Gameplay

Current version of this page is taken from https://predacademy.com/guide/guide-beyond-the-tutorial/, it will be rewritten soon

Roles

Predecessor is, in the standard gamemode, a 5v5 game and each player is designated a specific role. These roles are: Offlane, Jungle, Midlane, Support and Carry.

• Offlane is a role usually played by a tanky damage dealer in a lane set up so players fight a 1v1. To be successful in this role, you should aim to have a lead in experience which makes you much stronger in the mid-game. It is a lane that is hard to come back from if you fall behind. The recommended heroes, from the free selection, for this lane are Greystone, Grux and Steel.
• Jungle is a role usually played by a mobile character that is good at appearing in lane to destroy an opponent using the element of surprise. It is the most complex role when you start since you don’t play in a lane but in the jungle. We will cover a quick start portion for those interested by the role later. The recommended heroes for the roles from the free selection are Khaimera and Grux.
• Midlane is a role usually played by a mage, caster that deals high damage with their AOE abilities, but are weak once their abilities are on cooldown. The midlane can greatly impact the map thanks to its central position. This also means everyone can collapse on you making it a double-edged sword. The recommended heroes for the roles from free selection are Gideon and Countess.
• Support is a role usually played by heroes that can protect their teammates, these are usually enchanters or tanks. Support heroes don’t deal a lot of damage as they shouldn’t last hit. This leads to them having less gold but in return they have good crowd control used to disable opponents. It is the role that has access to the best vision tool via Solstone. The recommended heroes for the roles from the free selection are Narbash and Dekker.
• Carry is a role usually played by a ranged damage dealer that becomes stronger as the game progresses through their items. To be successful in this role you should focus on farming until you become an unstoppable force that will become the main source of damage for your team. The recommended heroes for the roles from the free selection are Kira and Murdock.

Each Role has a dedicated position on the map in the early and mid-game which is indicated to you when you enter the map through an arrow VFX. If you are on the Dawn side, Offlane will be on the right side, Midlane will be in the middle, both Support and Carry stay together on the left side in duo lane, and Jungle stays in the jungle. If you are on the Dusk side, duo lane and offlane are inverted.

When entering a game there is a role select screen to convey your will of playing a specific role to your teammate, but keep in mind that if multiple players want the same role, it will be attributed randomly to one of those players.

Crests

When you enter the game, you will be received by a “Select a Crest” screen. You can go with the default options that is presented to you when you start so simply click confirm and you are good to go.

Crests is a special kind of item that requires you to do a mini quest to level it up, you have a little window that tell you the progress of your crest and what you should do to level it up. Usually simply dealing with minions and damaging opponents is enough. Once the progress is filled you get the tier 2 of the crest and need to level it up one more time. Once completed your crest will be ready to be upgraded to tier 3. To do so you need to go back to the fountain to pick one out of three options. Once again you can select the default options and you will be fine.

What’s the difference between the options, well tier 3 crest are an active item which mean you can activate a special ability that will have a cooldown, think of it as an additional ability in a sense. And each option has different abilities, for instance on Carry the Marksman Crest evolve into a crest that gives you a short dash, a cleanse to protect from crowd control, or a steroid that increase your damage, very different effect for different situation. Take your time to explore the different options the more you play, and you will learn which crest is better in which situation.

As a special note for crest be extra careful with support crest that are Guardian Crest and Consort Crest, if you are a support, you absolutely need one of those crests or you are going to fall behind in terms of gold since those crests offer more gold thanks to their passive. But if you are not support, you should never take them because their offer more passive gold at the cost of reducing the gold from last hitting and if you take them there will be a point when you will earn almost no gold anymore.

Buff Camp

There are 8 buff camps on the map, gold, teal, two blue, two red and two river buff. All those camps have an additional property when we kill the monster associated with it, the person who last hit the monster reap the benefit from it.

Gold buff is located on the side of the duo lane and will offer a good amount of gold to his slayer. The more it gets killed to more gold it provides.

Teal buff is located on the side of the offlane and will offer a good amount of experience to his slayer. It also give back a bit of health and mana so be mindful when fighting around it, the person who last hit it can turn the fight around thanks to the healing burst.

Red buff is located in each jungle and is usually the buff the Jungle start with because once killed you will gain a temporary buff that makes all your basic attack apply an effect on the target that will burn it and slows it. The damage is great to help clearing more, and the slow is great to gank lanes.

Blue buff is located in each jungle and once killed you will gain a temporary buff that offers you mana regeneration and ability haste. On top of that it will also increase ability damage against monster which is simply a form to help the jungler clear faster with his abilities.

Last but not least, River Buffs are located close to the midlane on each side of it. They are bit special because they are random, there is 4 differents river buff that can appear there: Orange, Pink, Grey and Green. Orange gives you a temporary buff of Attack Speed, Pink of Ability Damage, Grey of Movespeed, and Green of Shield. They also give back 250 mana over 5 seconds to the slayer so if multiple teammates are around try to give it to the one that have the lowest mana. They first spawn at 3 minutes and then every 2 minutes from there, so 5, 7, 9, 11 and so forth.

Jungle

Jungle role is not covered by the tutorial so here some information on how to start the role under good conditions. Compared to a normal lane, you spend most of your time farming in your jungle. This farms comes in the form of the blue and red buff we have seen in the previous part but also through the white camps. There is 4 of them named based on the number of monsters in it, 2-Camp and 4-Camp near the midlane, and 5-camp and 3-camp near the side lanes.

