Welcome to ModLegends, Ultimate Mid lane Beginner's Guide. My name is Saurabh, and I'll be walking you through this guide. I've been Challenger for 10 years straight. Believe it or not, I was once a beginner too. In fact, I was actually hard stuck bronze and silver for almost a, games before reaching gold, which means I definitely wasn't learning the game properly at first and wasted hundreds of hours just playing and not improving. That's why we believe that it's important to get you learning the game off on the right foot. In this guide, you'll learn everything you need to know to get started as a midlaner in League of Legends.
And with that said, let's jump back into today's guide. We'll be going over the types of Champions and abilities you can expect to see in mid lane, how you can choose a main or what Champs to learn, tips for winning Lane, and also tips for how to play Lane if you're countered or fall behind. How to roam, your itemization, and how to play mid to late game macro including team fighting and side laning. And lastly but not least, we'll be guiding you how to actually go about improving effectively by setting proper attainable goals to reach the next level as a mid laner. And without wasting any time, let's get right into it.
The Ultimate Beginner's MID LANE Guide for SEASON 14
- Mid Lane Champions
Midlane Champions can be divided into two main types. There's your standard Mage that deals consistent damage from mid to high range using their abilities, and then there's the melee assassin that gets up close and personal using either AP or AD as a damage source to deal quick burst damage to important squishy targets. There are a couple of other viable midlaners such as ADC Champions, bruisers, and tanks, but in 95% of your games, you'll either be playing versus a mage or an assassin. So if you can understand how these two types of Champions generally work, then you'll understand how you want to play Lane and your win conditions.
Assassins will always have at least one gap closer built into their kit. There is not a single assassin that doesn't have a built-in dash or a blink. On the other hand, Mages excel at doing their damage from a distance and typically lack gap closers. However, they'll usually have some sort of crowd control ability which is useful for peeling yourself, which is basically the act of moving backward and using these types of abilities to avoid the immediate threat to your health bar.
While assassins have the advantage of being able to close the distance, Mages have the direct ability to respond to this threat and the advantage of range. So make sure you don't throw out your peeling abilities recklessly, or else the assassin will punish the Mage during the time frame they're vulnerable when they have no way to peel themselves.
Now let's get into some more general patterns like the types of abilities present in mid lane and what you should expect your opponents to have access to. This is important to know; otherwise, you might just end up dying to some enemy abilities and have no clue what just happened. In my opinion, the most dangerous type of ability is a point and click ability. These are not dodgeable if you're in range of the caster, whereas everything else can be dodged or juked. The first type does damage, and the second type applies crowd control.
The crowd control version is a lot more dangerous. It can be used to set up jungle ganks, and you have no real counterplay once the ability starts hitting you or affecting you. On the flip side, point and click abilities typically have lower range than aimable abilities, so try and keep your distance and run away if you sense danger or just see your enemy running straight at you. If you're out of range, they literally can't hit you at all.
The next type of ability that you'll verse is skill shots. Skill shots are linear missiles that either do AOE or single-target damage, and most of them have a travel time. But there are some exceptions. They have higher range on average but are a lot more dodgeable than other types of abilities. Most of them are dodgeable by standing behind your minions.
The next type of ability are AOE sphere type abilities. They usually have lower range than linear skill shots, but they are still in the mid to high range. They do a solid amount of damage, and you'll run into this type of ability a lot in mid lane. A great way for both beginners and expert midlaners to dodge these is by using reverse psychology and juking forwards. Unlike linear missile type abilities that hit everything as it travels to the max distance, spheres are always the same circle on the ground, and most people will not expect a forward juke.
Of course, you can always just juke left or right, but the key is to always attempt to dodge skill shots whether they're spheres or missiles. And finally, the last type of ability is the gap closer, which we already mentioned earlier. It will be in the form of a blink or a dash, and usually, only melee champs will have it with a couple of ranged exceptions. Dashes and blinks themselves don't do that much damage, but it's the abilities that come afterward that are the problem. Always make sure to stay out of range of them. Gap closers tend to have lower range than missiles and spheres, so always try to take trades that outrange gap closers if you have abilities with higher range.
