Why is top lane losing its appeal?

Recently, Soraka and Sona are the two names emerging to dominate the top lane for having the highest win rate that forces Riot to intervene in the upcoming patch 10.4 update. There are many reasons for this to happen and most of them are that the top lane is becoming less and less important and no longer holding its position. Not just losing its appeal, with the new meta revolving around dragons and the bottom half of the map. Top laners now have a hard time making mass affects to the game.

Teleport has been nerfed.

Teleport is an extremely important spell to top laners. This spell helps top laners quickly appear in teamfights anywhere on the map. But it seems like other roles abused Teleport too much Riot has decided to increase cooldown and not allow players to interrupt mid-way as before. This greatly affects the top lane. Now, you will have to calculate how to use Teleport properly to your advantage or stay in lane pray for your teammates to do well while waiting for the spell cooldown.

Dragon Slayer buffs are increasingly important.

In pre-season 2020, Riot released a new update with the biggest change is the Dragons. Now killing Dragons in early game is very important and the fastest team that kill 4 Dragons will get extremely powerful Dragon Souls. Every basic game is decided by Dragons unless your team is far superior.

Now, what can you do to compete against Dragons early on? Abandon minions, abandon turrets to plunge down? Not wise at all. Accepting to go and dispute may help your team get the Dragon early, but you will lose the advantage in your own lane. The amount of gold from plates and creeps that your opponent earned during your absence will make it almost impossible to win the lane for the rest of the time.

The appearance of turret plates

Turret plates has been around since pre-season 2019, created to prevent players from roaming early. For every plate you’ll get 120 gold, do you want to leave top lane to engage in combat and when you return, the opponent has more than 500 gold from minions and plate? For champions like Darius, just a full item from that separate amount of gold makes it impossible for you to do anything but becoming his toy.

Turret plates is definitely not a bad thing, it makes the match much more interesting. But for the top laners, it is like a prison that makes you unable to run away if you don’t want to be destroy by your opponent.

Diver Fighter and Tanker had no place to stand.

If you look at the list of champions that are frequently used on top lane at the moment. The most popular is the Fighter with great damage and high mobility. In the top 10, only Ornn is a Tank that frequently used, however the reason that Ornn was picked because he can buy items while laning and upgrade his teammates with valueable items. (Ornn is also the latest Warden champion Riot has recently launched).

Instead of Tankers, Fighters emerge to dominate the top lane because of their good resistance and can also deal a huge amount of damage. Or if not, the “weird” options like Soraka or Sona top are the next options.

In the past, when the meta belonged to Tankers, it was so horrible that Riot had to add equipment to be able to penetrate armor, reduce armor, health reduction and penetrate magic resist. But now, the resistances like armor and magic resist are mostly for “fun” without much effect. It’s like something you have to buy but doesn’t give you the same effect as before, because no matter how good you resist, you’ll still be locked into a corner and get beat up until you’re on the score board. Items like Thornmail are not as strong as it’s used to be and everyone realize this.

So how to make top lane great again? Here is a summary of some ideas form players on how to make top lane great again.
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– First is remove top lane turret plates, which will make it possible for top lane players to roam freely in early stages of the match without worrying about having less gold than the opponent. But other lanes will have different amount of gold and the same thing is, we still need a lot of time to get to a different place on the map, especially when Teleport is on cooldown.

– Teleport before being nerfed was a perfect spell for top lane, where you have to take every little advantage to be able to win against your opponent. But the big problem is that if the old Teleport came back, it’s clear that other lanes will abuse it and use it everywhere, and that’s why Riot is making this spell so unpleasant.

– And Dragons should also have their power reduced, whether that be good or bad, it’s complicated. Do people want Dragon buffs to become something to help them dominate their lane? Or do they want it to become something everyone craves and willing to trade everything for the Dragon Soul like now? There are also ideas that Dragon should appear on both parts of the map to create a balance of power between the lanes.

It is possible to have a new item with some kind of new indicator, anything except armor and magic resist because it doesn’t really work anymore. In addition, many suggest that an item that have the same effect as Teleport for Tank champions, can be a mechanism to move from top to bot with certain conditions.
So what about your opinion? Let us know in the comments below!

Cre: lol360