LoL Bot Lane Guide: Positioning, Spikes and Trading

Marksmen die in the ten seconds after they win something (rarely during the fight itself). This covers what nobody tells you about bot lane: what positioning actually means, why the level two rush is a trap, and why your spikes are a schedule.

League of Legends Guide

Bot Lane

What Nobody Tells Marksmen

Bot lane is two people playing one lane, so it's the only place in the game where half your decisions belong to somebody you've never met.

Most advice for it is about mechanics. Almost none of what decides these games is.

Your Support The Laning Phase Range and Spikes Positioning After You Win

Your support isn't a project

Plenty of bot lanes are lost by a marksman spending ten minutes coaching the other person. It never works. It costs you attention on the wave and converts somebody who was going to be neutral into somebody annoyed at you.

Play around what they do rather than what you wish they did. A support who dives at everything is one you follow occasionally and back away from otherwise (that read takes four minutes to make).

The one piece of coordination worth insisting on is recalling together. Two people who go home separately spend the next ninety seconds taking turns being alone in a lane (exactly where marksmen die). Going together costs one of you a bit of gold and buys both a safe reset.

The wave matters more than the two champions

It's easy to spend a laning phase watching the enemy pair and barely looking at the thirty minions between you. The minions pay you, and their position decides whether anybody can do anything about it.

A trade that leaves your wave in a good place is a good trade even if you came out slightly down on health. A trade you won that shoves you into their turret usually isn't, and swapping those two judgments is most of the improvement available in this lane.

Which is also why the level two rush is overrated. Racing for it means shoving, shoving means an unfriendly wave, and an unfriendly wave hands your lane to the enemy jungler. Take level two when the wave is already going that way, and when the enemy gets there first, remember they've just told you exactly where they'll be standing.

Range is something you spend

Every step forward converts range into damage. That's a real trade with a real cost, and the cost arrives late (when somebody closes the gap you made smaller for them).

So ask what you're buying before you walk up. A cannon minion, yes. A turret plate, often. Three points of chip damage on somebody who heals it back, almost never.

Your power spikes work the same way (they're a schedule rather than a mood). Marksmen get stronger at specific knowable moments, and the losing version of this role is fighting on somebody else's timing because a fight happened to start nearby.

Position is what you're next to

Everybody tells marksmen to position well and almost nobody says what that means. It's who and what sits between you and the people who want you dead, which is why the same spot can be correct and fatal within the same minute.

Standing as far back as possible feels responsible, and it's frequently the worst option available. It puts you alone, out of reach of anybody who could help, and directly in the path of whoever went looking for exactly that. A marksman behind a tank is safer than a marksman behind nothing.

Your deaths cluster right after you win

Watch where marksmen die and it turns out it's rarely mid-fight. It's the ten seconds afterward: chasing one more kill, taking the objective a beat too greedily, standing still to farm a wave with every enemy cooldown back up.

Winning something is when your guard drops and when the enemy is most motivated to find you. Treat the moment after a won fight as the most dangerous part of it and a large share of your deaths stop happening.

The same steadiness applies to losing the lane. Bot lane is the shortest phase in the game (and the one people treat as the whole match). The failure usually comes afterward, when you force something to make it even.

---

The short version

Read your support instead of coaching them, back together, watch the wave rather than the enemy pair, and spend range deliberately. Then survive the ten seconds after you win something.

For the wave itself, our minions guide covers aggro and gold value, and our range guide covers why your auto attack reaches further than the number says.