- Picking a Champion
Now that we've covered all the basic types of champs and abilities, what about choosing a champ to play? Are there some that are better than others? We'll tell you that you should always just pick a champion that you enjoy. Any champion is viable and capable of climbing to the highest rank of Challenger. Of course, there are some aspects that make a champion strong for climbing in their own way. For example, a champion with strong wave clear is able to roam and impact lanes by keeping their opponent shoved in, while at the same time, an assassin with a lot of map mobility can impact lanes by rotating around the map quicker before the enemy has a chance to react between waves.
Some factors you might consider when choosing a champ to play are wave clear, mobility, solo kill potential, team fighting potential, but most importantly, if you enjoy playing them. And if you have absolutely no clue what champions might interest you, we do have some recommendations to get you started. We'll give two recommendations for each playstyle, a mage and an assassin.
For mages, we'll first recommend Annie. Her abilities have lower range compared to other mages, but her kit is very simple to use with a point-and-click Q and two more damaging abilities with a very large hitbox. So it's difficult to miss her damage. Learning Annie will teach you to understand the importance of range, figuring out the limits of your damage, and using your flash summoner spell to make crazy plays. For our second more mechanically challenging recommendation, we recommend Orianna. She has probably the most standard mage kit, providing above-average damage, mobility, wave clear, and team fighting potential with a combination of missile skill shots and AOE sphere abilities.
For those of you interested in assassins, we recommend Ekko as a starter champion. Ekko has a really strong and easy wave clear for an assassin champion, still does really high damage, and he also has an emergency panic button in the form of his ult that will teleport him out of danger and give him his health back. Ekko is great for learning your damage limits and how far you can go before you end up being in threat of dying. As for our second assassin recommendation, it doesn't have to be Zed. Zed is the champion you want to play if you're just looking to blow someone up instantly. However, he is a bit on the harder side because most of your damage comes from your Q shurikens, which are linear missile skill shots. So missing them can make you do no damage. He also has more than one gap closer you have to manage, but if you can figure it out, you'll understand exactly how every assassin functions and be outplaying people in no time.
- How to Win Lane
Now that we've introduced you to what you should expect to verse in mid lane, let's talk about how you should go about winning lane. In this section, we'll be going over the three biggest tips for winning lane: how to win trades, how to use your auto attacks effectively, and how to snowball and push your lead in solo queue.
It's always best to be selfish and prioritize winning your own lane as opposed to focusing on helping others and roaming. We'll talk about when you should roam later in this guide, but for now, we'll be going over how to carry by dominating your lane.
The most important tip for winning mid lane or any lane really is to trade your opponents while they're trying to last hit. Basically, it's any time when you deal damage to your lane opponent, but you don't have to trade damage for damage. One of the best ways to win lane is through taking free trades where you deal damage but take none in return.
Targeting your opponent when they're trying to farm is the best way to accomplish this because this is when your enemy is most vulnerable since they're locked in Auto animation and can't do any other actions during that time. Some midlaners, such as melee champs that have low Auto Range, will even commit their abilities to last hit, making the strategy even more effective since they can't trade back with abilities afterwards.
This is the best time to target your opponent with basic attacks, abilities, or ideally both. Try not to stay engaged with them too long, though, or they'll be able to trade back. But this also works in reverse. If you're the one that messed up and got traded on, make sure to chase them and try to land some damage back, assuming you have some damage tools up. However, don't chase too far because the enemy minions will deal a lot of damage to you.
Minions aren't just there to be farmed; they're there to help you with trades or stop you from chasing too far. While single-target abilities and basic attacks will cause enemy minions to aggro you, AOE abilities will not. If you have abilities like this in your kit and can avoid minion aggro, it's pretty useful for min-maxing trades.
Basic attacks are also really important for trading and laning. It may seem counterintuitive since you're likely playing a champ that's reliant on their abilities rather than attacks, but you can literally just win trades based off of who gets more auto attacks in. Try to get in the habit of weaving in auto attacks after spells in trading. At the same time, you should get used to constantly auto-attacking minions as soon as the lane begins. This is so important for beginner midlaners, and even some higher-ranked midlaners in emerald and diamond struggle with using auto attacks as a resource.
