5 Tips To Rank Up Easily As A Baron Laner

Yo! Siege here, Master rank support main and Baron Laner secondary. This is the third installment of our 5 tips series! This next guide will be about Baron Laners.

The Baron Lane is an isolated Island. This is where the heavyweights head toe-to-toe in a slugfest test of strength. But do not be fooled, this place is also infested by the quick and the quick-witted.

As a solo-baron laner, we are focused on 1v1s.

Sometimes epic – Fiora Vs. Camille

Sometimes boring – Anyone Vs. Nasus

Sometimes downright annoying – Anyone Vs. Teemo, Vayne, or Lucian. (Freaking Ranged Baron laners, am I right?)

Baron Laners will frequently feel so far from their team and that would make it seem like they have less impact compared to other roles. Here are 5 easy tips to increase your chances of winning your lane and carrying the game.

1. Learn optimal trading patterns

Yes, I know. It’s fun to just simply butt heads with the enemy and see who’s tougher. But if you use your head more than your muscles, you will definitely win more fights.

1. Classify your enemy. Are they an early game bully? A late game champion? A healing champion? Or a high mobility champion.
2. See how you fair against your enemy: If you are an early game champion like Fiora, you’d want to be on the offensive for the most part. If you are a Nasus against Fiora, of course, you’d want to play it safe for most of the early game.
3. If you decide to trade with your opponent because you think you have a fighting chance, size up your opponent. Do they back away? Do they counterattack immediately? Do they move like a one-trick or are they one of those who practice in ranked?
4. Be aware of your cooldown timings, if you don’t know for sure, note the time between using their ability again. Why does this matter? It matters because if you can bait their abilities, you’ll know how much time you have before they can fight back again. During their cooldowns, abuse them.
5. This is an addition to point D. If the enemy has used all their abilities on you and chunked your health, they will have no tool to fight you back during their cooldowns so do not let them get away without getting hurt as well.
6. When your xp bar is almost full, burst the wave and the moment you level up, initiate a trade.
7. Sometimes, not trading is the most optimal way to win your lane.

TL;DR 1: If you don’t want to bother with all those points, just play a lot and do not be scared to limit test trading patterns and different matchups. It will lose you some games yes, so do at your own risk if you are playing rank games. But it will definitely make you improve, and therefore increase your rank in the long run.

Don’t die doing the same exact same thing over and over again and you’ll see yourself winning more games in the Baron lane.

Playing the Baron lane is the most straightforward way to learning how to win trades and it will transfer to other aspects of your game.

2. You are wasting your lead by not managing the wave.

If you win trades, you will have control of the wave. DO NOT WASTE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO CONTROL IT HOW YOU SEE FIT.

Some wave management techniques:

• Hard shove – this is how you usually see low elo Baron Laners. They will shove and shove and push to the enemy’s turret early, putting themselves in a dangerous situation, leading to a gank and to an equilibrium shift in the power balance of the Baron Lane.
• Zone and Freeze – Keep the enemy champion away from the wave and only last hit at the very last possible second, resulting in the lane being frozen at its current location. This can only be done if you have total control of the wave. This is best done if the wave is near your turret so you can avoid being ganked.
• Slow Push – You can start a slow push by hitting the low hp minions earlier in a frozen wave. A slow pushed wave creates a big wave that will crash at the enemy’s turret. Before it crashes, notify your jungler and do a 2v1 dive. This is how you break the enemy Baron Laner’s game.

TL;DR 2: Don’t waste your lead shoving your lane mindlessly. Assert Dominance, Control the wave, and bury your opponent.

3. Macro decision making: To split push or to team fight.

Some Baron laners are like this:

They AFK farm all game long and don’t translate their lead into pressure for their team. For their allies, it’s like playing 4v5 all game long. This might be great for strong split pushers Fiora, Jax, and Camille. But it’s not always the case.

The first event in the Rift that you will have to ask yourself is whether you want to join the fight is when the Rift Herald and the first drake spawns.

Do you leave your lane and help your team? Or do you keep on farming and try to take the first tower? Of course, just like everything in Wild Rift, the answer is not so simple.

First, ask yourself? What kind of champion are you using?

• Split-pusher – Fiora, Jax, Camille – These champions have little teamfight impact in the early game and it is best to stay in the lane to farm and shove lane to force the enemy Baron laner to stay or lose their turret. (Camille is a case-to-case basis situation because her ultimate, Hextech Ultimatum is a high impact team fight ultimate that usually results into a kill.
• Bruisers and Tanks – You are made to fight in the front lines and usually have strong team fight impact skillset like Malphite with his ultimate, Unstoppable Force or Darius with his constant pressure due to his stacks. These champions are usually slow to take turrets as well. The best option is to take dragons with your team but if your ultimate, in the case of Malphite is on cooldown, just defend your turret.
• Ranged Baron laners – Most Ranged Baron laners are made to scale in the island that is the Baron lane but an exception is Kennen who also has a high team fight impact kit.

