To cut to the chase, we sat down with Cristian “Palafox” Palafox on his general list of Champions to effectively climb and improve on the ranked ladder. It’s short and quick but will give you exactly the Champions that will definitely let you build the fundamentals to become a strong mid laner.

Sylas

Palafox: “For Sylas I think he has pretty good waveclear, you don't really need to think too much, you just fight a lot.”

There are many basic fundamentals to explain when laning, but one Champion that embodies and forces you to proactively play and learn the game is Sylas. For Palafox, Sylas’ waveclear gives him a lot of advantages, because the faster you can clear waves, the more you can use that time to do other things on the map as well as deny your opponent the same opportunity. In a very broad way of looking at the value of waveclear, if you can shove in a lane fast, someone has to deal with it or the gold disappears to tower damage and the minions chip away at the tower. It’s a basic kind of way to pressure your opponent into losing priority on the map.

For another, the most unassuming part of his mastery curve is considering his skill leveling order depending on the matchup. Consider the following.

Maxing Sylas’ Q – Chain Lash is safer into matchups where you need to farm from a distance, but also yields the maximum damage when maxed first, but will often be difficult to hit without landing your other abilities or your opponent stepping into it. In some ways, it could be considered the highest risk to max first.

Maxing W – Kingslayer is more or less something used in extended trades, where Sylas may need the sustain but his burst isn’t enough to survive a fight. It also is the easiest source of damage without needing to aim anything, valuable in melee matchups where you might struggle to hit a highly mobile melee Champion.

There are also situations where Sylas considers spreading his points out more (e.g. 3 points into Q into W max), as well as maxing his E second for the lower cooldown on his dash and more burst than maxing Q into W. But what I’m getting at here is as a Champion whose primary win condition is going in and making aggressive trades/plays like Sylas, you want to maximize his fighting potential as much as you can. If you’re constantly trying to force fights, you’ll generally improve and learn what kinds of smaller optimizations you can make like skill orders to edge out advantages against different opponents. Eventually, Sylas becomes a Champion that you can kind of play by feeling and understanding what you need to build and max because he encourages you to think about the situation at hand (not to mention, thinking about what ultimates to steal at the given time).

Katarina

Palafox: “For Katarina, this Champion is really good at roaming, even if you're not the best laner, not good at CSing, you just do your best, and look for plays to roam on, and you just click all your buttons (laughs).”

Without offending every Katarina main (well, I’m sure they understand what Palafox means with how much it might feel like button mashing when multiple skills get refreshed and daggers are all over the place), I think what we can get at is the importance of roaming. Compared to our previous example Sylas (who incidentally can be played as an assassin), many assassin Champions tend to be on the weaker side of waveclear lest they become menaces. Part of the reason is that they often have to commit their main killing tools to clear the wave and may be forced into a situation that prevents them from hitting both their opponent and the minions.

Here comes roaming, a rather notorious part of being a mid laner, particularly assassin mid laners, where your best opportunity to get leads is on other parts of the map. Since the dawn of Katarina’s original kit to her current iteration, she’s always been a very feast or famine Champion, where most of her gold is probably in kills and if you fail to get those kills, you’ll feel very useless.

What playing Katarina will teach you is to be constantly proactively looking for plays around the map and not simply fights in the mid lane where some mid laners might simply sit there for the first 20 minutes of the game. Mid lane has one of the easiest times reaching either end of the map, which gives them a lot more chances to participate in skirmishes and pick off opponents roaming in the jungle or pushed too deeply into a lane.

You might have noticed a trend where assassin players might be like 100 CS down on their opponent but have like an enormous amount of kills and end up winning the game anyway and seemingly climbing higher than what their actual skill may suggest. A lot of that comes from both a mechanical sense but also an understanding of roam timing and taking opportunities on the map versus maximizing only your farm. While ideally the best mid laners want to do both, you’ll learn a lot playing Katarina simply from being proactive on the map.

Yone

Palafox: “Yone is really simple, you just need to farm and get levels on this Champion, and you can be a warlord.”

Now as soon as I tell you about roaming to learn and not simply farming, we have Yone, a Champion who is incredibly reliant on his item powerspikes to get to the ever-coveted 100% crit rate and lower cooldown Q – Mortal Steel. Crit-based carries which are often more or less near exclusive to marksman also applies to both the wind brothers. You have to think of it like the lower your critical rate, the less likely your full damage is going to completely pop off and delete Champions, and usually Yone only gets to that point around his second or third item where he usually maximizes his crit rate.

Probably the most basic thing to pick up, but essential for any mid laner, is simply learning when you need to just farm and wait for your powerspikes. It builds skills like learning to play safe, learning to control the wave, learning not to take every fight available to you, and generally learning not to fall behind. Some players might excessively roam or skirmish and end up failing, which can easily snowball out of control if your opponent abuses those failed roams into taking waves and turret plates.

In general, learning to farm and scale is a rather unappreciated part of the game, because your teammates might feel like they’re losing early or that you don’t have a big presence on the map. Yone kind of falls under this due to his reliant on item powerspikes, but once you reach them, you can carry the game and blast out similar damage numbers to late game AD carries.

Ekko

Palafox: “For Ekko, he provides a lot more safety, it's the same thing as Sylas. Easy to learn how to fight, simple combos, it's not too hard. Honestly Ekko is one of the best champs, because it makes it so you can learn like safety, range trading, stuff like that.”

Ekko, as Palafox puts it, is fairly similar to what you would want to learn when playing Sylas, but rather than focusing on his skill order (which more or less is Q-E max near universally), we can talk about the two factors Palafox identified in safety and ranged trading.

