The Mindset: Picking the best Top Lane Champion

Champion select is an important, but often overlooked element of strategy in league of legends. If your team picks champions who work well together with common goals in mind, you have a higher chance of being able to accomplish your goals and win games. While having effective champions in each role is crucial for success, I believe that the top-lane champion has the greatest amount of influence on team compositions, due to the wide variety of champions and builds the lane allows.

Additionally, thanks to this versatility, the top lane player is able to fulfill the greatest number of roles on a team through an effective champion selection. Here are some things you can think about in champion select to improve your chances of winning. These tips are mostly for pre-made 5-man teams, but can also be helpful for solo queue. They’re also best for players like me, who are dedicated to playing and specializing in top lane primarily over other roles in the game.

As a top laner, there are generally 3 basic goals you should have when considering who you want to play in a game, and I’ll discuss each one in turn. (Note: these goals are easiest to achieve when your last or second-to-last pick, since you’ll be able to see who everyone else is playing.)

The first goal every top laner should try to satisfy is fulfilling a need on their own team. Does your team need more damage or more protection for your carries? Is your team focused on poking the enemy down while chipping away at towers, or do your teammates’ champions do best in all out engagements (which I lovingly refer to as “pressing R and running at each other)? For me, I usually look at who my jungler is playing to make this decision. If I see that they’re playing a champion who does a lot of damage but can be squishy late game (like Lee Sin or Fiddlesticks),I’m more likely to consider a tanky top champion like Malphite, Shen, or Galio.                        

If I see that my jungler is playing a champion who brings a lot of tankiness and CC but lacks damage (like Maokai, Nautilus or Amumu), I consider playing more damage-focused champions like Riven or Rumble.

The reason for this is that usually, a well-balanced team is successful and since the top laner and jungler primarily make up the front line, I feel that it’s important to balance each other out without worrying too much about the rest of your team (who will probably be primarily focused on damage or utility).

The second goal every top laner should have when picking their champion is shutting down some aspect of the enemy team. For example, if you see that your opponents are running a composition that revolves around a single champion, an example being the (in)famous “Protect the Kog’Maw” composition run successfully by high level teams and not-as-successfully by lower level teams a few months ago, you may want to consider a champion who is effective at shutting that particular champion. In the example above, Jax  would be a good pick here because he has high single target damage to kill Kog’Maw while his E allows him to dodge Kog’s auto-attacks.

When trying to fulfill this goal, I often find myself looking at the enemy AD carry or my top lane opponent, since experience tells me those are the two champions I’m most likely to encounter and be forced to deal with throughout the game. Or, you can pick a champion who nullifies your opponents ‘primary strategy. For example, picking Wukong to hard initiate against a team who is built around prolonged fights and poking. Understanding this goal is something that requires a lot of experience and a healthy champion roster.

The third goal you should think about in champion select is whether or not a champion you’re considering can be independent during the laning phase. The reason behind this consideration is simple: If you get shut down in lane, you will lack the experience and gold necessary to be effective at achieving your other goals as the game progresses.

What do I mean by self-sufficient? To me, self-sufficiency means that your champion can either win or go even in the lane without any help from your jungler or mid laner. While this consideration is obviously more poignant in solo queue where you won’t be able to communicate with your jungler and mid very easily as opposed to in an arranged team, it’s important to think about this every time you play top.

While league has very few (if any) “hard” counter-picks, every champion is susceptible to hard match-ups that will make it difficult to farm and level up as needed. Things to consider here are related to the act-of-laning, like the way in which you and your opponent do damage (do any of their skills negate yours, or vice versa?) and the differences in auto-attack range (many melee champions struggle against ranged champions due to their inability to farm without being at risk for harassment), as well as things related to the overall game, such as ability to roam and force objectives; does your champion or the enemy champion have a way to quickly move across the map? A low cooldown, high damage ult or way to initiate skirmishes?.  Or maybe they are capable of pushing quickly and safely on their own, Nidalee  and Teemo being great examples.

 

Ideally, you want to pick a champion who can meet all three of those goals, but sometimes, your champion pool or other factor may stop that from being possible. In that case, try to focus on being independent in lane and adding something to your team. Learning how to pick the best top lane champion takes time and experience, so don’t be afraid to experiment.

As long as you think about the above goals and try to reach them every game (or, if you don’t meet them, think about potential other picks that may have been more successful), you’ll make better and better decisions, which will lead to more wins and an increased satisfaction with your understanding of the game.