If you and your teammates are down several levels and keep losing fights, and you are wondering what you should do, the correct answer is not to continue fighting every possible chance you get.
Instead, consider soaking lanes next to your Towers. That will allow you to make up your exp deficit without increasing it by feeding the enemy team more kills.
To put the value of exp in perspective, a 3 level lead grants a ~13% stat advantage as well as a 1 talent advantage (except between levels 16 and 20). The team with that kind of exp lead deals 13% more damage and has 13% more health than their opponent, meaning they kill their opponents faster and die slower than them.
This announcement is especially intended for a particular Alarak who played in my last game on Volskaya Foundry, who refused to soak lanes all game and instead seemed to be under the impression that we were losing teamfights because⌠we werenât winning the teamfights? I donât really know what he was the reason we were losing every teamfight, but he just kept saying, âSoaking wonât win us the game,â and then proceeded to feed the enemy team even further by picking yet another pointless fight halfway across the lane.
Tl;dr: If you are down levels and you keep losing teamfights, try getting your level up before teamfighting again.
You definitely donât want to fight every chance you get, but if youâre down several levels, you actually should intelligently pick fights in a defensive position or try to pick off and exploit when they split from overconfidence.
âSafelyâ split soaking at that point just becomes a slog that takes too long to close the gap if the enemy team is also not stupid. If you get cocky behind your towers, you can even potentially put you further behind if the enemy decide to exploit you guys being split up.
If youâre losing team fights because youâre down levels, thatâs one thing. If youâre losing fights because someone is too preoccupied with soaking so youâre outnumbered, thatâs another.
Definitely true. The waves arenât going to catch you back up in EXP since the enemy team can soak as well, if anything you should be looking for ganks but safely. If youâre behind on something, you gotta take risks at times, just not stupid ones.
Letâs be real here. If itâs an Alarak whoâs blaming you for losing team fights, then he must be right. You supplicants must be doing an atrocious job. He particularly hates it when he gets those protoss teammates who waste Alarakâs time and their own breath trying to inspire the team into making a comeback, and the former has value. He only cares if his teammates hear and obey, which is why Alarak tends to love having Samuro on his team.
Not true. If theyâre levels ahead of you, the value per wave toward their exp goals are less than your value from exp.
To use simple numbers to illustrate my point, if theyâre 3 lvls ahead of you, letâs say they need 50 exp to reach the next lvl. However, your team only needs 20 exp to reach the next lvl and then 30 exp to reach the next level after that.
So, from soaking, you can gain 2 lvls by the time they gain one if both teams are smartly soaking.
Once the gap is closed, THEN you can try to contest them again because youâll have better odds this way. Thatâs waaaayyyyy smarter than feeding because âhurr durr, we need to take a riskâ.
I mean, if youâre behind, there are no smart gank risks at least not anywhere above potato league. Chances are, if theyâre ahead, theyâll be looking to press their advantage so theyâll be looking for you. Thus, your team trying to go for a âgankâ will easily get noticed and now youâll feed another cycle of deaths.
Mostly this, players have become more cautious over the years, itâs very rare to catch people off guard in plat or higher anymore once theyâre 20 and youâre 17.
Though sometimes the game will force you to take that fight, like if your core is completely exposed without structures, and theyâre about to capture last immortal/dk/protector that will kill your core no matter what you do.
In that case you just have to fight them 17 v 20, but it usually ends up bad for obvious reasons.
I have been in such situations and there is maybe a ~10% chance you will win, if they have a very bad player making blunders during the fight.
Letting the game get to the point where youâre 3 levels down to their storm talent is a blunder itself though, they deserve to win unless they make an incredible mistake.
Also, itâs important to not fight right before you hit talent levels. Get the talent advantage first and then force a fight. That little time that you have the talent tier advantage is so important.
LoL, no way unless that team was already on the cusp of the next level and the other team JUST got a level, in which case theyâre not really several levels behind. Though itâs true exp levels are increasingly graduated, they donât ever increase by that huge a factor. It takes way too long to meaningfully get even levels just from passive soak, it just doesnât happen which is why the comeback advantage rewards primarily through kills.
Besides not what I said, why do you insist as if you have anything meaningful to contribute? Youâve been like a middling player, slowly gaining rank, and you still have yet to reach master even after years of playing.
