Introduction

Marksman is one of the most straight forward roles to play in League of Legends. There are fewer intricacies to it than other roles, due to several factors. The first being that you do not have the agency to impact other lanes early on when game-deciding moments are created. Secondly, you often lack the power to fight alone, especially against solo laners or junglers that are overleveled in comparison. The third factor is that you are laning with and against an extra player, which can add an extra degree of randomness to your game.

Despite the existence of these roadblocks, citing them as a reason for why you’re unable to consistently fulfill your role better than your opponent is invalid, because both sides are playing under the same circumstances. It’s important to know the existing flaws of each role while playing it. On the flip side, it’s easier to get fed vs bad players because you are laning against 2 opponents instead of 1.

While marksman champions are simplistic, the people who can exploit the smallest of opportunities consistently will still manage to excel. The lack of intricacy can actually lead to an extra layer of difficulty, just due to basic human nature. It’s difficult to master something repetitive when you don’t feel that the outcome of your decisions are rewarding enough. But make no mistake, bot laners must be quick to make important, game altering decisions; just often at the whim of their teammates. Do you heal the support who is about to die with absolute certainty, just to ease his/her mind? Perhaps you join in on the death match and die as a pair just to show a united front to your opponents. In order to make the proper choice quickly and efficiently, you must know the answer ahead of time.

There are already a plethora of individual champion guides out there, as well as access to the day-to-day builds that pros use on multiple websites. For that reason, my goal is instead to convey the mindset of a successful bot laner. I specify marksman due to most of this advice being directed at cultivating the proper train of thought required to play ADC at a high level. While you could apply this to other niche picks that can be played bot lane, often a slightly different mentality may be required in order to excel at each archetype.

Mindset

When you stomp around in a puddle, the water splashes everywhere; it’s easily displaced. Try stomping the ocean and it’ll swallow your foot. Attack Damage Carries, or “ADC’s”, are not the force causing the waves to crash, but the body of water itself. I see this as an apt comparison because while you can manufacture your own leads, you are easily disrupted. You lack the power to impact the rest of the map, the support is often stronger than you in terms of laning power, and the jungler can easily make a splash in your lane. That’s without even mentioning solo lanes roaming or using teleport. But as a carry role, as you grow bigger, your area of influence increases dramatically.

While the word “snowball” gets used to describe someone getting stronger rapidly, I would say what happens with an ADC is more akin to global warming. Everyone is having a good time on the beach until they blink and now they’re all under water. Like the human race, it was our ability to consume that was holding us back from melting the ice caps in the first place. Marksmen never really stop scaling, so it’s not like there’s any rush to close the game out. Once they hit the point where they can consume resources with ease, it only gets worse for the other team. From the beginning, you’re only ever laning with another champion because you’re too weak not to. Any marksman champion that isn’t is automatically picked up and played in whichever solo lane it can fit into. With that in mind, your goal is to try and play catch-up. Immediately outside of lane, other carry roles will be a couple levels higher, so you have very little cushion for moving around the map incorrectly or failing to generate experience/gold for an extended amount of time. While taking resources is a priority for everyone, ADC’s must do it in a much more greedy and selfish way. Because you are weak early on, your teammates will be able to take gold & experience sources from you easily if you are in the same area. It’s up to you to understand what‘s necessary to carry the game. In life, no one understands your exact predicament as well as you. Other people can’t see your needs, wants, and intentions. Not only that, all of those things are meaningless if you are not the one to bring them to fruition.

Consumption & Expenditures

If speed running is your forte, you might want to pick a different role. Playing marksman is for those who like seeing the soul slowly leave their opponents body. There are a few champions like Kalista or Draven who can take souls early in the game and have trouble scaling, but the majority of the roster only gets stronger with time. In order to take souls, you must also be willing to hold onto yours at all costs. There is nothing more frustrating than diving an ADC, making them lose countless waves, and still watching them farm up and try to carry with a smile on their face. Become the resource hungry psychopath you hate playing against the most, taking great pride and joy in both the process of consuming, and the process of denying consumption.

