Lava Wave Timings

Lava Wave allows you to soak distant lanes while getting Experience from other lanes or while helping allied Heroes. This is possible because Heroes who kill Minions with Abilities or Basic Attacks will automatically collect the Experience from the Minions. Lava Wave always kills Minions when hitting them, so it can reliably be used to soak.

What is the best moment to cast Lava Wave if you want to catch as many Minions as possible? The answer is different for almost every lane across all Maps and changes as the Game Time goes on, based on the number of lanes involved, because Minions do not spawn exactly every 30 seconds.

After casting a lot of Lava Waves and doing some math, we have managed to extrapolate Lava Wave timings for each lane on each Map. You can use these timings to cast Lava Wave when the Game Time shows the corresponding amount of seconds. This way you will maximize the Experience you gain from it and help your team level up faster.

This guide has been created with the help of Debug Mode, a special Sandbox for all Maps. Take a look at our Debug Mode Guide in the Gameplay Guides section if you want to test out our timings for Lava Wave on a specific Map.

To make them easier to learn, as the numbers were a bit less homogeneous across all lanes and Maps compared to what you see here, we have rounded the values a little. Our simplifications come at the cost of occasionally casting Lava Wave with 1-2 seconds of unnecessary delay, which is not a big deal.

Being slightly late is not bad because either you and the rest of your team will usually be able to soak Experience from enemy Minions that are under allied Structures or already clashing with allied Minions. On the other hand, being too early is not ideal because it could cause Lava Wave to miss the whole next wave of Minions.

In some situations you may need to ignore the timing and cast Lava Wave defensively, to quickly kill enemy Minions near allied Structures and deter the enemy team from damaging them, or offensively, to deal damage to enemy Heroes who are fighting in lane. The closer to your Core enemy Heroes are, the easier will be to take opponents by surprise.

All you need to remember is, for each Map, the yellow numbers in the images below and to add 1 second every 4 minutes, starting from when you reach Level 10, that usually happens approximately at 6:00 minutes. You do not really need to learn the orange numbers because you can easily calculate them by adding 30 seconds to the yellow numbers. Considering that Lava Wave has 120 seconds of cooldown, make sure to delay each consecutive cast by 0.5 seconds.

If you do not want to learn all those numbers or if you cannot remember what is the current timing for a given lane while playing, bookmark this guide and click on the Maps name at the top to quickly find what you need. Alternatively, just cast Lava Wave when the Game Time shows 22 seconds or 52 seconds, except for Towers of Doom where the simplified values are 28 seconds and 58 seconds.