Curious about how to freeze lane in LoL? Check out this guide to freshen up on slow pushing basics, denying the enemy cs, and controlling the wave for total lane dominance!
Let’s face it, having your enemy level up faster than you is one of the most frustrating things to have happen in LoL. Lane freezing is one of the best ways to be on the winning end of this annoyance. You’ll get a steep level advantage, while also making keeping up with the pace of the game more difficult for your enemies.
However, freezing the lane in LoL, or doing a slow push, isn’t exactly the easiest thing to pull off if you’re just getting started with learning how to control the lane.
And that’s why we’re here!
In today’s guide, we’re going to give you the world’s best crash-course on freezing and basic minion wave control mechanics to help you get ahead in lane and dominate your LoL games with ease.
Why should you use this strategy?
Whether you’re trying to dunk on your enemies with one of our LoL mid lane tier list champion picks, or simply get better at taking control of the earlier phases in the game, freezing a lane is a useful concept to practice. There are a few significant advantages to using this sort of lane control strategy. Here’s a briefer on what they are:
- Deny your enemy a large amount of EXP and gold throughout the entire laning phase.
- Safe farming without much risk of ganks or aggressive engagements from the enemy laner.
- Frustrated opponents are prone to making dumb mistakes, making them much easier to kill.
What does freezing a lane look like?
Freezing a lane is actually a pretty simple concept. It boils down to just holding the two waves of minions in place to be able to farm them without needing to push.
This is usually done under your tower, or slightly off the middle of the lane, which makes sure you can farm safely.
This approach, alongside throwing a timely ward in your tri-brush, will keep you safe from ganks. And if you’re not much of a brawler or simply suck at making well-thought-out trades, this will allow you to stay relevant in-lane without risking taking too much damage from the enemy.
How to freeze lane in LoL?
It might sound tricky, but you need to try to do exactly as much damage to the opponent’s wave as your own wave is taking. In a nutshell, you’ll be mirroring their attempts to cs. If they take a caster minion – you take one of theirs, if they hit a melee minion, you hit one of theirs.
Keep in mind, this is something that can only be done reliably after a fair bit of constant practice!
Now that we’ve covered the basics of freezing a lane, let’s talk about a more long-term approach. Unlike freezing the lane, to begin with, maintaining a freeze is a different thing it’s actually very simple to do.
Effectively, you just need to keep minions on the edge of your tower’s range, while throwing out your last hits as last-minute as your reaction time allows you to. Keep in mind that if you slip up and they do get closer to the tower, it will erase all your work and ruin the entire plan that we’ve set up.
Let’s Talk About The LoL Slow Push
A slow push is exactly what it sounds like, it’s all about having your minions push down a lane slowly. This allows you to pile up several waves of minions and have them storm down your opponent’s lane in one go.
Keep in mind that to be done effectively you need to make sure you have more minions than your opponent
Why should you slow push?
Firstly, if your opponents come to stop the push, they’re at a big disadvantage. This allows you to score an easy kill if they’re careless, and maybe even take an objective.
Alternatively, you can simply take down their towers, maybe even an inhibitor, and then recall safely for some juicy gold gains. This is especially easy to pull off in the lower ranks as most people have pretty terrible map awareness at that ELO.
How to use lane freezing to slow push?
Lane freezing and slow pushing go hand in hand since it gives you the room to play safely. If you’re ahead, you can easily try to do more damage than your opponent to the wave and transition into a slow push
But, what exactly is it that makes this strategic combination work so well?
At its heart, the freeze is kind of like a form of psychological warfare (especially against higher ELO players). The enemy will be too scared to overextend just to increase his creep score, this will cause him to fall behind on both gold and experience if the freeze is maintained for long enough.
Starting a freeze yourself also helps you avoid a scenario where your enemy freezes lane on you, which will keep you safe from falling behind or getting zoned out.
At the same time, slow pushing can take the enemy’s attention off the key objectives, giving you a lot of objective control and flexibility. This helps a lot when you’re trying to do something elsewhere on the map but need to lure your enemy away to have an easy take.
Conclusion
In League of Legends, a freeze is one of the most powerful strategies to push for an advantage or to catch up to the opponent.
You can use it to keep yourself nice and safe while gradually building up an advantage. And when you’re confident enough, you can transition a lane freeze into a solid slow push in order to steam-roll your enemy’s towers while taking control of key objectives.
Need a little more guidance? Here’s a quick 5-minute guide covering how to freeze lane in LoL & slow pushing your lane!
Applying this strategy correctly will have you easily getting ahead game after game, leaving the enemy team struggling and behind.
