Vision and Trinkets in Season 4
The preseason 4 brought about some drastic changes in the vision department in the form of limiting how many wards a player can place, and trinkets. Players quickly adapted to the new vision system, but here we’ll look at how to utilize them more efficiently.
Warding Totem
The Warding Totem is the trinket of the most basic use, yet the most versatile. At face value it’s a free “lesser” ward. It may not last as long as a stealth ward, but if you watch the cooldown, you can have the vision for one minute, every two minutes. So far the trend for Warding Totems is to use it to ward while a lane is pushed, to pre-facecheck bushes and to provide short-term, immediate vision during fights in the jungle and at objectives like dragon. If the short two minute cooldown isn’t enough, after level nine players can upgrade to either a full-fledged stealth ward or a vision ward at the cost of 475 gold. It’s an investment, but having (in theory) an infinite amount of stealth or vision wards is worth the price.
My Suggestion: Buy this in about every role at the start of the game, including jungle. As a support you might miss the chance to deny enemy vision, but more wards for you means more vision and as vision equates to knowledge, knowledge equates to power. Any other lane can use it to keep themselves safe when pushed or in the middle of a lane. Junglers can use it to place outer sentries on their camps for defense, or try and catch the enemy jungler unaware.
Sweeping Lense
The Sweeping Lens is a useful tool for denying vision. Used most often by junglers and supports to clear lane and objective wards, the sweeper can change the condition of a lane at a moment’s notice. The instant a lane loses their vision, they either have to back off to avoid the possibility of a gank or take a gamble on whether or not they want to risk the danger. If a jungler takes the time to destroy a lane ward (like in tri-bush for example) before a gank, the target will likely notice and back away. Regardless of if the gank merited a kill or not, the presence of the jungler helped the lane by easing the pressure off their teammate. When the time comes to upgrade the Sweeping Lens into an Oracle’s Lens, players can spend the 475 gold to have the same six second reveal, but gain an eight second true sight buff. This upgrade allows you to find other wards that might be just outside the lens’ range.
My Suggestion: I think this trinket is most useful in the hands of the jungler and the support, in some situations during the laning phase, but more so after. Once the match enters mid game, the importance for vision control in the jungles and on objectives like dragon and baron becomes paramount to the gold income and safety of a team. Depending on how much you find the opponent warding, the top laner may also want to pick up the lens, leaving the carries with the face-checking Warding Totems.
Scrying Orb
The Scrying Orb is essentially a mini Clairvoyance, and is useful in situations like quick checks for camps. Say the other team is in the process of taking dragon or baron. Although any other ward would work in this situation, wards can be destroyed quickly or lens swept away. A Scrying Orb cannot be stopped, giving the caster uninterrupted vision of the objective’s health, making a smite steal much easier. Once upgraded to the Farsight Orb, the orb’s range increases from 1500 units (Jinx’s Zap!) to 3000 (Lux’s ult). This opens up the usefulness of the Scrying Orb in leaps and bounds. With the extra range, uses extend from smite steals to ambushes and jungle security.
My Suggestion: : Grab this trinket on champions with long range abilities like Lux, Caitlyn, Xerath, Nidalee, Nocturne and any of the marksmen with global ults. It may also be a good pick for a jungler without the ability to easily jump over a baron wall and back. With a Scrying Orb a low mobility jungler like Cho’Gath would be able to know whether or not it would be worth it to burn a flash to secure the objective.
When it comes to the professionals, we see a general trend showing almost everyone purchasing Warding Totems at first, so that they can see their opponent’s early movements. As LCS games transition into the later game, we see many (but not all) Warding Totems being exchanged for Sweeping Lenses. This is due to the mid game desire for dragons and stealthy rotation for turrets, and from that point on, it seems that the more sweepers the better.
The fact that each player can only place three stealth wards and one vision ward at a time means that a team needs to be attentive when purchasing trinkets, because each game is a different scenario and calls for a different vision game plan. Now that you know more about the new vision, remember that vision is knowledge and knowledge is power!
Robert Wery