Lane Roles

Just what I need, more blogs.

I like to theorycraft a lot in League of Legends.  Sometimes it even works.  I'm going to put what info I can here for others to share, mostly my league group (Ionic Spark OP).  I'll try to make this newbie friendly, at least at first, and explain terminology as I go along.

On that note!  A recent discussion in Ionic Spark has left me with an itch to categorize the various roles in League of Legends and break down everything I know about them.  This is mostly because I happen to really like making lists.  Let's get down to it:

There are two divisions:  Lane roles, and character roles.  Here's the lane roles list.

Top Lane:
The top lane is the most isolated of the three lanes.  While technically a mirror to bottom lane, it is almost always a solo lane, since team fights tend to trend towards the large dragon objective in the early game.  A top lane character needs to be able to both beat his opponent and survive gank attempts from the enemy jungler or mid, which means that most top lanes are big, beefy, tanky fighters with reasonable mobility and a good toolkit for trading damage.  A character with range (We'll use Teemo as an example) can sometimes abuse this meta, provided that character has a reasonable strategy for preventing the jungler from murdering him (ala the Teemo Mushroom trap, speed boost and passive ability to hide) and surviving the enemy bruiser when he flashes or uses a closer to begin trading (ala the Teemo blinding dart).

With any lane, the objectives are the same: Kill creeps for money, kill the enemy for money if possible, prevent the enemy from killing creeps or winning a duel whenever possible.  In the early game, the top tries to either keep the lane's minions from pushing forwards by being as careful as possible with his damage ("last-hitting") or shoves the lane up into the turret, denying the enemy top minions and freeing the top to go elsewhere.

If the top plays careful, fights will happen closer to his turret and the jungler will be able to come from the side and assist.  If the top plays aggressively, he can sprint to the mid lane to gank or retreat into the jungle and take the creeps there for an extra edge.  Top's tower has twice the HP of any other, so they get a little more breathing room to assist in protracted teamfights and objective hunts.

Because the top laner is so isolated, he often serves as a split pusher in the mid-late game, forcing the enemy team to divide their efforts across the map and come in twos or threes to deal with him.  In a good top lane, either the big, beefy, double strength top turrets go down to the top, or the enemy team splits off to deal with him and allows your allies to start favorable teamfights and take bottom/mid objectives at their leisure.  When pushing is not a favorable option, the top lane can join teamfights or back into the jungle to kill extra creeps and gain the edge, as his talents are usually similarly suited to jungling.

Jungle
The jungler exists to maximize the efficiency of the teams gold generation and to increase the teams options and potential threats.  He does this by leaving the lanes entirely, fighting neutral monsters ('creeps') in the nether realms for their gold, experience, and useful buffs, only emerging for murder and bloodshed.  They are not uniquely powerful, but everything they do is a lynchpin in the teams overall success. As a result, the top and mid lanes gain solo experience and level up faster, and all of the teams resources on one side of the map are consumed as they spawn.

A team without a jungler will usually win their top lane reasonably well, but have less global gold, lower level characters. Most importantly, they'll have less kills: a good jungler gank is the tiebreaker for any matchup.  A 2v2 fight that suddenly becomes a 3v2 often ends with two dead corpses, a mountain of free minions, and possibly even a turret or dragon objective without any loss of life on the side with greater numbers.  Without the invisible threat of a jungler, the enemy team can only lose by being outplayed, and need spend no money in the early game to ward their lanes against danger.

To jungle properly, a jungler needs to have reasonable base stats to withstand creep damage, abilities that function well for clearing the creeps out, and good gank potential - something that allows them to leave the brush and immediately cause an opponent to be at threat of death.  As such, junglers usually share similarities with top laners - tanky melee bruisers with violent distance-closing ability.  A jungler also needs the ability smite, a spell that serves only to speedily clear large minions and eke out that extra bit of efficiency.  Non-smite junglers are possible, and generally claim to be better gankers, but are usually doing it wrong.

Junglers can be everywhere, and there are many schools of thought as to what's most appropriate.  Roaming junglers have poor ability to fight creeps but excellent ganks, and gain their experience and gold from assisting their allies in kills.  Counter junglers have unique skills that allow them to aggress, taking valuable resources from the enemy's jungle and weakening the enemy at great risk.  Power junglers clear the creeps at exceptional rates but gank less often, keeping global gold efficiency but forcing their team to fend for themselves more and more.  Most good junglers can do a passable impression of all three roles.

