Beginner's Guide: Basics to Top Solo Lane (1v2 lane)
Not an expert guide at all, just a beginner’s guide to all the fundamentals. A 1v2 lane is one of the hardest roles to manage as a beginner player, which is why it's important to learn it so others don't fail this role.
Priorities as a Top Solo:
#1 priority: Don’t lose tower.
#2 priority: Farm and XP.
#3 priority: Don’t take damage.
The first priority is DON’T lose the tower. You’ll lose map control over almost a quadrant of the map. Your next tower (zone of safety) is all the way to the 2nd outer tower, so you can't farm safely and are in danger of a gank at any point extended.
Second priority is to Farm and gain accelerated XP. You’re either a carry, or a champion that needs level 6 as fast as possible (Nidalee,Kassadin). Laning phase is all about farming, never about champion kills (2 minion waves is equal to 1 champion kill).
Third priority is to not take damage. This is important, because it stops you from doing priority #1 and #2. Don't trade one last-hit minion kill for a spell hit from the enemy. It’s almost always never worth it. Think of it this way: if you're forced to blue pill, think of all the last-hits you're missing then.
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Beginning of Game
What are the best items to buy:
Cloth Armor + 5 hp pots (especially against ranged AD)
Mana Crystal + 2 hp pots (rushing catalyst, which lets you lane forever)
Doran's Shield/Regrowth Pendant + hp pot (More passive lane)
Ok, so minions have spawned.DONT EVER FACECHECK BRUSH. If they are MIA, they are either waiting for you in the bush, or they are waiting at their tower too. So show yourself momentarily to the creeps, then back off until you know their location.
Now that you know who you're facing, take a quick look at their summoner spells and items (press TAB button). This is one of the first basics you must learn in LoL.
If they have flash, exhaust, ignite, you have to play more defensively. There's been too many times that my teammate dies early, and then says "Oh sh*t, I didn't know they had ignite". Knowing a champion's 2 summoner spells is just asimportant as knowing what their 4 basic spells do.
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Early Laning Phase
Don't AUTOATTACK constantly. One of the first things you must learn in LoL is to last-hit. Auto-attacking constantly pushes your lane. Pushing your lane leaves you overextended. Overextending leaves you open to ganks from jungler or mid. If they try to kill you, you have to run the whole distance to your tower. You won't make it.
You must understand that killing the enemy creep wave as fast as you can (Singed, talking to you), does not make the next creep wave come any faster. The rate at which you kill the enemy creeps and the enemy kills your creeps, decides how far the lane is pushed/pulled and who has more lane control for zoning. If you push your minion creep too far, you can easily get zoned 1v2.
If you're under your tower, there is a strict method to last hitting.
Melee minions: 2 tower hits, then one autoattack
Ranged minions: 1 autoattack, 1 tower hit, 1 autoattack
Cannon minions: No precise method. Make sure you last hit this one (most important for gold)
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Mid Laning Phase
At level 3, you should begin to have a level advantage over them. Keep track of your creep score (CS) and make sure you're around the same CS as your mid.
By level 4, you should have done some damage to your enemies. This is because at this level, your jungler should have lizard buff and start ganking. OR the enemy jungler just got lizard buff and having half-health will prevent them/hesitate from 1v3 diving you.
When you need to recall, spam all your skills and push the lane as far as possible (safely). This makes sure that they don't take your tower because lane is pushed. It also makes sure you don't lose as much CS (minion kills). Try to come back before the creep wave reaches your tower without you in range, that is lost gold/XP.
Once you come back, you should have a level advantage and item advantage. You should start being more aggressive, and try to coordinate a kill with jungler or mid. Buy a ward, especially if enemy jungler has been aggressively ganking other lanes.
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Who Can 1v2 Solo Lane
Essentially, anyone can 1v2 top solo with good map awareness and lane control. Some are better than others. Here are some champion traits that are most advantageous (in order of importance):
1. AoE spells (ability to clear waves fast if they are pushing hard)
2. Range (ability to last hit or harass safely)
3. Regeneration (Survive in lane for long periods, remedied by pots/items)
4. Escape mechanism (Avoid ganks, remedied by flash/ghost/exhaust)
5. Teleport mechanism (Remedied with teleport, which is the best 1v2 laner spell bc. it's a free bluepill, and you can teleport to dragon ward if a fight breaks out, making it a 5v4 fight won + dragon).
Gragas is one of the best examples of a good Top Solo champion.
His barrel roll can clear minion waves AND harass at the same time, at safe range.
He has mana regeneration and health regeneration from skill/passive.
He has an escape mechanism.
He prevents ganks with ultimate.
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Q&A Section
Q: What do I do if my lane is pushed?
