If you have seen ANY of my content, I’m sure you have seen me obsess over the concept of “Lull state usage”. I thought it’d be fitting to write an article on this topic given how important of a concept it is, both from a coaching and climbing perspective.
A ‘Lull State’ is simply any period in the game where you are not actively required to engage in another task, therefore having free space in your mental stack.
Lull state examples are:
– Coming back to lane from a reset
– During a death timer
– In between waves etc.
I like to categorize Lull State’s into two separate fields:
1) MAJOR lull states, meaning large chunks of time where you can actively think proactively. Examples of these are:
– When you are dead
– When you are resetting
– When you are walking back to lane
2) MINIATURE lull states, meaning small chunks of time where you can think proactively. Examples of these are:
– In between waves
– After winning a team fight
– While roaming to a side lane
Why is Lull State usage so important?
League is an incredibly mentally taxing game, majority of the time while on the rift our mental stacks are preoccupied with last hitting, trading, clearing camps, avoiding ganks, tracking jg etc. We often don’t even get a chance to think proactively about what WE want to do next, we even struggle to make basic ‘preparations’ for what might come next.
Lull state usage allows us to prepare for the NEXT play rather than simply being reactive.
Here is a basic example of Lull State usage in Solo Queue:
Let’s say you are playing Talon, and you come back from a reset and decide to roam top side. You start walking top and realize that your top laner is actually 0-2-0, the play inevitably fails and then you walk back mid feeling slightly annoyed.
If you were actually using your Lull States properly, you would have checked the scoreboard, realized that bot side was your win con and never even wasted time roaming top.
Another classic example I love to use:
Let’s say you are in lane and have a little time in between the waves to think/calibrate, you pan your camera bot and notice the enemy ADC blew flash.
60 seconds later you notice a bot river fight occur, you are playing Fizz and realize that the enemy ADC has no flash so you go for a long range R and are able to land it and kill him.
Now in an alternate reality where you didn’t actively use the previous MINIATURE Lull State to pan your camera and identify the enemy ADC having no flash, you might have not even been able to use R and let the enemy AD escape.
This is just another classic example, you can see how effective of a tool this can be in the long run.
If you are new to using Lull States, here are a few pieces of advice:
1) Start with what I call ‘basic calibration’. To Calibrate in a lull state simply means to press TAB and start looking for KEY pieces of information that give you context about what sort of game you are within. E.g.
– Who is fed and weak on your team AND enemy team?
– What is the next objective and when is it up?
– What is your ROLE within the comp?
– When is your next spike?
– Who are the key threats onto you?
– What side of the map is the most volatile?
2) If you find yourself getting overwhelmed during Lull States, I’d keep it simple and ONLY use the major lull states and focus on 1 or 2 key variables, don’t try to process them ALL at the start. Over time you’ll become used to processing this information and then you can start to factor in MORE things.
NOTE: Learn to prioritize based on your champion’s needs. If you play an immobile mage, assessing key threats is probably more important than understanding which side lane is the most volatile.
3) Lull state usage is made up of TWO parts:
The first being the actual processing of information, the second being the usage of that info to make an actual hypothesis.
E.g. I PROCESS that bot is my winning side and is taking good trades, therefore I can HYPOTHESIZE they are my win condition.
Start first with learning to process info, THEN begin to make your own hypotheses about win cons or game plans.
I hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions about anything mentioned here!
Cheers,
Curtis