Hey guys, so this is the first part of a new series I am starting called Concept of the folds, trying to help new players understand Vainglory concepts that can help you improve on your gameplay, I will be discussing Vainglory Concepts each article and I will give you some tips and insights on how they work, and what you can do to improve on it.
Today, the concept we are discussing is Trading. So what is Trading in Vainglory? Is it exchanging of goods? Something to do with buying and selling stuff? Well, Trading in Vainglory is about exchanging blows and also exchanging kills, and objectives. It is a very important concept that can generally allow you to know whose team is ahead, and knowing that you made a good trade makes space for a whole lot of opportunities for you to take advantage of. But how does one make good Trades, and how do you make the most out of every good Trade? Let’s talk about that now.
So first, what is a good Trade? Well first, we got to understand the two types of Trades.
|
Damage Trade |
Trading damage is like basically exchanging blows by hitting the enemies while trying to avoid taking more damage than them or just staying out of their range. |
|
Kill Trade |
Basically it is like trading manpower. So for example a 1 for 1 trade is when both team kills 1 member each from their opposing team in team fights. |
|
Objective Trade |
An objective trade is when you allow the enemies to get a kill or a turret for an objective like Blackclaw or Ghostwing. It’s like when the enemies are distracted and are unaware or unable to contest the objective. |
So now that we know the basics of what Trading is, what makes a winning Trade?
Damage Trade:
In a Damage trade, it is always whoever has the higher kill potential over the enemy wins through having more hp or more damage. So if you are in lane and you can poke or outrange the enemies, do it. It will slowly chip away their hp and apply pressure. One way I like to do this is punishing the enemies for farm. When a cs is about to die, most of the time enemies will move forward to try secure the creep, and when they do, you could hit them for free. Now you may be asking, why wouldn’t the enemy hit back? Well, by moving forward to trade, you are forcing them into a decision of either getting their farm, or make an even trade and lose the creep. So they can either have the gold and take damage, or make an even trade but lose out on gold, thus benefiting your team either way. They can do it to you to can’t they? Of course they can, but that’s why sometimes I will play more passive if I feel that I might be in a bad early game match up by only trying to Trade when the wave is more towards my side of the lane so it will be easier for my jungler to gank as well as allowing me to fall back to turret range easier so that the turret can defend me when I am attacked. In a winning Damage Trade, generally there are a few things you could do to maximimise your advantages. Firstly, you could apply more pressure in Lane, which might leave an opening for your jungle to rotate up and go in for a kill, or secondly, forcing the enemy jungler to rotate up into lane and letting your jungle steal their farm. Also, I mostly don’t bother freezing my lane when I am in a winning Damage Trade because I want to push back the enemy team, and I can keep poking and pressuring until the minion wave is in their turret range. They pretty much have to deal with a wave getting shoved under their turret, which might lead to losing in farm to the turret, and also it can give me a chance to rotate down to jungle for fights, poke them even more if I can with my range so they are even more pressured to either clear cs or trade, and I can also recall without fearing of losing much farm.
When caught in a losing Damage Trade in lane, what should you do? First off, remain calm, play passively. Going in for a fight in a losing Damage Trade isn’t going to end well when you die, but clearing the farm and trying to hold on to turret as long as possible is still better than instantly recalling. Like of course if a turret has totally no hope of saving, then saving yourself by recalling is the better option, but never ever give up on the turret too early unless you are vulnerable to getting killed yourself. Next, just play passive and let gold even out the late game so if the enemy is winning the Damage Trade due to items, at least you would stand a much better chance with a similar set of Tier 3 items by lasting into the late game than having weaker items.
Also, remember when hiding in the bush, know your enemy. As humans, we generally have a very logical way of thinking and predicting, like we will always go for the safest and obvious route whenever we are in a situation with uncertainty or against the unknown. Like in Vainglory, we have a general way of aiming skillshots into a bush without vision that in our brain we feel has the highest chance of hitting the enemy and poking them, allowing us to deal damage for free and in a safe distant. For me, when facing heroes like Reza or like Blackfeather, the general rule of thumb is always stand at the unexpected edges of the bush when getting poked. For example, in lane, there is the jungle entrance bush that is in a horizontal L shape leading up from the jungle to lane. What I would usually do is stand at the pocket right at the entrance of the jungle part of the bush, thus making it impossible to poke me through the longer side of the bush and spot me out waiting for a ganking opportunity unless your brain has already figured out thats how I play and has already anticipated the unexpected. Like basically it is just understanding where the damage is most likely going to be targeted at and avoid standing in positions that will allow the enemy to make Damage Trades easily for themselves. Whatever that happens, just remember, in a losing Damage trade, abandoning an objective or jungle farm is always better than contesting it and getting yourself killed, I will be explaining more on that in Kill Trades.
Before I forgot, there is always the question of what I should do in a 2v1 lane? Well simply either get your roamer to rotate up to equalize the pressure or trading under turret, like trade in a spot where shall you be chipped all the way down to a dangerously low amount of hp, you would just need to take a few steps backwards and recall. This is because enemy roamers can deal a bit of damage too and it will really accumulate over time, or they can also give their laner health barriers like Ardan’s Vanguard (A) and allows them to make trades while taking little to no damage.
Kill Trade:
In a kill trade, there are multiple things to take note of. Firstly, people who are on a higher killing streak without dying have a higher gold bounty than people who have lesser kills, this also means players are worth more gold whenever they kill someone without dying and thus making them more rewarding when killed. So in a teamfight you traded a kill for your team for a kill on the enemy team, however the person on your team is a nightmare while the enemy you kill is just that typical feeder you meet in SoloQ, so ultimately out of the trade, the enemy has earned more gold out of that fight than your team as well they killed a fed and high gold bounty player that just never dies while you killed a player who isn’t as fed and dies more frequently.
