Achieving your dream rank requires mastering your chosen role and understanding its unique dynamics and responsibilities. Whether you’re a top laner, jungler, mid, or bot laner, excelling in certain aspects key to your role can disproportionately influence your rank performance and team success.

In this guide, we’ll highlight the top three tips for each role to help you refocus your time and energy to help you climb the ranked ladder and reach that dream rank!

Top Lane

1. Master Map Awareness

In the top lane, being attentive to the map is key to being successful. It can often feel like you’re on an island, but having map awareness is what separates you from the rest of top laners. You must make a habit of glancing at the mini-map between last-hitting minions, especially when trading with your laner. Often, you’ll find it easy to check until you start trading and your focus tunnels onto the enemy Champion. This is a problem that you need to correct! It will save you from that dreaded gray screen on numerous occasions!

You’ll also need to ward effectively. Warding is your first line of defense from ganks and helps you see when your opponent is leaving lane or even warding themselves. Information is key and warding will provide plenty of value!

Finally, you’ll need to master that mini-map to ensure your Teleporting is on point. Pay attention to the map and remember where wards are that you can Teleport to when the time comes so you’re not scrambling looking for a ward when you see the pings and deaths start popping up.

2. Learn Matchups

Again, with the top lane feeling like such an island, there’s no excuse to not learn the matchups. You need to be familiar with your Champion’s ins and outs, and your opponents’ Champions as well. Knowing more about the enemy’s cooldowns and their limitations is a great way to find the gap in their armor! Then it’s a matter of using your Champion’s strengths when the right opportunity presents itself.

Flexibility is key to actually playing out the matchup. You might be familiar with an Ornn vs Renekton matchup from both sides, but that doesn’t mean your opponent will play in the same way. Gauge your opponent and determine how you need to play your lane out to still find those same opportunities, though they may come in different ways!

3. Manage Wave Control

We’ve all been there in the top lane when the enemy gets the better of you and freezes the lane where you feel like you’ll be starved for the rest of the game, and it’s not fun… unless you’re doing it to someone else! Controlling the wave by keeping it close to your tower to force your opponent to overextend is the easiest way to emphasize enemy weaknesses. Learn to count minions and adjust your last-hitting to try to have a slight push towards you so that you can trim the wave and create that freeze. Then call for that juicy gank!

Ultimately you need to push the wave to end up getting to the enemy nexus, so knowing when to push is important too. Shove the wave under the enemy turret when you want to roam, recall, or create pressure on your opponent with a dive. Just make sure you’re doing it safely!

Finally, slow pushing is a great strategy to accumulate your minions to apply a ton of pressure to your opponent and force them to make a decision. Can you dive them? They might back off to avoid the death, but then lose out on ALL those minions to tower. Maybe you’ll just hide in a bush near their tower so they think you’ll dive with your jungler. Or maybe you’re just pretending you’re doing that but actually roaming to an objective!

Improving on these three skills will dramatically increase your game quality and help you win more lanes, and win more games!

Jungle

1. Optimize Jungle Clear

Optimizing your jungle clear comes in many forms, but the combination is what makes an efficient jungler. Planning your route to maximize gold and experience is obviously ideal. Efficient pathing also means you’re using the correct abilities in the correct situation such as area-of-effect abilities.

In the same vein, kiting camps to minimize damage taken is crucial for making sure you’re healthy enough to use your experience and buffs gained to gank for your teammates! Of course, Smite usage is very important to consider and often overlooked. What’s the cooldown, and what objectives are coming up? Is it better to save it to use on an enemy for the damage? These are important questions to ask yourself before using it throughout the game!

2. Tracking and Counter Jungling

While it’s important to make sure you’re being as efficient as possible in your clear, it’s honestly more important to provide your team with information to make the right decisions. Junglers are always a wildcard, and it’s very daunting to play against a jungler when you don’t know where they are. Make sure you’re tracking your opponent for your team and actively communicating their position, so your team knows how to respond. The added benefit of this is you have more opportunities to counter-jungle, increasing your gold income, and preventing your opponent from getting it - twice the value!

Remember, the more information your team has, the easier it is to make the right decisions, and the easier it is to suppress your opponent. Your laners will be able to avoid gank windows, you can follow up with counter-ganks, and you can deny your opponent the resources they need to keep up!

3. Secure Objectives

Of course, what’s probably the most nerve-wracking part of being a jungler, securing objectives. Setting up before with vision, communicating with your team to peel off the objective or burst it down, and mastering those smite combos to ensure you can create as much burst damage as possible at the right time to maximize your chance of winning the smite fight! These are all things that will make a huge difference in your games and can easily help you claw back when behind!

Mid Lane

1. Improve Your Last Hitting Skills

Last hitting as a mid laner is imperative to maximizing your gold income. Mid laners have some of the most expensive items in the game and need to get as much gold as possible to stay ahead of the curve. By mastering last hitting, you’ll have the most consistent method to get gold and be a menace in the mid and late game. A big part of this is wave management. Controlling and manipulating the wave to create windows of opportunity means you can recall to buy items or roam to create pressure, a real win-win!

2. Remember to Ward

Mid lane is unique because there are SO many ways you can be ganked. It’s a very vulnerable place on Summoner’s Rift making it quite the prime place for fighting. Warding often and warding well is the best way to ensure you have as much information as possible at your disposal. You’ll have a better time avoiding ganks, spotting your opponent roaming or recalling, and can hopefully see where they ward to help you avoid their vision when you try to move around the map.

