How to Play EVERY Bot Lane Matchup! - League of Legends

if you play adc you'll understand what we mean when we say that it can feel like a roll of the dice whether you win lane or not you either get a support who has no idea how to lane and constantly gets caught and dies or sometimes you'll actually find someone who pairs well with you to stomp the lane neither of these outcomes feels consistent and thus it feels like a roll of the dice one of the biggest causes of lane success feeling so volatile for players in platinum and below is simply a lack of bot lane match-up knowledge of course matchup knowledge is an essential skill to learn for all roles for example as in orianna versus zed she has to strategize what she needs to do to beat zedd and deal with the enemy jungler but in bot lane there are four champions instead of just two add in the enemy jungler and it can get confusing very quickly there's just a lot more things to consider for example if you're playing jin alistar versus caitlyn morgana you need to think about your alistar's goals and how to assist him and forge a plan to beat caitlyn and morg with your alistar then next game you may still be against caitlyn morgana but now you have a karma what do you do then not to worry you don't actually need to memorize every single bot lane combo to master match-ups in league of legends instead we've broken down how the best players generalize different matchups and how they use that information to formulate a winning game plan so let's get started and the first thing that you need to think about is what type of support is on either side support champions have a utility heavy toolkit by design and so they have the biggest influence over which team will win lane since their abilities are far more influential than in adc's early on in the game if you compared kog'maw's abilities to pike or jinx his abilities to velcoz you get the picture so we must break down what types of supports are in the bot lane as this will always play the determining factor as to how each match-up should be played the simplest way to break down supports is into two categories number one melee engage supports and number two caster range supports both archetypes come with different strengths and weaknesses and it's on you to make the most out of their positives while minimizing their negatives as much as possible each type comes with a different set of guidelines on how to play with them so let's get started with how to play with a ranged support to succeed with caster based supports you'll need to learn three critical skills starting with the first what you want to try and achieve with caster supports is to have a constant wave advantage and pushing to help enable them for success most ranged supports have skill shots in their kits by having more minions than your opponent you're making it less likely that they'll have something to hide behind to dodge your supports spells range supports also tend to be quite squishy we're sure you know how easily they die so having more minions than your opponent can deter them from going in and killing your lane partner let's get into some examples of what we mean both miss fortune and ezreal arrive in lane at around the same time some trading occurs immediately which is all fine from both sides but notice that shortly afterwards mf stops auto attacking the wave whereas ezreal continues to auto this is a clear indication that the enemy ezreal wants to try and contest the wave for level 2. mf needs to immediately recognize what's going on with a ranged support versus a melee you need to get wave control she should have been auto attacking a lot more to make sure that she and brand remained in control of the weight take a look at the consequences of her actions once both sides hit level 2 at roughly the same time brand has to run really far away and be useless of course he does he's a brand with barely any minion protection against thresh by wasting a lot of time just walking back and forth sometimes mf was unable to contest the push nearly enough by not doing so she just earned herself a useless support that she'll complain about at the end of the game before continuing let's show you a quick example of how easy a laning phase can look when you're actually enabling your support at the start of this laning phase ezreal makes sure he gets a solid minion lead as both he and karma are skill shot based champs what ensues is an unrelenting volley of skill shots flying toward kaisa and soraka throughout the entire laning phase making their lives completely miserable with so few minions to stand behind the kaiser and soraka had to tank a ton of poke eventually they were whittled down and disposed of by a great karma engage that's what your supports can look like if you enable them to succeed you should likely have an immediate concern upon hearing this though well of course it's easier to win with the wave pushing but the problem is that if you constantly push you'll just get ganked by the enemy jungler right well not necessarily all you have to learn how to do is know when you should go for some deep wards to keep yourself safe keep in mind that with overwhelming minion control comes the freedom to leave lane basically whenever you want there's very little that your opponents can do to stop you you might be immediately tempted to say well that's my supports job if i leave lane to get deep boards i'll miss some cs yes that is very likely but remember that the point of this guide is to eliminate the randomness of how successful your lane phase is regardless of what skill level your support is do you think that if white