Week 4: When should I leave the lane?

Pulling, blocking, stacking and the courier — the first week whose honest answer is that it depends

15 March 2027

Open the slides

This week’s decision

The lane stops being the only place worth being. Pulling, stacking and the camps in the space between lanes are all ways of spending time somewhere other than where the experience is, and each one is a small bet that what comes back is worth what you gave up.

The mistake this week fixes is leaving the lane “to have a look”. Beginners do not fail by being afraid to leave — they fail by leaving without a reason. A rotation with no target trades certain experience for nothing at all.

Mechanics

Camps spawn on the game clock, and only when empty. The first spawn is at 1:00 and they come every minute after that — not on a timer that starts when you cleared the camp, but on the match clock, at the same moments for everybody in the game. That is the difference between a rhythm you can plan around and one you have to keep rediscovering, and it is why “is there anything in the jungle right now” is a question with an answer.

Pulling. Drawing neutrals into the creep wave so they clear it for you, or so that you take creeps and neutrals at the same time. Only four camps on the map can be pulled into a lane — the two small camps, and the large camp inside each main jungle by the off lane. Lane creeps ignore neutrals from anywhere else, so “pulling” is not a general technique you apply wherever you happen to be standing. It is four specific places.

Stacking. Pulling a camp out before it checks to respawn, so that a second group spawns alongside the first. This is a pure trade of attention for gold — no risk in it at all, only focus.

Blocking. Placing a ward so that a camp cannot spawn. Week 9 returns for the other half of what wards do.

The courier. It decouples “I need this item” from “I must go home”, which is what makes staying in lane a decision rather than an endurance test.

Two panels. The first draws a camp's cycle as a clockwise loop: a mark at the top is the spawn check, which fires on the game clock and does nothing at all if anything is still standing in the camp. Around most of the loop the camp is occupied, and an outer arc over that stretch is the pull window. A shorter arc nested outside its tail, running right up to the next check, is the stack window. The second panel contrasts two kinds of camp along an early-to-late line: a dry camp is three identical shapes, the same camp all game, while a river camp is three shapes that grow, stepping up as the game goes on.

The resource lens

Time traded for experience. Leaving the lane means giving up a certain share of experience for a possibly larger return — jungle gold, a rotation, a camp you stacked two minutes ago. The trade is only good when you can name what you went to get.

Before the lecture

Valve’s in-game tutorial, section 3 — pulling and stacking neutrals; and section 1 — using the courier.

This week’s hero

Lion — Earth Spike. The most common payoff for leaving your lane is catching somebody standing in the wrong place, and Earth Spike is the plainest tool for it. It also makes a point this course will keep making: a support leaving lane is not giving up farm. They are going to earn it somewhere else.

This week’s item

Observer and Sentry Wards — as a placeholder only. This week a ward blocks a camp. Using wards to watch people is week 9.

After this week you can…

Teaching team