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LoL Bot Lane Explained: A Guide On How To Play ADC
The role of Attack Damage Carry (ADC) is often regarded as the most important role in League of Legends. ADC champions, usually marksmen, are capable of dishing out huge amounts of continuous damage. However, while their damage output is incredibly high, they have a low effective health pool and most of them do not have mobility spells, apart from the summoner spells Flash or Ghost.
Because of that, the marksman role is considered one of the most difficult roles to play in League of Legends. In order to make them work, pro players usually draft around their fragile champions in an attempt to buy them enough time to decide a team fight. But how do you make a marksman work in solo queue, where the team is usually not picking their champions to support you optimally? We are here to explain how you can be successful as a bot lane carry.
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If you have a friend who plays support, feel free to play with them while you are learning how to play ADC! Communication is one of the most important aspects of League of Legends, and having someone you know better than solo queue randoms by your side will make your game easier. Make sure to prepare a game plan together!
LoL ADC Guide: The Most Important Aspects
Let's get in there! These aspects will help you understand the ADC role better.
1. Pick the right champion
It is easy to say that there should not be too many differences between the marksmen of League of Legends, but every champion has their own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. Champions that are easy to learn include Ashe, Tristana and Jinx, so they will help you with your first steps on bot lane.
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While always having the perfect champion for your team composition and your matchup would be the best scenario possible, it is difficult to make that happen while being equally proficient on each champion. Ideally, you have a pool of three or four different champions that you enjoy playing. This also gives you a higher chance of success than simply picking whatever is the best pick on paper.
Optimally, you will have a lane-dominant champion like Jhin, a spellslinger like Lucian or Varus and a hypercarry like Kai'Sa up your sleeve at all times, but that is a tough ask. Especially when you are forced to pick early in the draft phase, you may pick the wrong choice and only come to regret it as soon as the remaining opponents lock in their champions. In this case, comfort picks are usually better than trying to predict the opponent's team composition.
2. Maximize your gold income
Marksmen scale very well with items. In order to get your hands on some items as quickly as possible, you need to optimize your gold income.
There are multiple, reliable ways to earn a lot of gold quickly. The easiest way is to kill minions, of which a wave will spawn at the nexus every 30 seconds. Due to cannon minions appearing every third wave in the early stages of the game, the optimal creep score would be 12.3 per minute.
Hint: In order to calculate your creep score per minute, simply divide your creep score by the game time, with every six seconds adding 0.1 minutes.
If you manage to maintain a lane push or you just forced your enemy laners into recalling, you can also go for turret platings. Each plating is worth 175 gold and will be distributed equally among all champions of your team that are close enough to the turret once it breaks. Every kill is also worth a lot of gold, but keep in mind that your opponents will also gain gold from killing you, so be careful.
3. Communicate with your support
We get it. It is difficult to play with random supports. Usually, you can make your life a little easier by communicating with your support. You do not need to use text chat for this, you can use smart pings instead. As long as you do not question-mark-ping your support on repeat, they will be happy to assist you in lane.
Having a happy support also helps you win the game, because they are more willing to help you out!
4. Positioning is key
In order to maximize your damage, it is important that you do not die. Always be aware of every champion that can threaten you during fights, and make sure to keep track of the spells they can use to get under your skin. An alive marksman deals more damage than a dead one, so it is fine to sacrifice a little bit of damage in order to survive.
5. Keep your cool and stay with your team
It is easy to be caught out as an immobile champion. Everyone else can move quicker than you, some even ignoring the existence of walls on the map (yes Kayn, I mean you). Make sure that if an assassin is trying to jump at you, your team is close to you and can destroy them before they delete your health bar.
Apart from that, do not let get your nerves to you. Playing ADC is one of the most frustrating experiences in League of Legends because you depend a lot on a team that might not want to take care of you. Adapt in every match, make sure that you survive fights you get into, and take good care of your gold income. Complaining at your team will never do any good. Be better than the people you would report for their behavior.
That is our mini guide to playing bot lane. We hope you can take something away from it!