sure you move them close to the minion before the health gets low. This class of champions need to be close to the minions in order to perform any attack. Range champions are better at farming minions though, since you don’t need to move close to them in order to get the last hit.

If done correctly, a last hit should lead to a literal burst of gold from the minion and a shower of gold coins should follow. You should also observe that the amount of gold you now possess has increased.

How to Perfect the Art of Farming

Truth be told, starting out sucks. When you’re just beginning to play, you’re probably going to realise that hitting the minions isn’t just a succession of clicks in the hope that something lands. Even worse, you’ll enter the fray and instead of landing the finishing blow, your own minion is the one that does it and steals the kill from you. It’s normal. It has to happen at one point or another. Being a pro farmer is a skill that comes with time.

Lastly, don’t be too discouraged when looking at the leaderboard – people with over 100 million kills are the ones that have been playing for quite a while. At one point, they were rookies looking for guides on how to play the game online. A great place to start is to have 150CS in every game you play. Once there, start playing against human opponents and get at least 100, maybe more if you’ve really perfected the art.

Human opponents are particularly difficult to deal with since they will try their hardest to make your life hell. Compound that with the likelihood that they are trying to do the same thing that you are, and the final result is that you need a bunch of strategizing to get round obstacles like that.