Beginner’s Tips For Playing League of Legends

Understand the basics of the map and different positions.

In order to talk with your teammates, you need to know what you should actually say. You don’t need to become an expert overnight, but a good place to start learning the core League vocabulary is by familiarizing yourself with the general structure of Summoner’s Rift and the positions one can play on it. Here’s the map:

It’s comprised of three lanes—top, middle, and bottom. The area in-between the lanes is the jungle. Team bases are located on the bottom left and top right corners of the map. Your position on the team is determined both by the champion you choose to play as and the specific part of the map you choose to begin the game on. Here are the five main positions that’ll come up in conversation on your way to level 30:

Top: The champion who sticks to the top lane on Summoner’s Rift. Normally played by tanks or bruisers—i.e., melee characters who can either take, or deal, a lot of damage. Or both at the same time!

Mid: Like top, except for the middle lane. Mid-laners are usually champions with solid ability power, or AP for short.

Jungle: The one champion who doesn’t have an assigned lane. Instead, junglers move around the jungle, killing the monsters inside and dropping into any of the three lanes to help their teammates by, say, assassinating an unsuspecting opponent.

ADC: One of two champions assigned to the bottom lane. ADCs are supposed to spend the early part of a game farming minions, leveling up, and buying as much gear as possible to keep increasing their attack damage.

Support: The other champion who plays on the bottom lane. Supports do lots of nice things like: keep ADCs alive, help them land kills, and place wards on the map to increase their team’s visibility.