by Newfypuppie

Hello there fine summoner do you need help with mechanics? Worry not for I am here to break down how to make those sick highlight reel plays to show your friends.

Let’s begin

Micro an Overview

What is Micro? Micro AKA mechanics is the movement and clicking involved with playing the game. Whereas macro gameplay emphasizes map movement/rotations, and broader strategy. Micro emphasizes speed, speed, and more speed. How fast you can click, and how accurately and correctly you can execute combos and move is the “micro” aspects of a moba game like League of Legends. Many players believe that macro can be taught and that micro is based on innate talent, but this is wrong. Micro just like any fine moter skill can be taught. You learned how to write you can learn to be a micro master.

What goes into Micro

In my opinion micro can be broken down into three aspects

Reactions

Execution

Intuition

Now what does that mean? I recommend watching this video of TSM Doublelift’s outplay over Cloud9 widely considered one of the best mechanically well executed pro plays.

Reaction is simply your raw reaction time. in the case of this clip it’s Doublelift’s reaction to heal to dodge an gnar’s ability.

Execution is your ability to make combo’s, and move correctly basically how well you can execute mechanical plays. In the clip the execution is Doublelift’s ability to combo Lucian’s abilities.

Intution is your knowledge and ability to turn a situtation, and predict the moves of your opponents. When it comes the Doublelift’s play, it’s his knowledge to use his ult on key squishy targets intead of using it immediatly.

The good news is that two of these can be taught, reactions is the only thing that can’t be taught very well since a lot of it is genetic.

Sidenote: Admitedly, initution is a bit more intangible to teach but we shall do our best in spite of that fact.

Execution

Now how do we learn how to execute plays. This is very easy. First you need to know your champion. What they can do and how they can combo. This is highly champion specific, but there are some key pointers to teach you.

1. Bread and butter combos over flashy combos, I have over 1 Million mastery points on Vayne. While condemn flash is a cool play for highlight reels it has very little practical use, except in some 1v1’s. The combo I practice the most is AA Q->AA into AA silver bolts procs. This is my main trading pattern and being able to safely execute this combo in lane gains me infinitely more advantage than practicing condemn flash which I use maybe one in ten games.
2. Mouse accuracy, many of you especially those who’ve played this game for a while will be surprised to realize they actually aren’t very accurate with their mouse movement. Hitting and dodging skillshots (and orb walking for ADC mains) can be optimized. Being able to dodge at a 90° to skill shots requires accurate mouse movements. Many of you, if placed into an FPS with low TTK like csgo or valorant you will find you are very inaccurate. This is because league has very generous click hit boxes. Being fast and accurate with mouse movements can be trained. I recommend aim trainers like Kovaks or a free aim trainer called Aim Lab. I recommend speed and flick based training. You don’t have to aim like a CSGO pro but at least being quick an accurate enough will suffice. another quick tip is when moving to always click close to your characters it will allow you to react quick in case you need to make a drastic movement change I.E. dodging a skill shot.
3. Hitting smites, kiting camps, orb walking, csing, etc can be easily practiced in practice tool and this helpful site for smites. Orb walking should be practice at low and high attack speeds to adapt to all scenarios from early to late. Jungle clears should be practiced to perfection to optimize the first clear.

Intuition

Now what is intuition?

Intution is making the correct play/correct move for a given situtation. There a limits to champions, even the best mechanical players will still die. Scripters still die despite being able to dodge every skillshot. That is because there are scenario’s in which you cannot outplay. Mechanics allow you to break the rules of macro, but even some rules are immutable. For example, there is no way you can outplay a flash Malzahar ult without a quicksilver sash.

Knowing intutively how much damage your champion does. How quickly your combos will execute, is key to playing within the limits of macro play.

Sometimes you will not be able to execute a combo because it is too long to execute. This means that you need to optimize the DPS you can do in the certain time period This clip exemplified it Lee sin does not wait for his Q to his land and instead flash once he gets into range to try and insec lucian because waiting for his Q to land and do damage is a waste of time and gives more time to react.

Knowing what the correct play is a matter of game knowledge and experience. Your mechanical skill does not determine what you can do, rather your opponents composition determines it. You cannot walk into space a control mage is defending. You simply will not be able to dodge that many skillshots. This is what I call the “theoretically possible” and the “actually possible”. There are some plays that are theoretically possible if you are a god gamer and some plays that are actually possible based on your skill level, knowing the difference is important and is key to playing to your limits.

Now obviously you’re not playing vs training bots. You’re playing vs real live humans who want to win as much as you do. That means you need to enter the pyschology of the player. For example, a good thresh player will learn how each and every player in the game dodges, whether they dodge up or down or if they dodge at all has a strong effect on which angle they will throw a hook. To go even deeper, is the mechanical mind games. A classic example is the Malphite dilemna, in a teamfight a malphite player is winning the correct play is to hold ult to zone an adc main away from the fight. This leads a a damn if you do and a damn if you don’t scenario for the enemy ADC. Even deeper is micro misplays slight misteps and misplays, having the sort of killer instinct to know when something has gone critically awry. Maybe you insta turn the moment an enemy misses a seemingly harmless skillshot, things that seems like very small mistakes being able to punish them is what separate good mechanical players from the greats. Things like starting a teamfight when a enemy zed waste W, something that seems small but ends up mattering a lot.

Reactions

To get an estimate of your general reactions I recommend this link, it’s a fun little test that shows you’re reaction speed. Since most of reaction speed is genetics, we need to explain why this numbers matters very little in the grand scheme of things. Raw reaction speed is good but, only really matters when it comes to certain plays that need to be done. I.E. flashing a malphite ult, stop watching zed ult etc. Know what needs to be reacted to is a matter of intuition which is why raw reaction speed is less important compared to knowing the right play.

Concluding thoughts

Now are you Faker after reading this? Fuck no(you still have to practice anyway), but I have given you some tips to being a better mechanical players. Do not think that because you are mechanically weak right now means you will be mechanically weak in the future. It’s not about how fast you can click, it’s about how correctly you can click

Good luck with the climb!