3. Learn Your Matchups

Just like the top lane, matchups are of utmost importance in the mid lane. You must know your Champion’s strengths if you want any hope of being of value to your team. The mid lane is a carry position, and you must be very effective to win games! Your itemization must be efficient, and you must be ready to adapt your playstyle in matchups to increase your chances of winning lane. The more you know about your matchup, the easier it will be to make those tough decisions in each game. Having this knowledge will empower you to anticipate your enemy’s decisions, and ultimately become a fantastic mid laner.

Bot Lane (ADC/Marksman)

1. Get to Know Your Support

It perhaps goes without saying, but in the only lane of two Champions, communication is key. In the pre-game, you might as well get to know your Support. After all, in the laning phase, the Support dictates how the lane is played out. What are their preferences and playstyle? How do they want to play out the lane once you know the matchup? Ensure you’re on the same page before the game even starts!

Don’t forget that synergy doesn’t just stop after the laning phase. It’s important to consider how the Champions synergize as the game progresses and you gather more gold and experience. Sometimes, it’s better to stick together like a dog and a flea throughout the game! Sometimes it’s better to separate and have the Support lead the charge and engage while another teammate might help peel for you on the backline! It all depends on the game, so it’s important to consider how the synergies fluctuate throughout the game.

2. Farm Minions Efficiently

Of course, mastering last-hitting is obviously the most important. You should be aiming for perfect CSing, even if you can’t get them all. Consider you might need to sacrifice a minion or two to ensure you can safely farm more than the one or two you might not have otherwise been able to get if you kept the wave in a risky place. You have to remember that income efficiency is not just about the last hitting, but making sure you can last hit with little risk. The gold spent on a pink ward can provide enough of a safety net to gain more than the ward’s cost, easily!

Of course, kill participation comes from smart engagements and rotations to pick up gold whenever you can. These will make a huge difference over time. Consider roaming to an objective if you’re waiting for another wave to arrive and using that time to set a pick on the opponents who may be checking to see if you’re doing Dragon! These small details can drastically improve your income and can widen the gap in income between you and your opponent!

3. Think About Positioning

Enhancing damage efficiency as a bot laner means prioritizing itemization for your Champion and positioning yourself to not only last longer in fights, but deal more damage. In teamfights, optimal positioning means maxing damage, and minimizing risk. Target high priority threats while still minimizing your chances of death and you’re on your way to dealing tons of damage. A big piece of this conversation is Champion-specific. Consider what combos your Champion might have and leverage them to ensure you can execute the right play in those small windows of opportunity!

Some Champions are more mechanically intensive than others, so remember to really hone your skills with those combos and make the mechanics as second-nature as possible so you can keep more of your brain focused on staying alive, and let your hands do the rest!

Support

1. Maintain Vision Control

Vision control is paramount. Warding involves maintaining vision control with Control Wards, and strategically placing wards to track enemy movements and vision. Roaming is the opportunity for the Support to have more immediate impact on other lanes. The timing, however, is crucial. Make sure you’re communicating with your bot laner to ensure they are playing safe, or recalled when you leave them alone.

Of course, you always need to have an established coverage of warding before leaving to keep that laner safe from ganks, and continually monitor for potential roaming and ganking opportunities; for both your team and your opponent. The more time you can spend in the fog of war, the more pressure you will apply to your opponent, regardless of whether you’re actually even flanking or not. Keep your enemies on their toes!

2. Improve Your Map Awareness

Continuing on warding and roaming as a Support, is the importance of map awareness. This is of course a fundamental skill in League of Legends. Monitor the map, track your enemies, and use deductive reasoning. What camps are up in the enemy jungle? Where does that mean the enemy jungler likely is? Just because a ward doesn’t spot anyone, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful. It might not show you where an enemy is, but at least it shows you where they aren’t! Make sure you continue to develop habits of glancing at the mini-map every few seconds and share information with your team via pings and the chat. Never forget, information is key!

3. Always Have a Purpose

The hardest part about playing as a Support in League of Legends is knowing what your purpose is. For other roles, their tasks are far clearer. Support is much more multifaceted with vision control, peeling, engaging, roaming, and enabling your teammates in any way possible. Obviously prioritizing key tasks like keeping your carries alive is important, but it’s not always obvious how. The first two points highlight how important vision control is, and how it’s a proactive strategy. Warding is always going to provide more value in the future than it does in the present.

Knowing when to peel for your carries with your crowd control and safeguarding them during fights with heals and shields is also a great way to stand out. Are you just healing and shielding your carries on cooldown? Or are you actively paying attention to key abilities that will deal devastating damage to your carries and then shielding them to mitigate those threats?

Support is always a balancing act and quite nuanced. You’ll also need to identify the opportunities to engage and be the first player to commit to a play. Supports must always be adaptable with the dynamics of the game to constantly be a presence and as much of a pain as possible for your enemies to deal with. Enable your teammates and disable your enemies! That’s what it means to be an impeccable Support!

Conclusion

Reaching your dream rank in League of Legends is always a challenging goal, but it’s always attainable with the right focus. Embrace your role and tailor your concentration to capitalize on what makes players excel in your role and put all your energy into those pieces of the game. Continue to fine tune those abilities, and you’ll bring yourself closer and closer to your desired rank with each game!