Analyzing the Strength of Each Role in Solo Queue in League of Legends

3 Oct 20

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Analyzing the Strength of Each Role in Solo Queue in League of Legends

Which role is strongest? Let's talk about that!

Be you a new player to League, or amongst the old guard, a question that often gets raised is, “What’s the strongest role to carry from in League?” Well, that’s not a simple question to answer and it’s a very personalized one. Some players are better at certain aspects of the game than others, and depending on your personal strengths you may find success with one role over and another. After 10 seasons of ranked play however, the community has a good gauge of understanding with the board stroke strengths of each role and that helps us define what makes each role successful.

So, that’s what we’ll be doing today. We’ll break down each role and what makes them effective or ineffective in the Solo-Queue atmosphere. We’ll also talk about what player concepts you need to have mastered to be successful at them! Finally, we’ll slap them all on a tier list that breaks down their impact and strength in Solo-Queue!

The Top Laner

With the widest cast of Champions to choose from leading to tons of unique playstyles, one would think Top Lane could be one of the strongest roles to climb the Solo-Queue ladder with. But, in truth, its diversity doesn’t carry it away from its rather polarizing weaknesses. Top Lane is a very match-up dependent lane, more so than the other lanes. And if you find yourself on the countered side, there’s little that you can do to overcome your matchup without jungle pressure. Sure, mistakes happen and you can make plays off of your opponents mistakes, but if you’re looking to surely win a game, you want to be in the driver's seat the whole time, not being the one given directions and waiting for mistakes.

And to the point of jungle pressure, there’s little motivation for a Jungler to apply pressure to Top Lane with how heavily impactful Dragons are. Junglers are more incentivized to apply pressure Mid or Bottom since those lanes will give them control over the river around Dragon and allow them to safely control vision and muscle their opponents away. Sure, Rift Herald is on your side, but Herald is often a gate-opening objective that is used to pressure further leads, or it’s a response objective taken to answer a lost Dragon or pressured Bot. Unless your Champion is a high snowballing monster with an already established lead, you can expect little effort from your Jungler to help you win your lane in Top.

So, what do you need to have mastered to perform successfully in Top? Well, first and foremost is wave management. Proper wave management allows not only you to catch as much gold as possible, but it also enables you to set up lane pressure to allow you to roam away from your lane. You want to have mastered fast and slow pushes at minimum to allow you to help your Jungler. While mastering wave freezes allows you to set and control leads over your opponent.

The second skill to have mastered is trading. You’ll want to know what situations you need to look for a trade in, as well as know when your Champion is most effective at trading. Sometimes this is item dependent, other times it’s level dependent. But being aware of these moments allows you to properly swap blows with your opponents to set up for big plays.

Finally, knowing how to split-push and apply side pressure is extremely important. If you’re utilizing Teleport or are a strong split-pushing Champion like Tryndamere or Fiora, you’re going to want to be on the opposite side of the map as the biggest objective. So, Top if Dragon is up, Bot if Baron is up. Your pressure in taking towers and forcing a response out of your opponents is the goal here. Either they come to you, allowing your team to poke/fight them. Or they stay and you take their base.

Overall, Top’s map pressure is very situational and is more built off of dominating your opponent and/or getting a good matchup. It’s an island lane and very much 1 vs. 1 the majority of the game since it’s away from the biggest map objective early in Dragon. But it is, perhaps, the most snowball oriented of all the lanes, and if you master some of its most rewarding Champions, you can quite literally 1v9.

The Jungler

The strategists of League, Junglers have a plethora of Champion options and playstyles to make their own. But, at their core, they’re the ones that have the most control over the flow of the game. This can come from ganks, to sneaky Dragon secures, or through depriving the opponent Jungler of all their resources through efficient farming.

How you control the flow of the game as a Jungler, depends on your approach and Champion. Junglers like Master Yi, Kindred, and Karthus make their presence felt through fast and hard farming which leads them to securing Dragons, Rift, and Scuttle grabs quicker than most. These Champions are also ‘knock-out punch’ Champions as they hard scale and can close long lasting games effectively. Champions like Amumu, Jarvan, or Zac excel at being the initiator of ganks, dives, and late-game teamfights. Their presence is felt more within a group setting as they can come in from odd angles, pick off opponents, and disrupt what would be otherwise straight forward fights. But, if you’re more of the “me-carry’ mindset, there are Junglers to fit your bill. Lee-Sin, Kha’zix, and Rengar to name a few are all hard snowballing monsters that can insta-delete squishy opponents while also ganking in non-traditional angles. What they lack in defense, they make up for in damage.

To jump into our first needed Jungler skill, to play any of these styles effectively you have to have an objective focused mindset as a Jungler. Or, if you’d prefer, a Dragon focused mindset. With Smite in hand, you have the surest way to secure the game’s biggest objective. Dragon’s impact cannot be dismissed as, statistically speaking, the team that secures the first Dragon wins a higher percentage of their games.