A: If your creep wave pushes past your tower range (which is unavoidable, your tower will push your lane), stay in top bush. When you last-hit, don't last hit from bush (or you'll be visible). Move out of bush quickly, autoattack last-hit, then move back in bush. Using the bush to your advantage prevents them from using target-click spells on you. If they try to zone you out of bush, punish them each time with a spell+autoattack when they are running in. This will make them hesitate doing it again. If they harass you when you come out of bush, then just stand in bush and soak up experience, and wait for the lane to passively push.
Q: What do I do if they are pushing my tower hard?
A: Don't attack the champs, attack the creep wave. The faster you clear the creeps, the faster they go away. Try to call a gank from jungler/mid, because the enemy is far overextended.
Lane Mechanics
OP LANE MECHANICS - THE BASICS
So you're interested in playing top lane, maybe as a new pickup or to establish as your 'main lane' of sorts; what does this entail?
- You are your team's utility player; you pick a champion revolving around whatever needs your team has to fill. If they need an AP top, you pick an AP top, if they need a bruiser, you pick a bruiser, simple as that.
- The current favored style of top lane is Tanky-DPS/Bruiser. These types of champions are generally what dominate the current top lane metagame as of now. However, there are other situational/unorthodox picks such as AP top and duo top that we'll be addressing later.
- Top lane is heavily based around counter-play, both in itemization and in champion selection. Oftentimes you'll see in competitive play that the top lane pick tends to be the last pick in draft order so that your team's top lane champion already naturally has an advantage over the enemy team's.
Why this is so important will be addressed in detail in the advanced section. The concept of counter-picking champions also segways into the idea of counter-building and itemizing early tank stats (armor and magic resistance) to mitigate large amounts of both your enemy top lane and jungle's damage type(s).
-Top lane is the most isolated lane from the most important early-mid game objective,dragon (objectives are a whole other article in themselves). Given this, you'll more often than not encounter two main types of play at top lane.
Passive farming (last hitting creeps/minions in order to raise your gold value) with little to no aggression (influenced by the 'kill potential' of a lane, more on that later) in which both top laners attempt to simply 'afk farm' and shove to the turret when necessary, most often when the enemy top lane returns to base, then proceed to roam momentarily or move to take objectives with the team.
The other style of play favors heavy aggression, consistent and constant jungle/mid lane ganks in order to gain an early advantage and continuing to press that advantage in order to deny the enemy top lane experience and gold, thus incentivizing roam/objectives from your top lane. Why this is such a currently popular and effective strategy will be addressed in later chapters.
This may seem like a lot to wrap your head around when all you want to do is play your favorite bruiser at top lane but I assure you that having a strong understanding of these basic top lane mechanics will pave the way to you having a more enjoyable and more effective top lane experience!
So you're interested in playing top lane, maybe as a new pickup or to establish as your 'main lane' of sorts; what does this entail?
- You are your team's utility player; you pick a champion revolving around whatever needs your team has to fill. If they need an AP top, you pick an AP top, if they need a bruiser, you pick a bruiser, simple as that.
- The current favored style of top lane is Tanky-DPS/Bruiser. These types of champions are generally what dominate the current top lane metagame as of now. However, there are other situational/unorthodox picks such as AP top and duo top that we'll be addressing later.
- Top lane is heavily based around counter-play, both in itemization and in champion selection. Oftentimes you'll see in competitive play that the top lane pick tends to be the last pick in draft order so that your team's top lane champion already naturally has an advantage over the enemy team's.
Why this is so important will be addressed in detail in the advanced section. The concept of counter-picking champions also segways into the idea of counter-building and itemizing early tank stats (armor and magic resistance) to mitigate large amounts of both your enemy top lane and jungle's damage type(s).
-Top lane is the most isolated lane from the most important early-mid game objective,dragon (objectives are a whole other article in themselves). Given this, you'll more often than not encounter two main types of play at top lane.
Passive farming (last hitting creeps/minions in order to raise your gold value) with little to no aggression (influenced by the 'kill potential' of a lane, more on that later) in which both top laners attempt to simply 'afk farm' and shove to the turret when necessary, most often when the enemy top lane returns to base, then proceed to roam momentarily or move to take objectives with the team.
The other style of play favors heavy aggression, consistent and constant jungle/mid lane ganks in order to gain an early advantage and continuing to press that advantage in order to deny the enemy top lane experience and gold, thus incentivizing roam/objectives from your top lane. Why this is such a currently popular and effective strategy will be addressed in later chapters.
This may seem like a lot to wrap your head around when all you want to do is play your favorite bruiser at top lane but I assure you that having a strong understanding of these basic top lane mechanics will pave the way to you having a more enjoyable and more effective top lane experience!