If you caught out an enemy, be sure to have vision before jumping onto them, make sure that their team cannot get to them easily to help them survive. Also, be careful of a few things. For example, it is harder to fight in front of their crystal sentry as it will attack you and slow you down, making it harder for you to chase the enemies while dealing damage to you, opening a potential turnaround engage for the enemy team once they have gathered together. If the enemy team is fed, just poke and don’t hard engage unless you are really confident that their teammates can’t get to them in time and it’s a free kill. This is to avoid the enemies from getting even more fed by punishing you for engaging, taking your farm and objectives and lowering your chances of coming back.
Is it worth dying for a 1 for 3 trade? It depends. Let’s say you are hyper fed, you are a nightmare, and have quite a bit of gold bounty if you get killed. The enemy engages, and catches you out of position, and as soon as you got your first kill in that fight, you died, and now the rest of your teammates are left to clean up the fight for an Ace. So was it worth the death? Well if it’s late game and your team can just capture the kraken, then yes? Because kraken is a definite game ender due to how much earlier it spawns now which means teams that are behind in gold have a harder time to take it down due to lesser completed items as well as need ing to fight a full team that is ahead in gold and kraken is the hardest turret pressure any team could apply. However if you died, and no objectives are available, like kraken hasn’t respawn, or the gold miner has just been captured before the fight by the enemies, then gold wise you just gave the enemy quite a bit of gold for them to slowly comeback, maybe a turret or crystal sentry might be possible but if the enemy can respawn just in time to contest it properly, then the trade is not worth. Always remember, most of the time in a winning kill trade, win equals objective. Hard turret push, gold miner, crystal sentry or kraken, heck you can even take a turret and another objective if your lane is always pushed and your jungler has a decent amount of objective clear speed. This is because well you got the numbers advantage, it is harder for the enemies to contest an objective when they have lesser people due to having lesser teammates, more so if your team is fed and well ahead in gold. Always try your best to get at least one objective for every winning trade, the mistake low elo people make is always make a winning Kill Trade and do nothing. It is not the trade that really gets you ahead, but how you take advantage of your situation whereby you have more members.
Remember, the only way to win in 3v3 is push down every single turret, having more gold and items than the enemy team just makes it easier to win, so you got to understand how to trade efficiently to try earning gold for you to win the lane, or trying to go for objectives after every trade to get ahead be it a crystal sentry buff to make yourself harder to kill during the next fight with the buff, kraken to push down the lane turrets and allowing you to apply more lane pressure or gold from the gold miner to get your team ahead in items and better suited to fight.
Objective trade:
Yes I have talked about it in Kill Trade but now I am going into more detail. So generally what an objective trade is, is when you trade something worth less in a game for an objective….. Like trading in real life when trading an item of lesser potential value with an item of higher potential value is worth the trade. So in Vainglory context, trading a player’s life to distract the enemies and stalling them from getting to the objective you are capturing, or a turret that the enemy is trying to hard push is always worth in 5v5. This happens a lot lesser in 3v3, due to how much more bigger the map is in 5v5 making bad rotations more punishable, and harder to get from one side of the map to the other. So you can lose a turret and have a player just stall the enemies by trying to get the enemies to chase them, thinking they have caught out a free kill, when in reality they might have, but in return they got punished with a ghostwing buffed team or a blackclaw knocking down on the mid lane.
Like sure the turrets kind of determine how much of a dire situation or lane control a lane could be in, be it top, mid or bot. But when the game progresses, they are starting to worth lesser than objectives, since engaging with a ghostwing buffed team is always better than engaging after taking down a turret. All the enemy has to do is turn around an engage if they have a fed team who just lost a turret due to a minor mistake in lane management. However compare this to them having to fight a full ghostwing buffed team, the buff gives your team a higher survivability rate to win the fight, and by winning it going for turrets is easily an option and if possible, blackclaw. The difference is the probabilities of winning the fight with and without the buff and this could mean the difference between you winning and capturing blackclaw or them winning instead and waiting to comeback with a blackclaw of their own.
Other than that it’s like trading 2 turrets for 1 is worth as long as the enemies aren’t looking to siege like an armory along with it, got a kill or two due to teammates defending poorly and mispositioning or getting an objectives in the process. All these are pretty self explanatory and you just need to understand there are only a few factors to take now of that makes a Winning Trade. A good trade should grant more gold to your team than the enemy team, a numbers advantage to open up an objective capture opportunity or the ability to apply pressure and push your opponents backwards, making them more likely to make a mistake and punish them for it.
In conclusion good trades really are easy to pull off, and they are more or less what contributes to a win. Mechanics and rotations are a must in making these trades though so practicing enough is key, understanding sweet spots to stand depending on the matchup or the direction the enemy is going to most likely poke at will give you a hp advantage and allows you to apply pressure by threatening the enemies that they will be in a disadvantage and get killed easier so they will generally move backwards into turret range or towards their side of the map. This allows you to take down turrets uncontested, or capture objectives quickly right under their noses if possible knowing that the enemy team has been forced to recall and are unable to reach and contest the objectives in time or they are distracted and are denied of vision control over the objectives.
Well this will be the end of the first part of my Concept of the folds series, it is generally shorter than a hero guide but I feel the goal of these is to try explain as much as I can about a certain terminology or concept that might be good for new players to understand. As always, you can read my other guides in the meantime by heading over to BioStorm – A Vainglory site for Guides and Articles
If you wish to discuss more Vainglory related content, or even message me about your doubts, feel free to do so by joining my public guild server by clicking here
Once again, thank you for reading and I will see you on the fold.
-BioStorm’s Leader, SLICE
BioStorm 