Know Your Role: The Essentials to League of Legends

At times, climbing in League of Legends can seem almost impossible. But I’ve found that by maintaining a level head and a firm understanding of your role within a team, you can achieve climbing with relatively consistent ease. Over the course of several seasons, through several meta changes, I have found that in order to climb in League the vast majority of players should focus on their macro view of the game and allow your understanding of the game to carry you through the micro decisions.

The point of this guide is to give a detailed breakdown of the basics for each role from a macroscopic perspective that any and every player should know before attempting to summit the ladders of ranked play.

Top Lane: There are many approaches and philosophies that surround the island that is top lane in Legend of Legends. Some top laners believe that it should be a demilitarized zone for junglers and roaming mid laners, leaving the two solo-minded brutes to do their worse against one another in the only remaining true 1v1 lane. Others would rather resurrect the season 6 tank top meta, auto lock in Nasus while their opponent takes Maokai, farming until their eyes bleed and only using their Teleports to catch waves of minions. The reality is that the most efficacious top laners find the balance between all of these strategies.

Key Responsibilities:

Manage pressure top lane to alleviate early pressure bot lane
Establish your team’s win condition and build with that in mind
Play safe and play smart
Give your jungler as much assistance as possible

Almost the entirety of the game, as far as top lane is concerned, is determined within the first 5 to 10 minutes of laning phase. During this time the first ganks are occurring, jungle patterns and pathways are beginning to form, and points of interest/contest are revealed, so you’re gaining early advantages or securing your mid-to-late game. Lane bullies should seek to create a farming, experience, or pressure disparity against their opponents. Mid-to-late game scaling champions should ensure that they are farming well and placing wards in convenient places to avoid ganks and tower dives.

A few examples of top lane bullies include:

And for scaling top laners:

When possible, it is always advisable to place wards deep within the enemy jungle to give your team as much information about the enemy jungler’s whereabouts.

The wards are color coded to match the laning side you are on. The A-position wards are used to keep you safe from ganks on blue side. The B-position wards are for more aggressive plays such as when you are pushing a wave out to back or preparing for a tower dive. Try to pull their jungler top lane early so that they are unable to establish a presence around the bot lane when the first Dragon spawns at 5 minutes. Now the key to this strategy is to not die!

Jungle: I wish I could tell you there’s a foolproof way to ensure that every early game gank will work out, but the reality is most won’t. At least, not to the degree you want them to, but that doesn’t mean every gank was a failure. In the early game, your goal is to ensure the safety of your laners first and then proceed to counterjungle second. There are going to be players that disagree with the last sentence and they would be correct. In some instances, counterjungling and setting the enemy jungler behind can be a very effective way of keeping your laners safe.

Key Responsibilities:

Gank to give your laners an advantage
Counterespionage
Focus on lanes that are going to win you the game
Aim to secure objectives as early as possible

From the very beginning, you should always be aiming to gank a lane to burn a summoner skill or assist in breaking a minion freeze or resetting a wave. Recognizing the signs of a freeze is paramount as a jungler, so if the words freezing or resetting a wave seem unfamiliar to you, Blitz Esports LoL has an amazing Youtube video that explains the basics of minion wave control that you should check out:

As a jungler, you are, in essence, a spy. Information is your tool of the trade and you need to use any and all of it at your disposal. Getting deep wards into the enemy jungle is important, but do it only when safe or with the assistance of a roaming solo laner. Be cognizant of the fact that your enemy might also be doing the same thing to you and warding your jungle. Place strategic vision wards in bushes to either alert you to an early invade or prevent from an aggressive jungler gaining the drop on you.

 

It’s also important to remember as a jungler, you are the tempo setter for your team, and your presence on the map is always going to warrant a reaction from the enemy team. Use that to your advantage! If you know there’s a lane that the enemy team needs to get ahead, gank it once or twice and throw it back into your favor. This will force the enemy jungler to react and begin to camp that lane to shift the balance back into their favor. Dropping wards following a gank will always be appreciated by your laners and will guarantee your work isn’t going to waste.

Bot Lane: With the recent changes to bot lane dynamics, it can be difficult to summarize the goals of a bot lane in this meta. A Garen/Yummi bot lane are going to be aiming at slightly different goals than a Caitlyn/Morgana lane. However, the premises are still the same.

Key Responsibilities: 

Play to your win condition
Play smart and play safe
Coordinate backs
Rotations

It’s a bit elementary to say that two of bot lane’s key responsibilities are to play to your win condition and to play safe and play smart, but that is exactly what is necessary for a bot lane to succeed. In a game with a two five-man squads battling it out on Summoner’s Rift, the highest density of players is in the bot lane, with 40% of the players occupying this area. Add a jungler or two and that’s a quorum. Anything that goes wrong in bottom lane can spell the end of the game before it even starts. As such, you always want to ensure that you are playing safe in order to dissuade any unwanted jungler attention.

However, playing safely doesn’t not equate to playing passively. Exhibit A:

 

This showcases the perfect synergy between a jungler giving his bot lane knowledge that the enemy jungler isn’t near bot, allowing them to utilize their lvl 2 power spike by going all-in after Perkz landed a tornado to prevent Teddy and Mata from hitting lvl 2 first.

In some match-ups, in order to be competitive in the later stages of the game, you are going to need to force a fight bot lane or freeze the wave on your end in order to win the lane.  Coordinating backs and rotations go hand in hand. For the most part, save for a bad trading war, supports and ADCs should be backing at relatively the same time. You want to coordinate your backs so neither player is inconvenienced by sitting on more gold yet less items than your opponents. When backed, don’t always just run straight to lane. Survey the map and determine if your team needs assistance securing an objective. Because bot lane is so much of the team’s damage and utility always, remember to take a mental note of how lanes are progressing and where you should be rotating to help out.

Mid Lane: Last but surely not least we arrive at the coveted mid lane. This is easily the glory position on the team, and it isn’t without its burdens. Playing mid lane, you are kind of like the quarterback of the team. Most of the aforementioned responsibilities from the other lanes hinge upon the mid laner's ability to maintain their lane. For example, junglers can’t invade to set up deep vision into their opponent’s jungle or deny camps and jungling patterns without priority mid lane. Without proper pressure mid lane, both top and bot laners are far more susceptible to roaming ganks and dives from mid lane. As such the key responsibilities for mid lane are as follows.

Key Responsibilities: 

Play smart
Roaming
Maintain priority when necessary

The key to any lane is clearly to play smart. However, this is especially true for mid even more so than it is for other lanes. In mid lane, you have multiple alleys from which you can be ganked from a jungle, roaming support, or even top laner.

In addition to the increased risk of ganks mid laners can some times be responsible for roaming to assist other lanes which comes with its own peril. Finally, the hardest part of playing mid lane is maintaining priority, or at the very least letting you team know when you can’t establish priority in order to secure an objective or back up your team.

Priority, in League of Legends, refers to the ability to reach an objective, brawl, teamfight, or location faster than your counterpart on the enemy team. There’s an awesome video from a youtuber Virkayu that demonstrates how to maintain priority in lanes and its importance:

Hopefully these simple tips will help elevate your understanding of the game and your responsibilities in game. Best luck on Summoner Rift and I hope to see you climbing faster than ever!