lotus was smurfing in loilo he'd rely on his support to ward for him no he'd get it done himself as we can see ezreal despite having complete control of the lane for so long never even considered going to set up a war by the time his support karma finally realized that she should be doing it it was too late and rumble was ganking right during that timing ezreal went from completely dominating lane to handing over two kills just because he didn't want to cover for karma's slack just remember that shallow wards won't cut it as we saw in one of our previous examples they just don't give you nearly enough time to run away from the gank you are in control of the wave if you suspect the enemy jungler will be bought soon then go as deep as you can for vision with a ranged support you're going to naturally be playing close to your opponent's tower a lot of the time so you need plenty of warning so that you can back off in time from the gank the third and final thing to remember when playing with a ranged support is to abuse parallel positioning to win trades and all ins parallel positioning is pretty self-explanatory how you want to position when going for trades is simply to be side by side with your support so that you can both hit the same target we know what you're thinking though that's all easier said than done your support is 15 feet behind you at all times so this would be impossible to achieve and we won't argue that some supports are infuriating to play with but there's always something that you can do about it for starters you can try to ping them to walk up yes this won't always work but asking them to just stand beside you will work in a lot of cases the other is to accept that your support is afraid to get their hands dirty and to simply match your own positioning with theirs will this potentially lower your pressure in lane absolutely but consider things like this your opposing adc isn't thinking about playing parallel at all if you're always parallel to your support and they aren't then you're bound to be able to out trade your opponents more often by abusing when they aren't parallel to each other let's show you how potent parallel trading actually is in a real game example the matchup in front of you is aphelios paired with a nami against varus karma things have been pretty tame the whole laning phase until ifelios had enough and walked up to force a trade we're going to pause right at this moment based on what you know about parallel positioning who do you think will win this trade what you should immediately notice is that technically both sides are more or less applying the concept both varus and karma are standing parallel relative to affilios's positioning meanwhile both the felios and nami are parallel relative to varus but the big clue as to who will win this trade is looking at who varys is aiming his arrow at he's clearly focused on the enemy nami which is normally fine she's a super squishy support and is already a bit low on health problem is karma was positioned to help attack aphelios not nami of course this trade goes handily toward the red side bot lane aphelios was completely left untouched and fires away with impunity whereas varus has to immediately flee for his life we're not saying varys would have won this trade but it wouldn't have been as one-sided had he thought about who his karma could actually threaten and focus fired a single enemy all right let's move on to melee engage supports there are two key skills that you need to master in order to significantly increase the chances of winning your match-up number one maintaining health and number two controlling the wave these skills are required when you're with a melee versus any match-up regardless of whether the enemy has a ranged or melee support so starting with the maintaining health the idea here is that you would value your hp bar more than you usually would when it comes to playing with engage supports they have one trick up their sleeve going in their primary resource to enable them to engage isn't only their own health bar but yours as well if you or your support drops too low engaging is no longer an option and your support will quickly become useless this is most important to keep in mind during the first three levels like we mentioned earlier support champion's abilities are what makes them so powerful so it's essential to get to level two and three healthily and since many melee supports are strictly melee it means that they have to practically afk until they level up leaving you to 1v2 the lane while that happens you should also keep in mind most melee supports are playable at level 2 since they are usually able to kill think leona eq blitzcrank qe thresh qe but level 3 is more ideal since they can land their kills far more easily with leona being way tankier with her w blitzcrank repositioning to hook with his w and thresh lantern with w for his adc in this example we see alistair and kaiser against mf thresh while both supports here are melee engaged supports when we think more about how useless alistar is at level 1 compared to a thresh it's kaisa and alistair's job to stay healthy until level 2. so let's see what happens now that we're breaking it down it's super obvious what the kaiser lane should have done kaiser should move forward grab the last hits then pull back and wait for the wave to push to her thresh's ranged auto attacks flay and flay passive far outweigh the alistar's pulverize in this exchange in the next example we see leona samira against a sena yumi right off the bat we see leona lose half her health for a single relic shield creep and this trend continues