Experience

Since you’re sharing experience, falling behind in levels is devastating at all stages of the game. Once you’re behind one or more levels, you’re then much more vulnerable against your direct opponent, meaning your support has to stick around and share even more experience with you. Let’s have a look at Kai’Sa’s stats per level.

The biggest thing to look at here is the increase in health and armor. After that, base attack damage and attack speed. Magic resist is useful too, but an ADC’s MR/LVL is extremely low. These are combat stats that directly affect your ability to fight. Without factoring in the bottom 3 rows, the gold value you get at each level is 402.5. This is just base stats. Specifically the armor and health value is the most troublesome part with falling behind in levels. 86 health is almost an entire ability early on in the game, and it’s the difference between your opponent having lethal (the ability to kill) on you and not. Not only that, but the only health item a marksman ever ends up purchasing is usually Doran’s Blade. Items such as Hexdrinker, Phantom Dancer, and Ninja Tabi are only useful when you have the health to make their shields or resistances worth it. The only health you’ll obtain throughout the game is via levels. Thus, falling behind in experience pushes you into a corner much worse than a gold deficit.

Kai’Sa gains a significant amount of damage per point in Q, especially post-upgrade

To give you a better understanding of the value of gold, here is a chart outlining the average worth of a minion wave.

This means that each level pre-15 minutes is worth roughly the same as 3.5 waves. A lot of champions kits are based around the levels they have in the first ability they max, and so a gold deficit may not end up being as meaningful as an experience deficit. This is why in many professional matches, teleport ends up being taken over heal. The death itself is not nearly as significant as what you lose as a result of dying.

Although every role gets punished similarly for falling behind in experience, marksman already play a very fragile role, and your ability to actually make an impact on the game dissipates much more significantly as a result. Most other roles can still make clutch picks or important engages, while your only goal as an ADC is often to do damage, which you cannot do safely from a large experience deficit.

Items

Falling behind in gold on the other hand is a bit more salvageable as ADC items are meant to scale directly with each other, meaning that an ADC’s first completed item will not immediately start snowballing the game. It is still a slippery slope, but you’ll at least be able to participate in the game in a more supportive role.

Other roles first items often equip them to deal with anything. Getting a Trinity Force, Luden’s Echo, or jungle item fast means you are almost guaranteed to snowball. An ADC’s first item, however, is designed to create a sort of wall around them. An infinity edge by itself turns you into a slow firing RNG canon. There’s a 1 in 4chance that if you trade auto attacks with the opposing ADC, you will do a significant enough chunk of damage to force the opposition back. It doesn’t necessarily prevent plays being made upon you, but it immediately discourages short trades, and expands your area of influence to at least the space surrounding the minion wave. In other words, it usually allows you to get the push. All the sudden, if you are left alone with the opposing ADC, there’s no chance for the wave to be contested. Similarly, if you finish Essence Reaver, you can use your spells much more often and get a major wave clearing advantage. Blade of the Ruined King and The Bloodthirster work in a similar manner, carrying so much sustain that your opponent will avoid trying to trade hits altogether, giving you control of the wave.

While Blade of the Ruined King might be the one item that can go toe-to-toe with other roles’ 1 core, that is also why the item itself and the champions that utilize it are often nerfed. But the point is that the purpose of your first item is to give you enough breathing room to get your next item. Then your second item gives you not just breathing room, but the ability to clear waves and jungle monsters safely. By the third item, your participation in fights becomes momentous. At this point, you are the bridge they once said “We’ll cross when we come to it.” The molehill that actually turned into a mountain. It’s not spilled milk they’re crying over; they’ve got an entire dairy cow in their kitchen. You get the point.

Playing ADC is a bit like trying to stack a house of cards. There’s a constant tug-o-war in your mind between wanting to use all the gold you’ve earned to help your team win a fight, and using your gold to make even more gold. Your house might topple trying to stack up that last card, as either you or your team loses patience, fighting over something you have no right to. And you’ll find that often times they will want to fight over nothing, just because you’re strong. What they fail to realize is that you are that which dictates the game. The mentality that allowed you to get to those thresholds of strength in the first place, would never have existed if you grouped every time they thought you were “strong”. The thing is, it only ever takes one horrible fight to flip your cold, calculated game plan upside down. So why take the fight if you can ever avoid it? Although you could take fights early on, your opponent is relying on you to fight before the point of no return in order for them to mount a come back. You’ll find that playing ADC is a balancing act between making your team happy by grouping, and making your team really happy (making the enemy nexus boom).

