Top Lane Rewards For Passive Lanes Because of the Increased Sustain In Runes Reforged

Currently it feels like everyone is trying to solve many different problems at the same time. I can agree on most of the problems, but in my opinion it's kinda stupid to expect Riot to make a big top lane patch that fixes literally everything in such short time. In my opinion, we as a community should really improve how we communicate with Riot so we can actually have meaningful changes that matter to us. We should focus on single problem together, so Riot can nail it first time. If we are forcing them to address every issue, we either get small changes to everything that doesn't feel satisfying, or Riot decides to focus on one aspect of the problem and we as community are gonna be pissed, cause "Riot didn't listen to us/That doesn't change anything."

So here I am to to give everyone my take on the top lane problem, aiming to give more specific thing to fix rather than everything from the meta to systematic changes. I might be way off and 100% wrong, so you guys really should give your own take on the situation too here or in your own posts. There is no reason to not be part of the discussion, if you are passionate about this subject.

In my opinion top lane isn't fun because:

1. As a top laner, I feel like I don't influence the game in positive or negative way.
2. Winning the lane (that would transfer to meaningful lead for the team) is hard.
3. Winning the lane (that would transfer to meaningful lead for the team) takes too long.
4. Winning the lane usually doesn’t mean anything in terms of the outcome of the game.

And my take on the problem is:

THE INCREASED SUSTAIN FROM RUNES IS REWARDING THE PASSIVE PLAYSTYLE TOO MUCH

I disagree with Hashinshin in alot of things, but in his last video he said one thing super well: > ”There are autofilled top laners, who play tanks and stonewall you.”

And I’m pretty sure Hashinshin means by this the following:

> playing passively, mainly freezing the wave near your tower so the enemy can't trade and harass you out of lane, while making the enemy also easy to gank and not interacting with the opponent, resulting in a lane where nobody wins, which means that neither of top laners are going to give any impact to the game.

We have all heard the famous ”play it safe”, right? Me personally have alot of experience on this, since our group is super bot lane focused, so usually it has been normal, that me as a top laner don’t get that much pressure and try to win lane by myself. Whenever I start to tilt one of my friends reminds me to ”just smile and relax!” and usually at that time I’ll put my fake smile and start playing passively, mainly freezing and stuff. I’ve had the feeling for some time now, that my enemies might have started ”smiling” no matter the situation, which has been problematic, resulting me to maybe pursue the title of Best Urgot Finland rather than the Next Best Shen Finland after PetuTheBeast. What I mean by this is that the current top lane doesn't really seem to have a winner for most of the time, instead it has become more of a ”brolane”, because you cant really scratch your enemy, unless you are someone that can force your enemies to feed you with kills.

Playing passively is not unhealthy by any means and it's not something people have learned just now. In my opinion it is necessary to have that option, especially for weaker laners. The problem is that top laners have too much sustain nowadays, so it has started to be more problematic.

I can say this with confidence that the increase in sustain is the problem, because I have abused health regen quints with Shen and Irelia for 5 seasons. Many Shen and Irelia mains used to run health regen quints, including me and I can say that the health regen negating the bad trades have been super helpful. Large amount of health regen can be problematic on both aggressive and passive playstyles, but in my opinion it doesn’t feel good to laning versus enemy who sustains all your harass, and is being able to stay in lane for whole game, because it makes it harder to find windows to roam elsewhere or to take the tower.

With the old rune system, opting to sustain was way harder on many champions, because you lost the combat stats, but nowadays you have tons of options to get sustain from and the two biggest ways to get it happens to be resolve and inspiration, which are super popular for basically every top laner.

HERE IS WHY I THINK THE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF SUSTAIN/NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY AGGRESSIVELY IS THE KEY TO MANY TOP LANE PROBLEMS:

1. Having a constant and large health regen negates bad trades, making top lane less punishing and skillful.
2. Not having bad trades results in both top laners being present at the top lane, unless the other roams.
3. Both top laners being at the top 24/7 means that taking the top towers takes longer.
4. Both top towers being up means that neither the splitpushers nor the teamfighters can make impactful plays early.
5. Not being able to make impactful plays early means, that you don’t have any way to carry in early game.
6. Not being able to carry in early game means, that you are the least impactful role in the game, resulting to top being so unpopular and ”not fun” in top 1%.

In other words, I feel like our favorite role would be much more impactful, if we could actually force our enemies to back and to be able to get the tower by ourselves. The most impactful moments to carry for a top laner (or at least the most fun) is when they either get to finally group with their teammates and crush the carries with their powerspikes or to draw enemies to stop you from splitpushing. To do that, you usually need to be able to get the top tower to do so. That is the reason I currently think we should have more punishing laning phase by reducing the sustain top laners have access to, so we could have our mid game earlier.

So uh, I’m not sure how to end this and if I gave you enough context for my point of view but sure hope so. Thoughts? The first time I wrote this (this being the 3rd or 4th one) had over double the word count so I had to trim it a little bit, things might have lost in the process, so feel free to ask for clarifications for my opinions if they seem like confusing. I would love to discuss about this and other problems/possible changes with everyone, while maintaining the respect for the guys working on the game. There is alot to be done with top lane, so we really need to tone the rage down, so we can together figure what kind of changes to prioritize over anything else.

TL;DR: Let’s stop the hate and try to communicate better what we want from top lane. In my opinion the biggest thing Riot should focus on is giving the top laners easier time to influence the game early to mid-game and I feel like top is currently frustrating, because everyone has great sustain because of the new runes, making the lane reward more of a passive style when in a losing matchup. ILY everyone and cats are cute. Remember to smile.