If you get into this habit now, you'll be way ahead of the curve. But why is this so important? Well, it's because midlaners scale insanely off of levels. By constantly auto-attacking minions in lane, you'll be the first to level up since you'll have killed more minions, meaning you get to unlock your abilities first and you get to win trades with a level advantage. Not only that, but this will make the first tip of taking trades on enemy last-hit timings even easier to accomplish because you have the shove.
So far, we've covered the two tips of winning trades and using auto attacks to guarantee even better trades by getting shove and level advantage. And of course, the whole point of trading is to either kill your opponent or force them to recall. In this guide, we won't cover the minute details of executing a solo kill. For that, we recommend you watch one of our specialty guides dedicated to the topic "How to Solo Kill Like a Challenger." But if you follow tips one and two, then solo killing is just finishing the job of all the prep work you've put in, and it's really the easiest part.
After getting a kill, you might be tempted to farm the minion wave, assuming there is one since your opponent is dead. But this is wrong in 90% of cases, for two reasons. One, if you're low on health, which is pretty common after a solo kill, then you are a sitting duck for the enemy jungler. Two, even if you're not low, there's a thing called Tempo in League of Legends. Well, Tempo can get very complicated, and we have whole guides dedicated to just this topic. In this case, it's very simple to understand: while your enemy is dead, you have free time to do anything you want without getting punished for it. On the other hand, as soon as your opponent respawns, it's a race against time.
If you're still shoving minions while your opponent respawns, then you will be late to the next wave. This will allow your enemy to get an uncontested shove, which should never happen if he's behind, allowing him to roam to the jungle or a side lane and get himself back into the game. On the other hand, if you had instead not shoved the wave and channeled recall while your opponent was still dead, you'd meet him at mid lane at the same time, and you'll be able to win trades using your solo kill lead and keep them jailed in lane, maybe eventually solo killing them again.
Basically, if you're winning your lane, force your opponent to interact with you, solo kill them, or force them to take bad bases and miss out on minions. Don't give them any options while giving yourself all the options, whether it be a choice between solo killing, taking plates, or roaming to another lane. So, to snowball effectively, always make sure that you never give a losing enemy a timer to impact the game. A recall takes 8 seconds to finish. If your enemy would respawn 8 seconds after you finish shoving a wave, then feel free to do so. But if they would respawn earlier while you're still in the process of shoving, you're much better off basing so you can keep up the pressure when they return to lane. You should check out our article on the Jungle guide if you've read this far and are more interested: Ultimate Beginner's JUNGLE Guide for SEASON 14.
- Playing from Behind
Now we have some tips on how to play from behind either because you messed up and died or maybe you're just straight up countered in a bad matchup. Things happen sometimes; you have bad laning phases but you can still come back later on in the game, especially on a role as impactful and scaling heavy as mid lane.
The most important concept for playing from behind is to have a mentality of stopping the bleeding. How do you accomplish this? For starters, you don't give up any more kills and you don't give up any guaranteed resources such as minion exp and gold. You need to keep your health bar as healthy as possible. Try to farm using your abilities rather than your auto attacks since that will allow you to pick up farm more safely, and in most cases, your opponent will just get impatient and shove into your tower where you can farm safely.
But if you do end up taking a bad trade, you have to stop the bleeding. The thing is, even if your opponent is ahead, they won't be able to straight up 100 to zero you. In most cases, they'll get you down to maybe 50% HP or lower and then try to kill you. That is the key. So many players will just take a bad trade and stay in lane. If you get to this HP threshold where you're killable, you can prevent further damage by just basing. It's much better to base, lose out on only a few minions, and then lane with full health than to bleed out and eventually die with low health and lose out on even more minions.
Recalling is the most underrated and powerful tool at your disposal. Not only can it snowball you when you get a kill, it can also stop the enemy snowball by preventing them from getting any further kills.