Each camp possesses an aggro system which means the monsters will follow you until the aggro bar is depleted. Once that happens, they will reset which means they’ll return to their original position and start regaining hp. To avoid that you may stay inside the blue circle that appear when you fight them. Also, as a jungler you possess the hunt item instead of having health potion. The Hunt item provides you with more damage on jungle camp, health regeneration and mana regen when damaging monsters. It also has an active effect that deals instant damage to monster when activated. It is associated with the little arrow above the health of the monster, when it turns red it means the monster is in range to be executed by the effect. The hunt item is also very important to secure team objectives, it deals 500 damages in its first form but after you kill 40 monsters, it will evolve into the Wild Hunt and will now deal 1000 damages.

Last, let’s discuss a little what you should be doing as a Jungle. You need to find a good balance of farming your red, blue and white camp while looking for gank opportunities. A gank is when you appear in a lane to try to help your teammate kill the people in that lane. So, to do so, you should try to have an efficient pathing which is get the camps or ganks that are near you. A classical pathing currently is starting red, into 5-camp into 2-camp. Look at middle lane for the river buff at 3 minutes and maybe a gank, then go into your blue side with 4-camp, blue, 3-camp and then look for a gank in the nearby lane or reset to base. Of course, Jungle is a complex role that needs to be adaptive but for your first games following those directives for the first 5 minutes of the game should give you a good feel and practice for the role.

Team Objectives

To complete our round up of what is available, we have to talk about the yellow dot on the duo lane side that is the Fangtooth and the purple dot on the offlane side that is the Orb Prime. Both of those objectives have an early and late game version. The early game version can usually be tackled by 3 people in a timely manner where the late game version needs the whole team.

Upon killing the Fangtooth, your team will gain a permanent buff based on the amount of Fangtooth your team killed. The first one offer +50% buff duration (to a max of +30s) which means River buff, Red and Blue buff, but also prime buff will be longer. The second one offer a +8% movespeed while being out of combat. The third one offers +8% Physical and Magical Power, and +8% Physical and Magical Armor to everyone in your team being a strong victory condition. After 3 Fangtooth are killed, the next respawn will be a Primal Fangtooth which is the late game version so be careful it does a lot of damage. Once killed, it will count as a usual Fangtooth kill for the 3 buff I mentioned but will also provide a temporary buff that will burn enemies with true damage (damage that ignores armor) every time you deal damage to an enemy. Which makes it very strong to fight the enemy heroes.

On the other side, before the minutes 20 you will have access to the mini prime that upon death will give his slayer only a temporary buff that give more damage, more physical and magical armor, and an aura that makes nearby minions stronger which is great to apply pressure on lanes to take towers. After 20 minutes the Orb Prime will spawn and will offer a temporary buff to the whole team if killed. The buff offers more damage, and a very high health and mana regen if you did not take damage for a while. It also has the aura to empower minions which makes it a very strong buff to siege, attacking enemy tower thanks to stronger minion and the ability to regenerate health and mana by simply disengaging.

Vision

Let’s start the vision topics with the fog wall, you know those foggy blue gates that separates the lanes from the Jungle. The particularity of Predecessor is that there is no fog of war you can see as far as you want at the exception of those fog walls. They completely obstruct vision which makes it very deadly for laners since Jungle can be very close to you without you knowing.

This is where the wards are useful. Each character can select a vision item in the shop and the default one is stealth ward that gives you 2 charges to place a ward nearby your location. The ward will remain for a while and provide vision on any enemies in its vicinity, so if you are suspecting someone is behind a fog wall, place a ward behind it and it will be revealed. Wards are also useful to get information on the enemy Jungler and rotation, so try to place them when you have some time to not be surprised by the enemy team and keep yourself safe at all times. Also Wards are invisible to the enemy team once they are placed which means we need some form of detection to remove them.

This is where the second vision item Sentry is useful. Sentry offers you two charges of detection that will create a detection aura around you, that allows you to see wards so you can destroy them. Wards takes 3 basic attacks to be destroyed. Usually, only Jungler take this item since they want to remove the enemy vision so there gank are more successful, however be careful when using it, the detection aura is visible by the enemy teams which makes you very easy to spot when you use it.

Last Vision item is an exclusivity of Support player through the evolution of their crest. Upon reaching the tier 3 they gain Solstone wards, which is an advanced form of the stealth ward. Solstone wards can detect other wards, having the same property of the sentry. On top of that Solstone have 3 charges that refresh instantly when you go back to the base. Solstone is the main reason a Support can dominate the vision game when entering the mid game.

To finish the vision part, let’s talk about how Predecessor manage invisibility. Some characters can become invisible like Kallari and Wraith but also item like Echelon Cloak can provide invisibility. Invisible characters are invisible without much of a surprise, but they will be revealed under the following condition. If they are seen by a ward, if they are inside the range of an ally structure, or if they are close to an ally hero.

Advanced Movement

Last part, with a few information regarding movements. Every time you basic attack you are getting slowed. As a range character the slow is stronger than on melee character, and melee characters also receive a weaker slow when they miss their basic attack. So if you want to create space because you are getting run down by an enemy carry just walk away without auto attacking otherwise you won’t be running fast enough.

Talking about running away, there is no backpedal penalty in Predecessor, which means you can walk back while facing your opponent without losing speed. You don’t have to turn your camera. Of course, that means it is harder to know where you are going but it will make it easier to react to what your opponents are doing.

The map is also populated with explosive flowers that will bump people when they get detonated. To detonate them just basic attack them and then they will pop off a split second after, pushing people from its centre. It is a great tool to gain some verticality to be aggressive and to retreat to safety.