A classic League of Legends game on Summoner’s Rift puts five players against five, and each of them takes a different position on the map. You can read about champion classes (tanks, mages, marksmen and the rest) in the overview of all LoL champions. This article takes a closer look at the other way of dividing things up: the five roles themselves. You’ll go through top, jungle, mid, ADC and support, and for each one you’ll learn what it does for the team, which champions you’ll meet there and how hard it is to get into. Support gets the most space. It’s the role the community talks about the most while the fewest people want to play it as their first pick, and it’s worth explaining why.
Five roles, one map
Summoner’s Rift has three lanes with the jungle between them, and the split of roles is tied to exactly this layout. Top lane and mid lane are one-on-one duels, bot lane at the bottom of the map is held by two players at once (ADC and support), and the jungler moves between the lanes alone, without a minion lane of their own. Five roles, five different jobs in the team: top holds the line alone, jungle makes the calls on objectives across the whole map, mid sets a fast tempo, ADC carries the damage in the late game, and support gets them there and keeps them alive.
This split only covers where a champion goes and what job they have in the team, not how exactly they fight. That’s described by classes like tank, mage or slayer, which are covered in detail in the champion overview. In practice you’ll feel both: the role tells you what you take care of in a match, the class tells you how exactly you do it.
Top lane: a solo duel on the edge of the map
The top laner spends most of the early game alone against one opponent in the most remote lane on the map. The duel there goes on without outside interference longer than anywhere else. The jungler reaches it later than any other lane, so the outcome depends mostly on your own decisions, farming and matchup. You’ll typically run into fighters and tanks built to survive long trades, but a few mages and marksmen who like the independence also get played there.
For a beginner, top lane is a good choice precisely because of the isolation. You don’t have to watch four teammates at once; you just focus on one opponent and your own farm. The hardest part is the matchup game: against some opponents you lose the lane no matter how well you play, and learning when to back off and when to push takes dozens of games. The second thing that bothers top laners most is the isolation itself. When the rest of the map revolves around what’s happening bot side, top lane often runs at its own pace, and you need to know how to use Teleport at the right moment to get involved.
Jungle: the role that doesn’t walk a lane at all
The jungler is the only player on the map who farms neutral monster camps between the lanes instead of minion waves, and needs the Smite summoner spell to do it. Besides farming, the jungler handles two more things: ganking lanes, meaning surprise attacks on opponents out of the fog of war, and controlling big objectives like Dragon, Baron Nashor, Rift Herald or Voidgrubs, which give the whole team an advantage. If you search for “lol junglers” and their tips, you’ll usually find two approaches. A ganking jungler relies on crowd control and quick plays in lanes, while a farming jungler prefers to gather resources and wait for the late game, where they grow into the team’s main damage dealer.
For a newcomer, jungle is much more demanding than the other roles, because it requires awareness of the whole map, not just one opponent. You have to judge where it’s safe to gank, when it’s worth risking a fight over Dragon and when you’d better go farm your own camps. The hardest part is exactly this constant decision-making. Mechanically it isn’t always the most demanding role, but no other position asks you to decide so often where to move next.
Mid lane: the shortest way to the action
Mid lane sits in the middle of the map, so it’s closest to every other place where things happen: the jungle on both sides and both other lanes. The short distance to the enemy base makes mid a fast lane where fights happen earlier than elsewhere, and also the lane you can most easily leave to help somewhere else, known as roaming. It’s typically held by mages with good ranged damage, but more and more often you’ll also meet assassins there who try to quickly take out the enemy marksman or the mid laner themselves.
How demanding mid lane is depends heavily on the champion you pick. You’ll find simple mages with a clear casting rhythm there, as well as champions who rely on precise combos and timing on the level of the hardest characters in the game. What’s universally hard about mid lane is the tempo: your opponent can roam on you and you on them, and deciding when to stay in lane and when to go help elsewhere is a skill that takes longer to learn than the mechanics of the abilities themselves.
ADC: damage that needs protection
LoL players know ADC as short for Attack Damage Carry; the role is sometimes also called marksman or bot laner. The ADC sits at the bottom of the map together with the support and in the vast majority of cases plays a marksman, a champion who relies on basic attacks and whose damage grows along with their items. While top or mid laners deal damage earlier, a LoL ADC needs time: fragile and weak in the early stages of the game, they only become the player who decides teamfights in the late game.
That fragility is exactly why the ADC in LoL always plays in a duo with the support. Without protection, the enemy takes them down before they have a chance to scale. For a beginner, ADC is a tempting choice, because mechanically it’s mostly about positioning and aiming at the right target, not complicated combos. The hardest part is positioning in teamfights: stand too far forward and you die instantly, stand too far back and your damage doesn’t help the team. The second thing an ADC has to learn is patience. For the first fifteen minutes of a match you decide almost nothing; the payoff only comes with items.
Support: the role people talk about most and want to play least
The same topic keeps coming back in the LoL community: support is the role almost nobody wants as their first pick, and at the same time the role that sparks entire discussions and complaints. That’s no accident. Support is the only position where your success doesn’t show in your own score, and that makes it harder to sell to a new player than any other role on the map.
