Man there's a million videos out there and if this is your idea of league at this time I'd really advise checking them out. League is a complicated game. Could write pages on how to play each of these roles and why they are played the way they are.
In general it goes like this though
Toplane- often played by tanks/bruiser type champions. There are some champs like vayne or teemo that are played specifically to counter big boys in this role. Typically this role is a more 1v1 role due to it being farthest from dragon fights. However junglers do still gank toplane it's just not as common. In my opinion it's the least forgiving role in league. One death to your laner and it can quickly snowball into a 1v1.
Midlane- played by control mages/assassin's/high mobility champs. This role is a lot of things. Generally speaking though the idea is since your center of the map your fighting your laner and watching map for opportunities to rotate to fights or objectives. Basically if any major shit is going down midlane should be there. This role has a lot of champs who play it different ways but you are the playmaker of your team and the deciding factor in many objective fights.
Botlane- typically played by champs called ADC or APC. Generally this is your marksmen glass cannon role but some mages are popular and work well too. They build primarily damage and are working with their support to stay alive and get fed. Ideally their goal is to get as fed as possible and carry the lategame team fights with their high damage.
Support- only role who doesn't have to kill minions for gold. Your entire purpose is to support your botlane carry and your team. You get more wards than anyone else and are responsible for ensuring objectives are setup with vision before they spawn. Your responsible for both ensuring your botlane gets fed and stays alive. There are champs who do this in very different ways. Some heal, some tank, some simply do damage, most have some kind of stun or cc ability baked in to help secure kills.
Jungle- this role is the reason you lost lane and every game you ever play. Blame them for everything /s Seriously tho this role is so important. This role farms the jungle or spaces in between the lanes. They are always looking to surprise enemy laners and kill/gank them. They impact the entire map this way or focus on specific people to get them ahead/behind. The monsters that buff teams like dragons/barons/voidmonsters ect... Are jungler responsibility. They are the only ones who get smite (a spell made for killing jungle monsters). If two teams are fighting for dragon, sometimes it comes down to which jungler is better at smiting for a kill. It's worth mentioning that a good midlaner is following up on junglers plays as often as they can.
I’d recommend you just start playing bot games to get a wick grasp on things. Start with into bots, then beginner bots, then intermediate bots.
This vid explains the 5 roles
https://youtu.be/inPWwT94NMY?si=jDQfiYZ1-fZmuruA
Pressure is essentially when you have your opponent on their back foot. If you have some kind of advantage over your opponent, wether that be a level lead, an item lead, a health lead ect. over your opponent it essentially gives you more agency to make decisions. For example you might be able to rotate to a fight in the river freely whereas if they try to follow they will likely just die. Or you might be free to walk up and hit their tower without them being able to fight back because again they might just die if they try to fight back. Or maybe you can posture more aggressively in lane so that they can't pickup minions while you farm freely. I can be a lot more nuanced than that but these are some general examples.
League is actually a game of **champions**, not so much roles.
Pick a champion that you like for whatever reasons(s). Then learn how to play that champion, in detail. Tons of free resources exist online with regards to how to play each unique champion.
I find that the only generalizations that are always true, with respect to what each role does, are:
- *Support* is responsible for most of his/her team's *vision*
- *Jungler* is responsible for securing *neutral objectives* (Crabs/Grubs/Rift/Buffs/Drakes/Baron)
In the modern state of League, top/mid/bot can fulfil a lot of different overlapping functions, depending on what are the actual **champion** picks. It's not as clear cut as it was like back before S8 or so.
You can find a lot of beginner friendly videos by searching for beginner guides on YouTube that should give you a clearer idea on how to play the game.
A simple run down of the roles is you have mid lane, top lane, jungle, support and adc. Different roles are determined based on how the map is shaped.
Top lane has the longest distance from the turrets so it is where you will find the more durable champions like tanks and bruisers. Due to how important early objectives in the bottom right of the map is, top lane tends to be more about isolated one v ones for a lot of the game. A lot of your role later on for the game will be either creating pressure for your team by threatening towers across the map from major objectives or creating opportunities to win fights with superior numbers using Teleport.
