The wave crashes into your turret, you time your autos like always, and the turret takes the caster. Then the cannon. Your timing isn't broken. It was built for a lane where you decide when a minion dies, and under your own tower the turret makes that call on a fixed schedule. Learn it and you can last hit under tower without bleeding CS.
How Turret Damage to Minions Works
League turrets don't deal flat damage to minions. Each tower hit removes a fixed share of max HP, per the League wiki's minion pages:
- Melee: 45%
- Caster: 70%
- Siege/cannon: 14% from an outer (tier 1) turret, 11% from an inner, 8% from an inhibitor turret
- Super: 7%
Turrets fire at 0.833 attack speed, one shot roughly every 1.2 seconds. Target priority runs siege and super minions, melees, casters, then champions. A turret stays on its target until it dies or leaves tower range, unless an enemy champion damages one of your champions within 1,400 range.
Percentage damage means the shot counts never change. Your damage relative to minion HP does change, and that creates the dead zone: a minion left with more HP than your auto but less than one tower shot is lost. Every sequence below avoids it.
One caveat: the damage is pre-mitigation, and melees gain up to 20 armor from upgrades, so recheck the melee rule late.
The Last-Hit Sequence for Each Minion Type
Melee Minions: Tower, Tower, Auto
- Let the tower hit it twice.
- Auto it.
Why: 2 tower hits take 90% off a full HP melee creep, leaving about 47 of its 465 HP. Almost any champion's auto finishes that.
Exception: your minions hit the enemy front line first, so damaged melees show up every wave. Below roughly 90% HP, the second shot kills it. At early levels, with an auto around 60 damage:
- Below ~58% HP: tower once, then auto.
- ~58% to ~90%: drag it under 58% while it waits in the queue, or answer the first shot with auto plus an ability.
Caster Minions: Auto, Tower, Auto
- Auto it once before the turret targets it.
- Let the tower hit it once.
- Auto again to get the last hit.
Why: one shot takes 70% off a ranged/caster minion, leaving about 85 of its 284 HP. An early auto of 50 to 65 AD can't finish that. Pre-hit first and the shot leaves it near 25 HP.
Never hit it twice first. Two autos plus a 199 damage shot beats 284 HP, and the turret takes it.
Exception: once one auto deals 30% of the caster's max HP, skip the pre-hit, because now it hands the kill to the turret. Caster HP grows from 284 toward 600, so that line moves from about 85 damage to 180.
Cannon and Super Minions: Count the Shots
The cannon is the turret's first target. Under an outer turret, a full HP cannon sits at 16% after six shots (about 134 of its 835 base HP) and 2% after seven. Seven shots, then auto, with 1.2 seconds to spare before shot eight.
Don't touch it before then. At 60 AD, an auto after shot six leaves 74 HP, and shot seven deals 117. The natural count already leaves a 2% sliver, so an early auto only knocks it into the dead zone. If something else has damaged it, read the bar after every shot.
- Inner turret (11%): 1% left after nine shots. Nine, then auto.
- Inhibitor turret (8%): 4% left after twelve. Twelve, then auto.
- Super minions (7%): about 15 shots, so just add autos whenever it's safe.
Cannons are the priciest loss, so track them. Waves spawn every 30 seconds from 0:30, every 25 from 14:00 and every 20 from 30:00, and a cannon joins every third wave until 14:00, every second wave after, and every wave from 25:00.
Prep the Queue While the Turret Is Busy
The turret clears the wave in order: cannon, melees, casters. Casters wait at the back until everything ahead of them dies, and that's your window. Give each one its single pre-hit while the turret works the front line, and the creep wave falls into place: shot, auto, shot, auto.
Ranged champions can do this from behind their own minions. Melee champions have to step into poke range, so prep one caster and save an ability for the other.
Your own minions keep chipping the enemy wave, so HP shifts mid-sequence. Count to get in position, then re-read the health bar before every hit.
Adjusting for Your Champion, Level, and Enemy Pressure
Every rule of thumb here assumes an early auto of 50 to 65 damage. More AD deletes the caster pre-hit first. Less AD adds steps: low-AD mages and enchanters can sit on the 47 HP melee margin at level 1, so test your champion in the Practice Tool. If one auto can't finish a melee after two shots, pre-hit melees too.
- Abilities are last-hit tools. A short-cooldown damage spell covers the minion you couldn't set up.
- Ranged autos travel. On a ranged champion, fire slightly early.
- Attack speed limits you early. You rarely fit two autos into one 1.2-second gap, so every sequence asks for one.
- Enemy pressure resets the count. If the enemy hits you under your turret, its aggro swaps to them. Recount from the next shot on a minion.
A wave that keeps crashing under your turret usually means the enemy is slow-pushing, which is a wave management problem. Bot laners get stuck there most, and working with an ADC coach on wave states fixes it before the crash.
Does Last Hit Assist Work Under Tower?
Last Hit Assist turns a minion's health bar white when your next basic attack will kill it. Enable it in game under Settings > Interface > Health and Resource Bars > Show Last Hit Assist. At launch it was off by default except on new accounts. It arrived in patch 26.5 for bot games, Swiftplay, customs and the Practice Tool, and 26.13 added Normal Draft, but Riot kept it out of Ranked after player pushback.
It tracks basic attacks only, skips temporary boosts like Sheen, doesn't support Azir or Graves, and ranged champions still need to fire a touch early.
Under tower, its blind spot is timing: it shows whether an auto kills now, not what the next turret shot will do. At 60 AD, an untouched caster never turns white after the shot, and the indicator won't tell you to pre-hit. Counting is still your job.
Why Dota 2 Tower Advice Doesn't Work in League
Half of what you'll find on this topic is Dota advice: "let the tower hit it three times", "you need 45 to 55 damage", Quelling Blade, denies, 300 HP ranged creeps, tier 1 tower damage averages. Dota towers deal roughly flat damage, so those rules hinge on your hero's damage per hit.
League turrets deal percentage damage, and League has no denies or Quelling Blade. If you learned lasthitting in Dota 2, drop that maths: a League cannon needs seven outer-turret shots, not 3 tower hits, whatever your damage.
A Practice Tool Drill for Tower Farming
Knowing the counts is easy. Hitting them with a laner in your face is the skill.
- Open the Practice Tool on your main champion, use Lock XP Level to stay level 1 and turn on Auto-Refresh Cooldowns.
- Shove two or three waves into the enemy outer turret, switch cooldown refresh off and walk back. The enemy waves bounce into your turret.
- Farm three crashed waves, scoring melees, casters and cannons separately. Target: every cannon, and at most one miss per wave.
- Repeat at level 6+ with items, then again with Last Hit Assist off.
If the rhythm feels fast, drop the game speed to 0.5x until counting is automatic. In real games, tally under-tower misses in replays. Most players leak one minion type, and in our experience it's the caster.
Replays show what you missed, not why the wave kept crashing. A VOD review with a high-elo coach separates timing misses from the wave-management mistakes behind them, and fixing those keeps you out from under tower.
