A Scrub's Guide to League of Legends: Wild Rift - How to Learn Any Role

League of Legends: Wild Rift is a team game that requires each player to fulfill a specific role. More often than not, the team that covers each role with specialized characters suited to those roles establishes and advantage before the match even begins.

Learning how to play each of these roles is crucial for anyone looking to climb high in the ranks of Wild Rift, or just improve their game generally. Even if you choose to fill one specific role most of the time, knowing how each one works gives you additional insight on how to help your teammates and hurt your opponents in those positions.

But how does one go about learning a new role? That's exactly what this guide is supposed to answer! Read on below to figure out how best to learn a role without wasting you or your teammates' time.

Know the role's purpose
If you can't honestly give a quick, succinct answer to how every role in Wild Rift helps your team win over the map, then you might want to do some reading up. In our team composition guide, we lay out each role and how they work toward getting your team a win, so make sure to head over there first.

This understanding is invaluable in knowing how you should play characters in that role, what items to buy for them, and what they should do in teamfights or while taking objectives. If you go in blind or emulate what you've just seen other players do, you could develop bad habits that reinforce a misguided playstyle. Even watching pro players can set you up for failure, as they play with well-coordinated teammates and have mechanical prowess that allows them to do things within roles that usually average players can't or shouldn't do under normal circumstances.

Find a build
There are so many aspects of learning a new champion in Wild Rift, one of which is picking the right items for them to fulfill their role well. As a scrub, I find this part of the learning curve a little overwhelming, but have found a good solution in deferring to the game's community at large. That's why I recommend finding a quality build guide for a champion online before you even start practicing using them. After all, you can only really tell how much you like a character if you're also testing them out when equipped with the right gear.

This is the Scrub's Guide, so I don't expect to be posting any build recommendations of my own any time soon, but I have found success with build guides over at Wild Rift Guides and Wild Rift Fire, two sites that seem to have the Wild Rift subreddit's blessing as being fairly up-to-date, quality build sources. You could also try searching r/wildrift itself for build advice, too, though many threads simply recommend learning how to adapt and purchase items given your team and matchups. You know, high-level play type stuff.

Beat bots with your fave
Once you've got the fundamentals of a role's purpose and general build, try out champions in bot matches to get a feel for them. For the most realistic practice environment, skip Wild Rift's Practice Mode and opt instead to make a Custom Match filled with bots. Practice mode is a weird 1v1 mode against an AI Garen, whereas a custom bot match gives both sides full teams and feels more like a real match.

You should only play a couple matches against bots with any single character--just long enough to get a sense of strengths and weaknesses, as well as your own personal preference. If you stay in bot matches practicing for too long, you might again develop bad habits about how to take advantage of AI players as opposed to real ones.

PvP to Ranked
The next step on your journey to role mastery is to play unranked matches in said role. Playing PvP lets you practice against real players but wins and losses won't affect you or your teammates' rank, making it a safe place to experiment and learn.

PvP is also nice because it lets you hone your skill with one particular character. In ranked matches, if the opposing team picks your favored champion, you have to pick someone else, and you don't want to be in a high-stakes match playing a less familiar character in a role you're still learning, do you? I don't!

Diversify your pool
The final step in learning a role is by training up on several champions that work well in different situations with different matchups and teammates. Ideally, you'd learn the whole pool of champions for a role so you can be as flexible as possible, but realistically you can learn 2-4 champions in a role to ensure you bring some tankiness if your team is heavy on assassins, for example, or pick a hard-counter every so often against an enemy champion.

To do this, make sure you pick champions that play significantly differently or have different utility for the team as a whole. Every champion is different, of course, but you don't want to learn a set of champions that all play similarly and are countered by similar strategies. That would be counter-productive.

With these tips in mind, you should be able to get a few different roles and champion sets under your belt, which is exactly what you'll need to dive into ranked and be a valuable addition to every team you're on.

Looking for more beginner tips for Wild Rift? Check out more of our scrub's guides here!