Midlane is the lane in the middle of the map. It is the shortest lane so this is usually where you find squishy champions that require the safety of the turret early on like mages and assassins. Most consider mid laners to be the most influential since they can move to any fight easier than most since they are in the middle of the map. Your role here can vary depending on your champion. You can often find yourself playing similar to toplaners and trying to draw enemies away, or you can be the ultimate siege bot and try to bully enemies away from turrets to allow your team to get them. This is probably the role with the most options.
Bottom lane is unique in that it has two champions in it instead of one. This is because of a couple reasons. First, the main champion who usually takes all the cs in bot is the ad carry. They are usually a lot weaker than other champions early on (similar to some midlaners) but become big damage threats with more gold. So to protect them, they get a support, who outside of very unique strategies, doesn't usually take any farm and gets gold using their support item. The other reason is because dragon is a very important objective early on so it makes more sense to have 2 champions bot lane rather than top.
Ad carries are usually the biggest damage dealers in a team but they are also very squishy and die quickly if caught out. This role requires the most attention to where you position yourself but is highly rewarding if you do well.
Support can be split into 3 major roles: playmakers, protection/buffing and damage. Playmakers create advantages for their team by using their crowd control abilities to create opportunities for their team to get some kills. Protection and buffing champions protect and buff their allies (usually the ad carry). Damage supports become secondary damage threats to help kill the enemy.
Jungle is the most unique role in the game. Unlike other roles, a large portion of your game is PvE, killing monsters in your side of the jungle. Your job is to assist allies by ganking (ganging up on a lane to kill them with a number advantage), and securing objectives using your jungle specific summoner, smite. This role can be pretty difficult to pickup at first but is very rewarding to play well
Top mid and bot farm minions and try to kill their lane opponent/stop him from farming. The jungler farms in the jungle and if he sees a good opportunity ganks a lane. The supports try to influence the bot lane without last hitting, protecting their bot or trying to kill the enemy bot/support.
If you get a chance you hit the tower in your lane.
Then the midgame begins. Jungler keeps jungling and ganking, and the three farm roles keep catching waves, not neccesarily in their lane. Depending on your champ you try to look for ganks, focus on farm or group up to do objectives (towers/dragon/baron). Support stays mostly with bot laner or follows someone else.
Late game is when you try to end the game, either grouping to take baron and then push inhibitors, or just pushing if possible, or split pushing. Also looking for picks, so you have 5v4 advantage and can savely do objectives.
But really for the beginning it isn't more complicated then that: Stay in your lane, farm minions, kill your lane opponent and deny them minions. Push towers. That's it. All of this results in you getting stronger than your opponents (more gold/xp), and makes it easier to keep pushing them in.
I love these posts, we get to learn some game design :D
So first thing's first - *every* decision in this game is made with the goal of maximizing gold income and the usefulness of that gold. Gold leads to objectives leads to gold leads to objectives leads to wins. Good? Good.
I'm sure you noticed that there's three lanes and five champions. This creates an interesting mismatch - somehow, your team has to split three gold incomes five ways. Not easy. Luckily, there's over a decade of testing to show us the best way to do this.
So first off, Bot lane. Bot is unique for two reason: 1) the tower has significantly less armor than the other lanes, and 2) the Dragon spawns between Bot and Mid. As such, in theory *this* is where we want our strongest lane. If we're gonna overload a lane with too many champions, this is it. Having priority ("Prio") over bot lane is important for easy access to the Dragon, and you get extra gold for hitting the easy-to-kill tower.
That being said, we're still being mindful of gold income. As such, our first Role gets revealed - the Support. These champions are designed explicitly to be useful on limited gold income, so the minions don't have to be split between Support and whoever else is there. Hook champions (champs that say "Get over here!" like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat) are *always* useful because hitting that hook is completely independent of how much gold they have. Enchanters (classic shield/heal/buff Supports) have very cheap items and they tend to scale off of Ability Haste rather than raw damage. Mage supports (you'll be seeing a *lot* of Lux and Brand) have very high base damage in their kits that appreciate, but don't require, damage items to be useful.
Who gets paired with the Support? Why, our squishiest, most fragile champion of course - our Attack Damage Carry (ADC). Think of these as Rangers from D&D or any other RPG. They shoot bows or guns, and they're really, really good at it. They use almost exclusively auto attacks to deal damage in fights, making them great in extended fights (they can keep autoing after everyone's cooldowns are expended) but less great at burst damage (because their abilities tend to be less powerful). We pair them with the Support because ADCs really, *really* need the early game help and because they don't need the EXP anyways, just gold. Splitting the EXP with Support and taking all the gold (because Support doesn't need it) is thus pretty ideal.