Never become content with the next item, think about how you’ll use that next item to guarantee your next. Consider your lead insurance against your teammates throwing. The goal is to become strong enough that skill & team cohesion stops becoming a factor in whether you win or not. It may not be legitimately attainable unless there’s a large skill discrepancy between you and your adversary, but goals need not always be met. Shoot for the moon, land in the stars.

Consuming with Intent

Although this really applies to any role, it’s specifically really bad for ADC’s to spend too much time roaming the map. I’ll get into macro later, but generally you don’t want to leave wherever you go until you’re resetting again. Many people make the mistake of leaving to contest an objective on the opposite side of the map from the lane that they’re farming. But as an ADC, there is always a great cost to rotating. You’re easy to hunt down and kill in rotation for the enemy team, and since you don’t have a sweeper you don’t know whether you’re running through wards. I speak from experience when I say that your teammates, especially in low elo, will NOT understand this. It’s not you staying in your lane that is stopping dragon from being contested, it’s your team only opening up top lane for you to farm one minute before dragon spawned.

Like chess, League of Legends is made up of turns. The higher the level of play you get to, the more you’ll understand this. You aren’t supposed to be able to control both sides of the map at once, however it’s not something most people fully consider. When you commit to an objective, you solidify your forces on one side of the map, and you lose the fluid state of your team, leaving the other side unguarded to make sure you have a numbers advantage. But that is when you can be capitalized on the most, so the objective has to have been definitively worth it. Tempo is much harder to regain than it is to keep.

If you are wasting time in a staring contest over an objective, it means you are no longer consuming. You must learn to see the game in 30 second windows, which is of course the time it takes for minion waves to spawn and crash. When you leave your side of the map to contest something, don’t forget that you were already contesting something to begin with. And along with this, you are committing to giving up what you were contesting previously when you abandon ship. As an ADC, you need the foresight to see if you’ll get the short end of the stick before the objective is even finished. When you favour farm and resource consumption over your opponents, you are instantly applying pressure.

Try to think about things from a much broader perspective. Consider how nice a cloud, ocean, mountain, or infernal dragon feels. Now think about what it is going to do for you in the literal moments after it dies? It’s like when you stuff your mouth with fast food only to realize you don’t actually feel that amazing afterwards. Don’t put yourself in a position where you have to ask if it was worth it after the fact. Often the positional advantage gained from not going out of your way to contest an objective that’s out of reach is much more significant than the value of the objective itself. The part that gets difficult is when you lack knowledge, leading to a lack of confidence and trust in yourself to override your teams decision. However, playing with these things in mind constantly and watching skilled players to see how they react to situations you have trouble with will get you over the hump.

10 CS(Creep Score)/PM (Per Minute) is often referred to as the holy grail of a good LoL player. It’s almost a trick answer to the basic question of “How do I improve my game play?”. You don’t actually get 10 CS/PM by just hitting minions well, you first need to make sure at least 10 minions are appearing on your screen per minute in the first place. This is why the best players have the discipline to not chase unnecessarily or get baited. Fighting opponents is more of a means to an end, not their sport of choice. If you think about what a counterpick does in LoL, the main purpose is often to prevent your opponent from farming until an item/experience differential is created. But if that’s what makes a counterpick so valuable, and it’s the results of a counterpick that you’re after, then why not try to replicate it at any possible stage of the game that you can find it in? This is why consumption and denial needs to be on your mind constantly.

As for your team’s point of view; being greedy is selfish, but is losing your team the game to make them happy momentarily a selfless act? Not really, it just shows a lack of confidence. They’ll be confused and blame you when you can’t carry team fights later in the game anyways. The decisions your team will want you to make are often what will hold you back from climbing as an ADC. They want to bring you down to their level and lack of understanding. Or perhaps their intentions are less malicious and more misguided; it really doesn’t matter either way.

