In League of Legends, playing bot lane with a duo is one of the greatest ways to climb because you can develop strategies and consistent play from game to game. Unfortunately, we don’t all have the privilege of playing bot lane with a duo partner all the time, and must go about playing a duo lane, as two solos. This is much more difficult because your partner changes with each game and can really make a difference in the result of the lane and game even if you play the exact same way. So, let's go through some ways to clearly develop methods of working together in this partnered lane and take your game to the next level.

Communication

In a partnered lane, it's very important to have good communication. The last thing anyone wants to see is the support engaging a fight when the bot laner is looking to recall. Establishing clear communication is a great way to minimize the chances of sending mixed signals and being in line with your bot lane partner that you have never played with before.

First, using the smart pinging function as often as possible is great for clear and straightforward communication. Here are some ideas for using your pings effectively:

Pinging ‘On My Way’ on a bush to signal that you are going to ward it. Or, to do one better, ping your ward and then ping On My Way to ensure the message gets across. Doing this before moving towards the bush will help preventing you and your partner from both warding the bush at the same time. It happens all too often and can easily be avoided.

Quick and Effective Pings to Communicate

If you want your teammate to ward something, ping for assistance on the bush, or pinging your ward and then the bush for further clarity. This prevent use of chat and delaying the message from having to be typed out, then read by the teammate, and avoiding the chance of the message not even being noticed as pings come with a bright flashing visual and a louder audio cue that will help grab your partner's attention.

If you're looking to freeze the wave, use the careful ping on the minions to alert your partner not to touch them, and if that isn't enough, you can quickly type freeze in chat which should do the trick. If you're looking to do the opposite and push the wave out, then use the assistance ping on the minions to ask for help shoving out the lane. This one is incredibly undervalued and should be used a lot more in games as wave management and recall timing is very important.

More common examples of communication that are often intuitively used are "on my way" pings to signal that you want to engage in a fight. A simple response if you do not want them to go in is the "careful/back off" ping. Using these methods of communication is much faster than typing 'engage’ and having your partner type back 'no'.

Using Pings to Suggest Engaging

For more complex topics for later stages of the laning phase, its usually best to type them out, and the best time do so is when you are recalling and walking back to lane as you don't have much else to do. For example, telling your teammate to save an ability to cancel an enemy's ability in fights is a great tip and cannot really be communicated in any other way. Since it's something that will be useful for the remainder of the game, it doesn't need to be said right before the situation occurs unless your partner needs some reminders.

To stay one step ahead of your matchups, it's a great idea to start discussing the strategy you want to use when your matchup is identified in champion select, or before minions make it to lane. This gives you a lot of time to establish a game plan in how to approach the wave management, creating priority over the lane, or mutually understanding how the matchup should play out and how your other teammates can develop plans to help you out, or push your advantage.

Be clear, concise, and nice!

Positioning

A lot of players in solo queue have very interesting positioning in bot lane to say the least. Sometimes you'll see bot lane ADCs positioning aggressively and forward to show their teammates they want to fight, but all it really does is put them out of position and make them vulnerable. Don't use positioning to communicate. One of the key aspects to good positioning in bot lane is to stay neutral with your partner. Staying neutral basically means that at any point during the laning phase, you should both be in line with each other. This means that if you fall back in lane, you fall back in lane together. If you want to move forward and play aggressively, you do it together. This keeps the lane as simple as possible and always keeps you in the best position to win fights or escape ganks together.

For further explanation, imagine you’re an ADC, and your Alistar support is ahead of you in lane and decides to engage with his W-Q combo. Not only does this dash animation move Alistar further ahead of you, but he already started engaging way ahead of you. Even if the W-Q combo is perfect and gets a double knock-up on the enemies, by the time you follow up to take advantage, the enemies have already come out of the crowd-controlling effect and renders the engage useless. Sure, if you're an ADC with gap closing abilities like Ezreal, it's much easier to follow up, but at the same time, it's probably in your interest to save Ezreal's Arcane Shift to dodge an ability, reposition in the fight, or escape if the fight turns south.

Staying Neutral with Lane Partner vs. Not Staying Neutral

Warding

The perks of playing bot lane with a partner are plenty, but one of my favorites is that you can have the lane lit up like a Christmas tree when compared to Top lane. Since both players can use their Stealth Wards, and can purchase Control Wards, it's easy to have good vision. So where should you put your wards? That's a good question, and something that changes with each game, so the best strategy to work with that fact is to add that to your preparation for the lane. When loading into the game establish where you would like to have vision to maximize your coverage and minimize enemy jungle interference. Keep your Control Ward for more defensive positions where you can easily protect it and try to keep a spare Control Ward for denying enemy vision if you see them place a ward somewhere that will be an issue.

Oftentimes, supports will automatically ward both the tri-brush and the river bush whenever they can to help prevent ganks, but it's important to remember where you actually need the wards because you likely won't need both warded, and especially not at the same time. Communicate so you are on the same page with your partner, and place wards as efficiently as possible to cover all the angles. For example, try warding just outside of dragon pit to see river activity, and if you are playing on blue side, ward around your red buff to see if enemies are roaming through your jungle to gank your lane. Not only does that serve the same purpose as the tri-bush and river bush wards, but it is further away from the lane to give you more time to react to the information the wards are providing you with. Furthermore, these wards are also in less common places, so when the enemy tries to remove the vision with Control Wards or Red Trinkets, they will have a much more difficult time finding them. From there, you can use additional wards for the lane bushes to keep an eye on those pesky hook champions or to prevent lane ganks.

Establish Warding Strategies

Helping Each Other

Remember that in a partnered lane, your teammate's success is your success. Help each other out by making sure they know what they need to do to help you succeed, and vice versa. Not every player knows the ins and outs of every champion and the partner's role. If your support is great at roaming, do your best to manipulate the wave to allow them to roam without losing out on too much experience or gold. If your ADC is a hyper-scaling champion, make sure you keep them alive and prevent them from being denied as much experience and gold as possible to make their scaling that much easier.

Importantly, remember that your partner is a human-being, too! They have feelings and want to win as badly as you do, not helping your teammates to succeed is one thing, hurting them and harassing them for mistakes will never do you any good.

Do What You Can to Help Teammates (with Bard Support)

Preventing Tilt

Inevitably, some games your partner will do something that will really annoy you and hurt your chances of winning but by any means, make sure you prevent yourself from tilting, and more importantly, your teammate. Solo queue can be a toxic place and we each must do our part in making it better. So, start with yourself, and put your teammates above you and treat them better than you would treat yourself. Some people won't learn from blunt criticism, especially in the heat of the moment, so do your best to spin comments in a positive light and focus on the future, instead of dwelling on the past. Often, the best way to prevent yourself from tilting, is to prevent your teammates from tilting! Hard to believe, but you'll be surprised how accurate that is for a lot of players. You're likely one of them so keep positive and motivate your teammates to perform better and they will do their best!

Focusing on Future, Not Criticizing Past Mistake (with Bard Support)

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is very difficult to play a partnered lane with someone you have never met or played with before. It's a great disadvantage and can be enough of a difference to make the game feel absolutely doomed from the beginning. Sometimes people are just not on the same page and can't quite synergize the way the game requires them to succeed, other times, players just don't put in the same amount of effort and expect the same return from their partner. It's a challenging balancing act that other positions in the game don't have to deal with, so do your best to make it as easy for the other person as possible, and they will surely do the same in return.

Do your best and keep asking questions.

Good luck, Summoners!