The second skill you need to have is that of a map-wide eye. Meaning that, at a glance, you should be able to know where you and everyone else needs to be for the best play available AND you need to be able to know how your opponent is going to respond to beat them in pace. This also carries into early game pathing. Based on your opponent’s Champion and items, you should be able to know and counter whatever route they plan to take, and then you must feed that information to your team. Your analytical map-eye becomes a source of knowledge for your team and their ultimate prevent defense.

The last skill you need to have as a Junlger is selflessness/selfishness. I know it’s weird to say you need to have both. But depending on your style of Jungle Champion, you need to know when to have the selfish/selfless mindset and be aware of who the game’s gold will be most effective on. So, if you’re a tanky Champion like Zac or Sejuani, sure gold and stats help you, but you get more done through your abilities than you do raw stats. If you’re a Lee-Sin or Kha’zix though, if your damage is what is needed to carry fights, then you need to be able to tax minions, kills, and camps away from your team to sometimes propel yourself forward to be the team’s carry.

With all that said, Jungle is the strongest role to influence the map. And if you can disable and enable multiple people from role, then it’s bound to be extremely effective to climb with in Solo-Queue.

The Mid Laner

Home to Mages, Assassins, Marksmen, and Fighters, Mid Lane has a wide cast of high-damage and high-crowd control Champions that can take over the game at a moments notice. But, to truly excel at perhaps League’s most pressured lane. You’ve got to have not only rock solid Champion fundamentals, but also that map-wide eye so you can apply your pressure as necessary.

Like Junglers, Mid Laners have a ton of ability to influence the map as a whole from the early-to-mid game. Champions like Talon, Twisted Fate, Galio, and Pantheon all call the Mid Lane their own. And hey, what do each of these Champions have in common? Ultimates that allow them to traverse the map quickly, or abilities and overall speed that allow them to do the same. So, a huge part of a Mid Laner’s mindset should be moving and roaming in correct times to apply pressure against their opponents.

But, not every Mid Laner can roam super effectively. Champions like Malzahar, Heimerdinger, and Anivia, who are hard pushing control mages present a playstyle that’s about lane pressure and teamfight domination. What they lack in this map wide mobility, they make up for in hard hitting crowd-control or massive zone control to establish control over important neutral objectives nearby their lane.

It’s on you to find your style in Mid and the above may not even be your flavor. I know plenty of Marksmen and Top mains that rock their Lucian and Irelia picks Mid simply because they can be effective solo-laners. But regardless of pick, there are some core concepts to have mastered...

So, what skills do you need to be a masterful Mid? Well, first and foremost, solid Champion mechanics. Mid, like Top, is extremely snowbally. You want to have your Champions MASTERED before you carry them into ranked. Top Laners can get away with their experience being weaker sometimes since there are plenty of stat stick/tanky Champions to fall on in unfamiliar matches. But Mid Laners, can’t fall back on tank picks. They have to be the big teamfight presence by supplying damage for their team. So, have your Champions down pat to know their matchups, limits, and overall effectiveness game to game.

The second skill is that map-wide eye we mentioned. Mid is the heartbeat of the Rift. And with Herald and Dragon looming close throughout the early game, you want to have solid control around Mid. So, this means being your own Support and keeping up regular vision, playing safe around objective timers, and constantly communicating when you can’t see your opponent. It also means having roam timers mastered. If you know the states in which your Champion can roam away from lane to influence another, you can apply pressure against your enemy’s weaker laners and boost your own team with kills and assists.

The third skill you need to have mastered is teamfighting. Teamfighting as a Mid Laner is largely Champion dependent, so this doubles with Champion Mastery, but you have to understand what your role is in ever single teamfight. As mentioned, you’re typically the second or first biggest damage source on your team as a Mid Laner, and if you botch your positioning or are poked out early before a fight, then you’ve costed your team your presence and taken that damage off the board.

The Bot Carry

Be you Mage or Marksman, the being a carry in the Bot Lane often means you are looked at as the knock-out punch of the game. Jungle and Mid are the body blows. They want to weaken the enemy over the course of the early game. But you, my friend, are the hook that ends the match. Funneled farm, given a safer laning phase thanks to having a Support for peel and disengage, or being enabled by said Support to get omega-fed, Bot Carries are given a ton of trust and expectation within Solo-Queue.

Unfortunately, this expectation comes with fragility. You aren’t tanky, you don’t have a ton of burst (minus select mages), and you truthfully don’t ‘come online’ until your second or third items. Further, your mobility is often short and tends to not be great at escaping from the likes of Zac, Jarvan, or Sejuani. Even further, you rely heavily on your team to act as a wall between you and the enemy allowing to DPS down your foes and carry fights.