Except, it happens often enough. How else do you think comebacks happen? Itâs not through just soaking. At that point, theyâre already in the end game, you either take a risk and hope to balance the scales or just die anyways.
They are a huge factor. You could be dominating a team by 4 lvls and then by the time you reach lvl 20, if you havenât ended the game, the lvls look more like 18 or 19 to 20.
Comebacks happen late game when spawn timers are high, not early game. So if youâre lvl 13 and theyâre lvl 16 or even lvl 7 vs lvl 10, all your kill attempts will just lead into a cycle of feeding until theyâve ended you and can finish the game at lvl 17.
No they arenât. Just look up the exp tables. You can always get CLOSER, but never even, and it takes a long time. Iâve never gotten back into the game just from soak, itâs always been through a combination of kills and soak. Youâre assuming kill attempts are failed, thats why I said to pick intelligent fights. I mean if youâre always failing your attacks, Iâd maybe try to evaluate why that is because that is not normal.
Sure, if you want to throw yourself over to the enemy over and over, thatâs a losing strategy, but thatâs not what Iâm saying.
I never said EVEN. Scroll up and read what I actually wrote. Iâm basically saying closing the gap by soaking before engaging again is the smart play, rather than, âwe need to take a risk because our risk is worth more now that weâre 3 or 4 lvls behind!â
Even if you look at my hypothetical example where I stated at 3 lvls down, you can gain 2 lvls for their 1 lvl gained, the math still wonât put them at even lvls, itâll just create a situation where youâre NOT 3 lvls down. Thatâs the point that you missed.
Obviously, the closer you are to their lvl, the more similar the exp requirements are to the next lvl and therefore, you wonât ever match their level simply by soaking.
HOWEVER, if the disparity in your lvls is 3 or more, there ABSOLUTELY is value in soaking because youâll be able to close that gap to more acceptable levels. The larger the disparity between your lvls, the more value soaking has, even if both teams do it.
Additionally, soaking has another advantage to the losing team and thatâs regaining map control. Like, if you ignore map control, finally get the pentakill and then lose to minions killing your core while you try to kill theirs then you should just uninstall the game. In fact, Blizzard should just automatically uninstall the game for you if minions kill your core.
Itâs actually not smart, because if you take the right risks, you get huge rewards relatively quickly. Only soak takes way too long to meaningfully get back into the game when youâre that behind and the enemy is not just sitting in their base.
I can confirm that âjust soakâ works at lower leagues for sure. People keep missing lanes for long times and the minionsâ XP scales with time while your lower levels mean you need less XP to catch up. Even in GM you see lot of missed lanes but itâs less of a âfree real estateâ situation. Certainly, if you focus on laning while the enemy does other things you do soak more XP than them. Itâs a natural fact. How much, though? Thatâs a very good question and depends on your team comp, skills and so forth.
Ganking individual heroes in lanes is certainly a surer way to catch up but when you are provided with that opportunity? Furthermore doing so you may miss soak so it may cost you more than you gain.
The truth lays somewhere between these two, I guess. You can get an elim and force the enemy into uncomfortable situations while you also soak more. What you absolutely shouldnât do is to play as if the enemy has no advantage. If you keep forcing big team fight you lost twice in a row, thereâs a good chance that third time wonât be the charm, eitherâŚ
And theyâre also not sitting around like lone rangers, waiting for you to kill them either lol. If theyâre winning, chances are they have map control and loads of minion vision. If they have the lvl advantage, you think youâre going to find the âright riskâ? lol, thatâs hilarious. Maybe in potato league.
But the moment your portrait shows up on the map and they have a 3 lvl lead, theyâre going to be headhunting because itâs to their benefit to fight you again due to their advantage.
If youâre playing in leagues where they have some afk nazeebo pushing a lane that you can get an easy gank on and enemy teammates of that naz who donât watch the minimap seeing that youâre converging on their naz, then sure, get the kill.
Games above potato league wonât feature such absent minded plays though.
I always take that last desperate fight, the team would be dumb not to, if not taking it leads to the enemy getting final DK/Immortal and killing your core anyway.
What is there to lose by at least trying? If you die, there is no downside anyway, as they would kill the core regardless.
IMO even if itâs a 1% chance, why not? Even if youâre 4 levels down, you have to at least try and stop them from getting that final objective that will push your core down.
