It’s been a while since I wrote any articles! Last time, I talked about Presence. This time, we’re going to cover Freezing.
Now I understand a lot of you already know what freezing is and how to freeze your lane. Still, I want to take this opportunity to go through some of the finer details of Freezing.
WHAT IS FREEZING?
Freezing is when you prevent a minion wave from pushing in either direction in the lane. This will make the wave completely still, hence frozen. It’s a basic idea that’s pretty convenient to learn.
BENEFITS OF FREEZING
An ideal freeze spot would look something like the one shown in the image below.
If you manage to pull off something like that, it would give you quite a few big advantages:
- You will now be safer against ganks. It becomes very hard now for a jungler to gank you, giving you time to stay in your lane and focus on CSing.
- You have put your enemy in a situation that forces him to overextend in lane if he wants to continue CSing. This lets you call your jungler for ganks so you can get some early kills.
- They will now have less incentive to fight you in lane. Champions like Irelia or Riven would want to fight you in lane if they could. By freezing the wave, you will hinder your enemy’s opportunity to snowball.
HOW TO FREEZE
Now before we begin, I want to explain a few ideas which will help your wave management first:
- Minion Wave Health — This refers to the total health of an entire wave. Now the minion wave with the least total health will die first and thus get pushed against.
- Minion Wave Damage — This refers to the total damage of an entire wave. Now the minion wave with the higher damage will push.
Usually, you don’t need to know these. This is because, at a glance, the wave with the most minions normally has more health and damage. But when it comes to learning the finer mechanics behind freezing, you do need to be familiar with these.
So how do you set up a freeze? As the waves come together at the start of the game, they’re both equal. The opposing forces are equal so the lane will remain in the middle. Yet players like to push the wave a little in the early game to get to Lv2 quickly and rush a trade.
Now if you plan to freeze a wave, this is ideal because the enemy’s damage is adding up to the enemy wave’s damage. This will make it push toward you. Now as the wave pushes towards you, you want to keep last-hitting minions.
Make sure that you are attacking less than your enemy. This is because you want the enemy wave damage to be higher than yours so it will continue pushing. Once you get to a position you want outside of the turret range, you want to start the freeze.
To freeze the wave, all you need to do now is balance the waves’ damage and health. Every time the enemy attacks, you want to match that. If the enemy wave damage is greater, you should attack more, and vice versa.
The longer you can hold this and balance the waves, the longer your freeze will stand.
One final thing, you need to know how to break a freeze. This is important because if this happens to you, you need to know how to intercept it. You also need to know what to look for to try and prevent the enemy from breaking your freeze. The only way you can break a frozen wave is by creating an imbalance in the wave damage.
The easiest way to do that is to get the turret involved. It will force damage onto the minions, killing them, and resetting the lane. All you need to do is to use all your abilities and push the minion wave into the turret as fast as you can to have it reset.
If you’re the one freezing the wave, you need to do everything you can to stop the enemy from doing exactly that.
TIPS AND TRICKS
An essential trick in freezing a lane is being able to negate your minion’s damage. This means you should observe your ranged minion’s projectiles. As they are mid-flight, you kill the minion that is being targeted.
This will make those projectiles do no damage. This makes your freeze hold longer because you managed to lower your wave’s damage.
Another trick is to use your champion to block minions. Sometimes if your minion wave is still a bit behind, you can stand in front of the minions to tank them. This will stop them from getting in range of your turret and resetting the wave.
You only do this if you don’t believe that your enemy will be capable of damaging you too much while you’re doing it. If not, you will risk taking too much damage.
That’s all for now! I hope you learned something from this article. Good luck on the Rift!
