I often find myself in a situation where I as a jungler have a huge lead (Kha'Zix, Lee Sin) but somehow manage to throw it when it comes to close out a game.
In my most recent game, I played Kha'Zix, had a huge lead including first blood and assist on first tower, and in the end managed to die often and lose to Kindred who was at this point too well-fed.
Regarding my replay, I just started dying over and over and thus loosing my shutdown gold to the enemy team.
Since I'm Gold V, I'm still not aware of how to efficiently close out a game.
- How do I transition an early lead into finishing a game?
- What can I do to not fall behind as an early / mid game melee?
- How could and shut I have kept this Kindred & Twisted Fate (who where behind pretty bad) efficiently shut down?
Best Answer
While the other answers give some useful hints on how to snowball the game early to midgame with ganks and pressuring objectives after those ganks, this doesn't always result in victory, especially in low-mid tier LoL, where team cohesion is usually lacking.
A thing you always must consider in the mid- and lategame is splitpushing. Assassins usually are good duelists, they can kill quickly and they are highly mobile allowing them to escape sticky situations. A champion like Kha'zix is very weak in big teamfights even with a substantial lead, he excels at eliminating isolated targets.
Later in the game, your focus should be splitpushing. As long, as you are able to duel most members of the enemy team, you force them to respond asymmetrically. Either they send one person, who you kill, turning it into a 5v4 or allowing you to continue pushing, forcing a further response or they send more than one person, which tilts the game in your teams favor on the other side of the map. Between Kha'zix ultimate and jump, you can escape many such gank attempts.
One more thing to remember: Keep aware of the map, as the jungler, splitpushing is more risky, you are a key member at taking baron and elder and you don't have teleport. You have to make sure, your splitpushing doesn't gift the enemy team either of them, meaning you need to smarter about when and where to splitpush than you would as a laner with teleport.
You also need to think more about your back timings. At ~4:30 you were killed, while being 2/0/0. This should not happen, you had a massive advantage at that point. But the buy order reveals the problem, you bought your first items at 4:50, after you died and buy items worth 1650 gold, that entire gold advantage was pretty much worthless till then. You should have backed at 4 minutes to spend your gold and make Kindreds life hell, instead you died with your starting items and donated 450 gold to Kindred in a situation where you had a big gold advantage but an item disadvantage. So instead of being able to bully her with your two longswords, you allowed her to almost equalize your build.