Warding

Today's blog will cover warding - this is an essential part in the play-making aspect of a support. I will start covering lane wards, but I will give some warding tips for late game as well.

First of all, I should answer where wards are there for.

The answer to this question seems obvious, but the answer is not simply 'to prevent ganks'. You ward because you want to dictate the pace of the game:

• With good ward coverage you can catch people off-guard
• With wards you deny/gain zoning advantages through bush control
• Wards will allow you to play aggressively without getting punished by the jungler
• (Counter-)warding will allow you to take map objectives like turrets, dragon and baron, or prevent the enemy to make their move.

If you read this carefully, you will notice that all the things wards do for you, can be used to open up plays all over the map. This is why having sufficient knowledge of wards is mandatory for anyone wanting to move up in the ladder.

While warding in botlane (and to generalize for the sake of simplicity), you have 3 kinds of wards:

1. The most obvious one: to prevent 'regular' ganks. To optimally cover ganks, you need 2 wards: tri-bush and dragon. Also, you would optimally never ward in the riverbush (even though some exceptions apply)
2. To cover dragon. This one is self-explanatory.
3. To deny/gain bush control and cover for any sneaky ganks. This one requires the most explanation. Basically, having brush control means that the enemy can deny/zone you because you have no clue what their support is up to, without you being able to do anything to them. Just place a ward in the lanebush to prevent this :)

Obviously you can pink ward when you think you can abuse it. For example: an aggressive support like Leona can pinkward a lane for brush control, pink dragon for a dragon attempt or pinkward tri when your jungler is incoming.



Now this is only a fraction of where warding comes to play: lategame

When warding in late game, you should first ask yourself the following question:

Is my team ahead?

This is really important because this pretty much defines where you will be warding. Basically, when you are ahead you will ward differently than when you're behind.

For example: You are ahead quite a big sum and have taken down some turrets already. In this case, you want to ward aggressively. Why? Because you are the one dictating the pace of the game, and warding will allow you to pick people off, or go for objectives when people are mispositioned. For example, when you see the enemy heading to top with 3 man, you can take a turret on botlane or dragon, and so on. It could also allow for easy buff steals :)

When turning the same example around, and you suddenly appear to be far behind while having lost a few turrets, you will want to ward defensively to make sure this same thing doesn't happen to you. Ward your own jungle, and perhaps you can make a few kills happen if you can catch people off-guard while overextended in your own jungle.

USE PINK WARDS/ORACLE

Denying enemies of the advantage that wards can give is really important, and can open up lots of plays.

A few things about pink wards:

• Never go for a big objective without clearing wards, unless a few enemies (preferably the jungler) are dead.
• When pinking dragon/baron, place the pink close enough to the monster itself so you can also clear the wards that were placed over the wall. (too lazy to find images to show this)

A final tip on warding: try to cover as much routes with only one ward, like this image explains:

Credit to Panglot for this image :)


As always, I appreciate all your feedback, and make sure to comment when you think I've forgotten to cover something or when you need further explanation :)