Dear Top Laner without Teleport

I understand. You want to snowball your lane. You're sure that if you take ignite and get kill pressure on the laning opponent you can shut them down. I understand. I get it.

I'm not gonna tell you what summoner spells to take, but I will tell you something - shutting down your lane opponent IN LANE does nothing if you sit top for 45 minutes and splitpush.

I have seen too many games where someone gets fed and goes "omg I will just splitpush top and no-one can stop me!"

And then their laning opponent roams bot and we lose the 4v5 because there's no TP top.

If you don't have Teleport, it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to back and group with your team for objectives. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to follow your laner. You wouldn't want a mid laner who just watched their lane roam and win their team the game while passively sitting mid farming, would you? So why do people think it's okay to do the same thing top lane?

I get it. I understand. "BUT MUH SPLITPUSH DATS HOW PROS WIN".

Well yeah, but if the enemy team sees your splitpush and just moves their top laner bottom and gets dragon and baron at 25 minutes because you couldn't be assed to rotate, it doesn't matter that you had this totally sick push and took 2 towers top before 20 minutes - we still are at a huge disadvantage. It doesn't matter if you take an inhibitor and the enemy team kills the other 4 members on your team because it's unlikely you can stop them from pushing. (of course this only counts if they can take an inhib in response).

After death timers hit a point where you're dead for more than 20-30 seconds, it's REALLY IMPORTANT that you group with the team. When 4 people die contesting first dragon they're not dead for very long and it's unlikely the team will get anything. But if it's 40 minutes and you're just sitting top... The team is going to lose. Guaranteed.

This of course does not count if you go push it up and back off or what have you... But if you're physically sitting in the lane and not rotating, you need to watch some actual pros play top lane. A lot of top laners rotate mid to gank! This isn't Season 2/3 where splitpushing was REALLY strong - times have changed, friend, and splitting just isn't as strong as it used to be.

This of course doesn't apply if you're playing someone who pushes insanely fast and that's their main thing, or if you're very far behind and can't contribute meaningfully to fights. This is a very small exception though, and it bothers me that people will go 10/0 and not come bottom to spread the love. Your score doesn't matter if you don't use it to win the game.