Top Lane Tactics - Expanding Your Champion Pool With Premium Game Coaching

[Faheemkhatri4]

Michael Plant has been playing League of Legends since 2010 and analyzing it for nearly as long. He has a passion for finding champions that allow him to focus on team fighting and the basic laning phase.

Counter picking your lane opponent can be a good way to get an advantage early on. It will also help you avoid unnecessary fighting while saving teleport for mid game fights.
1. Know Your Role

Unlike most other elite coaching lol roles in League, top lane doesn’t have an ally champion to lane with. This makes it important for top laners to be able to sustain themselves in order to make it through the long laning match. This is why tanks or high damage champions tend to do well in top lane.

One of the best ways to do this is by focusing on getting a lot of minion kills in lane. This will help you clear your lane faster and allow you to avoid taking too much damage from enemy champions. Taking into account your spell cooldowns is also vitally important. Attempting to trade when your opponent’s spells are on cooldown will only leave you vulnerable.

Another way to improve your ability to survive a snowball is by picking a champion that can clear jungle minions quickly and easily. This will help you stay healthy and allow you to contribute to team fights later in the game when your teammates start taking a lot of damage.

Jax is a great example of this. He’s a strong one-versus-one champion that scales well and itemizes very well. By the late game he’s a hard to kite, tanky, DPS machine that can eat ADCs for breakfast.

Mundo, Malphite, and Caitlyn are also great options for this purpose. Each of them has a decent amount of poke, but they also have great sustain from items like Grasp of the Undying, Comet, and Conditioning. In particular, Caitlyn has a lot of range and escape potential, which can be useful for staying safe in bot lane. The other two can also be very effective in ganking if you need to avoid enemy heavies.
2. Minimize Fights

The biggest problem that many players run into when they are losing in their lane is getting angry or stubborn and trying to force fights even when they are losing 1v1 hard. This is not a good idea and you should always play safe to avoid causing your team unnecessary damage. This will allow your team to find advantages in other lanes, gain map control, and take objectives.

A big part of playing safe in top lane is knowing when to recall. This is especially important in a game where you are losing hard in your lane and the enemy team is likely to gank you in the future. When you are going to recall, you should try to freeze the wave as much as possible and not leave it so that the enemy champion can just run straight up to your tower and gank you.

Warding is also very important in top lane, as it allows you to stay safe from ganks in the early game and get ahead in CS. You should typically place your first warding totem around 2:30 into the game, when the enemy jungler is done with both red and blue buffs. If you don’t have a lot of wards, the enemy team will be able to easily gank you and you will quickly lose your lane advantage.

Lastly, it is important to remember to be careful when trading. This means that you should never trade into an enemy that has a lot of ability damage since they can easily bully you out of your lane. However, this doesn’t mean that you should be passive and not fight back when the enemy is bullying you out of lane. Instead, you should be aggressive when fighting back but still know when to recall and let your team come to your aid.
3. Defensive Trading

Because top lane is so isolated, it’s important to understand how to gain an advantage over your opponent through trading. The goal of trading is to deal damage to your enemy champion while taking as little damage in return, and this mainly depends on the nature of a champion’s auto attacks and their range. For example, a melee champion will have much more difficulty doing damage at close range, but a long-ranged champion can often harass an enemy from far away with spells that can easily hit their target without risking their own health.

Another aspect of trading is wave manipulation, or knowing when to freeze the lane and when to push it. This will help you gain an edge over your opponent by denying him gold and experience based on his in-lane play. It also opens up other possibilities like counterjungling his jungler, pushing the lane to deny him creeps, and proxying waves.

In addition, it’s important to know when to take a tower and how to do so. Some players believe that you should always try to take your opponent’s tower as soon as you can, while others think that you should only try to take it at certain points in the game or when you’re ready to leave laning. The truth is that there’s a lot of grey area in this question and it really depends on your own playing style.

As a beginner top laner, you should try to focus on understanding these core concepts of the role before trying to pick too many champions and learn them all at once. Instead, it’s best to focus on around 3 champions at a time and master their mechanics, items, runes, and matchups. This will give you a better feel for the role and allow you to develop your own unique playstyle as you learn more about it.
4. Split Push

Split push is a top lane strategy that involves one champion dominating their lane while another draws pressure and helps their team take objectives around the map. This type of composition is very common in pro play and requires great map awareness and communication from the entire team. It also often relies on champions with strong wave clear (like Irelia) and a Teleport ability that lets them get in and out of the fight quickly.

It can be tricky to tell when a team is trying to split push because there aren’t a lot of objective-based signs, but there are some things you can look out for. First, if the enemy top laner has significantly more levels and farm than everyone else it’s likely they’re splitting pushing. This is especially true if they have a monster item like an Infinite Durum or even just a full AP Volibear build.

The other way to spot a split push is by seeing where the enemy team goes in teamfights. If the enemy top laner is always taking a fight to the other side of the map or running away from them it’s very likely they’re split pushing.

Lastly, watch for enemy champions who are constantly walking near wards or into the jungle. This is a sign that they’re trying to hard push and that it may be time to go in and break them. You can then teleport into the fight and help your team take an inhibitor or even the enemy’s home nexus tower! This type of split push can give you a huge advantage against your opponent and is a fun way to play the game.
5. Teleport

Top lane is an isolated lane, which means that plays that involve other teammates don’t happen as much here. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t play a role that involves interacting with the rest of your team to secure important objectives or skirmishes. That’s why many top laners run teleport, which not only gets them back to lane faster after a recall but allows them to hop between lanes and help out in a fight if needed.

It’s also important for top laners to have a good understanding of wave management. This is especially true in the early game when most champions rely on a minion wave to farm and level up. A good understanding of when to freeze the wave or push it will improve your safety, lane tempo and your ability to impact the map.

While there are many different champions that can be played in top lane, the three most common picks are Tanks (Vanguards and Wardens), Bruisers (Killers and Warriors) and Skirmishers (Duels and Marksmen). While all of these champions can be effective in the laning phase, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, a Skirmisher like Jax is great at fighting enemies and can use her abilities to pressure the enemy in lane, but it’s important that she carries enough damage to get in a decent trade with the enemy champion. Having a solid understanding of the best way to approach these trades will help you become an even better top laner.