Goldenglue’s Mid Lane Solo Queue Tiers:
- S-Tier: Syndra
- A-Tier: Orianna, Zed, Jayce, Ahri, Xerath, Zilean
- B-Tier: Fizz, Ryze, Azir, Ziggs, Twisted Fate, Veigar, Katarina, Annie
- C-Tier: Akali, LeBlanc, Lulu, Anivia, Lux, Diana, Viktor, Malzahar, Kassadin
- D-Tier: Yasuo, Riven, Mordekaiser, Brand, Galio, Cassiopeia, Heimerdinger, Cho’Gath
- X-Tier: Everything else.
Explanations for each tier:
S-Tier: The reason Syndra is alone in this tier is not because her name starts with the letter S, but because she is overall one of the strongest, if not the strongest, mid laner for solo queue games. She has a very strong early game and also has a very strong snowballing effect on the game if she gets ahead. She has high assassination potential on a carry, but can also choose to blow up the front line. The downside to Syndra is that she can be hard to use and has a very high skill floor (It can be hard to pick her up in your champ pool).
A-Tier: A tier is filled up with a multitude of very strong champions who can when played right solo-carry a game. The main thing that separates this tier from the S tier is that these champions have slightly weaker lane phases. This really isn’t that big of a deal because if you can manage to get a lead on someone like Orianna you can control the pace of the game with your ultimates. Tier-A is overall just really safe picks that you can usually blind pick into any match-up.
B-Tier: B tier has both very strong laning champions such as Annie along with some very weak lane phase champions such as Fizz. All these champions can carry with a lead, but usually you have to jump through more hoops to get fed as these champions, or teamfights are harder to execute with these champions. Regardless these champions are still viable and if you enjoy playing them feel free to spam it until your hearts content.
C-Tier: These champions are more of a situational pick. You wouldn’t want to blind pick any of these champions unless you are very confident in your ability to lane. These champions are good counter-picks and can still do well but if counter picked can be absolutely useless. These champions can have very high impact in games and since they are less played you can sometimes surprise the enemy. Overall, feel free to pick these but I would advise you not to pick these unless you are very confident in playing them or you already know who you are laning versus.
D-Tier: These champions are overall pretty bad in the midlane. They require outplays to keep up with the higher tier midlaners. If one of these champions is your favorite ever you can still win with it, you just have to be really good.
X-Tier: This is anything and everything that is not on this list. Just because its not listed above doesn’t mean it is necessarily bad, I might have forgot one or two viable champions but most of these are purely counter-picks or niche picks like AP Malphite or AP ezreal. X-tier is the weird picks that no one really plays but a few people but sometimes the new OP picks come from X-Tier such as the recent resurgence in Talon which then caused him to get nerfed.