Every season, I encourage my friends, students, and League community members to set goals. And often times in League, our goal is centered around reaching a rank. Be it Bronze, Silver, Gold or even higher. And one of the main mantras that people often exercise when talking about climbing and improving your rank is to, “Pick a Role or Champion, and focus on them alone.”

And largely, I agree with that sentiment. It’s extremely important to have your Role and your main Champions mastered. But, I think there’s value in becoming proficient in other roles beyond your primary. And today, I’m here to break down why you should take the time to become adept at every role in League of Legends.

You Improve and Expand Your Secondary Role Potential

This one’s a throw away point, but it’s important to have just as much proficiency on your Main Role as you do your Secondary Role. Often times, a game of League can be dictated by who got their main Champions in their Main Role, so if you’re able to easily flex yourself between your two roles without complaints, you’ll reduce the ability that Riot themselves has to ‘nerf’ you at any given Champ Select and increase your odds of winning each and every time.

And if you’re one of those that doesn’t have a truly established Secondary Role, allow me to offer you a few quick pairings that blend in terms of skill! Take the time to explore these suggestions and Champions in those roles you like and you might find what really works for you!

Suggestions:

Top-Mid
Jungle-Support
Mid-Bot Lane
Support-Jungle

You Come to Adapt to New Meta Changes Faster

Every Season Riot spices things up by changing around Champions, Items, Objectives, and more. And if you’re familiar with all roles to an adept extent, then you can more easily soak in that new information and process it in a way that helps you apply it in-game.

Take for example our recent item changes with Season 11. A ton of items were overhauled and Mythic Items affected the potential of a ton of Champions. Some shifted in power up & down, while others stayed the same. If you’re not familiar with the Jungle role, you may not understand why the item overhaul benefited Ivern while hurting Rengar. To you, those Champions were night and day in terms of playability and potential in Solo-Queue, but now Ivern has eclipsed the Knife-Cat and is running wild as one of Solo-Queue’s most dominant picks.

But, if Jungle is your Secondary or if you’ve taken the time to learn it in your off-ranked time, then you’ll come to understand that Rengar’s clear was significantly nerfed by the Tiamat changes, and he needs more help from Riot before he can get back to where he was as a dominant Solo-Queue pick.

It’s changes like these that can fall under the radar to an average player and one that doesn’t expose themselves to new situations regularly. By being familiar with the Meta beyond your role, you allow yourself to apply the adjustments of power in game, and can push to expose Champions that have undergone significant changes, thus increasing your chances of victory.

You Learn the Goals and Perspectives of Your Team

Solo-Queue is wild and chaotic, and lacks heavily in terms of communication. A lot of times inference and instinct can take over, and this doesn’t serve as a great basis to play off of when you’re wanting to take control of a game.

Experiencing other roles helps you get familiar with the tempo of each lane and their play styles, while also helping you understand what it is your allies are wanting to do next. For example, if you’re a Jungle-Top player, and an early gank gets off successfully in your lane, you’ll know instantly as a Jungle Main that you’re in prime position to gain control over the topside Scuttle Crab. Through a simple two-pings, you can communicate with your Jungler that you want to hard push the wave, and then rotate to the crab to help them with it.

And this act alone helps you establish tempo and control over the topside of the map. This act proves to your Jungler that you’re reliable, and will coax them to come back topside and help you. This same situation can be echoed for the other roles as well.

As a Bot Laner, we all know what we want our Support to do, but really getting into the Role and understanding the battle of cooldowns and positioning will really open your eyes to how the roll executes and why your Support takes fights when they do. And the same could be said for you Support-AD mains. Understanding the value of big-waves, and item spikes when playing your secondary will help you win out on more and more of these clutch 2v2 fight situations.

And the only way you get familiar with these moment to moment queues is to get into mix of other roles and really come to understand their flow and tempo.

You Become a Master of Adaptation

Meaning, that you’re always able to twist a situation to your advantage either through excellent mechanical play or from the Draft itself.

For example, you’re an AD-Mid main. You’ve got your primary role and are hovering your favorite Marksman to run this game with and your Mid Laner locks in Cassiopeia. In response, the enemy Mid locks in Fizz.

That’s a pretty bad matchup to Cas, but you’ve done your homework and put time onto Cass as she’s both a viable Mid and Bot Laner, so you offer to trade. This allows your Mid Laner to swap to Pantheon, granting them an easier matchup and thus increasing your chance to win, while not hurting your potential to carry in the slightest because you’ve truly put time into mastering more than just the common Marksmen of the Bot Lane role.

Further, when it comes to understanding your limits, you come to grasp how particular compositions like to play and you can help direct those comps in game. For example, you’ve got a Malphite, Diana, and Hecarim coming from the topside of the map as a Bot Laner.

Sure, you can lock in your main Kog’maw and be just fine with your Support who’s hovering Janna, but it’d better to synergize with your team. All of those Champions like to dive and get into the mix against opponents, so you make the pivot to Kai’sa who’s great at playing alongside dive. Your Support does the same and picks Alistar who has some of THE BEST dive potential in the game, and now you can direct your entire play pattern around diving and being extremely aggressive.

Conversely, if you are locked in on Kog’maw and Janna, you can help direct your allies to keep their dive pressure and aggression away from your lane as you’re looking to scale. You can ping around your items and levels to give everyone an idea of the time you’re online and really help your team play to those moments when you’re at your most powerful.

Your knowledge and understanding of your primary role, can help you adjust on the fly or double down on what you do best and help your teammates play in a fashion that promotes their picks even if you’re only communicating via pings.

Closing Out

I hope this piece has helped you understand the importance of knowing more than just your Main. League is a game of endless potential, and if you’ve covered and reached to every corner, nothing will catch you by surprise and bait you into bad play.

I hope the start of Season 11 treats you well, and you accomplish whatever goals you have set for yourself by Season's end!