- Roaming
A big reason players tend to pick up mid lane is the fact that mid lane is in the center of the map. This means you have the agency to impact other lanes and not only just your own. While it's true this aspect of mid lane is important, most midlaners make the mistake of over-prioritizing roaming compared to just winning their own lane. Roaming is a great way to get your team ahead, but this should only be an option if you can't push any further leads in your own lane.
Maybe your lane opponent won't give you any kill angles despite you winning trades, or maybe the tower plates are getting really tanky, so there's diminishing return on hitting them. In cases like this, roaming is a great option, but it's important that you do it right. Before roaming, you should always shove in your minion wave. If you don't do this, then you'll end up falling behind and lose your lead very quickly, and this pitfall is all too common but easily avoidable.
The value of minion waves is extremely high, not just because of the gold they give you but the exp that allows you to reach your level spikes quicker. Always try to be at the midlane minion wave as it meets and use the time in between the waves to roam rather than when a wave is immediately active. A neat trick that you're going to use for the rest of your league career is looking at the minion wave on the mini-map. Minions will always be mirrored in map position assuming the wave hasn't met anything yet, so you can have a general sense of when the next wave meet is going to be. And if it's sometime soon, then definitely don't roam.
Sometimes you'll miss out on minions no matter what, but the key is to minimize your loss. That's why we tell you to shove in your wave before you leave. When you do this, you'll create what is commonly referred to as a bounce or a rebound. They both mean the same thing basically; after you crash a wave to Tower, the next wave will either meet the crashed wave at the Tower or your opponent will shove it in if they're there. All the while, you're finishing up your roam play. Then when you return to your lane after roaming, you'll have the enemy minion wave primed and ready for you to collect due to this rebound.
Following the simple process of shove and then roam will consistently keep you ahead in the games you play. But you also have to consider if the roam is even going to work out or not. If the enemies are overextended in fighting your sidelaners, then chances are you'll be able to get a good roam off. Either the enemies have to be overextended or your sidelaners have to be a breath away from killing their opponents, in which case your roam will just finish the job. But if your sidelaners aren't a part of the equation and you would be outnumbered if you roam, then you should just stay mid because there's a very high chance that the play won't work out.
Only roam if you'll have followup from your teammates. If your roam is successful, then you can go back mid for the next wave. If you're healthy enough; otherwise, if you're 70% health or lower without any potions, you should just take a base after the roam play and walk to mid from base to collect the wave. Although you miss out on some minions, there's no threat of you dying, whether it be to the enemy jungler while walking back through River or the enemy mid after laning with a health disadvantage.
- Itemization
Itemization in League of Legends can be confusing when you're first starting out. There are so many components in build paths, and each finished item does something entirely different from one another. While we can't give you the most optimal build that will always be optimal all the time, we can definitely give you some high-value pointers that will give you an edge in your games.
For starters, we highly stress the importance and value of a refillable potion on your first or second base. I recommend starting your Doran item combined with as many potions as you can get, and then on your first base, you should always get a refillable potion if you can afford it. Even if you literally have the exact amount of gold for your first component, such as a lost chapter or a serrated Durk, we would still recommend you get the refillable potion instead of just buying the one item. Having any potions, whether it's the 50 Gold version or refillable, allows you some leeway for making mistakes in lane and not losing because of it. And if your opponent has no potions while you do, then winning lane just becomes a walk in the park.
The typical build path for AP Champions is to rush lost chapter and then finishing it into a completed item ASAP. And for most AD Champions, you'll likely be going the serrated Durk into completed AD item route. The item you finish into really depends on the champion you're playing.
- Mid Lane Macro
Moving on, we'll be teaching you how to macro in the mid to late phases of the game. Decision-making is hands down the most important skill for a mid laner to have, and we're going to teach you exactly what you have to make decisions around and how you can make the most optimal decisions as a mid laner.
You have three in-game goals: one, maximize your resource collection (AKA gold and exp); two, maximize your damage to enemy Champions and objectives through team fighting and/or side laning; and three, be as safe as possible while accomplishing goals one and two. Your first goal in mid to late game is to collect minion waves for their guaranteed value.
