[TOP] A beginner/average level guide to people trying new lanes

1.) WARD ALWAYS

• This prevents ganks from behind since you are unfortunate to have 2 forms of entry from the jg/river. Pink wards are better since they are cheep and have no lifespan.

2.) A good TOP laner will be able to recognize and report common actions preformed by their opponent such as when they go to ward.

• Many players do not ward secretly. Sometimes they just walk into the river with the other TOP laner standing next to them and alerting them to the existence of a ward. But if you can sneak a ward into the river brush without detection, then you have that assured protection which they think you don't have. Other things to notice are when they back, teleport, flash, how well they farm, what is their build path, is Rift Harold a priority to them, are they pushing/freezing/or equalizing the lane, and if they get ganks a lot or leave lane a lot to gank.

3.) **Learn some of if not most of these ** >

• These are all fairly common and depending on who you are against (consider both top and jg) can become very strong champions to carry with. Yorick is surprisingly strong.

4.) Try and get a counter pick

• Although a typical strategy for most roles, I find it most important to the TOP laner. Your job is usually (not always) to provide either: tankyness, bruiser based stats which usually helps by you becoming an option for split pushing, or utility. That being said, you will often find that you have low kill potential (lower than a MID or ADC or JG) because you are going for more sustain/tank than damage/ DPS. However, TOP lane is very snowball prone. That 1 kill advantage could spell out the rest of the lanning phase, so make it an easy kill by counter picking.

5.) TOP LANE CAN CARRY

• Mid lane usually gets the reputation for the DO NOT FEED AT ALL COST lane. But AP burst mages cant finish out a game, meaning that most, if not all, will fall off in strength as the game progresses making their kill potential diminish. But with TOP lane, your team can lose every lane except top and because you got fed as , you are basically unkillable (hypothetically of course) and can stall out the game so your team can climb back in. Top lane also has the highest amount of champions in its pool who deal true/ % hp damage.

6.) You do not need to win lane, to win lane

• You don't need to carry hard, get tons of kills, or take the tower as fast as you can. As long as you are not feeding, have around equal to or better cs than your opponent, and good map awareness, you should be fine. it is better sometimes to not push a lane so that the opponent has to come out to the middle of top lane to farm, while you don't have to risk getting ganked by being too far out from your tower (look at new minion mechanics when a tower falls). One of the best strategies to win TOP (IMO) is have a higher CS count than the opponent. to do this you can either just out farm them (hard but self explanatory and simple in concept) or prevent your opponent from farming (hard but with more options). Preventing farm is done by either blinding, hard CC, zoning, changing their damage output/ attack speed/ minion health at the last second (like alistar's ability to heal minions), or pushing under tower. Banner of Command () works great against full AP, caster class, champions.