The Choice of Top Lane Champions

There is no perfect champion in the position of the top lane. In fact, it is unreasonable to rank the champions. There is a counter to everything in Top Lane.

I will give you some suggestions as follows, and hope they are useful to you.

 1. Why the top lane is so unusual?

The specialness of the top lane is that, this position requires the comprehensive abilities of the players. You should know how to use last hit, freeze a lane, avoid gank and resist compression at the same time. When some players are snowballed, they may lose confidence to play the rest of the game.

Maybe some players will say that, the mid lane also requires these qualities. In fact, there is less compression in mid lane than in the top lane. Because of the terrain of the mid lane, it is easier to attack and defend in mid lane than in top lane. Most champions in mid lane are ranged, with great control ability. Mid lane has one more advantage: support jungler and team fight with dragon. Once succeed, it will bring many advantages. That’s why we can often see top lane being snowballed not mid lane. Mid lane is easy to control attack and defend rhythm.

Top lane is too far to get support. Jungler and mid lane champions like to gank in top lane since it has a long retreat route and easy to from 2v1 situation. Especially in the early game when there’s no warding. Solo top lane is very easy to kill enemies or be killed. Once you lose advantage in top lane, you may be pushed under the tower or the champions are placed at front. The worst situation is: your champions are freeze in front of enemy tower and enemy champions are your counter. These may cause you cannot get close to your champions even if you have warding. Thus you will lose both money and experience. Without money and experience, you will be easier to be killed by enemy in laning. That’s what we call snowball.

The major reason you are snowballed is because champion counter. For example: Rumble is a counter to some top laners with short arms and legs like Malphite, Wukong, Olaf even Irelia. Rumble has no mana, no energy cost with shield, add speed and reduce speed skills and his damage is very high. Once his skills are used correctly, he freezes the lane in front of the tower and you dare not get close to the lane. Gradually you are snowballed.

Oftentimes you'll see in competitive play that the top lane pick tends to be the last pick in draft order so that your team's top lane champion already naturally has an advantage over the enemy team's.

So once top laner is counter picked, you’ve lost half of the game.