I recently started an unranked to challenger climb and had a game in platinum where I was splitting top lane at 30 minutes. An ocean dragon was spawning, and because nobody matched me, I traded two towers for it. My teammate rage quit the game because I didn’t want to fight over a late game ocean dragon, and I lost. I’d still do it again, because playing around the whims of unstable players is counterproductive to winning as an ADC.

Rotations

There are far too many macro plays that can only be learned through repetition, seeing what works and what doesn’t work. The main thing that you need to understand is that you should not force what is optimal if your team does not understand what you’re doing. In lower divisions, I noticed that assassin players continue to go mid lane even after I destroyed the bot lane turret and tried to take mid from them. Same with top laners when I tried to rotate top. Even though it’s much easier to expand your lead by going to a different lane, by grouping up and sharing experience with a solo laner who doesn’t understand what’s happening, you are only hurting yourself. Don’t be stubborn, because there are multiple ways to play the game and sometimes you can be wrong anyways.

Here is a legend for the following maps which describe how to expand your lead after getting the first tower. These may not be perfect, but are just quick examples of things you can do.

Blue line = where you want to force your opponents to path in order to defend

Red line = your optimal pathing

Red circles = objectives

Yellow lines = where you should try to cut the wave

Green ! = where to look for picks using sweeper & control wards

Blue side first tower

Red side first tower

Blue side first tower laneswap

Red side laneswap

There are actually less individual objectives for you to take when you end up lane swapping, however the likelihood of getting another tower is much higher. As I said before, if you are going to go top, make sure you commit and don’t waste time rotating to dragon unless you are certain it’s necessary. By going top lane, you are committing vision, vision denial, and time to that section of the map. That typically means you are willing to give up the next dragon. A lot of players don’t really understand this, but it’s important you realize that pushing out top lane can be an objective equal to dragon. If your team is somehow smart enough to realize they can control the side opposite to the objective that your opponent grouped for, you will get a huge positional advantage afterwards on the map. If not, it’s fine anyways. Just make sure you’re keeping track of where crucial enemy champions are such as assassins or anyone that could kill you / burn summoner spells.

Objectives are not taken based off of emotional attachment.

Tempo is the word used to describe the pace of the game. There are two halves to it. The first being the spawn of minions, jungle camps, and objectives such as Drake, Herald, and Baron. The second half is the necessity to actually farm them in order to progress in the game. The reason teams can’t usually group up to take dragon the moment it spawns is because they lack the tempo to do so. People seem to forget as the game goes on that this doesn’t actually change much. The punishment of fighting for an objective without the tempo to do so is significant. Conversely, the team with more tempo is essentially “cashing in” their tempo in exchange for an objective. As I said previously; this game is seen by many as an ongoing battle, but at the highest level it looks more turn-based.

Another important part of rotating around the map is acknowledging when your jungler is trying to make a play on the opposite side. Because it is inefficient for your teams overall experience and gold to leave jungle camps up, you must always look out for opportunities to take jungle camps on the side that your jungler is not playing to. Of course, denial of the opponent’s jungle camps is another major objective to look out for. We lack the ability to kill our own minions like in DOTA, so this is the only form of direct denial.

Champion Select

Since champion select is what will decide the immediate difficulty of your game, it’s important that you play it smart. There are several factors that are all weighted differently depending on the game.

Mobility

Even a small escape like Lucian E or Caitlyn E can make a big difference when playing against a champion like Jarvan or Thresh.

Lane counterpick

When the enemy team picks champions that you have one or more counters for, you can weight how hard of a counter it is vs the other factors to see if it’s worth taking.

Teamfightability

This takes into account how stable the champion will be for teamfights. For example, Xayah and Sivir ult are going to be extremely useful most of the time and help your team out a lot.

Lategame carry strength

Often times, this is the most important thing to think about. Jinx for example is one of the most powerful ADCs for 1v5ing, but she is easy to punish. Factor this in if you think you can be self-sufficient enough early to get to the point where you can carry.

Safety

This is a combination of multiple things. Ability to buy defensive items such as ninja tabi or GA without it hurting your damage output too much, mobility, and waveclear all play a factor. Against a team that requires you just to stay alive in order to win, this is extremely important.

