League is a game of decisions. Any stats site will give you metrics on win rates for dragon acquisition, grub slaying, baron taking, etc. BUT they’re all useless stats for us because the team who is winning is usually the one to get the stuff. So here, I will approximate for you the values of the stuff when teams possess equivalent gold and objectives. I used 8 million diamond+ games from NA, EUW, EUN, KR, and VN for split 1 2025. In this article I’ll focus mostly on the first 15 minutes of the game.
The Value of Gold
Let’s take a look at team win rates at 15 minutes based on their gold and XP leads.
A pretty nice bell curve. XP and gold are nearly perfectly correlated, with a Pearson correlation of 0.85. For this reason I’ll be ignoring XP as a variable since they are essentially colinear. It makes sense when you think about it. Stuff that gives you XP generally gives you gold.
Since the bell curve shows how gold is distributed among winners, we can flip that to ask “what’s the chance of winning given a certain gold lead?”
When we do we get a sigmoid curve:
These sigmoids are steeper early in the game (gold is worth more) and flatten later (gold is worth less).
Great! BUT there is a caveat. Teams with gold leads tend to also have leads in dragons and grub passives and Atakhans… things that give power that gold can’t account for. Therefor, the chart below only considers games with a 0 grub lead and tied dragon leads. Atakhans, Barons, and Elder drakes are trickier to balance so I did not attempt them. Their exclusion will likely cause a slight overestimation of gold value in the very late game.
We can see how gold leads become less impactful as the game progresses. These gold value calculations will be referred back to as we go, but it does let us get a feel for how valuable some early gains are:
Now the we know the gold to win-fraction conversion at different times, let’s calculate the value of early game objectives.
A quick word on caveats: Gold will not have the same value on every champion. How a gold lead is distributed is important, and we will talk about that in another post.
Dragons vs Grubs Pre-15 mins
The decision that defined split 1: dragons vs grubs. Which are worth more? On paper, each grub gives about 73 gold (10 per teammate, + 20 to slayer, +3ish for mini grubs). Dragons give an average of 1203 gold worth of stats (assuming an average mid-game amount of champion stats, I pulled numbers out of my ass here like 150 AP) broken down here:
However, simply multiplying the gold value of stats by 5 isn’t really fair, because not all champions will make equal use of these stats. I tried to estimate how useful each stat is to an average team of 5, but I’m really just making stuff up and I don’t think it is super important. I just want us to have a ballpark idea.
There are a few factors we want to deconvolute here:
1. Gold lead
2. Dragon Lead
3. Horde (riot’s name for grubs) Lead
The dragon and grub lead depend on each other. In a neutral gold game state, it is likely these objectives are traded. For games with gold leads between -500 and 500 gold at 15 minutes:
We can see that when you are ahead on dragons you are likely to be behind on grubs and vice-versa. This means if we look at gold vs win-probability with a 2 dragon lead for all game states, it will underestimate the win probability at parity because getting 2 dragons likely means you got 0 grubs. Therefor we will facet our analysis by grubs and dragon leads.
Let’s start with dragon lead when grub (horde) lead=0:
Pretty nice. We can estimate the win percent effect at an even gold state as 8% for 1 dragon and 16.9% for 2 dragons. Not bad. Let’s compare to my estimated dragon gold values:
You can see the mismatch between the win rates predicted by the true gold values which I basically spit-balled anyway and the much more elegantly measured win rate increases I calculated from the previous plot (purple column).
Now let’s do grubs. What grubs are worth is much more concrete gold-wise as I mentioned above, about 73 gold. There is the caveat that the 219 gold you receive from killing grubs is attained before 15 minutes, so that first grub spawn kill is much more valuable than the second, as early gold is a big deal. I factor that in there. The first 219 gold at approx 5 minutes is worth a 3.9% WR increase while the second 219 gold at approx 15 minutes is worth a 2.7% WR increase.
This however, doesn’t account for grub passive. We can measure grub passive value at 15 minutes by looking again at gold-corrected WR for each dragon state:
Cool! So now we have estimates for the WR value of grub passive. A full 6 grub passive is worth a whopping 11% WR (shown in the previous table). Combined with the gold of first 3 and second 3 grubs, that gives a total 17.6% WR boost. Now, as a BIG caveat, this doesn’t count any effect the grubs had on tower plates before 15 minutes which we are washing away here. To account for this, I looked at the average gold lead for teams that got 6 grubs and 0 drakes vs 2 drakes and 0 grubs. The 6 grub team had a 648 gold lead over the 2 drake team, which is 210 more than the 438 gold the grubs themselves give. This means on average the grub team is picking up an additional plate or two, adding another 2.1% WR.
For the record, that’s 19.7% WR for 6 grubs vs 17% WR for 2 dragons. Grubs were better split 1.
Feats
The best way to look at feats for us it at 15 minutes we want the team that has first to 3 kills and first tower. That way, we can hold grub lead to 0 and dragon lead to 0. We plot gold lead vs WR again and because kills and first tower basically gives all of its advantage in terms of gold lead, putting gold lead on the x axis lets us cancel it out.
This shows us an approximately 4% increase in WR for achieving feats when gold and neutral objectives are factored out. I did consider that first tower might open the map up, so I tried looking at when the winner gets feats from objective + first to 3 kills but the loser gets or does not get first tower. There was no difference. Therefor I think the 4% WR increase is a faithful estimate of feat value.
Now, is 4% reasonable? First blood used to give 100 bonus gold and first tower gave 300 bonus gold. If we take first blood gold value at 5 minutes and first tower at 15 minutes, that is 1.7% WR for first blood and 3% WR for first tower, adding to 4.7% WR. So honestly, feats were about where they should have been.
However, feats FELT more important than than the 4% WR they actually gave. I’m interested to see how much more valuable they will actually be this split.
Atakhan
There were 2 Atakhans. I didn’t identify them separately when I scraped, so we will be discussing their average value rather than their individual value.
Again we only consider games where the grub and dragon lead is 0. Atakhan gives a solid 15% increase in win rate when attained in an even gold state in an even game.
Summary
I hope this gives you all a solid understanding of what the pre-20 minute objectives were worth split 1. I was surprised how little feats were worth given how insane people would go to get them. Grubs surprised me with their strength. Atakhan passive surprised me too. I’ll follow up with split 2 once i scrape enough data!
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