Mid-game is a point in the game where people start to group and take fights around mid lane and objectives, which is where we run into a problem. If everybody is mid, that means you're probably sharing minion exp and gold with your top laner and ADC, averaging out to 2 CS per minion wave per player. That's a big issue, and many newer players fall behind during this phase of the game. So what you need to do is follow what we call the "find an empty Lane" rule. It's literally what it sounds like: find an empty Lane to farm so you don't fall behind in levels and gold. This can be either mid lane if it's empty, but more often than not, it's a side lane that you have to farm because everybody groups mid.
However, you have to be as safe as possible when farming. If the minion wave you can collect is past the halfway River Line of the map on the enemy's side, then chances are it's too dangerous to farm it. So you should only be looking to farm when the wave is either meeting directly at the middle line of the map or safely on your team side of that line. If you're not sure whether a wave is safe to collect, there's a trick we call "counting heads." Just press Tab, and if you see the enemy Champions light up in the scoreboard, that means they're showing on the map at that moment.
In general, Mages have a much harder time laning in the Side Lane. This is because they lack gap-closer abilities to both escape and kill their opponents. So if you're Sid laning as a mage, you should only shove to the halfway line of the map if you're certain you won't be forced into a fight or if you have teammates very close to your location to back you up. If you're playing a melee assassin, you actually have the green light to shove waves at the halfway line as long as you won't be outnumbered or as long as you're not weaker than your opponent. However, your goal isn't to just keep split pushing. Remember, we're here to upkeep our gold and exp so we don't fall behind. While there are ways to win just by split pushing, I don't recommend that beginners rely on this tactic for winning just yet. Not only will you stunt your growth by not interacting with the Enemy team and not learning important skills such as team fighting and objective control, but chances are there are always going to be random fights that break out for absolutely no reason.
And if you're not at a fight because you're just shoving sides all the time, then your team will probably lose the fight being down an important member, and you'll probably lose Baron and then the game. In fact, even the highest ELO of Challenger I rarely split push because this random team fighting aspect will never go away. Your teammates will always take the stupidest fights for no reason, and I can guarantee you that. So once you shove in or collect a side wave, you don't have to be in the Side Lane again until it reaches your Tower and starts dying to Tower shots. And during this time you don't have to be in the Side Lane is when you group mid to prep for team fights. Since you've already collected minions in the side, you're not really losing out on anything. And even better, if your opponent doesn't know that they should be collecting side waves, you're actually going to end up ahead just by doing what you're supposed to do.
- How to Teamfight
Now we've arrived at your second goal: maximizing your damage to objectives and enemy champions, in other words, impacting the game through team fighting. Team fighting is one of the most important skills you need to hone to climb. If you're a good team fighter, you will climb, I can promise you that. So how do you become a good team fighter?
It probably just boils down to outplaying your opponents with better reaction time and mechanics, right? Actually, no. As a midlaner, team fighting is literally almost all about fight selection and prep work. What do I mean by this? Well, there are a few rules you should never break when it comes to team fighting.
Rule number one: never take a team fight if you're outnumbered. This is a recipe for disaster in League of Legends, and it holds true from Iron all the way up to Challenger. In Pro play, it's best that you get in the habit of this now, and your climb will become so much easier. If you take a bad team fight like this, then you're probably going to end up dead. And when you do die, not only do you give gold and exp to your enemies from your death, but the time you spend staring at a gray screen is time you spend not collecting minions or impacting the map. So it's a double whammy of setbacks, and you should avoid this at all costs.
Use the technique of counting heads we talked about earlier to figure out what the numbers are looking like for a team fight. If you're guaranteed to be outnumbered, what you can do is go to the opposite side of where the fight will be and just shove out minion waves and hit towers until someone responds. That way, you're at least getting something instead of dying with your team.
Okay, now let's say that you have a numbers advantage or it's an even numbers for a fight. Here comes rule number two for team fighting as a midlaner: never frontline. Regardless of whether you're playing a mage or an assassin, you never want to be upfront. That's the job of your top laner, jungler, and support. Instead, you want to be towards the back with your ADC if you're a mage, or off on a side or back flank angle if you're an assassin. This concept of positioning around your teammates is what we call formation.