Blue vs red side

Sometimes you must factor in which side you are playing on. Take into account current jungle paths for which champion you play. For example, it can be very hard to play an aggressive lane on red side due to champions like Rek’Sai being able to come through the wall behind you. Not only this, but many jungle paths are based around their red side jungle clear, so you will often be left alone on red side.

Laning Phase: Weak Side & Strong Side

For some reason, this is one of the most misunderstood topics in League. It’s very simple, and yet I fail to see it get mentioned or really talked about much even by professional analysts and casters. That’s not to throw shade, I just think it’s importance is understated, or perhaps it’s considered too simple to be worth talking about. An example of this is when casters talk up a player for getting a 10 CS advantage top side, only to turn around and talk down a player on the same team for being 10 CS down on the other side of the map.

As I talked about earlier, the map should essentially be split into two sides. One for both teams. In competitive play specifically, this is a result of the ban & draft phase being different. It’s usually not the goal of any draft to try and counter both top and bot lane, mainly since the jungler can only be on one side at once. In solo queue, it’s just typically the result of jungle pathing & champion select pick order RNG. It’s important for one of the side lanes to try and play safe, and the other to play for priority. Priority is used to describe the priority in which one side of the lane can leave to assist teammates. The ability to push in a minion wave or fight their opponent for the right to leave first is what decides priority. Volatility is used to describe a lane where both sides are fighting hard for priority, and thus taking heavy trades often.

As a marksman in solo queue, it’s often not a good idea to make the lane volatile, nor is it a good idea to try and play for priority unless you know everyone’s position on the map. It’s often in people’s natural instinct to push when they have the ability to, but you should be considering whether you are the weak side or the strong side in each game. While you want to be getting plates in any lane you possibly can, they are up all the way until 14 minutes. It’s always better to play a stable game, than to overextend yourself when you’re uncertain.

Your general goal as the weak side is to survive as much pressure as you can while giving up as little as possible. As the map isn’t always split by the jungler, this could just be a result of you or your support having to blind pick. Staying healthy, stopping your plates from being taken, taking favourable back timings and avoiding dives are the most key aspects. It’s still fine to look for opportunities to punish your opponents mistakes, just try to avoid using summoners aggressively or taking extended trades. Don’t get to the point where you’re both really low and then cry to your jungler that he’s not there. If you do end up having to flash, always try to trade flashes with one of their engagers, otherwise you’ll have to give up a lot of farm just to avoid death.

Playing the strong side is much easier, and carries much less burden. Sure, you have to be the one to carry the game, but most people suck at playing safe and it’s easy to get fed with a jungler camping your lane. Since the jungler won’t always be there though, you need to keep goals in mind for your 2v2. The most important thing is to play around your team’s vision. Even when your jungler is playing towards your side of the map primarily, they will still need to farm their jungle. Their jungler could also be looking to relieve pressure for their team. Remember, the map will not always be split down the middle, so even if your jungler is trying to play around your counter pick, the other jungler might decide its their goal to stop you from getting big as well. This can only really impact you early game though, as if you have the counter pick your 3v3 will be stronger. Once you can afford control wards, the ball is 100% in your court as long as your jungler is hidden. So, the goal beyond just playing around vision becomes to do the worst you can to your opponents in your windows of vision. There are several viable options for your lane; getting your opponents so low that they cant fight back 2v3, taking their plates, setting the wave up for a freeze, taking a favourable back timing, getting dragon, roaming mid. The list goes on. For you individually, though, since you are the less important half of the lane, don’t try to do anything that relies on your support. Try to get the stable plays down. Pulling the wave as your ward is running out, taking their plate if you have the range to do so, getting perfect CS. Just focus on consuming.

What Do I Do When My Support Sucks?

You’re only getting 2.95 CS per minute with me as your support ;)

Naturally, this is the next question people will have. You have the choice to duo queue every time you queue up for a game, so by going solo dolo you relinquish your right to complain. You can be frustrated, but learning to play with a wide variety of players is extremely rewarding. Don’t get stuck in your predetermined way to play the game, try to feel the flow of things. When you obsess over your hatred for someone, you take away their ability to redeem themselves. A Blitzcrank could miss 10 hooks in a row, losing you countless minions, only to land the most insane and game changing hook you’ve ever seen. You never know what other people are truly capable of. If you keep an open mind, it makes the game a lot more fun.

