POSITIONING GUIDE | Teamfight Tactics

Hello Ladies and gentleman today I’ll be having
a guide on positioning. I’ve been asked a lot about how to position
in a lot of different situations and I want to start off this video by saying that I do
not know how to position in a lot of situations. Positioning is a nuance that’s difficult to
figure out and something that’s going to be evolving as the game evolves as well. I’m giving you my best judgment as well as
giving you tips on how to position, especially in certain situations in the early game, as
well as late game positioning with specific comps. You should think of positioning as .. kind
of like an MMO where you’ll have meele DPS, Tanks, ranged DPS, and Assassins. Where you want to position your Tanks is at
the front line tanking all the damage, your meele DPS does the most damage in meele range
but they’re also the squishiest, so you want them to tank the least amount of damage – they
should never take immediate aggression based on your positioning. Your ranged DPS should be well protected in
the backline in a position where they don’t get jumped on by assassins; and isolated. So how do you position your tanks to soak
the most damage in the game? Well.. first of all you should think of positioning
as a situation where generally speaking the opponent can chose to position their units
on the left, the middle or the right side of the map. Most of the times, most of the people do not
position in the middle; you should assume the attack comes from the left or the right. What this means is that the unit you have
at the very farthest forward of the board is going to get hit first, regardless of whatever
else happens – assuming you position in the direct middle as well. Additionally, units that will be on the far
left and far right have a higher chance of getting targeted first. This is because usually people position their
units on the far left or far right in terms of formations. Commonly what ends up happening is I feel
a lot of people end up stacking on the left side, and since the game mirrors your positioning
and reflects it on their board, that means the enemy spawns most commonly on the right
side. So what happens is, when I position my tank,
usually my tank is positioned at the furthest forward point, far right; or the far left. That way they’re the first thing to get focused. My tanky DPS, or I would say my meele DPS
usually gets positioned right behind, or right next to my tank, so they don’t get focused
as hard or immediately – because you really want the tank to get all the damage while
the meele DPS, who could be squishy, something like Fiora is doing as much damage before
they die, even if they lose one second or one hex worth of travel time. While we’re on this topic of matter, we should
also remember; and this will be important in the future, that Assassins positioning
is very interesting. Assassins jump to the farthest unit away from
them; on the opposite side. Usually you kind of cut the map in half and
kind of think: If my position is here on that Hex, my assassins is going to jump on the
exact opposite adjacent side of the board. They start out stealthed and they Jump in. This makes so that when you’re positioning
your assassins to jump probably towards the weakest unit, or the backline ranged DPS and
their assassin wants to do the same, they want to kill your Vayne, they want to kill
your Lulu; anything in the far back that can do a lot of damage and is relatively squishy. So while we’re on the topic of formations,
let’s talk about how to actually use this theory in reality – and I’ll do this with
the formation that can occur, as soon as level 4. I call this formation Y-Formation: mainly
because when I stream we jokingly called it the Y-Formation and then it just caught on. So the Y-Formation requires 4 units and you
kind of push them in one straight diagonal line and add a unit to the left of the diagonal
line. So it kind of looks like a Y; makes sense
right? Your strongest tank is on the , your tankiest
unit is on the top right of the formation and then your meele DPS is on the left, because
you want your top right unit to tank first, your meele DPS immediately joins. the bottom left unit is the most interesting
one, it is NOT your ranged DPS. Your ranged DPS unit is actually in the middle
of the formation. The entire reason why this formation was made
was for one reason and one reason alone: and that reasoning is because Kha’Zix is the number
one most annoying unit for me to play against early game; he has an ability that if their
ranged DPS is isolated it does extra damage and it’ll kill pretty much every one 1v1. So what this formation does is it forces a
unit to be on the very back that tends to either intercept the assassin when he jumps
in, or create a position to where if the assassin does jump on my ranged DPS, while my very
far back end of the Y unit is coming toward the middle of the board, it’ll stop next to
the assassin and while it may not attack it, my ranged DPS unit is close enough either
to my front line, or to the back line Y unit that it doesn’t get isolated. So this formation is entirely build around
the idea of stopping Kha’Zix and ranged Assassins from isolating your one ranged DPS. Now…. Counters to this comp are if you’re against
mages such as Ahri which can AOEd own your units very quickly, you don’t want Vayne to
be that up close, and additionally champions that AOE similar to Ahri like Graves go through
units will also hit Vayne in this position when usually they can’t. Yeah we made the Y-Formation. I just recorded a video about this formation
today. And in the recording I’m going to talk about
how if you’re playing against Graves you actually get countered by doing this Formation hahahaha
roflmal wait Graves literally IE-Crit me and I died. However even with those downsides I tend to
use this formation quite a lot just because this is how much I hate Assassins and Kha’Zix
early. Another early game Formation that I want to
talk about is Gunslingers positioning – specifically Gunslingers with Graves. Graves is a really interesting unit in the
sense that he splashes his Damage and he’s considered a front line, but you don’t want
him to be taking damage. However, you do want him to give you angles
to do a lot of damage because his buck shot can just obliterate teams especially with
items. Gunslingers have a very unique position, especially
Graves, that you put graves in the top right HEX, where there’s only one or two units that
can possibly attack him while he gets a great curve onto any units that tend to stack onto
the right side of the board. Additionally if they don’t stack on the right
side of the board because he’s behind another unit, your actual tank will be positioned
left of the graves in the situation, the actual tank will then move forward to the left first
and soak the damage anyways, so that if there’s an encounter that stabilizes towards the middle
of the board, Graves doesn’t get hit first, and it should clump up for Graves to do maximum
amounts of damage. This positioning maximizes your Graves positioning
damage and while this is happening you can kind of create like a mini Y-Formation with
your Tristana to make sure she doesn’t get isolated by Assassins as well. Finally I want to talk about Assassin Positioning. Assassins are probably the composition that
I understand positioning the most in late game. The biggest thing and the biggest counter
to assassins is clumping in the corner and a lot of assassin players I see don’t correctly
position their front line to be able to make them come out, your job as the assassin play
is to drag the backline away so you can isolate that juicy Ashe or Aurelion Sol in the corner,
crit it, and win the teamfight. So how do you do this? You position your front line at the very first
row and what happens here in this position is that they take the longest to run toward
the opposite team, on top of this the opposite team takes the longest to run to them and
because your assassins stay invisible for the first half second of the fight, everyone
is aggro’d onto your frontline so they’ll ignore all the assassin positioning. So it’s very very common for your assassin
positioning to have tanks on the first row, assassins surrounding the tanks, bottling
them in to force them so that they can’t move at the very start of the fight on top of the
fact that it isolates the enemy assassins from being able to jump on them immediately
because they kind of bodyblock for half second and then both assassins, your assassins and
their assassins will jump and it creates kind of, I guess a “stalling effect”. This is the best way to play assassins right
now and while there could be an argument where in the backline you position them against
different types of corner stackers, left or right, this is so important, I can’t stress
this enough – I think a lot of people fall behind on assassins late game because they’re
not positioning correctly in this situation and this is something that you really need
to know if you’re looking to play assassins kind of past six or seven units. Thank you so much for watching, if you guys
enjoy this, please like, comment and subscribe and see you guys next time!

Written by Raul Dinwiddie

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