Attention to Details
OP LANE MECHANICS - DETAILS DETAILS DETAILS
So you've come to rather enjoy top lane, its gameplay, and the champions it harbors. Great, I enjoy top lane a lot myself (why is why I'm incidentally writing this guide as my first article) and I suppose now you want to know more of the in-depth details, the kind of facts that will help you move from being an average top laner to an above average, or even great top laner. Well look no further:
- Top lane is the longest lane by far in terms of sheer length of the lane as designed by Riot on Summoner's Rift. What this means for you as a top laner is that both your mistakes and your 'big plays' are amplified by the greater amount of time it takes for either top laner to reach safety, or their turret. You can think of top lane as the lane where risk/reward trade-off plays are amplified to the greatest amount.
Does this mean you should constantly gamble and try to win out on trades? No, League of Legends is by far and wide a game in which safety will always win out over risky play, this is why you see champions like Ryze with his instant-cast zero travel time snare regarded as one of the best if not the best caster competitively (not to mention his insane late-game scaling!). What this does mean for you as a top laner is that when you do look to trade, you need to be acutely aware of both your surroundings (ie: strong map awareness in understand if the enemy jungler or mid lane could make a sudden appearance) as well as the champion matchups: whether or not you can look to trade an autoattack and a spell over the enemy's single spell or whether or not you can even come out of a trade favorably.
This ties back into why counter-picking champions in top lane is regarded as such a favorable strategy to employ, if you are a counter to the enemy top lane the burden of mistakes is considerably lightened and you naturally gain an advantage in trading. Because of these inherent lane mechanics, you'll begin to see that the more popular and powerful top lane champions are those with high poke, high sustain, and more often than not some form of a gap closer that helps you reach safety quicker (ie: Gangplank, Lee Sin, Shen, Warwick, Olaf, Irelia).
- In accordance with the idea that top lane is the longest lane you need you have appropriate ward control. As a top laner you should be buying two or more wards each back if possible (regardless of whether you have a Wriggle's Lantern or not) so that you can cover all your possible chokes that could be ganked.
So you've come to rather enjoy top lane, its gameplay, and the champions it harbors. Great, I enjoy top lane a lot myself (why is why I'm incidentally writing this guide as my first article) and I suppose now you want to know more of the in-depth details, the kind of facts that will help you move from being an average top laner to an above average, or even great top laner. Well look no further:
- Top lane is the longest lane by far in terms of sheer length of the lane as designed by Riot on Summoner's Rift. What this means for you as a top laner is that both your mistakes and your 'big plays' are amplified by the greater amount of time it takes for either top laner to reach safety, or their turret. You can think of top lane as the lane where risk/reward trade-off plays are amplified to the greatest amount.
Does this mean you should constantly gamble and try to win out on trades? No, League of Legends is by far and wide a game in which safety will always win out over risky play, this is why you see champions like Ryze with his instant-cast zero travel time snare regarded as one of the best if not the best caster competitively (not to mention his insane late-game scaling!). What this does mean for you as a top laner is that when you do look to trade, you need to be acutely aware of both your surroundings (ie: strong map awareness in understand if the enemy jungler or mid lane could make a sudden appearance) as well as the champion matchups: whether or not you can look to trade an autoattack and a spell over the enemy's single spell or whether or not you can even come out of a trade favorably.
This ties back into why counter-picking champions in top lane is regarded as such a favorable strategy to employ, if you are a counter to the enemy top lane the burden of mistakes is considerably lightened and you naturally gain an advantage in trading. Because of these inherent lane mechanics, you'll begin to see that the more popular and powerful top lane champions are those with high poke, high sustain, and more often than not some form of a gap closer that helps you reach safety quicker (ie: Gangplank, Lee Sin, Shen, Warwick, Olaf, Irelia).
- In accordance with the idea that top lane is the longest lane you need you have appropriate ward control. As a top laner you should be buying two or more wards each back if possible (regardless of whether you have a Wriggle's Lantern or not) so that you can cover all your possible chokes that could be ganked.
Down to the Detail
OP LANE MECHANICS - THE NITTY GRITTY
Simply knowing these nitty gritty details isn't going to push you over the edge and transform you into a top-tier top laner, however having an informational advantage over any other top laner you may encounter is always going to be nice and having a solid grasp of tactics popular in the current metagame as well as mechanics that not everyone reads into should give you some sort of positional advantage in the war that is winning your lane, so hey, why not take it?
- Although bruiser top and AP top are the popular, self-explanatory trending picks for top lane in the current meta, one strategy that has come into popularity with several professional teams of late is duo top, or sending what would traditionally be your bottom lane AD carry+support to top lane and sending a bruiser down to bottom.