For safety, as a melee Champion, you’ll have a bit higher base stats in general than a ranged Champion, but are much more vulnerable to ranged harassment and ganks due to your range forcing you to play closer to your minion wave. While Ekko can clear waves simply by throwing his Q from a distance, you’ll probably not be able to always consistently get every CS without going in to auto a minion.

Basically, you’re balancing something almost akin to how it feels playing a short-range ADC into Caitlyn, where you play around a significant range disadvantage where you have to carefully position not to get harassed, but also take opportunities where you can safely take cs or go in aggressively. You’ll also pick up trying to track where the enemy jungler and support is, because your windows of aggressive trades rely on knowing you can go in without being flanked by the enemy jungler or support, more so than many other Champions.

Range trading is also part of safety, but more specifically is that tethering is just as important if not more so as a melee Champion into a range matchup. You might notice that funny dance every player does where they move back and forth and one Champion might get hit multiple times while the other avoids getting hit because they can’t be reached by the opponent. Tethering in League is basically maintaining a constant ideal position between you and your opponent that gives you safety from their trades, but the ability to punish your opponent when they move into range. Tethering is often like at a very precise range that you know is safe but exactly at a point that makes your opponent really want to move into a bad spot that they think might give them an advantage but won’t in the end.

As a melee Champion, you kind of use tethering for multiple reasons. For one, you want to maintain the range that lets you get XP and take CS. For two, you might want to be in range where you can use Ekko’s E – Phase Rush to engage. You also want to be in a spot where your opponent might struggle to punish you, say on the side of a minion wave where they might have to choose between farming and hitting you while also simultaneously feeling the threat that is you engaging.

Now expanding upon it is explaining taking certain minions purposely to control the wave or purposely even taking a seemingly bad trade that works out in your favour, but there are plenty of guides out here to explain more in depth. All you need to know is you’ll learn by doing when playing Ekko into the many ranged mages of the mid lane.

Swain

Palafox: “Swain's simple, you're pretty much just a control mage that can go forward, is relatively tanky, and just makes a lot of space. So you have like some flexibility in the way you play him. He honestly does a lot of damage too.”

Now you might have noticed that we’ve basically talked about all melee Champions. But you might want to also balance it out with a ranged Champion that also plays almost similarly to a melee Champion in Swain. What Swain teaches you is taking advantage of your ability to deny your opponent from stepping into certain areas, or rather more plainly, zoning. Swain’s notorious E – Nevermove is a rather tricky ability for the opponent to play around, because it can travel right through the minions and pull them directly into range of where Swain has enough time to hit his W – Vision of Empire and Q – Death’s Hand while also getting the full value out of his trading potential.

One of Swain’s biggest weaknesses, incidentally as a ranged Champion, is his effective range, which is severely lacking without his E. You basically learn how to keep your space from your opponent while your main cooldown on E is up, but you also practice positioning aggressively to try to zone your opponent off farming their wave and punishing you. Because Swain’s E ignores minions for the portion of when it first goes forward, you have a large zone where your opponent can’t step that you can take advantage of by pressing forward as long as you have the ability up.

As an added benefit, Swain is a very versatile Champion that lets you use his W as a vision-securing tool or a way to last hit Champions trying to recall at low health. He’s rather vulnerable in lane when pushing up due to a lack of escapes, which makes you want to be very aware of what’s going on in the map and where everyone is.

Orianna

Palafox: “I think it's really good to learn the idea of, like, if you're going to play all these assassins, you should learn what makes Ori strong and weak, and once you understand a Champion like Ori, I think it'll make it easier to play against them. But Ori is a staple, Ori is honestly really chill vibes. I dunno if that's making or strong, but she's just really just chill to play, you just kind of coast throughout the game.”

We’ve basically given you a list of assassin Champions and Swain who plays like a hybrid of melee and ranged, leaving us with Orianna, as Palafox puts it, a pretty chill vibe champion.

I think while we can touch upon many things about Orianna’s kit, we’ll focus on the value of understanding Orianna because it can help you understand playing your assassins. It’s the sort of age-old advice many people give where they’re like “Oh, if you want to know how to beat a Champion, just play it.”, and it’s honestly a pretty tried and true tactic.

One of the key things you’ll pick up from playing Orianna is understanding when Orianna is vulnerable. For most players, they’ll see Orianna use her ball, know that she used skills and that they’re on cooldown. For more dedicated players, they’ll know her cooldowns in their head, giving them mostly close timings on when they can punish Orianna, but also her effective range. It’s a really key factor in playing any kind of mid lane Champion, where if you know how much reach your opponent has, you’ll know exactly where you can stand to be safe from harassment but also ideal spots that make it difficult for Orianna to play without being engaged on.

There’s also the factor that it can teach you what ranged players will do to protect themselves. For Orianna, she’ll have her W – Command: Dissonance that in a nutshell leaves a zone after the damage that slows and speeds her up, she’ll have her shield from her E – Command: Protect, and her ultimate Command: Shockwave. But another factor is that her ball will return to her if she goes too far away, something that can be used defensively where you might see the ball being too far away but suddenly back at Orianna’s side. Playing Orianna will give you that understanding of the nuances in her kit and at what ranges you can play around the ball’s zone.

Conclusion

While you may also call this list a “Just play melee Champions and learn ranged Champions only to learn how to play against them”, I think a shared aspect is that at some point in the game, the Champions will make you want to be proactive and create situations that win you the game. Sylas stealing a good ultimate and catching people off, Ekko catching people in his W – Parallel Convergence, Swain catching people with his E, Orianna and Yone hitting a big ultimate, or even Katarina simply finding the right angle to go in, get a kill, and reset. While there are many fundamentals you can pick up from playing these Champions, at the end of the day, it will come down to you doing something that lets you win the game to give you the best way of improving by doing.

We thank Palafox for his time, check out his socials here!

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