Essential Skills to Master for Top Laners in LoL

Essential Skills to Master for Top Laners in LoL

To climb as a Top laner in League of Legends, you need to have a plethora of skills under your belt that you can utilise to their maximum to win a game of LoL. If you can master certain skills as a Top laner, you will increase your chances of winning the lane and then winning the game.

You can focus on many things to become a better Top Laner in League of Legends, and in this Mobalytics article, we will break down several important skills you need to master to improve and climb! If you work on improving at all these things in our article, you will see yourself climbing quickly in League of Legends.

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Essential skills to Master for Top laners in League of Legends

1. Farming in the Lane
2. Trading in the Lane
3. Wave Management
4. Tracking the Enemy Jungler
5. Team fighting

1. Farming in the Lane

The first thing you need to master is CSing and earning lots of gold. Gold and killing minions are significant for a Top laner, as it will be your main income source. If you want to get your items quickly and deal lots of damage to the enemy, then you need to master the art of farming.

There are many different ways you can become a better farmer in League of Legends. The first thing I recommend is going into a custom game and practising last-hitting and killing minions. The more you practice the art of farming, the better you will be at it.

The second thing I would suggest is to learn how to last hit under the tower. In the very early game, to secure minions under your own tower, you need to let the tower hit the melee minions twice, and then you finish it off with an auto. For a ranged minion, you need to auto it once, let the tower hit it once, and then finish it off with an auto.

Where are your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to farming? Are you good in the early game, but fall off late? You can find out where you’re going wrong by checking out your GPI!

2.Trading in the Lane

Learning how to trade effectively in lane is crucial for all roles, especially solo lanes like the top and mid lane as you’re on your own. Learning how to trade is quite challenging and there is a sharp learning curve to it. Even the best players take bad trades sometimes, but the goal with trading in lane is to minimize these poor trades and only get good trades.

There are several ways you can improve on trading in lane. The first thing I would keep in mind is the current state of the wave. If there are lots of enemy minions around, I’d avoid trading (in the very early game) as the minions will focus you as soon as you auto the enemy. The minion damage stacks up quite quickly, so the trade can favour the enemy.

The second thing is to play around enemy cooldowns. If you notice that the enemy Renekton has used his Q on the wave, you have a few seconds to trade with him as his main source of damage is down. Fighting when the enemy has an ability missing is one of the best ways of trading in LoL.

I would also advise that you check where you’re going wrong when fighting. For instance, are you fighting at the wrong time, or are you just dying needlessly? You can find out how good you’re at trading in the Fighting section of the GPI.

Finally, if you do use your abilities on the minion wave to either push or to last hit, try and aim them, so they hit both the enemy minion wave and the enemy champion at the same time. Of course, this is quite a caveat, but the point remains.

3. Wave Management

Managing waves is essential in League of Legends. Otherwise, you’ll be denied in so many different ways. You’ll fall behind, get zoned away from farm, and be repeatedly killed if you do not learn how to manage waves.

Wave management is quite complicated, so I would highly advise you to give our in-depth wave management guide a read, as it has everything you need to know about how to manage waves properly.

In general, if you’re weak early on, then you want to keep the minion wave closer to your side of the map so you can pick up farm without fear of being zoned away from farm or dying. But if you’re strong early on, you may want to keep the minion wave even or slightly closer to your side of the map so you can all-in the enemy when they walk up to farm. Farming is crucial and it leads to a variety of other problems. For instance, if you are bad at dueling, you will find it hard to get a good farming score.

Every champion has different wave requirements. For instance, Camille (generally speaking) wants the minion wave closer to her side of the map up until levels 4 or 5. She is weak early on, but once she has a few points in her abilities, she can trade more effectively. After this stage, she can either keep the wave here, or have it slightly towards the enemy.

You may think you have good wave management, but do you really? Having good wave management has a benefit in so many ways and it allows you to do achieve a lot of other things. If your GPI score isn’t looking too hot, work on your wave management first and you’ll soon see the rest of your GPI taking shape!

4. Tracking the Enemy Jungler

The next skill I would recommend you improve on and master is tracking the enemy Jungler. The top lane in League of Legends can be quite different to the mid or bottom lane. By this I mean that you’ll either receive a lot of Jungler attention, or non at all.

You should always be aware of the general whereabouts of the enemy Jungler at all times. Knowing where they are givs you a lot of power in the lane. For instance, if you know that the enemy Jungler is in the bottom lane, then you can fight the enemy Top laner or push the minion wave.

Having a general understanding of jungle routes in LoL is a good way of anticipating enemy Jungler movements as you may know when the enemy is on your side of the map. A common jungle route is level 3 into gank top lane. So you should be aware of this.

Another thing you need to keep an eye on are objectives and what things are available on the map. If you see that the Dragon is up, it could indicate that the enemy Jungler isn’t nearby, as they might be at the Drake instead.

Also, knowing when the enemy Jungler is strong too is quite good. If the enemy is weak early on (like Fiddlesticks or Malphite), then you can safely assume that they will not be ganking early and that they need level 6 and their Ultimate before they can come online. You can use this to your advantage to play aggressively.

5. Team fighting

Team fighting is something very important to master in LoL. If you do not understand your role in team fights, you will struggle to win them. Mind you, each champion will have a slightly different role in team fights, but I would recommend that you check out our Mobalytics Champion Pages for specifics on how to team fight. Nevertheless, let’s talk about team fighting.

For tanks such as Maokai or Malphite. You need to soak up damage for your team. This means you must be at the front of your team and ready to pounce. You should stay at the front of your team and be prepared to pull the trigger to start the fight. Once you’ve gone in, peel for your carries or focus the enemy backline.

For fighters like Kled or Darius. You should be in towards the front of your team and try to take down the closest target. If you can focus one enemy at a time, your team can easily kill them before moving on to the back line. However, fighters can also solo the enemy backline if they’re strong enough. So you have 2 options: peel for your carries and focus the frontline, or destroy the enemy backline on your own.

We’ve made a separate guide on team fighting in the past, which breaks down a ton of extra information to help you team fight, which I would highly recommend you read.

Conclusion

That about sums up our article on things you need to master for Top Laners in LoL if you want to climb in Season 13. We hope these tips and acknowledgements will give you the edge over the enemy in the lane to help you climb.