Whether you’re the roam-er or the roamed upon, roaming can decide who wins or loses a game of League of Legends. Let’s go over how roaming works so that you know what to expect in-game.
While lanes are one of the most important features of League of Legends, with your role in the game being codependent on the lane where your champion thrives, games are often decided by players’ willingness to break from the lane structure and help their allies across the map. However, there are always risks associated with roaming: what if you miss important experience and gold from a minion wave? What if the enemy jungler is waiting there to counter-gank you? While roaming may seem like a simple ‘win-more’ strategy from the outside, there’s actually quite a bit of nuance in regards to what roaming is, when to do it, and what roles are best suited for roaming. The goal of this guide is to hopefully shed some light on the in and outs of roaming, making you more prepared to either roam the map or intercept a roaming enemy in your next game of League of Legends.
Before explaining the more nuanced aspects of roaming, it is important to consider what is meant by the term ‘roaming’. In most games of League of Legends, roaming refers to when a champion who has been assigned to a lane leaves their lane momentarily to assist another lane-bound ally. As a result, roaming exclusively occurs during the early stages of the game, as this is when characters are typically bound to their lane so that they can get their first important item before any sort of major map-wide plays or teamfights occur. This definition of roaming also suggests that junglers do not ‘roam’, as they are not bound to any one area of the map and when they do enter a lane, it is typically referred to as ‘ganking’. However, simply knowing what roaming is can only get you so far towards actually understanding it and either executing a roam effectively or countering it.
Given the difficulties associated with roaming that were laid out in the introduction, you might be wondering what makes roaming so worthwhile that it is a staple of League of Legends gameplay. Typically, the goal of roaming is to help one’s allies either kill an enemy or bully them out of the lane so that the roamer’s team may secure an objective, like a turret. Both killing an enemy and destroying a turret have associated gold rewards, so it should be apparent why it is economically important to roam. However, by securing an objective like a turret, you free up the allies in that lane to be able to move around the map more freely, roaming to other lanes themselves or helping slay epic monsters to obtain team-wide buffs. In short, roaming rewards both the roamer and their team if done successfully, so the risks of roaming backfiring are often well worth the potential benefits.
While different roles roam for different reasons, there are a handful of consistent indicators which suggest that it might be a good time to roam:
When your own minion wave is pushed in: In order to ensure that you miss the least amount of experience and gold possible, it is important to time your roams around the state of your minion waves. If you have a wave pushed under the enemy tower, and the enemy wave is about to slowly push back towards you, that is the perfect time to roam.
When the enemy is pushing their minion wave in a different lane: Sitting contrapositive to the above, an enemy who is pushing their wave in and intends to stay there to put pressure against an objective is a prime target for a roam.
When you’re ahead against your lane opponent: If you’ve taken an advantage over your lane opponent, it can be tempting to stay in your own lane and bully them around to the point where they can no longer play the game. However, it can often be more advantageous to take your advantage and help out other lanes who perhaps aren’t doing so well. This will establish dominance not just for you, but for your entire team.
When you’re behind against your lane opponent: Funnily enough, it is also advisable to roam when you’re getting left in the dust by your opponent. Think about it like this: you can either stay in your own lane and keep getting bullied by your lane opponent, or you can try to make a play in another lane that could turn the state of the game on its head.
When the enemy jungler is spotted: While knowing where the enemy jungler is tends to be a valuable piece of information on its own, it also means that you know what part of the map they’re leaving undefended. This means that anyone who could roam to the undefended lane and secure kills/objectives would be significantly safer doing so than if the jungler were there.
When most League of Legends players think about roaming, this type of roam is what comes to mind. What makes roaming from mid-lane to elsewhere so powerful is that mid-laners often have plenty of gold and the highest level on the team in the early game. This puts them in a prime position to overpower anyone else, particularly in a lopsided fight where the numbers are in their favour. Furthermore, if you consider the geographic location of the middle lane, it is quite literally the best position from which one could move to any other point on the map. It is this flexibility that compounds upon the power of someone roaming from the mid-lane, as they could go to either of the other lanes and sway the flow of the game in their team’s favour. This can often amount to their team not only securing turrets, but also the nearby epic monster and potentially enemy jungle camps.
Example of a Good Roaming Mid Lane Champion: Twisted Fate, the Card Master
Twisted Fate’s abilities render him designed to be an effective roaming champion. Breaking down his kit piece-by-piece, his passive allows him to gain more gold per minion killed than any other champion, granting him the potential to hit key items faster than his lane opponent. Given that his Q does sizable amounts of damage in three separate lines, it should be apparent how it is great for pushing minion waves in. His W, Pick a Card, is where this really starts to come together to make a great roamer; his red card lets him push in waves more effectively, his blue card lets him stay high enough in mana to roam frequently, and his yellow card allows him to stun an enemy when he roams to their lane. While his E doesn’t add much in comparison to his other abilities, it does allow him to store up damage to unload once he roams somewhere. His R, Destiny, brings all of these powerful tools together by granting him the ability to teleport around the map with ease. With these tools combined, Twisted Fate emerges as a mid-laner who can roam both easily and effectively.
