How to Snowball: a Guide to Toplane Snowballing

Overview

As the toplaner your main goal is to win lane and through the use of your solo gold and experience advantage be either a tank or carry threat for your team. The toplane meta has shifted to Carries such as Irelia and Jax, snowballing a lead on these type of champions can allow you to solo carry games. This guide will walk you through snowballing a game from first blood to destroying the nexus.

First Blood

First Blood can you give a great advantage in lane. First blood is worth 400 gold, and you also gain a huge chunk of experience. A level over your opponent can be worth 500 gold in pure base stats. To gain first blood you must understand your champion’s power spikes. I will be using Darius as an example because he is a notorious early game bully. At level 3 Darius hits his first major spike, he has access to his 3 basic abilities Decimate, Crippling Strike, and Apprehend. Decimate is a high damage cleave, Crippling Strike is an auto attack reset and a 90% slow for 1 second and Apprehend is a 550 range (which is the average range for Marksmen like Ezrael) pull and a 40% slow. On top of this he has his passive Noxian Might where after applying 5 stacks of Hemorrhage through abilities and autos, he gains a large amount of Attack damage (45 at level 3). Combine all of this and you have a first blood waiting to happen. Champions that can obtain first blood easily like Darius are great to snowball with because they can begin get an early and kill and hold the advantage compared to champions like Jax who have to scale.

What to Do You with Your Advantage in Lane

Kills are great but they aren’t the only aspect of snowballing. Now that you have solo killed the laner there are three things you must identify: if the enemy has teleport, if you have vision on the enemy jungler, and how fast you can push the lane. Denying minions will push your advantage even more. Not only will you deny Experience and Gold but by your minions hitting the enemy turret you can reset the lane and freeze the wave in the middle of the lane. Once you come back to lane try to keep your opponent away from your Minions denying gold and potentially denying experience. Constantly apply pressure on the enemy laner, forcing them to either fall behind massively or forcing the enemy jungler to come top. Make sure to grab a pink ward and use your trinket wards to protect you from this scenario. Try to look for proactive teleport ganks botlane. You will most likely have a large level advantage due to your early kill or kills and the fact that botlane shares experience. Teleport’s recent change to 4.5 second channel from 3.5 makes it harder to force teleport ganks, so make sure the enemy has no vision when you do teleport. By this time the game should be transitioning into the midgame and this brings us to our next section.

This ward placement gives you vision of the junglers ganking paths.

Midgame: Split Pushing and Teleporting

Around the 20-25 minute mark, midgame will begin and teams will begin to group up looking for objectives and teamfights. At this point in the game, the game will revolve around you in the toplane. The enemy toplaner should not be able to stop your split-pushing because of your early game gold lead and gold denial. If you successfully ganked mid or teleported bot your other lanes should also have an advantage and be able to 4v4 in the mid lane or in whichever sidelane you are not currently pushing. Split pushing can be very dangerous if not done correctly. No matter how far you are ahead, you're still only one champion.

Do not push past the enemy Tier 1 turrets unless you have complete vision on the enemy team or your team is pressuring in another lane. You will most likely have a gold bounty and a couple of careless deaths can equalize the game for the enemy. The enemy team will have two options, either try and wait out the until the late game or to try and fight your team 4v4 while you are split pushing. Similar to the early game teleports botlane, you should be always looking for a teleport to initiate a teamfight. Your number one goal during the midgame is to gain as much objective control as possible before the late game starts or to end before it begins.

Lategame: Not That Special Anymore

By the 35-40 minute mark the lategame begins. Most champions are nearing full builds and unless you are playing godlike scaling champion like Jax and the enemy toplaner is playing a champion that falls off in the late game like Renekton your lead will most likely be equalized at this stage of the game. Victory at this point of the game relies on you understanding that you are not a gigantic threat like you were in the early and midgame. However, the game should still be in your favor because of the objective advantages in turrets and dragons you obtained earlier.

Conclusion

The primary objective of snowballing is to push your advtange as hard as you can not only in your lane but your allies' lanes as well. If the game reaches the 40 minute mark, be patient and play around your objective advantages.

My name is Alex and I am Diamond V toplane main on NA. My summoner name is Alexmanpersonguy if you have any feedback or questions you can add me. Thank you for reading this article.

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