If you miss the peel, lack the situational mobility, or misposition yourself, you’re often going to go grey-screen when playing carry. It’s such a team reliant position that it’s hard to fully recommend climbing with this role on your lonesome and often players partner with a Support duo to increase synergy and effectively mitigate some of the role’s inherent weaknesses through added coordination. But, again this is a knock-out role. If you trust yourself and your mechanics, Bot Carries can win most games if they’re given the time to find their footing.

The last big negative for a Bot Carry is their lack of map influence during the lane phase. Carries are often focused on soaking waves and gold, so they don’t want to wander too far from lane unless it means free kills or dragons. Ventures away from lane mean less time earning gold which prolongs those ever important item power spikes.

So, what skills do you need to play Bot Carry? Well, first and foremost, you need to be excellent at farming and wave-management. Like the other lanes, you want to receive more minions than you give and to always have an edge in CS on your opponents. That leads to an edge in items, which leads to an edge in trading, and some incremental edges are what make up the difference in those clutch 2v2s or 3v2s in Bot or around Dragon.

The next skill you want to have mastered is positioning. Teamfighting and dueling are all about how you position as a Carry, and you want to be in the best spot to maximize your safety and your DPS. You play fights front-to-back, meaning you kill what is in front of you, and guide yourself to the backline safely. For Marksmen, this is particularly easier since they have overall better DPS than compared to Mages, and are given tank-shred and crit-based items to make cutting down frontliners easy-peasy.

The last skill you want to have mastered as a carry is a mental skill. You want to be untiltable. Regardless of your Champion or class, as a Bot Carry, you again are the hook that can turn a game if a fight swings just ever so slightly in your favor. Being untiltable and always looking for that clean hook will put you into winning mindset and will literally will you into winning more games. It also doesn’t hurt that you typically only get better as the game goes on as, especially again for Marksmen, your kit is entirely balanced around items and it’s only natural to build those up as the game drags on. This point is so even for aggressive early game focused Champions like Lucian or Draven, but even more-so for scaling Champions like Kog’maw or Vayne.

The Support

Carrying their carry, keeping vital objectives in vision, maintaining control over the lane through pressure and positioning, tracking the enemy Jungler’s movements, calling for dives, holding waves, peeling for your partner, roaming to pressure Mid Lane, contesting Scuttle Crab with your Jungler, engaging great fights… And that barely scratches the surface of the expectations that a team has for their Support. Let alone what a Carry has for their Support.

Anyway, Supports are the tempo in Bot Lane. Carries might do the damage and be the knock-out punch but Supports are the jabs and the body blows that open the opponent up before they can land the literal one-two with their carry for a clean victory in lane.

So, what does it take to be a Support player? Well, I mentioned some above, feel free to unpack those, but I’ll give the big tips here.

Great Support players manage cooldowns. From Summoner Spells, to Ultimates, to vital abilities in lane, great Supports will not only know how long each thing is on cooldown, but they’ll also punish their opponents when they’re down. This is vital to setting the tempo and controlling the pace of the lane to enable a Carry to come online.

The next great skill is being a master of warding. Keeping up wards around Dragon during lane phase, over tricky walls when up against very uniquely ganking Junglers or maintaining brush control against Mages that look to punish positioning is a skill that can never go unsung. On top of this, clearing the enemy’s wards or tracking where they are is equally as vital as this information is key to receiving pressure from your Jungle in the form of ganks, and allows them to path unseen giving less information to the enemy team.

The last skill that a Support needs is an eye for big plays. Be you playing a Mage, Enchanter, Tank, or Fighter, making plays in what the Support life is all about. Supports often lead the charge when taking fights 2v2, or they’re the ones locking down a lone wandering enemy to allow the team to pick them off. But those big kill plays aren’t the only things that matter. Perfectly timed shields, ults, or crowd-control to allow that carry to live with a sliver or health, or the cheeky hooks to blow Summoners also fall into the big-play category. It’s on you to have an eye for this and to be in the right place at the right time to take over the game!

Where Do They All Rank? / The TLDR!

So, where does that put every role? Well, I’ll show you here. From the top of the chart, to the bottom you’ll find Jungler > Mid = Support > Carry > Top. Why? Well, Jungle sets tempo across the entire map and can literally affect every lane. Mid and Supports have the ability to dominate their lanes, and the entire bottom half of the map. Carries are the knock-out punch capable of plays, but they need more from their team to get them there. While Top lane is almost always trying to outplay and snowball over their opponents.

Signing Off!

I hope this helped you find your new role or affirm yourself in the role you currently play! Even more so, I hope the skills listed here help you find where you truly belong or help you recognize something you need to add to your play. Now, with all that said, get out their and tear up the Rift!

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