League of Legends - How To Choose Your Main Champion. Beginner's Guide
Introduction
There are over 160 champions in League of Legends, which makes it extremely difficult to choose who you should main. This way, you can start playing with who you really enjoy faster and begin climbing at a quicker pace by being consistent with those picks. But before we get into it, be sure to check out the skill cap.
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Top
Do you enjoy dealing a ton of consistent damage and being a force in the 1v1 arena?
If so, choosing a champion from the fighter or bruiser class is what we'd recommend. To make things even easier for you, we'll place these fighters into a few different categories. This first category of fighters are ones who can exert a ton of pressure throughout the earlier stages of the game. If you like being aggressive right from the jump or being able to punish your opponent's mistakes, then playing someone like Renekton, Darius, Aurelia, or Rengar is a great idea.
If you'd rather play a champion who scales super well into being a menace in the side lane, then here are a bunch of picks to try out. You can still win early with many of these characters, but with a couple of items is where they can really shine. What if you don't really care much for the split push power and would rather have a stronger team fight or the ability to start fights with someone like Cled, Wukong, or Gangplank?
They are all great options. This isn't to say these champions can't be strong in the split, it's just that they offer more team fight presence than the champs we had in the split push category. Therefore, if you still want the option to split push but also want to be able to team fight, choosing from this category is a great idea.
If you prefer a champion who can team fight extremely well but doesn't offer very strong side lane power, consider maining a tank. These tanks have a ton of crowd control and are built super durable, so you're able to start fights very easily and be the go-button for your team. This next category is more of a mix between a tank and a fighter.
The champions in this category are generally a little stronger than the tanks when put into the side lane. These are the champs who have the potential to be most dominant in the early game and can snowball harder than most since the majority of champions playing top lane are melee. You have a pretty big edge in most games.
One of the downsides to range tops, though, is that they are super volatile, meaning if you fall behind you're going to be way less useful than fighters or tanks. We've divided the range of top laners into two different subcategories: being mages and being ad champs. For mages, these are a little less risky than the ad champs as they can scale better without items due to their CC. 80 range tops, on the other hand, are super feast or famine as it's really the only damage they can provide for their team.
Jungle
Moving on to the jungle role, let's start off by running down the skirmishing fighters. For junglers who like being able to duel their opponents in the early game and excel in any fights that break out, these are your options.
If you don't want to rely on the early game as much and would prefer to come online much harder later on, these are the fighters to choose from. Hard farming and playing more of a PVE style until you can reach item or level break points is what you'll be doing on these champs. The last category of fighters are ones who are not the most optimal for early skirmishes but have much stronger gank power to compensate.
If you don't care about invading the enemy jungler or fighting over every crab and instead want to snowball your lanes by spam ganking, look into any of these. As for tank junglers, we'll split them into two categories to make things really simple for you. Tank junglers are going to dominate in team fights and have excellent engaging power.
If you want someone who can also gank well early on, look into Nunu or Rammus. These next couple of tanks don't have the same kind of early gank potential, but they make up for that with even more potent team fight and engagement power. You can think of them as the better scaling tanks. We're putting Diana in this category, but she could honestly have her own as she's super unique in the sense that she can get really tanky in team fights but also has amazing skirmishes.
It's no wonder she's one of the highest playrate junglers right now. Next up we have assassins, so if you enjoy being able to one-shot your opponents with heavy burst potential, there's a bunch of options. For more early-game impact, assassins like Rengar Shaco or Nidalee are going to be your best bets.
Assassin junglers who are more reliant on farming levels and hitting item spikes but don't fall off as hard later in the game include the likes of Ekko and Kha'zix. The vast majority of junglers are melee, so if you enjoy ranged champs, you can narrow it down quite easily. First we have the AP range junglers, and if you like playing an early game pick, then Talia is really your only choice.
As for scaling ap junglers, Fiddle, Lilia, and Karthus are who you have to choose from for more of a supportive build. App Jungler Ivorn is the only option. The rangers and junglers are grave kindred, and if you want to throw a twitch in there you can. But Graves plays more like a traditional adc than Kindred does, though, so it makes it very easy to choose between the two.
Even though Graves is ranged, he thrives the closer he is to his opponents. So it's definitely a very unique playing style.
Mid
In mid lane, there are so many different champs you can bring to the role. Many of the fighters' champions you see playing top can actually have great success in mid as well. Playing a fighter mid can beat out the majority of assassins early on and will provide you with great skirmishes and an overall better potential to impact the game than from the top.
Mages make up the majority of mid lane champions, but we can sort them into subclasses to make it easier to choose from. In general, mages are very spell-reliant and quite vulnerable, but can have an instant impact with proper spell usage. Most mages like artillery. They are extremely skill-shot dependent, so they require more skill-expression than the average champ.
If you like being able to sit back from afar and rain down heavy damage from spells, then ziggs, velkas, or xerath are your options. This next category will feature the burst mages, who are champions you will want to choose from if you like being able to insta gib your opponent with one rotation of spells.
