The best free resources for learning League of Legends

League of Legends may be Asia’s most popular game, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to pick up and play. Especially for those who haven’t played MOBA games before, League of Legends can be quite confusing at first, and the community doesn’t tend to be particularly friendly to clueless noobies, so if you want to play, you’ll need to learn how.

I wrote a review of the lolguides.com Summoner School a few months ago, but that costs money. League of Legends is a free-to-play game, so why shouldn’t your learning materials be free, too?

In this post, I’ve collected some of the most useful free resources for learning and improving at League of Legends. We’ve got our favorite picks below, and then a list of additional resources at the bottom of the page.

Best of the Best

The absolute basics

The League of Legends game itself will run you through a couple basic tutorials before you can play a real game, but you may find it helpful to watch a video or two before you even start that to get some of the basics down. This video from the folks at IGN is a little slow to get going, but it’ll give you a great idea of the basics of the game.

Of course, the League of Legends scene is also full of jargon, and that can be difficult to follow. Thankfully the League of Legends wiki has a very thorough, easily searchable glossary.

Building your knowledge and skills

There are tons of resources out there to help you improve, but I think the best single thing you could do would be to watch the unswlolsec video lecture series. These videos are long, and they can be a little dry, but they are clear, and watching even one of them will likely help you improve your game. Here’s a list with a link to each video for your convenience.

1. Basic Mechanics (Part 1)
2. Basic Mechanics (Part 2)
3. Teamfighting
4. The Silver League
5. Losing Games
6. The Jungle
7. Advanced Mechanics ADC Support
8. Top Lane
9. Mid Lane
10. Support
11. Solo Queue
12. Comebacks and Carrying
13. Ending Games (Part 1)
14. Ending Games (Part 2)
15. Venture Beyond Gold

As you’re looking to improve, you’ll probably often have specific questions you want to ask. The Summoner School subreddit on Reddit is the best place for this, as it is populated by lots of helpful people. There are also frequently Platinum- and Diamond-level players there who are willing to offer free mentoring, coaching, game critiques, and other similar services.

Learning specific champions and item builds

There are a ton of guide sites out there, but the best bet is solomid.net. Go there, find a popular guide for the champion you want to play (ideally one written by a respected pro player) and read it thoroughly. There are dozens for every champion so even if you want to try a non-meta pick, you can probably find a guide for it there.

If you want to learn more about champion synergies and good counter-picks for particular champions, championcounter.com is very helpful in breaking down who a champion is strong against, weak against, and works best with.

For the most up-to-date information on champion builds, you can check out Pro Builds, which automatically tracks League of Legends pros. Pick your champion, and then look at the builds and build orders for pros who have recently won games playing that champion.