How do you help your team with roaming, and who should take the roaming role? I've seen some mid AP carries roaming, but that's a risk because they are leaving their turret unguarded.
League-of-legends – What are the benefits of roaming
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Other than having a low item and level dependency (as mentioned here) a good roamer needs to be able to do a few things:
- Counter-jungle
- Deny the opponent's solo
- Gank
I'll talk about why each of these are important, and what champions other than Alistar fit these roles very well.
Counter-Jungling
Counter-jungling is simply screwing with the enemy jungler. Junglers are countered by stealing their buffs and denying respawn.
Stealing buffs can be crippling to many junglers, as buffs are needed for clearing the jungle faster and ganking. For example, a jungler without crowd control needs Lizard to slow when ganking. A jungler who needs their abilities to jungle effectively (Nunu/Shaco) relies heavily on Golem. Stealing either of these will not only deny the jungler experience but likely prevent them from ganking other lanes, making your allies lives easier.
Denying respawn is simply done by killing the highest experience value creep in a camp of the enemies jungle. This gives less experience to the enemy jungler and the creeps will not respawn until the jungler kills the entire camp. Good creeps to do this with are the Big Banshee, Big Wolf, Lizard, and Golem.
Keep in mind that going for enemy buffs is extremely risky; most teams will actively protect their jungler and you might mind end up in a 1v3. A roamer needs to be able to deal with this.
Denying Solo
Simply put, prevent your opponent's solos from getting experience. Running into a lane and harassing the solo enough that they have to blue pill back home is basically all that you need to do. This gives your team's solos some free time to level and get last hits without harassment.
Ganking
This largely happens along with denying solo. In order to do this a roamer needs crowd control so that your allies can get in to do damage. Even if your gank fails, as long as you manage to get the enemy champion to blue pill back home you have successfully given your allies an opportunity to freely farm their lanes.
An important thing to remember is that you do not want to get the kill from a gank, unless the target will escape without you taking the kill. It is more important for your carries to get the gold in order to carry your team late game.
The glue that keeps it together
To accomplish the above goals you need to move quickly. This usually depends on the boots you choose, but getting the gold for those boots can be difficult as a roamer, so inherent speed is important.
The less time you spend getting from lane to lane the less experience you will lose while traveling. Although this isn't a huge deal, because you losing experience means your allies are gaining more, you still need to be able to travel quickly in order to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. Fast traveling means you can run to the enemy jungler when you see him at the buff you warded, run to a lane to gank, or escape from a nasty scenario where the enemy team decides they don't like you roaming.
Alternatives to Alistar
Addressing all of the above roles, I have a few champions suggestion other than Alistar.
As stated in other answers, a champion who can jungle tends to make a good roamer, because both roamers and junglers have similar roles (deny solo, gank, counter-jungle).
Nunu in particular is a great roamer because of his abilities. Consume is a natural Smite, ideal for stealing buffs. My games usually start with me warding the enemy Lizard or Golem (depending on the enemy jungler), and waiting until they bring the creep down low so I can flash in and Consume. If that proves too risky I waltz to the banshees and consume Big Banshee for an easy respawn denial. Blood Boil is a great way to get around the map quickly, especially with Boots of Mobility. Less time traveling means you lose less experience and get more opportunities to be present for a gank or push. You can also cast on an ally to make them even deadlier during a gank while still getting the advantage for yourself. Ice Blast is a wicked ganking tool, providing a massive slow that is a nice lead into the ultimate Absolute Zero. The combo should give your allies plenty of time to run in and take out the target, but be careful not to take the kill with Absolute Zero's high damage.
Evelynn also makes a good roamer. Her ganking is ridiculous, and I won't bother going over how it works. Instead of stealing buffs, unless you have Smite, she tends to be more effective at scaring off junglers when they try to take a buff. Especially at level 1, many junglers get very low hp while taking Golem or Lizard. It's an ideal time to kill them with a stun/Ignite, or at least scare them off. If you take an Ignite/Smite combo you might get both a kill and a buff (win!). Going invisible makes Evelynn impossible to catch early game unless someone invests in an invisible detection wards (which will not happen), so there's little risk to counter-jungling. Her ultimate provides a massive speed boost around mid game, making her a very fast traveler, especially with Boots of Mobility.
There are plenty more roamers that I won't care to mention but given the criteria it should be easy to point out which of your favorite champions can make a good roamer.
Nocturne to me is an "anti-carry". Make sure to play him in a team that can handle you not being around them in a teamfight. After you dispatch their squishy carry, fear the most disruptive member of their team to minimize their impact and then focus on the next highest priority target.
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Best Answer
Having a roamer and a jungler allows you to effectively have three solo lanes, which gives your carries faster experience gain. But that's really just a side-effect of the roaming strategy. The roaming strategy is mostly defined by having a non-jungling champion with no "home" lane. That distinguishes it from simple ganking.
The role of a roamer is to enable the other lanes to get kills either through a combination of CC and the carry's damage, or by having enough burst/surprise damage to effect a kill. The basic idea is that, in combination with the jungler, there are so many ganks going down that the other team is going to fall behind in their lanes. Thanks to the experience advantage, merely damaging a lane or forcing them to blue-pill can generate an advantage.
Good examples of this kind of roaming can be in seen in the IEM Hannover finals with Moscow 5 running a roaming Alistar against Dignitas: Game 1 with the roaming Alistar and a Lee Sin jungle
The downside is that you need to roam with someone who fits the role, which is not a lot of champions. Low-risk roamers are those who don't need a lot of levels or gold (since you won't have much of either) to still be effective. Alistar and Taric are good examples of this, though Alistar is by far more common in the roaming role. High-risk roamers are champions who do need the gold (but not necessarily the experience) and are usually assassin-style character. Twitch is a good example. Talon can also work, but his lane power is so strong I can't recommend doing it.
Sometimes you'll need to roam even when you haven't specifically selected for it. This is usually because you've either destroyed your opponent's turret or because your lane is truly hopeless. However, before choosing to roam, make sure you read everything above... an ineffective roamer is just an exp leech and is rarely a threat in the other lanes.
Finally, there's the situation where you have a champion who can leave their lane unguarded. This is usually because they can either push the lane toward the opponent's turret, and thus have some time to roam, or because the opponent isn't capable of pushing very hard (or both). Nunu is fairly effective here because of the speed boost from blood boil: He can make it another lane quickly and has decent CC. However, it's rare that Nunu will spend the inordinate amount of time outside lane to be truly considered "roaming."