Perfect Mastery: How to Excel in Your Role

With League’s continuous evolution as a game, what is required of every role has constantly changed. One patch top laners are required to be the front line tank that soaks in the damage, but another patch they may be the ones who need to carry the team and be the primary damage dealer. With that being said, there are still aspects of the game that each role needs to understand at all times, regardless of their current role within a team. Through this article, each role will be analyzed, and we’ll be able to analyze what concepts each role must understand in order to get an advantage against their opponents.

Every Role

Before we analyze each role separately, it’s important to analyze and determine what every role needs to be able to do in order to become a competent player overall. For starters, every player should have a decent understanding of objective control and proper map movement. Without this basic understanding, you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage as your opponents will be able to outrotate you and force you to chase them around the map without accomplishing much for your team. After that, it’s important to properly set up for various objectives and the best way to do that is through two things, proper wave manipulation and proper vision control. In terms of wave manipulation, it’s important to manipulate the waves to ensure that the lanes are pushing in your favor to minimize the risk of having to trade a turret for an objective. For vision control, you should ward deep into the enemy jungle to ensure you have knowledge of any attempt to contest the objective while also denying vision around the objective through use of pink wards and sweepers.

Aside from objective control and the steps required to accomplish it, two other important aspects that should be mastered are proper trading and teamfighting. Both these aspects of the game require you to understand when to fight, how long you should fight, how to effectively use your abilities, and how to properly play around your power spikes. With these basic aspects of the game mastered we’re now able to move on to the individual roles.

Top

For top laners, the main aspect of the game that you have to master apart from the aspects that were previously mentioned is understanding how to properly use your Teleport. With teleport becoming a must-have summoner spell for top laners, it’s important to understand when you should be using Teleport throughout the game. For example, during the early game, it’s usually fine to use Teleport to get back into lane. However, by the time your team is able to take dragon, it’s important to start saving Teleport in order to help the team. Apart from this, it’s important for the top laner to understand where he should Teleport in order to give their team an advantage during a teamfight through a devastating flank. Through this, a top laner who may not excel during the laning phase is still able to become a huge threat later on due to the fear of a great flank that can completely change a teamfight.

Probably not the best use of teleport. (Image courtesy of LoL wiki)

Jungle

In my opinion, jungling is the hardest role in the game at the moment. Part of the reason I think this is that the skills and aspects of the game they need to master are vastly different compared to the other roles, simply due to the PvE aspect of the job. Because of this, the first two aspects that must be mastered are proper jungle pathing and being able to Smite at the right time. Proper jungle pathing is important because at the highest level, pathing around the jungle during the early game becomes its own form of mindgame. So with proper jungle pathing, you will be able to jungle with a higher level of effectiveness. Junglers must also understand when the time is right to invade and counter-jungle. This entails knowing the location of the enemy jungler, either through vision or simply understanding the jungle path they’re likely taking. This allows you to deny resources from the enemy jungler and you’ll prevent them from hitting their power spike at a faster rate. This leads to the final skill you need to learn, proper ganking. To properly gank, the jungler must understand the ideal state of a lane to gank, where to enter the lane from based on the state of the lane and their champion, how to properly start off the gank, and finally when to dive the tower to finish off the kill. This allows the jungler to inflict a constant state of fear into the mind of the enemy and become a threat throughout the game because of it.

Mid

As the mid laner you must also understand how to properly Teleport, but because mid laners have a variety of second summoner spells to choose from, they can usually get away from not understanding this concept. However, they need to understand how to roam properly as their position on the map allows them to affect every lane in the game. In order to properly roam, they must understand when the proper time to roam is and they must set it up by manipulating their minion wave ahead of time. Through proper roaming the mid laner will be able to push the advantage in other lanes as well as force the enemy mid laner to answer the wave pushing into his turret.

ADC

As the ADC, the main skills and aspects of the game that you need to perfect are all combat related. These skills are proper kiting during fights and knowing how to properly punish the enemy ADC with your range during the laning phase. Kiting is important for ADCs to perfect because they are often the main target of teamfights and even with the assistance of the support, they can only stay alive for so long. Because of this, it’s important for ADCs to understand how to properly kite as that’ll usually be the difference between winning the teamfight and losing it. Finally, there’s punishing the enemy ADC with your range advantage. The perfect example of what this means is seen in the Caitlyn vs Sivir matchup. During the laning phase Caitlyn is able to abuse her significant range advantage to harass Sivir as she walks up to farm. Through this, you’ll be able to slowly but surely gain an advantage in lane as the enemy will be forced to recall regularly. On the other side of this concept, if you’re at a disadvantage, by understanding how you would get punished you'll be able to avoid that form of harassment.

Vayne: the queen of kiting. (Image courtesy of LoL wiki)

Support

Finally, we come to the support role. While supports are often under-appreciated, they actually play a huge part in the team as they are usually the ones who are able to set up the plays that eventually lead to victory. Because of the important role supports play on their team, they must be able to properly peel for their carries, know when to start a fight during the laning phase and understand when to leave lane to ward. The importance of peeling for your carries is prevalent throughout the entire game. By properly peeling for your carry you allow them to focus more on the enemy then their own safety allowing them to maximize their damage output during fights, which can be the difference if winning and losing a fight. But in order to get to that point in the game, the support must be able to perform the other two skills as well. During the laning phase, it’s often the job of the support to start a fight. Because of this, it’s up to the support to determine the ideal time to start a fight based on the positioning of all the champions in lane, knowledge of where the junglers are, and the general cooldowns of the enemy. At the same time, the support needs to find a good time to exit the lane in order to ward. Proper timing allows you to slowly but surely gain an advantage based on the timing of the enemy support, as their potentially awkward timing may cause their ADC to take free harass during the brief moment of the 2v1.

Conclusion

It’s clear that there’s a lot to understand and master no matter what role you play in order to become a better all-around player. However, if you put in the work to perfect these skills, you’ll be able to see a huge improvement in results because of it. While what’s required for each role may change as the game evolves, it’s still important for the player to master these skills as they can usually be applied to other roles. So as you master these roles, take it into your ranked games and enjoy as you slowly raise your rank to a whole new level.

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