The most selfless junglers weaken and then cede the largest of creeps to their lane buddies, giving them a huge and relevant buff to allow them to win their lane more easily. In addition, each of the smaller creep camps "belongs" to a lane, and if the opportunity arises, it can be taken by that lane for a slight edge.  This frees up the jungler to gank even more, though it can decrease his overall efficiency if he cannot find opportunities to collect money.

Lanes will also call for a jungler to cover for them, protecting the turret and collecting minions that would otherwise slip through the cracks.  They also will call for ganks, usually when their lane is pushed up against their tower and a teamfight is extremely favorable.  In an ideal world, anyhow.

In the mid-late game, the creeps fall off in value (not as much as they used to, but still a relevant amount) and the Jungler is free to be more aggressive, to join team fights, and to split push.

There is actually way more I can say here.  I will probably do a jungler post soon, assuming interest on the part of others or boredom on my own part.

Mid

Mid lane is the easiest of the lanes to operate in, having wide open spaces with a lot of distance from the brush and the minions.  The lane also has the greatest access to all parts of the map.  As such, the mid lane is usually a resource-greedy, assassination capable, relatively non-tanky champion - typically a mage, or AP Caster.  It also helps that the mid lane is the closest to the blue buff, a delicious font of mana and cooldown reduction that's tasty pickings for a caster.

The mid wants to feed like no other.  He eats champions, violently aggressing his lane opponent when opportunities available. He soaks solo lane experience from a position of relative safety.  If he's capable, he will push the lane up to the turret and vanish, only to reappear in one of the other lanes, assisting the jungler for a sure kill or just popping in to burst down an unfriendly enemy laner.  Mids really don't like dying, and are much more susceptible to being shut down by a jungler if they inappropriately push their lane.  As the mid lane easily transitions into being the center of the action, Mid lanes decision paths are some of the most straightforward and crucial.

Bot 1
This is almost completely synonymous with "AD Carry".

The team needs an Attack Damage carry, and an AD carry can't function on his own.  He's a greedy jerk that doesn't quite have what it takes to solo a bruiser, but feed him well and long enough and he'll carve a giant hole in the opposing team, carrying the game.  So you give him a support, you put him in the lane where the two can function together and exert the most presence at the dragon and you eat everything from safety until you win your lane.  Carries require a lot of skill to outmaneuver a team of two, fend off ganks, and work as a team with their lane buddy - but in terms of grand strategy they are quite simple. They don't roam, instead trying to get as much pure gold as they can out of their early game, and while they can drift mid for a gank it's usually less efficient than sticking it out.  Once the tower is gone, the carry has definitively amassed enough wealth to start being a presence in team fights, and he'll try to stick as close to those as possible.

Alternately, you stick a really angry person in this slot, with a really angry buddy, and he won't do anything but leap down the AD carry's throat, leaving that carry in the same nonfunctional position he started in while you add one more fed fighter to your roster.

Bot 2
This is almost completely synonymous with "Support".
The toughest role, or at least, the most spit upon.  This is the guy who can't share the wealth - if he does not cede creeps and kills to his lane partner, both of them will suffer for it.  As such, the support exists as an enabler - whether by aggressive assistance in securing the carry kills or defensive assistance in keeping the carry alive and sustained. Usually it's a mix of both.  In almost all early game situations the bot 1 and the bot 2 stick together like glue, as one cannot survive and profit without the other.

Supports get gold generation items to make up for their lack of money, but they also tend to be pretty self-sufficient.  In the interest of making the carry as ridiculous as possible, they pay all upfront costs for wards to protect the lane from enemy junglers and control the bushes.  Later on, in the teamfight stage, they buy the items that make the entire team win.  They continue their ward coverage over the whole map, providing control of objectives and safety from ganks.  They buff, they heal, they ward, they do all of the dirty work that keeps your team from devolving into a ragtag gang of murderers getting picked off one by one.

You can stick another person of any type in this slot, but apart from early lane dominance the results are usually not all that stellar in the grand scheme of things.  You can also remove this slot entirely, instead opting for the:

Roamer
While pretty much entirely out of favor with the nerfing of gold generation items, the roamer might still see some action with the new sight stone, extra move speed and other changes in season 3.  Roamers are a cross between a jungler and a support - they free up three lanes for solo experience by wandering up and down the map planting wards, counterjungling, generating passive gold, and turning every fight into an uneven one.  These guys have it rough. You won't see them in an unranked game ever, as the team composition needs to be just right for such a character to exist.