This week on League: "Proxy Singed"

A new fad: Proxy Singed

Recently there has been a fad in League of Legends. Just like LeBlanc support or Jarvan IV support, they come and go and only live for a little bit. This week, everyone seems to be up in arms about Proxy Singed.

What is Proxy Singed?

"Proxy" is a verb and made up word in League of Legends which means to farm between enemy turrets so Proxy Singed farms between enemy turrets. It is extraordinarily dangerous and puts you severely out of position for an easy kill. He uses the reverse snowball mechanic in League of reduced kill bounties and kill streak shutdown bonus gold. Optimally, you farm every minion in a dangerous position and get away often, eventually getting enough farm to become a major problem. By farming between turrets your minions will never fight the opponent's minions and will inevitably push down the turret through minions alone.

After several deaths, Singed will become worth less than a minion (approximately 15 gold). However, by creating a huge amount of pressure, you force the enemy to deal with you, or lose pressure across all lanes, as eventually singed can farm two lanes at once by being in your base farming as they spawn. As one of my friends put it in Starcraft, "a traveling army is a useless army." This can also apply to your jungler who is supposed to offer pressure to relieve lanes, but will have to dedicate resources to dealing with Proxy Singed. After dealing with Proxy Singed, because your lanes are so pushed, it becomes very difficult to counterpush.

Isn't this griefing/Intentionally Feeding?

In a sense, yes. But having an unorthodox strategy by utilizing a mechanic in the game used to slow down a winning teams momentum into a lose-lose situation is interesting. This report system makes it seem borderline undetectable in the Tribunal. In fact, DruidDroid, the player who had originally started this trend (who made it to Diamond III) was recently temporarily banned because several of his teammates were upset at him when it didn't work. When Proxy Singed works he will probably 0/3/0 but win through sheer pressure alone. But when Proxy Singed doesn't work, his score ends up looking 0/13/0.

Proxy Singed is invading my games! How do I stop it?!

Relax. You may recall in season 1 there were snowball items that everyone built: Sword of the Occult, Leviathan, and Mejai's Soulstealer. These are nice soft counters to singed as regardless of how much Singed is worth, a kill nets 2 stacks. These items (aside from Leviathan which was removed from the game) only need 5 stacks to become cost effective for the gold you put into it.

Additionally, keep in mind that with no minions, you will have to learn to last hit under a tower. Typically this means wait for melee minions to take 2 turret shots and then last hit, or wait for caster minions to take 1 turret shot before last hitting it. You can also prevent this scenario altogether by having enough sustain to take on an entire minion wave alone for the rest of the game--Bloodthirster of Lee Sin for example will give you enough Lifesteal to not care about minion damage; Hextech Revolver on Kennen should give you enough Spellvamp to not care, etc.

In one of the game I have played before, AP Tryndamere was extremely effective against Singed as we were both able to proxy each other, but with Tryndamere's Lifesteal and Lichbane I was able to chunk down turrets with one or two hits a wave, slowly but surely winning the race.



That's all there is for today! If you'd like to see Proxy Singed in action (from an enemies point of view) check out the embedded video below!

Skip to 3:13:00 to see a MegaZero from team MRN (a professional player) have difficulty versus Proxy Singed. (It may require viewing an ad.)