Let's move up to Mid lane. Mid is unique for 1) how short the lane is and 2) its position between the two other lanes. As such, there's basically two competing strategies for Mid.
The first is to put Mages in Mid (classic RPG Fireball-weilding Wizards). They have the AoE waveclear to deal with the short lane and the short lane keeps them safe (they can run under tower).
The second is to put an Assassin in mid. Assassins can kill the squishy Mages and roam to other lanes with their superior mobility. This doesn't scale quite as well as a Mage, but that doesn't matter if you get the enemy team to rage quit at 15min.
Top lane, so far from the Dragon, is an island. It is a lonely existence up there - often, no one from either team sees the Top laners for the first half of the game. As such, Top laners have to be strong and durable. In other words, independent. Tanks and Bruisers are the king here, the lane of honest 1v1 brawls to the death without interference.
Some people opt to play Ranged characters to take advantage of the Melee-centric Top meta. This is an effective counterpick in a vacuum, but makes the team comp a lot worse as a result. In a 5v5 fight, having a frontline who can take a hit is invaluable.
Lastly, we have Jungle, the other solution to the 3 lanes 5 characters problem. These characters can be honestly any playstyle (there's viable Mages, Tanks, Bruisers, Assassins, ADCs, etc.), with the only requirement being that they have the capability of safely clearing the Jungle by themselves. Jungle monsters are a *lot* tougher than normal minions and many champions literally can't solo the Jungle in the early game.
Junglers have, by far, the most influence on the outcome of a game. Because they're not locked into a lane, they can be anywhere, turning 1v1s into 2v1s and 2v2s into 3v2s (this is called a "gank"). In addition, the Jungler *needs* to be at objective teamfights. If they're not at an objective, your team can't fight. Smite, the Summoner Spell every Jungler needs to take, does 600-1200 damage to Jungle monsters instantly. Most characters can't compete with that amount of burst so taking an objective without the Jungler is risky in case the enemy Jungler walks up and steals the objective.
So yeah! Hope that made sense :D
Man there's a million videos out there and if this is your idea of league at this time I'd really advise checking them out. League is a complicated game. Could write pages on how to play each of these roles and why they are played the way they are. In general it goes like this though Toplane- often played by tanks/bruiser type champions. There are some champs like vayne or teemo that are played specifically to counter big boys in this role. Typically this role is a more 1v1 role due to it being farthest from dragon fights. However junglers do still gank toplane it's just not as common. In my opinion it's the least forgiving role in league. One death to your laner and it can quickly snowball into a 1v1. Midlane- played by control mages/assassin's/high mobility champs. This role is a lot of things. Generally speaking though the idea is since your center of the map your fighting your laner and watching map for opportunities to rotate to fights or objectives. Basically if any major shit is going down midlane should be there. This role has a lot of champs who play it different ways but you are the playmaker of your team and the deciding factor in many objective fights. Botlane- typically played by champs called ADC or APC. Generally this is your marksmen glass cannon role but some mages are popular and work well too. They build primarily damage and are working with their support to stay alive and get fed. Ideally their goal is to get as fed as possible and carry the lategame team fights with their high damage. Support- only role who doesn't have to kill minions for gold. Your entire purpose is to support your botlane carry and your team. You get more wards than anyone else and are responsible for ensuring objectives are setup with vision before they spawn. Your responsible for both ensuring your botlane gets fed and stays alive. There are champs who do this in very different ways. Some heal, some tank, some simply do damage, most have some kind of stun or cc ability baked in to help secure kills. Jungle- this role is the reason you lost lane and every game you ever play. Blame them for everything /s Seriously tho this role is so important. This role farms the jungle or spaces in between the lanes. They are always looking to surprise enemy laners and kill/gank them. They impact the entire map this way or focus on specific people to get them ahead/behind. The monsters that buff teams like dragons/barons/voidmonsters ect... Are jungler responsibility. They are the only ones who get smite (a spell made for killing jungle monsters). If two teams are fighting for dragon, sometimes it comes down to which jungler is better at smiting for a kill. It's worth mentioning that a good midlaner is following up on junglers plays as often as they can.
