Bot Lane Synergy - What it is and how to improve it - Impakt support guides

Hello guys, impaKt here. Today I'll be talking about one of the most requested topics that I've gotten so far, which is Bot Lane Synergy. Even though a lot of people wonder about this, I couldn't seem to find any specific content or articles about it, so I decided to make a video based solely on my own experience as a Support Player. First of all, let me just state something really quick. I'm not going to be talking about how well champions work together. I'll be talking about the actual relationship that the AD Carry and that the Support player need to have in order to become as good as they possibly can. In the first video guide I ever released - Supporting Team Fights - I tried to break down everything in a few basic steps. I'm going to do the same here. In my opinion, a great bot lane has the following 5 traits: 1- Friendship 2- Communication 3- Knowledge 4- Trust 5- Skill Note that I'm actually listing this from the most important trait to the least important, even though they are all necessary. First, Friendship. A lot of you may be somewhat curious as to why Friendship would be the most important trait. Lemme clear things out for you: If you're playing with someone that you care about and that you respect, someone that you can call a friend and that you hang out with every day, then getting pissed off at them won't be so easy. Other than that, you'll be playing the game for fun and to actually improve yourselves as players. Most importantly, you'll be a LOT more resilient to the temptation of blaming your mate for screwing up. And this is absolutely CRUCIAL. If you don't blame your ADC or Support, you'll immediately start looking for ways to improve your own game, or even play style. You'll then be able to share your opinions with your team mate, and the learning process will be a LOT smoother and a lot more efficient. While you can also do this when playing solo queue, by being friends with your lane partner you'll also be able to discuss games whenever you hang out. You'll be talking about your games in a more relaxed environment. Therefore, the probability of finding answers to the questions that you may have will be higher, since you'll be in a more relaxed environment. Communication is somewhat self-explanatory I guess and it is also an incredibly important tier of your level of synergy. Telling your team mate what you have in mind, will allow him to adapt. It will allow him to position, to play more carefully, and it prepares him for what is to come. This is actually one of the main problems in solo queue bot lanes. Since the laners aren't actually communicating through any voice-chat application, they're not able to know what the other person will do. While there are some pretty obvious situations, there are somethings that are incredibly hard to pull off unless you're actually talking with your team mate. Alternating crowd control on a jungler, in order to kite him and escape from a really sticky situation with no casualties is a perfect example of this. The best duo lanes will also establish a strategy to deal with the enemy laners at level 1. They'll look at the summoner spells, runes, masteries, and they'll conceive a way of dealing with it. If you'd like an example, the early push at level 1 to reach level 2 faster is a pretty common strategy. You'll have more damage, more HP, and 2 times the amount of skills that the enemies will have. Communication is pretty much essential when you're setting up your strategy. Even if you think you know the perfect way of dealing with something, discussing it with your lane partner will allow you to find flaws in your reasoning and it will grant you the opportunity to prepare better for the laning phase. To actually establish a good strategy, you'll need the knowledge. Both players will. And there is a lot I could say here. The exact cooldowns of your enemies are a huge help for example. If you know that, after missing a Death Sentence a Thresh won't be able to hook you for another 20 seconds, or 17 seconds if he hits a minion, then you know that you have a huge window of opportunity to go aggressive on your enemies. Now multiply this for every skill the enemies have, as well as summoners, and you get a better sense of what you'll need to be aware of during the laning phase. Other than that, you always need to think about the enemy jungler. If he's missing, then is it possible that he's near your lane? Well, did the enemy bottom buff just respawn? Then probably, yeah! Did your enemies ward the river? If so, at what time? Is it a trinket ward prior to level 9? Then it should last 1 minute. You can time it. Was it a standard ward? Then it should last 3 minutes instead of 1. You can then use this knowledge to ask your jungler or mid laner to roam as soon as the wards fade. Then there's the damage that each champion deals and the damage that you know you can take. Knowing a champion implies that you'll know how many attacks you'll be able to withstand from both of your opponents for example. You'll know how much damage you can tank for your AD Carry while he attacks your enemies. And speaking of tanking damage for your AD Carry, trust is also pretty damm important. It is usually never given as soon as you start playing together. Trust is built over time. The more games you have, the more you'll trust your partner and the more he'll trust you. Trust implies that if you make a play, your partner will trust the decision to be the right one, and he'll immediately follow it up. If you're playing with someone that doesn't trust you, then you may end up casting tibbers on a target for nothing for example. The same thing may happen the other way around, if you don't trust your team mate, and let's say he's playing ezreal, he may use arcane shift near the enemies waiting for you to follow it up, and he may end up dying for nothing. Trust also implies that you know each other's playstyle, that you know how your partner plays and you adapt to it. Adapting to each other's style is a sign of trust, and one of the most important things you'll need to focus on when playing with someone. You'll know you have adapted to someone when you instinctively follow up your partner's play without even talking about it. And finally, there's skill. I'm placing this at the bottom of the list for a simple reason: if you master all of the topics above, even if your mechanics aren't so great, then chances are you'll win most of your lanes. However, if you hit every single of your hooks with Thresh or Blitzcrank, or if you have incredible doublelift level vayne mechanics, then you'll have an even easier time when dealing with your opponents. You'll be waiting for skillshots and you'll be dodging them with your gap closers or flash, you'll be hooking at the very last second, just when a minion dies and clears the path for your hook. Now let's do a little experiment. Look at each of the 5 tiers of bot lane synergy that we've talked about, and grade them from Bronze to Diamond according to the relationship that you have with your partner. Is your friendship really top notch? Then let's say it's at Diamond Level. Do you talk a lot during the game? Well, then maybe let's say you're Gold, communication wise. Then let's say your Knowledge level is also gold, your trust level is Platinum and that your skill is Gold. Chances are, your bot lane synergy level is low Platinum. If for some reason you're already Diamond I, and that you rate all of the tiers as Diamond level, then you're probably playing in the Challenger League. This is just a little way of judging how well you're doing with your lane partner. Don't get demoralized by it! Just realize that there's always something to improve on, and that's kind of the beauty of video games! If you want this in action, I usually duo queue with my AD Carry quite a lot. Make sure to follow my stream, either by clicking the icon or checking the link in the decription, and tune in every weekend! I promise I'll try to make you feel as welcome as possible :) And that's it for this video guys, I hope it helps out! As always don't forget to thumbs up if you liked the video, to subscribe to my YouTube Channel and to Base Desire's YouTube channel if you liked the soundtrack, and make sure to follow me up on Facebook and Twitter! Thanks a lot for watching, have a great day and see you next time! Since I started playing Support competitively, I played with 3 different AD Carries. I won't name them, but let's call them X, Y and Z, shall we?