Assignment 1: The last-hit test

A single screenshot from a practice lobby, proving you can take the gold off a creep before someone else does

Due: 19 March 2027 · Weight: 10%

The brief#

Go into a practice lobby by yourself. Last-hit until you can do it without thinking about it. Send us the scoreboard.

This is the smallest assignment in the course and the earliest, and both are deliberate. Last-hitting is the first thing week 2 teaches because it is the first place a new player’s decisions become visible: every creep is a small question about whether the gold is worth the risk of stepping forward, and you answer it a few hundred times a game whether or not you are paying attention. Nothing later in the course works if this one is still costing you conscious effort.

There is no way to pass this by being clever about it, and there is no fixed number to clear. What is marked is the distance between the number your partner counted in Lobby Lab 2 and the number on your screenshot, and the only route to closing that distance is hours in a lobby where nothing is trying to kill you. What we are marking is whether you put those hours in, not whether you were naturally quick to begin with.

The paragraph matters more than it looks. A student who improves and can say why their score improved — that they were standing too far forward, that they were watching the creep’s health bar instead of its animation, that they kept taking the last hit and losing the next three — has learned something transferable. A student who improves and can only say they practised has learned a motor skill.

What you submit#

• One screenshot, unedited, from a solo practice lobby.
• One paragraph, no more than a few sentences, on what changed in your technique between your first serious attempt and the one you are submitting.

There is no separate figure published for this assignment. The number you are compared against is the one your partner counted in Lobby Lab 2 — write it down there, because this page does not ask for it again.

How it is marked#

Most of the mark is the improvement: how far your screenshot’s creep score sits above the number your partner counted in Lobby Lab 2. There is no absolute figure to clear — what matters is the distance you closed. The paragraph is what separates a pass from a good one — it is read for whether you can name a specific correction rather than describe an effort. Submissions with a screenshot but no paragraph are marked as though the paragraph said nothing.