That being said, most supports are truly terrible. Why? Because most players are terrible in general. If they’re in your elo bracket, you’re probably equally bad. But the other team will always have a randomly selected support from your elo bracket too, so the playing field is even. When you blame your games on a slew of bad supports, you’re simultaneously praising your opponents’ equally bad support, which is just flat out embarrassing. Playing too much of a support reliant play style will make games way harder than they have to be. Your support dying is often just an opportunity to pick up some solo experience. Things only go fully down the tubes when you join in and waste your summoners or die trying to help your support. Teammates in solo queue will set just as many traps for you as your opponents will, and its really important to make sure what they’re doing lines up with your vision of how to play the game before you commit to helping them.

Summoners

I didn’t want to focus too much on meta-specific things, however many people are confused about something which I touched on previously; teleport vs heal. It’s not actually too complicated of a subject. In pro play, fights are very controlled, lanes are predictable, and randomness doesn’t occur as much. Fights are discouraged by a lack of vision, jungler presence, and solo lanes being able to teleport. In the case where heal never has a chance to be used, teleport obviously becomes the stronger summoner spell. That one minion wave that you’d have to miss in order to secure your back in a difficult lane becomes yours. Or, the amount of pressure you can apply in a winning lane doubles as you can pick up your item and continue to push them in immediately after. You can see how in a non-volatile game, teleport is simply superior. That being said, heal allows you a cushion to play aggressively upon, and gives you much more breathing room in skirmishes and teamfights. In most cases, I recommend taking heal due to the fact that people willingly fight losing situations in an attempt to outplay in solo queue, so there are opportunities to fight. The only champion that consistently takes teleport no matter what is Ezreal, due to his item purchases being time-sensitive. In low elo, however, most Ezreals take heal anyways.

How Triumph vs Overheal Defines an Entire Playstyle

These two runes are the biggest indicator of how a player wants to play. They define an entire playstyle. Triumph has no use in a world where your only goal is to become an untouchable carry. Overheal is a preventative measure, stopping people from coming between you and your consumption. It exudes confidence in that kills simply won’t be necessary for you to carry, and in fact, any fights you choose to be apart of won’t be close enough for the triumph healing to matter. This is why every competitive ADC player takes Overheal. You are already behind in levels compared to the other carries in the game, and with that, you are lower in base health. Overheal gives you some padding to survive.

As I said earlier, with discipline comes the understanding that you could win a game with 0 kills. Grasping at straws is not necessary when you know you will do more with items than your opponent, and you’re better at getting those items than your opponent. That being said, you still prop your leg out to trip the person in front of you. By playing with perfection, you’re inviting your enemy into making mistakes in your zone.

Regardless of all that, myself and many others prefer to take triumph in solo queue due to the uncontrolled nature of the game. It gives you a lot of extra gold and lets you clutch tight situations. But it is the mentality of someone who takes Overheal that you need to carry with you. The creation of an invisible force field around you that your opponents know they cannot enter just by looking at you. For them to come in range of you, and disrupt what you’re doing, they would have to be ready to fight at the disadvantage of infringement on your turf. You get to decide the vastness of your zone, but it needs to be your focus.

Closing Thoughts

While ADC is a role where mechanics shine through, you’ll never get to showcase your skill if you are caught up in the wrong mindset. Even though you need to make high impact decisions on the fly, the way you think about the game to begin with is what will allow you to come to those conclusions faster. Generally, you aren’t weighed down with the burden of deciding which lane to gank, or which side of the map to play to, or make risky engages. This means you have more time to focus solely on optimizing your gold & experience per minute. Although we may not have the strongest role right now, we definitely are not weak either. While we are often victims of our teams misplays, and sometimes hardly even get to participate in League of Legends, playing with the mentality of a victim is not conducive to success. Expand your area of influence, consume more resources, and carry your games.

Become the ocean.

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