Hello fellow top laners. I am slowly losing my mind in both this role and soloq. I could really use some advice and others' perspectives. All of my frustrations and struggles in this game can be summarised into two words, which simply is: NO AGENCY.
And I would appreciate to see if you share my experience or not. I am currently in emerald 4 and mainly play as an illaoi otp with some exceptions depending on draft and team composition.
The struggles with top already starts in the draft, counterpicking and matchup has a huge impact on the result and your performance in top lane. 50 % of your games will already be at a big disadvantage for this reason or in some kind of stale mate where both players just clear waves and hope they have the better team, a conflip.
Also regarding draft, every lane and champ is a flexpick now so you have to mostly guess what your matchup is, which makes it even more frustrating.
Dragons and early objectives is also a huge porblem with top lane, you simply can't join any important fight during the laning phase or you have to drop a whole turret and several waves. So you are kind of stuck in the lane without any real agency while you hope your team come out better than your opponents. And unfortunately most games a somewhat decided before the laning phase have ended. I don't know how many games I have lost to no dragons or objectives secured.
But what infuriates me the most lately is just how much gold that is distributed in bot/mid in compaison to top lane. A complete stomp in top is like 3 platings and 2 kills, with being 30 cs up; that is a good result. Most of my matchups are with top laners that know their champ and know the lane well, so they and me included know how to mitigate the loss in lane if that happens. MEANWHILE in bot there usually is like 20 kills. the gold income is huge in comparison. It is common for adc in the enemy team to be 3 levels behind me and have a 2 complete items advantage over me. And once again top laners simply can't compete in agency when mid and bot have so much gold distributed to them. The constant fighting around mid/bot just makes top lane obsolete, they are forcing the game to be around them and simply donät give top a chance to carry a game.
Soloq as a concept is also truly getting on my nerves, I thought that the game quality would improve as I climb higher but I am speechless and baffled over how bad the game quality is in emerald. Players refuse to actually play the game and constantly start these random fights for no reason, I call them Aram players for that reason. The amount of players that just ignore objectives, start random fights 2 v 5 in enemy jungle without any vision 40 sec before an important objective, never apply any pressure on the map etc etc. And not to mention the amount of lvl 30 accounts, or players who first time a champion in ranked, or start flaming and write in allchat as soon 1 mistake happen. It never ends. At what rank does the game quality actually improve? At what point does players have an understanding of the game and play as a team?
My current games in emerald might as well be in gold, I feel no difference at all.
At this point ranked doesn't feel skilled at all, every game is just a dice roll or coin flip for me without much agency. And every game loss is just another hour wasted in order to hopefully get back to where I was. That is how it fells unfortunately, 1 out of maybe 10 games have a good flow and are enjoyable. I had as a goal to reach master but at this point I'm considering to actually drop soloq and just find a team instead and play like once weekly together as intented in a team game designed for 5 people.
Do you have similar struggles?
I could use some others' perspectives or maybe some solid advice on how to actually have agency and truly climb in top. Because as it is now I need hundreds upon hundreds of game to get anywhere with probably a 51% winrate total. It simply takes forever and in never feels like it is within my control.
Take care, sorry for the long rant.