What a LoL support actually does in a match
The support sits at the bottom of the map with the ADC, but the job changes as the game goes on. At first you protect your teammate in lane: you heal, shield, slow opponents, or keep them from getting close to your marksman. As the game progresses, the role expands to the whole map: a LoL support places wards, clears enemy wards and is usually the first to move over to help other lanes or guard objectives. Unlike the other roles, support usually doesn’t farm minions. Your gold grows more slowly, but a special support item makes up for it by gradually adding its own source of income and later free wards as well.
Supports play three basic champion archetypes. Enchanters are the team’s backbone, healing and shielding all game long and only rarely fighting on their own. Engage or catcher supports, on the other hand, wait for an opening and try to catch an opponent in crowd control so their teammates can finish them off. A mage support is something in between: they deal ranged damage, but still in a role that puts the team ahead of their own score.
Why support is an underrated role
If you type “lol support” into a search engine, you’ll find endless discussions about how underappreciated the role is, and that alone says a lot about how much people care about support, even if they don’t want to play it themselves. The main reason is simple: support’s contribution is the least visible on the post-game scoreboard. Everyone sees kills and damage, but the number of teammates saved by crowd control at the right moment, or the ward that prevented a gank, isn’t shown anywhere. A new player who came to LoL for the action and big numbers will associate support with “doing nothing”, which is the exact opposite of reality.
The second reason is dependence on a teammate. The ADC the support shares a lane with largely decides how easy or hard it is to protect them, and the support has no control over that variable. Few other roles are so tied to how well someone else plays. That’s exactly why support is the role with the lowest voluntary demand in matchmaking, and at the same time one of the roles that decides matches the most.
How to get the most out of support
If you search for “best support lol” for your first matches, you’ll usually come across one piece of advice that still holds: start with an enchanter with a simple kit, where the main task is knowing your ability order and timing, not a mechanically demanding combo. Support is also the role where you learn to read the whole map the fastest. Since you don’t farm minions, you have more room to watch the minimap, wards and where a gank is coming.
The real value of support shows the moment you realize you win games differently from the other roles. Support doesn’t decide the outcome through kills, but through how many teamfights your team won thanks to crowd control or a shield used at the moment it was needed. Players who try support in LoL with an open mind, instead of expecting ADC-style action, often say it’s the most decisive role they’ve played. You just can’t tell from your own score after the match.
How to pick a role that fits your personality
You don’t have to pick a role based on what’s popular right now, but on what you enjoy doing in a team:
- Top lane: you like making your own decisions and one-on-one duels without depending on teammates.
- Jungle: you enjoy keeping track of the whole map and making decisions for the whole team, not just one lane.
- Mid lane: you want a fast tempo, roaming and fights that happen earlier than anywhere else on the map.
- ADC: you want to be the one who deals the deciding damage at the end of the match, and you don’t mind waiting patiently for your items to power you up.
- Support: you’re happy when your teammates do well, not just you, and you don’t mind that your work doesn’t show in your own score.
A good way to get to know a role is to try at least two of them against bots or in normals before you commit to one in ranked. Words can’t replace playing the role. On paper, support sounds like a helper role with no decisions of its own, but in practice it’s the role with the most ongoing decisions about where to move and whom to save.
Autofill and why knowing just one role isn’t enough
In the ranked queue you pick a primary and a secondary role, but the system only guarantees that you get one of them, not the one you prefer more. When a role is short on players, the game gives it so-called priority and offers a bonus to anyone who picks it as one of their two. If you don’t pick any priority role and the system doesn’t have enough players to fill every position, it can place you in the missing role automatically. That’s autofill. After a match where you were autofilled or chose the “Fill” option for any role, you get protection from another autofill for your next game in the same queue.
In practice, this means a player who can only play one role decently will sooner or later end up in a position they didn’t want. Being able to play at least two roles saves you the frustration of autofill and teaches you the game from a different angle. Support is also one of the roles most worth knowing as a backup: it’s the one people pick voluntarily the least, so it’s where you’ll get autofilled most often.
FAQ
Both roles play together in bot lane, but the ADC carries the team’s main damage in the late game and needs items and gold from farming for that. The support protects them, heals them or neutralizes opponents and farms very little. Their work shows more in the result of the match than in their own score.
There’s no universal answer, but top lane and enchanter support tend to be the gentlest start. Both depend less on quick decisions under pressure than jungle or a mechanically demanding champion in mid lane.
Mainly because a support’s work is hard to see in the post-game stats. Kills and damage are visible right away; a teammate saved by crowd control at the right moment isn’t. The combination of invisible work and dependence on how well the ADC next to them plays makes support the role with the lowest voluntary demand.
A system that places you in a role you didn’t pick when matchmaking is short of players for that position. You avoid the risk by picking a role that currently has priority, and after a match where you were autofilled, you get protection for your next game in the same queue.
You don’t have to, but it pays off. Autofill comes for everyone sooner or later, and a second role you’ve mastered also makes you a better player in your main position, because you understand how the other four teammates think.
Not necessarily in terms of mechanics, but it demands far more ongoing decisions about the whole map than a role tied to one lane, which is why it’s generally considered the hardest role for new players to learn.
Information verified as of 14 August 2026. You’ll find how roles and champion classes combine in the overview of all LoL champions. Once your role is clear, the rune page comes next (see the article on runes in LoL), and closely related to autofill is how the ladder works, described in the article on ranks in LoL. You’ll find the full overview of the hub in the League of Legends section.