10 Tips On How To Play Mid Lane

With many flashy and mechanically depending champions, mid lane is by far most popular role in LoL. Its popularity could also be contributed to Faker, who stole the spotlight the moment he started playing. By being so popular, it also attracts many players who are not familiar with this role. In this guide we’ll talk about how to play mid lane better, and maybe even become like Faker himself.

Table of Contents

Decide your Class

Mid is easily the role with most variety when it comes to choosing what do you want to play. With champions such as Yasuo and Yone dominating it though, assassins are most fun class to play. On the other hand, there are also old school mages like Veigar.

Assassins

Assassins come with a lot of outplay potential and many ways to get ahead in lane. They’re a double-edged sword though. Unlike other classes, once they fall behind, they usually stay behind. Due to their complexity, we don’t recommend them to beginners. It takes much longer time to learn playing mid if you’ll be opting for one of the more mechanically depending champions.

Best assassins to play on mid in Season 11 are; Yone, Akali, Yasuo, Zed and Talon

Mages

We have split mages into three groups, general one, long range pokers and scalers. When we’re talking about general mages, we mean champions such as Orianna and Syndra. They’re relatively short ranged and best known for the zoning power. Unlike assassins, mages have much less kill pressure. This a reason why they’re recommended when it comes to learning mid. You’ll have to beat your opponent on basics such as trading, farming and roaming. Furthermore, they’re much simpler so you’ll have more time to focus on the game itself.

Best mages to play in Season 11 are: Syndra, Orianna, Twisted Fate, Cassiopeia, Azir, Ryze

Poke

Poke champions used to be dominating League of Legends until new baron was introduced few years ago. Since then they have been used only as situational picks. Alongside general mages, they’re good for learning mid lane. Their downside is that if you miss your spell, you’ll stay around standing until your cooldowns are back up. If you want to play such champions, we recommend getting to know mid lane through champions like Orianna and Ryze and then transition to them.

Best poking champions in Season 11 are: Xerath, Lux, Ziggs, Zoe (unlike hers companions, Zoe is an extremely strong laner), AP Kog Maw

Late-Game scalers

Our last class that we recommend playing on mid are late game monsters. In order to balance them, they usually have extremely weak laning phase. Knowing your limits and having discipline to let minions die without you last hitting will teach you a valuable lesson. They’re our second favorite class to play.

Best scaling champions in Season 11 are: Vladimir, Kassadin, Ryze

After you chose class that fits you the best, you’ll want to limit the number of champions that you’ll play up to 3. Having more than that will slow down both your learning, and climbing process.

Get better at Farming

Destroying enemy nexus and winning is not necessarily easy. But having few more items than the enemy surely does help. Having more minions than the enemy is best way to get those extra items and increase your chances of victory. Each minion that you last hit will give you some gold. It’s also worth noting that unlike anything else in League, you won’t have a chance to kill the same minion if you miss him on the first try. Instead, another one will come. But that one you missed is going to be permanent gold you’ll be missing but you could have had.

To help you understand this section easier, we broke it down in few paragraphs.

Freezing

We have a dedicated article about freezing, but in nutshell it’s a lane state where minions are not moving. You can choose a place where you’d like them to stay and manipulate them so they’re always there. This can lead to many advantages, such as enemy stepping up and being prone to gank. Or, enemy will have to approach you and you can try to fight him yourself.

Slow Push

Once the enemy breaks a freeze, most of the time it will initiate a slow push. This occurs when both players have same number of minions, but they’re located on one side of the lane. Naturally, supporting minions will arrive faster to the side that wave is located on and that side will have temporary advantage in numbers. You should use slow push to crash big waves and look for quick recalls or roams.

Shove

Imagine a scenario. You are ahead in lane after solo killing enemy laner, you press tab and see that the rest of your team is losing. At this point only advantage that your team has over the enemy is you. In order to swing back the lead to your team, you’ll be required to roam a lot. Best way to do this is by shoving the lane first. By shoving your lane before roaming you’re not going to miss out on the precious minions. If your roams end up being fruitful, great! If not, you didn’t lose anything.

How to move in Lane

Being in the center of the map, mid laner have many options when it comes to moving away from the lane. They can roam bot lane, as well as top lane with ease. But that also comes with certain disadvantages. Unlike side lanes, mid laners can get ganked from both sides of the lane. You should be playing towards the side you have more vision on, or on the side opposite of where enemy jungler is. Knowing this would require you to track enemy jungler through fog of war, or spot him on some wards.

Trading

Many mid lane match ups involve a lot of trading while battling for lane priority. General rule when it comes to it is knowing that the trade will be beneficial for you. Best way to initiate a trade is when you have more minions, since once enemy attacks you they will target him back. Furthermore, look to trade onto the enemy whenever he tries to last hit a minion.

Be careful of enemy support roaming and ganks from the jungler. Try to have information on where they are before going for a trade. You don’t want to risk dying and giving away 300 gold plus tons of experience just to deal 50-100 damage to enemy.

Where to Ward

Every game players start with 1 trinket in their inventory. It can be extremely helpful if you place it at the correct spot. Depending on where enemy jungler started, you should always ward opposite side. If you had a push in the lane you can even put a ward deeper in the enemy jungle.

Green wards represent blue side wards, while pink ones represent red side wards

Some exceptions to general rules of warding:

Zac

Zac’s E Elastic Slingshot can cover a lot of ground so his ganks can be somewhat unorthodox. To protect yourself you should be warding a bit further from the lane compared to the usual wards.

Evelynn

Unlike other champions, after she hits 6 Evelynn has an ability to be permanently invisible. With that being the case it’s extremely hard to play against her ganks. Control wards can be helpful, but the real counter play to her is warding her camps.

Best time to Roam

When we’re talking about strengths and weaknesses of particular lanes, roaming is one of the greatest strengths that mid laners have. They can impact both top and bot lane and swing the momentum for their team quite easily. Every time you decide to go for a roam, you’re going to be losing mid lane priority and pressure. This can be minimized by shoving the wave first and then roaming. By the time you’re back from the roam a new wave will be coming towards your tower. Second best time to go for a roam is immediately after your opponent recalls. This will give you enough time to shove the wave and instantly head to where the action is. Another thing you should be doing is checking out bot and top as you’re pushing the wave, so by the time you’re done you will know where you’ll be moving next.

What to do after laning phase

After laning phase is over, many players just group mid and look at each other until one team makes a mistake. What you should be doing is playing on a side lane that is closest to the next objective (for example baron or dragon), because the furthest lane will be reserved for top laners who have teleport. If you are an assassin, you’ll want to be picking off opponents. On the other hand, mages want to go to the side lane, push the wave and return to their team. You can be repeating the same process until a fight breaks out.

Watch Pros

Mimicking what professionals do can be quite hard when you don’t understand what’s happening. Watching and interacting with streamers is one of the fastest ways to get better in League of Legends. Sure, you could spend a lot of time playing and learn those things on your own. But its quite counter productive when you could just open some twitch channel and ask the streamer and still have the same outcome.

To better learn how to play match ups its mandatory to watch how professionals do it. They practice each day and have the best understanding of how to play their respective lanes. One way to do is to go to youtube and search for a vod (an example of a search would be, Faker Ryze vs Syndra). Watch it and analyze what Faker, or someone else did and then replicate it in your game.