Dominion: Bot Lane Positioning: Where To Be and When

Hello Everyone,

This time around I would like to discuss one of the biggest things that you can do to improve your play in the bottom lane; your positioning.

Positioning is one of the most important factors in the bot lane, and can mean the difference between you getting ganked and losing your lane, to setting up ganks for your own team, to putting pressure on the bottom capture point that will force your opponents to alleviate some pressure from the top lane.

Basic Knowledge:

So now I would like to talk about the basic positions you can be in. There are basically six different areas for you to be in. Those are:

1. Middle of the lane.
2. Right or Left side of the lane, not next to the capture points.
3. Next to/below one of the two capture points.
4. On top of your capture point.

There are four main factors that you need to pay attention to in order to know where you should be. (Note that I am assuming you are playing in solo queue, so knowledge and teamwork is more limited than it will be in organized play.) These factors are:

1. How strong you are compared to your opponent.
2. Your opponents positioning/whereabouts.
3. Your teams positioning and where they are heading.
4. How much pressure your team is and has been putting top lane.

So, how do we apply our knowledge of these factors into knowing where to be? Some points are obvious, such as if your opponent is much stronger than you, you should be on or near your capture point if help is not on the way/there. Here are some more of the obvious ones that you probably know.

1. If all enemies are top and your opponent is weaker than you, then you should pressure him and/or the capture point.
2. If you have a gank coming and you feel it can be successful, then you will want to engage on your opponent at an appropriate time, depending on positioning and strengths of the champions involved.
3. If you are stronger than your opponent and they cannot push minions well and enemies are top, then you should kill their minions below their capture point so that they have to constantly deal with minion waves. Note that when you start this, you should push a little slowly at first while bullying the enemy back, so that you can build up a large wave that will be difficult for the enemy to deal with.

These are the basic rules that I feel all players with medium amounts of experience bottom lane probably know well. However, there are also some other positioning strategies that you may not know of, or may not know how to execute well. Allow me to explain these in more detail one at a time.

Advanced Tactics:

If there are enemies that are MIA from the top area, and either they or your lane opponent can engage well, move closer to your capture point, or even to on top of it if those opponents are really dangerous. Even if they cannot engage well, you will likely want to move to at least the middle of the lane if you were past it previously. This is purely a safety measure. The fact that you are strong enough to draw an enemy to the bottom lane is a good thing for your team top, as they should be able to fight a 4v3 which they should win. However, if you die and lose your capture point, then you likely just hurt your team more than you helped.

If you are fairly even in strength with your opponent, and your team has control of top, then most likely the best decision for you is the boring one, just keep the lane equally pushed with your opponent. Don't fight or get too close to their point, as those are risks that you don't need to take. Instead, just sit back and farm and try not to fight. I personally don't like a farm fest being the best solution, but it often is when you are ahead, because you do not want to take any risks to mess things up for your team. 

If your team is having trouble taking the enemy top lane, but they would not have a problem with it if things were 4v3, then you may want to engage on your opponent or start putting pressure on their capture point. You of course have to take into account how strong your opponent is compared to you, and also whether or not you or they have revive off cooldown, and how much risk that adds or removes. Always assess the situation before doing anything risky.

However, if you play champions that are good at pushing lanes and bullying/pressuring opponents, then you will likely be able to put some real pressure on the bottom lane. If you are effective enough, this will cause one of two things. Either you will take the capture point and your opponents will have to deal with it soon after, allowing your team to take top, or they will have to deal with it before you can take it, and your team can take top in the meantime.

If you are in a situation where you cannot put pressure on the enemy team when you need to, you have two main options. The first is to have someone on your team who is fairly mobile come and gank for you, while having the rest of your team defend. If you are able to kill your opponent while at fairly high health while their revive is on cooldown, then your teammate can run back up to help top, while the enemy team will have to send someone else bot to stop you from taking the point. Either you will get bot, or your team will be able to fight 4v3 top and hopefully win this and take top. Perhaps both will happen if you are lucky, but don't count on that. This strategy depends on having high levels of coordination, so don't count on it to always work in solo queue.

The other option in this situation is to call for a lane swap. This is only viable if someone on your team is willing to swap, and either they can do better bot lane, or you can do better top. If these conditions are not met, then there is not much of a point to switching.

If you cannot use either of these scenarios, then your only option is to just hold out as best as you can, farm up every minion you can, and capitalize on every mistake you see your opponent make, however small. If you do this and keep your own mistakes at a minimum, then you may find a chance to pull ahead in your lane, if only for a short time.

What to do After Taking the Enemy Bottom Capture Point:

Next, I would like to talk about what to do when you successfully take the bottom capture point from your opponent. There are basically three options that you have.

• Push towards their mid capture point.
• Stand on/near the point to try and keep the enemy from taking it back.
• Go back to base and buy, likely giving up the point to be retaken by one or more enemies.

Pushing towards the middle point is by far the most dangerous option, and you probably only want to do that when multiple enemies are dead and will be for a little while (Watch death timers!). You should defend the point you took if the enemy team only has one person trying to retake it, or two weak opponents and you are really strong and good at defending. Generally though, I make it a personal rule that as soon as more than one person shows up to retake the point, I leave if I havn't already, usually by recalling. One of the biggest mistakes I used to make, and still see others make is defending points when they really should just abandon it and recall and heal and/or buy.

Speaking of recalling, the best place I have found to recall from the enemies side of the map is the bush next to the capture point health pack. This bush is in the fog of war, and then gives you bush cover on top of that, making it so that it is harder for your opponents to get to you in time to cancel your recall or kill you, but also easy for you to engage upon them if feasible if/when they come snooping for you.

Summary

Figuring out your optimal position in the bottom lane is a process of constantly evaluating your own strengths, the enemies strengths, and the enemies positions. This puts a lot of pressure on the bot laner to constantly pay attention and compute lots of information throughout the game (unless bot just turned into a boring farm fest). However, the bottom laner who is able to use this knowledge better than his opponent will have an edge over them, and if they are smart about it, they can choose correct moves with minimal risk to take every advantage they can over their opponent, slowly leading to a win.