Hello everyone, my name is SoSexy and this is a guide on how to cs better. I have been a Team Liquid user for the past five years, mainly playing Starcraft II. I then decided to switch to LoL so that I can blame my loss on other people. LiquidLegends is rapidly growing and I feel like contributing to this community. Many of the things you will read here come from various sources and individual thinking, packed together to provide something fresh. Here we go!
What is cs?
CS stands for 'creeps score' which means how many minions/jungle monsters you have killed. In this analysis, I will focus purely on enemy minions, since jungling requires different mechanics. Why is cs so crucial then? Because when you last hit a minion, you will earn some gold. This process is called 'farming'. Therefore, cs indicates how much of a gold you have at a certain point in the game.
People really understimate the importance of cs, especially at lower elos. Remember, a kill is worth around 13 minions. Therefore, if the enemy has 13 cs and he killed you two times while you have 39 cs, you two have around the same gold. Never forget this. In a nutshell,
high cs = good, low cs = bad.
How do I improve at cs?
Here is the jist of this guide. I am going to show you some effective guidelines in order to improve your ability to cs.
STEP 1) Take a empty rune page (if you are low level probably you won't even have runes).
STEP 2) Take no masteries (as above).
STEP 3) Run a custom game where you are alone. Choose the hero you want to improve with, go to your lane and start farming. Remember: we only want to give minions the last hit, in
order to get the gold. It does not matter if you wound it beforehand - you won't get the gold unless you execute him.
STEP 4) Write down your cs at 10 minutes.
If you usually play with runes and you never practised this way, you will find this very hard. Your cs might be 10-20 down from what you would usually achieve with runes. Rinse and repeat. If you can get in the habit of doing 2-3 games per day, in 1-2 weeks you should see
improvements to your cs.
Why no runes and masteries?
The reason is simple - less damage output and attack speed makes it harder to finish minions. Let's suppose a minion has 100 health and your damage is 50. This means that when his health is half bar, you can hit him and be 100% sure that you will get the gold. Now try to imagine if you only had 10 damage: the skill required to read health bars and adjusting the hit would be much higher.
Think of it as a weight training. If you can run
100 meters in 20 seconds with 20 kilos on your shoulders, chances are that without weight you are gonna make it easier and faster.
More training - Freezing and pushing the lane
I believe there are two methods you can train cs. I will call one freezing and the other pushing. How do we achieve this? A general rule in League of Legends is that, in a equal scenario, you should try to freeze your lane in order not to get too exposed to ganks. On the other hand, if you get an advantage (i.e. you are bot and get a double kill) the ideal scenario is pushing the wave as fast as possible and recalling. Why is that so? There are two reasons:
1) The enemy will lose minions under tower, therefore his cs will be lower.
2) By pushing the wave, it will take more time for minions to reach your tower, therefore you will have enought time to travel back to lane without losing too many cs.
How do we practise these two concepts then?
Freezing: exactly as I described above. This is the 'standard' way of farming. You never touch the minions and only last hit them.
Pushing: pushing is the opposite. If you want to practise it, hit the minions as much as you can and try to push the wave as fast as possible. Obviously, you should try not to miss last hits.
Should I use skills?
My thought on using skills for farming is this: only use skills if you would lose the minion. If two minions are around the same health and receveing the same damage, chances are that if you only auto attack, one of them will be killed by your minions before you cooldown resets. In this case, it is ok to use a skill in order to finish him (or reset your auto which woould otherwise be too slow - the same thing). This is the only rule that I think it is worth.
If you paid attention before you will probably observe that it is ok to use skills when you have to push the lane very fast - after all, you are probably going to recall immediately after, therefore you have no mana drawbacks.
Remember that in a ideal scenario you want to keep your skills to poke and engage the enemy hero. Also, you may be tempted by certain skills (i.e. Xerath's Q-W is amazing at wave clearing) but remember: High cs by skills is not a measure of improvement. Use it as a last resort, rather than your bread and butter.
Training with normal runes/masteries
Once in a while, you should play a custom training game with your usual runes and masteries. This will show you how easy it will be to cs after you have spent many games cursing that 1 hp difference and give you a 'more normal' game feeling.
Benchmarks
Here are some benchmarks that you can use to see your improvements:
- At 5 minutes, 44 minions will have spawned.
- At 10 minutes, 107 minions will have spawned.
- At 20 minutes, 234 minions will have spawned.
- At 30 minutes, 361 minions will have spawned.
The numbers increases because there are more cannon minions after 10 and 20 minutes.
With full runes and masteries, you should try to achieve 95% cs in a single player custom game. This means that at 10 minutes you should have around 100 cs (I am a scrub but I can hit that. Without runes and masteries, I hit around 85).
If you watch pro games, you will see that the players have amazing cs stats, compared to the fact that they are dealing with pressure from very high elo opponents. In one game of the 2015 Korean Spring Finals, Easyhoon had 213 cs at 20 minutes. 91% accuracy against the
best of the best of Korea. Now you will cry, close this page and open LoL launcher (and I will do too)
Final words
I hope this guide will prove useful to many people who would like to have something similar on TL, instead than wandering across the Internet. You can PM me for corrections/updates/ideas to add. Good training everyone!