Furthermore, you have a few caveats to consider:

• How are the states of the matchups – If there is a significant lead over two match ups like if the mid and jungle are both behind, it would most likely be a bad decision to head toe to toe against the enemy in the Dragon or the Rift Herald. Ping your team to avoid the enemy and take the objective that they are not taking. 
• What kind of Drake is spawning? – The Infernal Drake is a non-negotiable no-brainer – You have to take it at all cost. But how about the other Dragons? Here is a simple breakdown of the impact of each elemental drake to your team:
  1. Highest Impact – Infernal Drake – Damage amplifier – Great for all kinds of champions.
  2. Second highest Impact – Cloud Drake – Bonus movement speed – Do you have a roaming jungler, mid laner, or support? This will allow your team to rotate faster than the enemy team, it’s like having a free pathfinder rune. Bonus if you are playing Singed.
  3. Ocean Drake – Omnivamp – Best utilized by high sustain, high damage champions like Renekton, Akali, Katarina and all ADCs.
  4. Mountain Drake – HP based shield – This is exactly Malphite’s passive. If your team consist of four low HP champions, why even bother? Take Rift Herald and First Turret. But this becomes the #3 or even #2 drake if you have three HP stacking champions like if you have Gragas, Galio and Alistar.
• The first tower grants the highest amount of personal and team gold among all objectives in the game. If the enemy is a hypercarrying split-pusher, you will risk being gold diffed spiraling into a loss if you leave your turret.

Learning to check the situation in the first dragon fight will translate into a better understanding of when to split-push and when to join the team fight.

TL;DR 3: Assess game state before choosing to fight or split-push. As a general rule, do not stray too far from your team if your teleport is on cool down.

There’s this saying in low elo league:

“It’s better to have 5 champions doing the wrong thing than having 1 champion doing the right thing”.

4. Counter picking and being counter picked.

Picking, counter picking, and banning are a big part of the Baron lane experience. It is akin to type advantages in Pokémon. Some champion plays better against another and you’ll just have that champion that you’ll never learn to have fun to play against.

But banning is not always an option in Wild Rift since only three people are given the chance to ban. So what should you do? Should you pick your hated champ and become the very thing you hate? Or should you play their counter champion that you have never played but you have watched some YouTuber say that it is the best S+ Baron laner super counter to Fiora?

The short answer is NO. You should never choose a champion just because it is listed as an OP tier in some tier list. You should never choose a champion just because your teammate insists that it is a sure win counter.

Choose three champions and learn their ins and outs and you will win all your matchups whether good or bad.

There’s a reason why one-tricks climb faster than average.

TL;DR 4: It’s better to choose a comfort champ than force another pick just because it’s a better matchup.

Let’s face it, we’re not the best in terms of mechanics. We’re no 369, Smeb, or TheShy. Maybe some of you are but you will not always be playing at 100% efficiency every single game. Some matchups we win, some we don’t.

But losing your lane is not the end of the game.

Baron lane is an extremely snowball-y lane. Once you die once, it is hard to come back unless the enemy makes a blatant mistake. And because it is so far from the other lanes and ganks are rare and far in between, it is easy to die over and over again.

If you want to make a comeback, we’ll have to back to point 1.G – Sometimes, not trading is the most optimal way to win your lane.

There are lots of other ways to help your team other than killing enemies:

• Be a secondary support and peel for your AD or AP Carry – Stay back, do not force fights and just help your teammates whenever they get focused or jumped on.
• Split-push but only if you know the position of the enemy team – Try to get their attention but immediately back away so they lose time chasing you.
• Be a meat shield – Stop building carrying items – Instead of Trinity Force, build Black Cleaver or Iceborn Gauntlet. Buy tank items like Randuin’s Omen or Force of Nature, items that will allow you to soak more damage for your team.

TL;DR 5: Stop dying. You can win by getting carried. It’s not the end of the world if you fail to get fed.

Summary

As you have read in this article, playing as a Baron laner is not as simple as it seems. I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it still reached this length. It’s because it is not true that the Baron lane is a low-impact role.

You can definitely carry and rank up by playing as a Baron lane main. Keep in mind what you have read in this guide, win your matchups, translate your lead into objectives, and carry your team into victory!