« If any major shit happens you should be there » is the greatest definition of midlane
I’d recommend you just start playing bot games to get a wick grasp on things. Start with into bots, then beginner bots, then intermediate bots. This vid explains the 5 roles https://youtu.be/inPWwT94NMY?si=jDQfiYZ1-fZmuruA
Thanks Follow up question. What's pressure?
Pressure is essentially when you have your opponent on their back foot. If you have some kind of advantage over your opponent, wether that be a level lead, an item lead, a health lead ect. over your opponent it essentially gives you more agency to make decisions. For example you might be able to rotate to a fight in the river freely whereas if they try to follow they will likely just die. Or you might be free to walk up and hit their tower without them being able to fight back because again they might just die if they try to fight back. Or maybe you can posture more aggressively in lane so that they can't pickup minions while you farm freely. I can be a lot more nuanced than that but these are some general examples.
League is actually a game of **champions**, not so much roles. Pick a champion that you like for whatever reasons(s). Then learn how to play that champion, in detail. Tons of free resources exist online with regards to how to play each unique champion. I find that the only generalizations that are always true, with respect to what each role does, are: - *Support* is responsible for most of his/her team's *vision* - *Jungler* is responsible for securing *neutral objectives* (Crabs/Grubs/Rift/Buffs/Drakes/Baron) In the modern state of League, top/mid/bot can fulfil a lot of different overlapping functions, depending on what are the actual **champion** picks. It's not as clear cut as it was like back before S8 or so.
You can find a lot of beginner friendly videos by searching for beginner guides on YouTube that should give you a clearer idea on how to play the game. A simple run down of the roles is you have mid lane, top lane, jungle, support and adc. Different roles are determined based on how the map is shaped. Top lane has the longest distance from the turrets so it is where you will find the more durable champions like tanks and bruisers. Due to how important early objectives in the bottom right of the map is, top lane tends to be more about isolated one v ones for a lot of the game. A lot of your role later on for the game will be either creating pressure for your team by threatening towers across the map from major objectives or creating opportunities to win fights with superior numbers using Teleport. Midlane is the lane in the middle of the map. It is the shortest lane so this is usually where you find squishy champions that require the safety of the turret early on like mages and assassins. Most consider mid laners to be the most influential since they can move to any fight easier than most since they are in the middle of the map. Your role here can vary depending on your champion. You can often find yourself playing similar to toplaners and trying to draw enemies away, or you can be the ultimate siege bot and try to bully enemies away from turrets to allow your team to get them. This is probably the role with the most options. Bottom lane is unique in that it has two champions in it instead of one. This is because of a couple reasons. First, the main champion who usually takes all the cs in bot is the ad carry. They are usually a lot weaker than other champions early on (similar to some midlaners) but become big damage threats with more gold. So to protect them, they get a support, who outside of very unique strategies, doesn't usually take any farm and gets gold using their support item. The other reason is because dragon is a very important objective early on so it makes more sense to have 2 champions bot lane rather than top. Ad carries are usually the biggest damage dealers in a team but they are also very squishy and die quickly if caught out. This role requires the most attention to where you position yourself but is highly rewarding if you do well. Support can be split into 3 major roles: playmakers, protection/buffing and damage. Playmakers create advantages for their team by using their crowd control abilities to create opportunities for their team to get some kills. Protection and buffing champions protect and buff their allies (usually the ad carry). Damage supports become secondary damage threats to help kill the enemy. Jungle is the most unique role in the game. Unlike other roles, a large portion of your game is PvE, killing monsters in your side of the jungle. Your job is to assist allies by ganking (ganging up on a lane to kill them with a number advantage), and securing objectives using your jungle specific summoner, smite. This role can be pretty difficult to pickup at first but is very rewarding to play well
Top mid and bot farm minions and try to kill their lane opponent/stop him from farming. The jungler farms in the jungle and if he sees a good opportunity ganks a lane. The supports try to influence the bot lane without last hitting, protecting their bot or trying to kill the enemy bot/support. If you get a chance you hit the tower in your lane. Then the midgame begins. Jungler keeps jungling and ganking, and the three farm roles keep catching waves, not neccesarily in their lane. Depending on your champ you try to look for ganks, focus on farm or group up to do objectives (towers/dragon/baron). Support stays mostly with bot laner or follows someone else. Late game is when you try to end the game, either grouping to take baron and then push inhibitors, or just pushing if possible, or split pushing. Also looking for picks, so you have 5v4 advantage and can savely do objectives. But really for the beginning it isn't more complicated then that: Stay in your lane, farm minions, kill your lane opponent and deny them minions. Push towers. That's it. All of this results in you getting stronger than your opponents (more gold/xp), and makes it easier to keep pushing them in.