Another very common type of roaming involves the support going elsewhere on the map to influence another lane. While supports do lack the raw power of mid-laners, making their roams less focused on overpowering an enemy, they also can truly only roam to either top or middle lane, meaning that there is no lack of power where they are headed. Instead of bringing power, support champions often bring loads of crowd control disabilities, ensuring that they can lock down an enemy champion for long enough for their allies to secure a kill. Furthermore, the support leaving bottom lane for a period of time allows their lane partner to gain increased experience while they’re gone, meaning that it puts their lane at a potential advantage upon their return. In this vein, it is also noteworthy that since supports tend to need less gold overall, missing a minion wave or two is not the end of the world for them. Combined with all the aforementioned reasons why roaming is powerful, it should be clear why supports are prime candidates for roaming around the map and influencing the game.
Example of a Good Roaming Support Champion: Bard, the Wandering Caretaker
What makes Bard particularly great at roaming is his passive: Traveller’s Call. As the name implies, this passive compels Bard to travel around the map by placing Chimes in semi-random locations across Summoner’s Rift. Collecting these Chimes has a handful of benefits for Bard, but the most noteworthy for the purposes of this guide is that they grant him a fair bit of temporary out-of-combat movement speed for each one gathered, capping at 80% bonus movement speed once he has collected five Chimes successively. Since collecting these Chimes also makes his basic attacks periodically more powerful, Bard is incentivized to roam around the map and collect them, visiting other lanes in the process. While his E enables this by letting him move quickly through walls, it is his Q and his R which respectively allow him to lock enemies down and temporarily disable turrets that make his roaming impactful. When his W, which allows him to leave a healing pad for his allies on his way out of their lane, is taken into account, it is apparent that Bard is built to roam the map.
This is perhaps the most niche, and accordingly most rare, type of roaming in League of Legends due to one key factor: it requires more organization and timing than any other type of roam. Since roaming efficiently from top lane to bottom lane requires the usage of the summoner spell Teleport, there are several conditions that need to be met for this type of roam to be successful: the teleporter has to have Teleport up, the teleporter has to be outside of the range from which an enemy could cancel their Teleport, the enemy bottom-laners have to have their minion wave pushed up, there has to be something behind these enemy laners to use Teleport on, etc. etc. However, given how strong some top-laners are in the early game, roams like these can often decide the winner of the bottom side of the map, determining who gets to reap objectives, kills, and gold from that area for a large portion of the game.
Example of a Good Roaming Top Lane Champion: Camille, the Steel Shadow
While almost any top-laner who is relatively strong in the early game can utilize this strategy effectively when the conditions are right, Camille has several tools in her kit which allow her to roam better than other champions. Firstly, between her E, Hookshot, and her R, Hextech Ultimatum, she has the potential to lock an enemy in place for a decently long time after she hits level 6. Beyond this, her Q and W grant her plenty of damage and healing, meaning that she is able to absorb damage from the enemy team while dealing it back. Her passive, Adaptive Defense, compounds upon this by making Camille able to flexibly enter any situation with minimal risk. As a result, her ability to roam to the bottom lane using Teleport is among the best of any top-laner.
With everything that has been said, you might be wondering what measures you can take to avoid the enemy executing a successful roam against you. Here are a few ways that you can avoid falling victim to a roaming champion.
Place plenty of wards: By ensuring that you have vision of not only your own lane, but also the jungle and the river, you’ll be able to know when an enemy is moving around the map and coming towards you.
Be willing to retreat: Building upon the above, being willing to run away from an incoming enemy is the only way that you’ll ever avoid fighting them. While killing a few extra minions can be tempting, it’s better in the long run to avoid dying at the hands of an enemy roamer and just back off.
Watch for pings/watch the map: With any luck, your teammates will be willing to use their pings to indicate when an enemy has left their lane. Watch out for missing pings and make sure you’re constantly checking your mini-map to know where enemies are, along with where they are not.
Keep track of both junglers: As was said before, the opportune time to roam is when the jungler is away from the area where a roaming champion wants to go to. Therefore, if you know your jungler is nearby, ping for assistance and you can potentially turn the tables on an enemy roamer. Alternatively, if you know that the enemy jungler is nearby, retreat or brace for a potential brawl in your lane.
From what has been said, it should be clear that roaming is a powerful tool which many champions and roles have access to. By roaming, one can ensure that their team has dominant control of the map, making the game easier to win than if everyone just stayed in their lanes and minded their own business. As a result, if there is one key takeaway from this guide, it is to not underestimate or underutilize the power of roaming. Whether it is your own team using it to help secure kills in your lane, the enemy team using it against you and you circumventing their attempts, or you roaming to aid an ally, keeping the details listed in this guide in mind will help you secure both objectives and victories in your own games of League of Legends!
