As a top lane main, i'm miserable. The game has never before been this cruel to me.

Disclaimer: salty rant about the current meta. Don't bother trying to read unless you're here to laugh at how pathetic we top laners have become.

I feel invalidated as a player. No matter what i do, i can't influence the course of the match anymore - if bot lane loses, the match is over at 07:00, if mid lane loses everybody gets blown up in the blink of an eye the moment they leave their base and if the enemy jungler is fed they can both face tank a tower and burst someone down from 100 to 0.

Meanwhile, in top lane...

It doesn't matter if i'm playing a tank, a bruiser or an assassin. Even before laning phase has ended, one of the other lanes has gotten completely dumpstered and as a result the enemy jungler has nothing else to do than to pressure me. Their winning lane will eventually come along and i will be forced to give up two towers.

Every other role in the game has an impact when they get ahead. Top laners do zero. You're just one player in a game where quantity>quality.

Example is not based on any single game. It's more like a conglomeration of all the freak shows i've witnessed since preseason begun.

Now i understand Riot wanted to get away from the one man army snowballfest of seasons past, but what's even the point with having a top lane at all? It feels like we're the new supports, in the aspect of what support used to entail back in season 1-3. You spend the entirety of laning phase barely surviving an extremely harsh dueling lane where you have to constantly watch out for a jungler or mid laner that can blow you up faster than you can flash, and all you get to build is tank items so that you can be a meat shield for your team. You can't possibly focus on outtrading your lane opponent, because if you build a damage item you're not going to have the resistances required to survive the full combo of the various damage types featured in the entire enemy team. Damage types massively boosted by new keystones only available to certain classes of champions. Your keystone is always melee-based - and nearly every champion in the game has ways to ensure you will never get into melee range with them.

But that doesn't mean you need to go FULL tank, right? One black cleaver, a trinity force, a titanic hydra couldnt hurt, right?

Yes. Yes it can. In fact, if you even think about building anything that doesnt benefit the entirety of your team, you may very well decide the outcome of the match from that one item purchase.

Because your assassin jungler is too busy finishing his third duskblade. Your mid laner is still building their morellonomicon 30 minutes later. Your adc is working on their and the support is building .

If you dont go tank, nobody else will. And then there's nothing standing between these full offense teammates of yours and the enemy super fed insert snowballed role here that is drooling so much their adc is wondering why their support hasn't warded this new river yet.

Of course, these glass cannons are also so afraid to die that they will run away at the first sign of trouble. If you get caught, tough luck - you're obviously inting.

They get engaged on and you peel their assailant off them? Wave as they never look back, high-tailing it back to base to refill that 5% HP they lost.

They ping you to go in and you do? You're now being attacked from every direction by 4 opponents while your teammates (yes, all 4 of them) panic flashes away from the enemy jungler diving into them all alone. Yeah, that full tank jungler that ends the game doing less damage than both supports.

What am i supposed to do, as a top laner? Do i have to duo queue with a tank jungle main and abuse the heck out of or before electrocute gets nerfed? Do i have to switch to being a jungle main to be given even the most remote impact on the course of the game?

I've tried jungling. It's my off-role. And i absolutely hate it - because every time i do, my top laner will lose their lane extremely hard - even if they counterpick their opponent - and they'll have absolutely no impact on the game, whatsoever.

It doesn't matter what champion i play. If i'm playing top lane, i can only pray matchmaking gave me teammates better than my opponents - because even if i teleport bot at level 2 and give my adc a double kill, you can be certain the enemy adc is going to be 5/1 by the time laning phase ends.

Please tell me this isn't your ideal state of the game. I figure this might be what makes the fun plays in the tournaments and on the streams, but i've never been more miserable.

Please dont force me to quit the lane. It's the only one i truly enjoy playing. But as it stands, its completely unplayable as a solo player - i don't play lethality slave champions that just stack anything with "lethality" printed on it, so i can't do anything once the laning phase has ended.