If you have good formation before a team fight begins, then your chance of winning the fight skyrockets. If a carry is frontlining and immediately gets blown up at the start of a fight, that fight is already over, since a huge source of damage just disappears and one team is now guaranteed to win. On the other hand, if you make the enemy frontliners work to reach you, then chances are their health bars will be depleted by the time they get anywhere close to you. And if you're an assassin playing from a flank on the side or a flank from the back, you'll be able to bypass the enemy frontline entirely and take out their priority targets, securing the fight for your team.
So to be a good team fighter, you need to select the fights with the best odds of winning, and you need to prepare a good formation by constantly shifting your position to match your teammates and the enemies. If you've done that, then the rest comes down to mechanical execution, such as timing and landing your abilities. Don't worry if you're not that great at this yet, you're a beginner, so we don't expect you to be an insane outplaying highlight reel machine just yet. As with everything, practice makes perfect, and perfect practice makes winners. By following the rules of numbers advantage and formation, you'll be able to get the highest value team fighting gameplay and practice so you can improve and make it to the next level.
- How to Improve
Okay, so we've taught you some simple tips and rules for getting started in mid lane. If I had all this knowledge when I first started climbing, then I suspect I wouldn't have spent a thousand games in bronze and silver, and I would have breezed through to gold in a tenth of that time. However, I do think I would have reached a bottleneck at around Diamond if I only spent my time playing with just the info provided in this guide so far. Don't get me wrong, this guide has really good cost-efficient info to get you started, but it's designed to be a starting point, not the end-all-be-all.
Basically, what we've done is we fed you a fish, the fish being the knowledge in this guide (in this metaphor, of course), but we don't expect you to keep eating off this one fish for the rest of your life. You need to learn how to get more fish, and in this case, what I mean is that you need to learn how to learn so you can improve even further.
I'm going to give you two tools that will make sure your improvement never stops. The first tool is analyzing replays. This sounds a lot harder than it actually is, but it's really simple. After every game you play, go to your match history, download the game you just played, and click play. Then watch every single one of your deaths one by one. I want you to try your hardest to figure out why you died. Did you perhaps use an important cooldown that you should have held onto for peeling yourself? Or maybe you went in too deep and screwed up your spot in the formation? Or maybe you didn't assess properly whether it was safe to farm sidelane or not? Whatever it was, try to figure it out and make sure that you don't die in the same way again. Chances are you're not going to know what your mistake was starting out; it's fine, just take a guess. The important thing is that you watch your deaths back, at least 1 minute leading up to it, so you can try and figure out what your mistake was.
And finally, I'll recommend you tool number two: the League of Legends Wiki. You don't need to read everything about every champion or anything, but you should make a habit of looking up the enemy mid lane champion you're going to be playing versus while you're in the loading screen. By understanding what their abilities do, their range, their damage, and their cooldowns, this can give you a much better read of how you want to play and win lane.
Conclusion
By constantly expanding your knowledge and improving your gameplay with these three tools, you'll be on the fast track to the ELO you want to achieve in the long run, whether it be Emerald, Diamond, Master, or maybe even Challenger, like I once reached for the first time. And that about wraps it up! Thank you for reading!
FAQs
Is it essential to main a specific champion in the mid lane?
While having a main champion can provide consistency, exploring different champions can enhance your overall understanding of mid lane matchups.
How do I deal with aggressive opponents in the mid lane?
Utilize defensive maneuvers and jungle assistance to neutralize aggressive opponents and regain control of the lane.
What role does vision play in mid lane strategy?
Vision control is crucial for preventing ganks and securing objectives. Warding key areas can provide valuable information and keep you safe from enemy threats.
How should I adapt my playstyle in a losing matchup?
Focus on farming safely under tower and avoiding unnecessary risks. Look for opportunities to capitalize on your opponent's mistakes and turn the tide of the lane.
What are some common mistakes to avoid in the mid lane?
Overextending without vision, neglecting to roam when opportunities arise, and failing to adapt your build to the game's dynamics are common pitfalls to avoid for aspiring mid laners.