Best LoL Champions for Beginners: One Easy Pick per Role, the Runes, and Where to Start

What Makes a Champion Good for Beginners

In practice, an easy champion has three things in common:

• A simple job. Start fights, survive the lane, or stand back and deal damage. Not all three at once.
• Forgiving mistakes. Healing, shields or a lot of health, so a bad trade does not end your lane.
• Abilities that are hard to miss. Point-and-click spells or big areas, so you can watch the map instead of your aim.

Easy does not mean weak. Several of these champions show up in high-level games too, because the same simple job wins fights at every rank.

Runes, Explained in One Minute

Before every game you choose a rune page. It looks complicated, but every page has the same shape:

A keystone. The big rune at the top, with the strongest effect. It shapes how your champion fights.

Three runes from the same tree as the keystone.

Two runes from a second tree.

Three stat shards: small bonuses like adaptive force, attack speed or health.

You do not need to understand every rune to start. The page most players use for your champion in your role is a safe default, and copying it by hand is where beginners usually go wrong: a wrong tree, a missing shard, or the previous champion's page left on by accident.

Summoner spells are simpler: almost everyone takes Flash, and the second spell depends on the role. Junglers must take Smite. Top laners often take Teleport or Ignite, mid laners Ignite or Teleport, marksmen Heal or Barrier, and supports Ignite or Exhaust.

Start in Swiftplay

Swiftplay is a normal (unranked) Summoner's Rift mode built for shorter games, and it is the best place to learn a role. You start at level 3 with 1,400 gold, the team that falls behind gets extra gold and experience to catch up, and Sudden Death at 25 minutes makes structures easier to destroy.

Across 1,513 Swiftplay games tracked by Hexgate in the last 60 days, the average game lasted 19.9 minutes, against 28.5 for Normal Draft. More games per evening means more practice per evening.

The one catch: before you queue, Swiftplay asks you for two champions for two different roles, with runes and summoner spells for each. Pick two easy champions from the lists above, one per role. The Swiftplay guide covers the rest of the rules.

Let Hexgate Set Up Your Picks, Then Help You Learn

Hexgate is a free desktop app for League of Legends that helps at every step of a game: the lobby, champion select, the game itself and, when you want to learn faster, what happens after it. It starts in the lobby. When you sit in a Swiftplay lobby, it opens a window with one tab for each of your two picks:

• The best Swiftplay picks for that role. Click one and it goes into your slot.
• The recommended runes, summoner spells and core items for your champion in that role.
• Import to slot, which writes the runes (and the spells, if you tick Spells) into that pick in the League client.
• A warning when a slot still has a rune page that does not match, for example after you swapped champions.

Slot needs runes Slot up to date

The rest of every game

1. Champion select Free

   In normal Draft and ranked games, the same runes and spells import in champion select, in one click, with counters and ban targets for your pick. ProLane matchup scoring adds runes and a build against your lane opponent.

2. In game Free

   Press Tab and the Hexgate overlay shows the next item to buy, ranked against the five enemies you are actually facing, with the reason for every move. That takes care of the other question every new player has: what to build. The same Tab also puts each lane's item gold difference on League's own scoreboard, so you can see who is ahead without counting items. How counter-building works

When you want to learn faster

1. After the game Pro+

   Match Breakdown of every ranked, Draft and Swiftplay game: why you won or lost, what hurt and what helped with the evidence from the game's own timeline, and one tip for your next game. Swiftplay games are judged at Swiftplay pace, not ranked pace. See a breakdown

2. Rewatch your deaths Pro+

   Clips records every death, kill and assist while you play, ready to rewatch in slow motion when the game ends. The clips stay on your PC and are never uploaded. How Clips work

3. Once you play ranked Pro+

   Lane Scouting on the loading screen: where the enemy jungler starts, which lane he ganks and how your lane opponent plays early, counted from their own ranked games. How Lane Scouting works

Frequently Asked Questions