with both the leona and the samira not respecting that they need to stay healthy until leona can reach level 2 and ideally level 3 before they want to fight while this was mostly the leona's fault until now adcs are just as guilty for losing too much health before their supports level up with random pointless trades like this remember when you're level 1 with an engaged support you usually do need to think of it like you're playing 1v2 if your support is disconnected from the game you wouldn't go up and auto attack here because it's 1v2 your leona isn't a champion yet and that's how you need to think about these matchups to stay healthy enough until they do become a champion and if you need more convincing let's quickly take a look at the end result when you don't discipline yourself to stay healthy in this game which surprisingly is from masters elo we see jyn alistar against a caitlyn morg jyn was way over aggressive and actively traded onto the caitlyn morgue losing his entire health bar at level one now rendering alistar completely useless alistar has no job but to strafe left and right tanking damage so his gin can farm where they ultimately end up getting dived by the enemy team safe to say this gin lost the game at level 1. so how do you safely get two levels two and three well first you wanna let the wave push to you so you can farm safely near your tower you'll also want to let cs go where you take too much damage for it this is usually the casters since they're further away and lastly know that it is acceptable to take some damage to get things done for example if you're exchanging autos with just their adc that is usually fine if they don't have a healer support you just want to avoid one of you dropping to less than 70 health if both you and your support are at around 80 hp by level 3 that's more than good enough to win most all-ins all right what comes next is learning how to enable your engage support to find as many all ins as possible and there are two simple things that you'll want to do with your wave to make it infinitely easier for engaged supports to function first try to keep the wave closer to your side of the lane as we said engaged supports tend to be melee they can't possibly look to engage if your opponents are always close to their tower give them enough room to work with and you'll be surprised at how much more consistently your support will help you to score kills secondly allowing the wave to be on your side of the lane generally means that your opponents will be the ones pushing and controlling the wave usually this means that you'll be at a large minion disadvantage in the early levels you don't want to tank a lot of minions during an all-in therefore you just have to wait for the wave to thin out a bit and you can do this actively yourself trying to thin through auto attacks or abilities or you can usually just wait for it to crash at your tower that way you'll naturally even out the waves and it should be much easier to engage after that awesome so let's take a look at how different the results are between an adc who plays around their engaged support with their wave control and the one who doesn't our first example here features a jinx playing with an alistar not the best duo but a good player could easily make this work in low elo watch how jinx plays these first few waves initially she can test the first two waves heavily so that she and alistar can hit level 2 first their opponents wisely back off so nothing comes of it sadly this was all fine but here's where she really messes up look at how long she allows the wave to just rest near gin and thresh his tower without a doubt this has to be one of the worst ways jinx can play this laning phase out look at this alistar imagine that he's ackerman he's got every trick in the world up his sleeve even with an insanely talented support here there's absolutely nothing that he could do meanwhile the enemy thresh has all the time in the world to find and engage jyn has the wave perfectly set up under his tower meaning that thresh can miss hook after hook until he inevitably hits jinx just once and scores a kill again here's a comparison of an adc who clearly understands what the wave should look like to benefit their support much like in the previous example kalista and rakan can test the wave at level 1 so that they can potentially go for the level 2 all in they managed to trade some flashes but not much else here's the difference from the jinx game kalista immediately begins shoving in the wave to crash it by crashing the wave she guarantees that it pushes back onto their side of the lane thus granting rakan more opportunities to all in later on we'll fast forward a bit through the lane as that process unfolds and we can see that the wave is indeed on kalista's side of the lane rakan now has a much easier time trying to land a knock up on the enemy duo eventually he finds a solid engage when trist messes up and an easy kill is scored alright everyone now you've learned how to better break down lane archetypes to formulate a winning game plan let us know how this improves your laning in your next games and as always thanks so much for watching you

Channel: Skill Capped Challenger LoL Guides

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Keywords: riot games, riot guide, riot lol guide, skillcapped, skill capped guide, skill capped bot guide, skill capped adc, skill capped support, skill capped lol guides, support guide, adc guide, bot lane guide, skill capped, league of legends guide, league of legends pro guides

Id: AeQLZfAF6EE

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021