In League of Legends, synergy in the bot lane is one of the most important things to have on either side of the ADC or Support coin, especially if you have a consistent duo partner to play with. But how do you work on building or refining that synergy? While there are many activities you can do both in and out of the game to work on your synergy, this guide will give a few starting points for both League and non-League of Legends ideas on how you might explore increasing your synergy with your bottom lane partner, and increase your effective teamwork as one unit!

Discuss How You Want to Play During the Laning Phase

This one’s a really easy one to do that helps you and your duo adjust how you play various stages in the game, and it’s something that you can do even before the game starts if you can see the enemy team composition/lane you are facing against. Oftentimes the support dictates the laning phase and what happens around it, so generally you want the support to be the one figuring out how to dictate what happens in the early game.

Some support champions can fulfill multiple roles in the laning phase. A good example of this is Thresh. Thresh is an excellent roaming champion due to his lantern that allows for more movement options for his teammates, as well as the multiple CC tools he has in his kit. However, he also functions very well as a defensive/disengage support in the lane, so he can also work well in matchups where you need your support to protect you during the laning phase while you scale. When facing a scaling enchanter such as Soraka or Yuumi, Thresh would prefer to roam more because they cannot follow his roams well (or at all), meaning you will always have a number advantage where you roam. It also means that the ADC shouldn’t have much of an issue holding off the enemy bot lane in a 1v2. If you have an immobile ADC against an engage support like Leona or Nautilus, as Thresh you will want to stick around in the lane a lot more and only leave lane to match their roams, rather than moving first and leaving your ADC in a 1v2 situation where they can get easily engaged or dove on.

This extends to other playstyles as well, such as a poke play style for example. If you’re running a lane like Caitlyn/Lux, you want to establish that you are strongest when you have the ability to poke. That means that when your abilities are down and you are unable to poke, you may want to play back until you get your next rotations of abilities up and you can’t be punished for having your cooldowns unavailable. Perhaps you’re playing a scaling lane like Lulu/Kog’Maw, so you want to prioritize getting as much farm as you can and only taking guaranteed trades rather than riskier all-ins. The point of these examples being that whatever it is you and your support want to accomplish in lane should be discussed before-hand, that way you are on the same page from the very beginning of the game, which allows you to more easily adjust and play off each other.

Play Parallel to Each Other in Lane

Playing parallel to each other, or otherwise known as tethering to your ADC/Support, is an incredibly important skill in the bottom lane that builds on and tests your synergy harder than almost anything else in this lane. I’ll link a few picture examples, with the green line meaning it’s a good position, and in the case with the red line, a bad example of playing parallel, and I’ll explain the meaning of each picture.

To explain the first picture, this is a pretty classic example of how an ADC and Support would want to tether to each other during the lane. Now, why is this important? It allows you to easily follow each other up if one of you lands a successful CC or engage ability on the enemy bot lane. It also makes it harder for the enemy lane to engage onto you, because if you are on a parallel line like illustrated in these first two images, often times what a support can do is intercept the opposing ADC and CC them while your ADC recovers from the engage and kites back and can start trading onto the overextended enemy support.

Likewise, I linked the second image to show that you can do this in the larger portion of the lane when you start to play bushes. This is extremely effective if you have bush control, as now do you not only have an easy way to follow up each other, but the enemy also can now only read the ADC’s movement which makes it harder for them to predict potential engage/trading windows, and can catch them off guard and net you some easy kills.

This last picture illustrates a bad example of playing parallel. This is bad from the ADC’s perspective because if the ADC is extended past their support and they get engaged on by the enemy support, your own support will not be in position to stop the enemy ADC from DPSing their own ADC and they will likely either lose summoner spells or die. From the support’s perspective, this is bad because if they get a good engage angle, their ADC will have a hard time following it up because the enemy support has a much easier time stopping them from hitting the enemy ADC due to your ADC being so far away from the engage. Oftentimes this is what I see a lot of bot lanes who don’t have good synergy with each other do, and it makes even favorable matchups potentially loseable due to poor positioning on either the ADC or the support’s part.

An important thing to keep in mind is whether playing with a duo or solo queueing, make sure to play off each other and try to read each other’s movements, as that is a way to nonverbally communicate with each other how you want to play the lane. Sometimes it can lead to frustrations where you might not be able to play your lane optimally, but remember to keep your cool and understand that it’s better to suboptimally survive and farm a lane rather than trying to force the optimal play that could get you killed and guarantee you lose the lane instead.

Play a Cooperative, Non-Competitive, Non-League of Legends Game Together

This one seems like a weird piece of advice for a League of Legends article, but it was one I had to do over the summer while playing on an amateur team and I actually think it’s a really solid way to figure each other out more on a deeper level outside of the game, how you communicate with one another, and how you each problem solve both individually and as a unit. I will say that this is focused more towards you duo queueing with someone and obviously you can’t practice this with a random teammate, and it can be more or less effective depending on how well you know your support outside of the game, but as someone who plays at a competitive level, there are oftentimes a rotating door of players that you have to get to know and trust.

Doing this as an exercise in building up that trust as well as just getting to know your fellow players better I think is really good, and I think it’s important to also make it a game that is not competitive in any way. This isn’t about showing how good you are at some multiplayer FPS game or another MOBA, this is about forming and strengthening the bonds between you and your duo in a low-stress situation. I think multiplayer RPGs and puzzle games are both really good choices, with some options including Portal 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Divinity Original Sin 2. You need to ensure that everyone has autonomy over solving problems in these games and that you are truly working together, rather than doing separate tasks and then coming together at the end and working together for a fraction of your total play time.

Another important thing to keep in mind if you pursue this tip is that you should be constantly thinking about how you can bring these lessons and bonding moments back into League of Legends. A simple example can be understanding the value of cooperation in setting up properly for a fight in an RPG to make it easier, and then taking that same method of communication you had with your partner for setting that up and putting it into League so you can work better together on setting up things like a dragon or a dive play. Again, this is for you and your duo partner to explore methods of communication outside of the context of actively being in a League of Legends game where you can more passively analyze how you do things, and then being able to implement those observations back into your active League games.

Conclusion

There are many more activities or exercises you can do that can increase your synergy with your bot lane partner, this guide mostly functions as a starting point to get you thinking about how you can apply various communication and strategy applications both in and out of game into your League of Legends thinking and gameplay, whether it be through discussion of how you want to play a match out before it starts, learning how to play parallel to each other in game, or even working on your communication and teamwork on a different game altogether and bringing it back into League. There are many methods, so make sure to find one that best suits both of you!

Best of luck on the Rift and stay safe out there!