Although you will most likely have trouble convincing your team to run this anywhere outside of arranged 5s, as a top laner you should understand what this strategy entails so that if you ever have to face it you'll be well equipped if you ever come face to face with this tactic. When sending an AD carry+support top the enemy team usually has several objectives in their mind that they want to accomplish:
1. Send a kill lane (an AD+support combination that has high CC and burst damage early on so that their kill potential is inherently very high) top and a bruiser bot with high sustain (so that they don't die 1v2 as easily) and with or without repeated jungle ganks force the enemy solo top to burn summoners leading to a kill, then repeatedly abuse the summoner spell-less solo top for kills thus putting your AD carry ahead. Take the turret after the duo feels as though they've earned as much as they can and then transition to bot lane and lane normally albeit with a large advantage, thus exerting enormous dragon control as well as having gimped the enemy top.
2. Send a push lane (an AD+support combination that has strong wave clear and turret pushing potential) top and a bruiser bot with high sustain and essentially accomplish the same goals as the kill lane by simply quickly pushing the enemy top turret to give your team a global boost. Early on this not only places pressure on the turret itself but also heavily denies the enemy solo top gold (and potentially experience from being zoned by a 2v1 situation) as not all champions and/or players excel at last hitting at turret early on.
Have your bot lane transition to bot as normal and have them take advantage of the global gold bonus, thus exerting high dragon control. Your top lane will have to ward appropriately as they 'afk farm' as they run the risk of being heavily ganked because your top with be continuously pushing with no enemy turret to equalize the lane.
- Counter jungling is an extremely powerful tactic made popular by M5 if run by solo top champions with the ability to naturally jungle quickly and effectively or those who decide to run an early Wriggle’s Lantern. This entails pushing to the enemy turret quickly then ducking out of vision so that the enemy top laner is unaware of your roaming then moving into the enemy jungler to either take buffs or small camps.
If taking buffs, be sure to take a respawn timer of the enemy buff camp so that your team is in position to contest at the respawn if they desire. Buff camps respawn every 5 minutes, take note by using annotations such as eb/tb (enemy blue/their blue) and such! When taking small camps the popular tactics are to either clear the camp completely or leave some of the small monsters leftover in order to deny the enemy jungler the gold of a full camp respawn.
Simply knowing these nitty gritty details isn't going to push you over the edge and transform you into a top-tier top laner, however having an informational advantage over any other top laner you may encounter is always going to be nice and having a solid grasp of tactics popular in the current metagame as well as mechanics that not everyone reads into should give you some sort of positional advantage in the war that is winning your lane, so hey, why not take it?
- Although bruiser top and AP top are the popular, self-explanatory trending picks for top lane in the current meta, one strategy that has come into popularity with several professional teams of late is duo top, or sending what would traditionally be your bottom lane AD carry+support to top lane and sending a bruiser down to bottom.
Although you will most likely have trouble convincing your team to run this anywhere outside of arranged 5s, as a top laner you should understand what this strategy entails so that if you ever have to face it you'll be well equipped if you ever come face to face with this tactic. When sending an AD carry+support top the enemy team usually has several objectives in their mind that they want to accomplish:
1. Send a kill lane (an AD+support combination that has high CC and burst damage early on so that their kill potential is inherently very high) top and a bruiser bot with high sustain (so that they don't die 1v2 as easily) and with or without repeated jungle ganks force the enemy solo top to burn summoners leading to a kill, then repeatedly abuse the summoner spell-less solo top for kills thus putting your AD carry ahead. Take the turret after the duo feels as though they've earned as much as they can and then transition to bot lane and lane normally albeit with a large advantage, thus exerting enormous dragon control as well as having gimped the enemy top.
2. Send a push lane (an AD+support combination that has strong wave clear and turret pushing potential) top and a bruiser bot with high sustain and essentially accomplish the same goals as the kill lane by simply quickly pushing the enemy top turret to give your team a global boost. Early on this not only places pressure on the turret itself but also heavily denies the enemy solo top gold (and potentially experience from being zoned by a 2v1 situation) as not all champions and/or players excel at last hitting at turret early on.
Have your bot lane transition to bot as normal and have them take advantage of the global gold bonus, thus exerting high dragon control. Your top lane will have to ward appropriately as they 'afk farm' as they run the risk of being heavily ganked because your top with be continuously pushing with no enemy turret to equalize the lane.
- Counter jungling is an extremely powerful tactic made popular by M5 if run by solo top champions with the ability to naturally jungle quickly and effectively or those who decide to run an early Wriggle’s Lantern. This entails pushing to the enemy turret quickly then ducking out of vision so that the enemy top laner is unaware of your roaming then moving into the enemy jungler to either take buffs or small camps.
If taking buffs, be sure to take a respawn timer of the enemy buff camp so that your team is in position to contest at the respawn if they desire. Buff camps respawn every 5 minutes, take note by using annotations such as eb/tb (enemy blue/their blue) and such! When taking small camps the popular tactics are to either clear the camp completely or leave some of the small monsters leftover in order to deny the enemy jungler the gold of a full camp respawn.