Hello and welcome back to Part 2 of my guide to getting through Silver. In this article, I’ll be talking briefly about the five roles and which ones are best for climbing as well as how to choose an optimal champion to maximize your chances of winning.

I was going to write a part on choosing your role before this one but there seems to be many resources readily available on which roles are best for climbing in solo queue so I’ll just speak about it briefly. In my and the general population’s opinion, the best two roles for solo queue are jungle and mid lane. Jungle is probably the most influential as you’re able to freely influence the entire map as part of your role while in the other positions you’ll be spending the majority of your time farming minions in lane. The next most influential role is mid lane as you have to option to roam to either side lane or into the enemy jungle. You’re close enough to each of these locations that you can very quickly react to opportunities that present themselves. The other three positions are all limited by distance from the map as well as the need to stay in lane to farm. Top lane players are limited by their teleport cooldown. Support players can make roam plays but leave their marksman exposed in lane. Marksmen players are typically looking to stay in lane and farm as much as possible. I personally queue up as mid lane and jungle but any role can be successful if you know how to effectively influence the map.

After you’ve chosen which roles you want to play, you can decide on champions to learn for those roles. To that end, I definitely have to recommend taking a look at win rates for specific champions within specific roles which can be found on many different websites such as champion.gg and leagueofgraphs.com. Champions with high win rates typically give you a higher chance to win once you’ve learned to play them well. Sure, it can be super fun to play Lee Sin jungle or maybe you’ve been dying to try out Miss Fortune support but you’re statistically giving yourself a handicap. Besides looking at win rates, I typically look for a champion that has at least one of four characteristics.

The first characteristic that I look for is lane dominance. A good example of a champion that excels at this is Pantheon. He has targeted damage ability as well as a targeted stun that makes it extremely easy to pressure lane and potentially get kills. On top of that his ultimate allows him to roam to one of the other lanes easily. Lane dominance is the earliest step a player can take to winning the game. By shutting down your lane opponent and then using your advantage to snowball other lanes, you set yourself up for an easy victory. Other examples of these types of aggressive laners are Kayle and Miss Fortune whom along with Pantheon, have an easy time dominating their lane opponent and as a result enjoy a win rate significantly higher than fifty percent. I only look for this characteristic for champions I'm planning to lane with. I think the next two traits are far more important for junglers.

The second characteristic that I look for is strong single target crowd control (CC) abilities. Examples of this kind of champion are Skarner and Malzahar. Each one of these champions has an ultimate that is targeted onto specifically one champion but is guaranteed to lock them up for a period of time. By using your ultimate, you’re basically throwing up a huge indicator to your team that they should kill the person that you targeted, and if that’s an enemy carry in a late game scenario, you've basically just won the game for your team. Of course it’s not always going to be that easy and there are a lot of factors involved, but by having an easy point and click disable, you give yourself an edge over maybe someone like Varus that has a similar ultimate that is used to disable but since it is a skillshot, is far more likely to fail. Other examples of these single target CC type champions are Vi and Warwick.

The third characteristic that I look for is champions with strong late game team fighting potential through area of effect (AOE) CC abilities. Three examples of this kind of champion are Amumu, Kennen, and Galio who each have ultimates that disable in a big circle. Galio actually currently has the highest win rate of all top laners which is probably something I (and most likely you) did not expect. In a late game situation, the team that can kill the enemy carries fastest is probably going to win and having abilities that lock up multiple targets at once facilitate this. Another example of this kind of champion is Morgana who also has an AOE CC ultimate.

The last characteristic I look for is ability to influence the map easily. Several champions have abilities that allow them to cover great distances very quickly which gives them an edge when they move to influence other areas of the map. Examples include Quinn and Karthus. Quinn's ultimate allows her to move at high speeds which opens up windows where she can gank easily without sacrificing farm in her lane. Karthus' ultimate allows him to deal damage to all enemy champions from wherever he happens to be on the map which could be the decider in whether your team gets a kill or not. I would tend to be careful with this trait however as roaming and making educated plays takes a lot of practice and on the fly decision making. You may put yourself in a bad position through poor execution and come off worse as a result. This trait is extremely rewarding in getting your team ahead but could lead to you getting punished instead.

Many champions actually fit into more than one of these categories which makes them extra suitable for solo queue. My personal favorite and the champion I used to get to Gold this season is Kennen. I saw him played during the World Championships, bought him, played a couple of normal games with him, then climbed from Silver I to Gold on a seven game win streak. Kennen is kind of a hybrid of all three of the categories I described above as he can easily dominate lane thanks to his ranged auto attacks and he has both single target CC and AOE CC from his passive and ultimate. Miss Fortune is a hybrid of lane dominance through her Double Tap (Q) and late game team fighting thanks to the strength of her ultimate. Morgana has strong single target CC because of the duration of her Dark Binding (Q) as well as strong AOE CC from her ultimate. Annie is similar to Morgana as she has targeted CC on her Disintegrate (Q) and AOE CC from her ultimate and Incinerate (E).

As a general rule of thumb, I try to play lane dominant champions in lane with some kind of easy to use CC and for the jungle I generally play champions with strong CC.

Even though I just got done talking about how specific champions with certain characteristics are preferable choices, that shouldn’t discourage you from playing champions that you think are fun and you can win with. I’d much rather have someone that averages a seventy percent win rate with Cho’Gath over sixty games as opposed to someone being forced to first time Yasuo because it happens to counter the enemy Gnar. If you’re comfortable with an off meta champion, by all means you should play it instead of a more meta champion. Another prominent example of this is Faker who is currently playing in NA Solo Queue during his World Championship run. He currently has an eighty-five percent win rate with Ryze over twenty-six games which is insane considering Ryze has the lowest win rates in both the top and mid lane across all champions. If you’re struggling to find a champion to main, try and follow my guidelines. However, if there’s one champion that you just love to play, play that champion as perfectly as possible and it will be just as good as any other meta pick.

I'll just include my own personal recommendations for strong solo queue champions at their positions. I think they are strong enough to carry on their own and offer powerful set up tools to aid your team. They should also be fairly simple to pick up with a little bit of practice.

Top: Kennen, Malphite
Jungle: Skarner, Zac
Mid: Kennen, Annie
Marksmen: Miss Fortune, Jinx
Support: Janna, Blitzcrank

That concludes the second part of my series on climbing from Silver to Gold. If you enjoyed my content, please toss me a follow on Twitter.

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