Rewatch Your Deaths: the Review Habit Every Coach Recommends, Automated

Why Coaches Tell You to Watch Your Deaths

Ask any coach or high-elo player how to improve and the answer is some version of "review your games, start with your deaths." There is a good reason for it. A death is the clearest mistake a game produces: it costs you gold, experience, map pressure and often an objective, and it almost always has a cause you could have seen coming.

The problem is that you cannot see the cause while it happens. In the moment you are watching your champion, your cooldowns and the enemy in front of you. The jungler that walked out of fog, the support who was missing for twenty seconds, the wave that pulled you two steps too far: those are all on screen, but your attention is somewhere else. Watching it again, with nothing at stake, is the only way to see what you missed.

Deaths also repeat. Most players do not die in fifty different ways; they die in three or four, over and over. Caught in the same side lane after 20 minutes. Overstaying for one more wave. Fighting with an item sitting in the shop. You only notice the pattern when you watch several of your deaths back to back, and that is something no post-game screen will show you.

Why Almost Nobody Does It

Everyone agrees with the advice and almost no one follows it, because the tools make it slow:

• Replays are tedious. Open the client, find the game, download the replay, wait for it to load, scrub through 30 minutes to find each death, then fight the camera to see the right part of the map. Ten deaths is a lot of scrubbing.
• Replays expire. A League replay only plays on the patch it was recorded on. Wait two weeks and it is gone.
• Recording apps need setup. Recording everything with a general screen recorder means configuring it, storing gigabytes of footage, and still cutting out each death yourself.

So the review that would help the most is the one that never happens. You queue up again instead, and the same death happens the same way.

What Hexgate Does Instead

Clips is part of Hexgate Pro+. Once it is on, there is nothing else to do: Hexgate records the League window while you play and, every time you die, get a kill or get an assist, it keeps the seconds before it and a few seconds after. Moments close together share one clip, and multi-kills are labeled. When the game ends, a small notification says your clips are ready.

1. You play

   Hexgate records the League window in the background.

2. The game ends

   A small notification says your clips are ready.

3. You watch

   Every death, kill and assist opens in the Clips window.

Inside the Clips Window

Every clip opens in the Clips window. The player plays at normal speed, half speed or quarter speed, and steps forward or back one frame at a time. Under it, the game timeline marks every death, kill and assist of the game, so you can jump straight to the next one. Point at a number to see what each part does.

1The game, as it was recorded2Slow motion and frame by frame3Rewatch the death4Every moment on the game timeline5Who killed you6How even the fight was7Where it happened

1. 1The game, as it was recorded. Champion, mode, quality and size: this ARAM Mayhem game was kept as highlights at 1080p and 60 fps, 9 moments in 320 MB.
2. 2Slow motion and frame by frame. The player runs at normal speed, half speed or quarter speed, and the arrows step one frame at a time.
3. 3Rewatch the death. Every jump to a moment starts three seconds before it, so you see the setup, not just the result.
4. 4Every moment on the game timeline. Each death of the game is marked on one line, with the list of moments underneath: champion involved and the minute.
5. 5Who killed you. Every champion involved, the final blow marked, with their items.
6. 6How even the fight was. Your level, gold and CS against your killer at that moment, and a warning when you died holding a lot of unspent gold.
7. 7Where it happened. The spot on the minimap.

A One-Minute Routine for Reviewing a Death

Watching a death is not the same as learning from it. This is the routine that turns a clip into one thing you will do differently:

1. 1×

   Watch it once at normal speed

   The clip starts a few seconds before the death. Just watch, and notice the moment you first think "I should not be here."

2. 0.5×

   Watch the last five seconds at half speed

   Now look away from your champion. Check the minimap: who was missing, and for how long? Where was your team?

3. ?

   Ask the four questions

   Did I have the information to avoid this? Was this fight worth taking with these levels and items? Did I die for something (an objective, a trade, time for my team) or for nothing? What was the last safe moment to leave?

4. Name one change

   One sentence, about the next game: "Leave the side lane when two enemies are missing," not "play safer."

Then do the same for the next death, and look for the repeat. If three of your clips start with you farming alone past the river after 20 minutes, that is not bad luck. That is the habit to fix, and now you have seen it three times in a row.

The Breakdown Says Why, the Clip Shows You

Clips pairs with the Match Breakdown, the Pro+ analysis Hexgate builds after every ranked, Normal Draft and Swiftplay game. The breakdown tells you which deaths mattered: three deaths in the eight minutes after your lead peaked, or a death caught alone on the enemy side of the map. Every recorded death in its list has a Watch button that opens that exact moment, three seconds before it happens. Reading "caught alone, no teammate near" is useful; watching yourself walk into it is what makes it stick.

It Will Not Cost You Frames

A recorder that drops your frame rate is a recorder you turn off. Hexgate records with the video encoder built into your graphics card (NVIDIA, AMD or Intel), the same hardware that streaming apps use, so the work happens off to the side of the game instead of on top of it. A few more details that matter:

• Only League is recorded. The League window and the game's sound. Not your microphone, not Discord, not anything else on your screen.
• Borderless window mode. League needs to run in Borderless window mode, which is also the mode most overlays need.
• Everything stays on your PC. Clips are saved in your Videos folder (you can pick another folder) and never uploaded. You choose how many games to keep, and the settings show how much space that will take.

Your Settings

The defaults are 15 second clips at 1080p and 60 fps in High quality, with deaths, kills and assists all recorded. You can change all of it:

• What to recordDeathsKillsAssists
• Clip length15 s30 s
• QualityStandardHighMaxExact bitrate
• Resolution and frame rate720p1080p1440pIn-game30 fps60 fps120 fps
• FormatH.264AV1
• Highlights or the full gameOnly the momentsWhole game, moments marked
• Game modesNormal DraftRankedARAMARAM MayhemSwiftplay

Lit options are the defaults. Normal Draft and ranked are recorded by default; ARAM, ARAM Mayhem and Swiftplay can be turned on, each with its own settings and its own number of games to keep.

What It Costs

Frequently Asked Questions