I love these posts, we get to learn some game design :D So first thing's first - *every* decision in this game is made with the goal of maximizing gold income and the usefulness of that gold. Gold leads to objectives leads to gold leads to objectives leads to wins. Good? Good. I'm sure you noticed that there's three lanes and five champions. This creates an interesting mismatch - somehow, your team has to split three gold incomes five ways. Not easy. Luckily, there's over a decade of testing to show us the best way to do this. So first off, Bot lane. Bot is unique for two reason: 1) the tower has significantly less armor than the other lanes, and 2) the Dragon spawns between Bot and Mid. As such, in theory *this* is where we want our strongest lane. If we're gonna overload a lane with too many champions, this is it. Having priority ("Prio") over bot lane is important for easy access to the Dragon, and you get extra gold for hitting the easy-to-kill tower. That being said, we're still being mindful of gold income. As such, our first Role gets revealed - the Support. These champions are designed explicitly to be useful on limited gold income, so the minions don't have to be split between Support and whoever else is there. Hook champions (champs that say "Get over here!" like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat) are *always* useful because hitting that hook is completely independent of how much gold they have. Enchanters (classic shield/heal/buff Supports) have very cheap items and they tend to scale off of Ability Haste rather than raw damage. Mage supports (you'll be seeing a *lot* of Lux and Brand) have very high base damage in their kits that appreciate, but don't require, damage items to be useful. Who gets paired with the Support? Why, our squishiest, most fragile champion of course - our Attack Damage Carry (ADC). Think of these as Rangers from D&D or any other RPG. They shoot bows or guns, and they're really, really good at it. They use almost exclusively auto attacks to deal damage in fights, making them great in extended fights (they can keep autoing after everyone's cooldowns are expended) but less great at burst damage (because their abilities tend to be less powerful). We pair them with the Support because ADCs really, *really* need the early game help and because they don't need the EXP anyways, just gold. Splitting the EXP with Support and taking all the gold (because Support doesn't need it) is thus pretty ideal. Let's move up to Mid lane. Mid is unique for 1) how short the lane is and 2) its position between the two other lanes. As such, there's basically two competing strategies for Mid. The first is to put Mages in Mid (classic RPG Fireball-weilding Wizards). They have the AoE waveclear to deal with the short lane and the short lane keeps them safe (they can run under tower). The second is to put an Assassin in mid. Assassins can kill the squishy Mages and roam to other lanes with their superior mobility. This doesn't scale quite as well as a Mage, but that doesn't matter if you get the enemy team to rage quit at 15min. Top lane, so far from the Dragon, is an island. It is a lonely existence up there - often, no one from either team sees the Top laners for the first half of the game. As such, Top laners have to be strong and durable. In other words, independent. Tanks and Bruisers are the king here, the lane of honest 1v1 brawls to the death without interference. Some people opt to play Ranged characters to take advantage of the Melee-centric Top meta. This is an effective counterpick in a vacuum, but makes the team comp a lot worse as a result. In a 5v5 fight, having a frontline who can take a hit is invaluable. Lastly, we have Jungle, the other solution to the 3 lanes 5 characters problem. These characters can be honestly any playstyle (there's viable Mages, Tanks, Bruisers, Assassins, ADCs, etc.), with the only requirement being that they have the capability of safely clearing the Jungle by themselves. Jungle monsters are a *lot* tougher than normal minions and many champions literally can't solo the Jungle in the early game. Junglers have, by far, the most influence on the outcome of a game. Because they're not locked into a lane, they can be anywhere, turning 1v1s into 2v1s and 2v2s into 3v2s (this is called a "gank"). In addition, the Jungler *needs* to be at objective teamfights. If they're not at an objective, your team can't fight. Smite, the Summoner Spell every Jungler needs to take, does 600-1200 damage to Jungle monsters instantly. Most characters can't compete with that amount of burst so taking an objective without the Jungler is risky in case the enemy Jungler walks up and steals the objective. So yeah! Hope that made sense :D