I find myself struggling to impact the game whenever I play a mage mid. Lane phase is usually fine where I can either shove and harass my opponent if the matchup allows it or play more defensively and focus on farming in harder matchups.
Once the mid game rolls around I dont know what I am supposed to do since you struggle to 1v1 people as a mage unless youre extremely fed. Am I supposed to go to a side lane and catch waves? If so should I only take the waves as they push into me as being exposed far up on a side lane as a mage usually means any enemy with engage will catch you out. Should I just push out the waves in a safe spot and then go to hover my team/the next objective in case a fight breaks out?
I find that if I stay around my team too much i fall behind in gold and xp and end up feeling useless.
The way I’m typically playing it is that you’re 1shotting the waves and then sprinting up the map, you want to be cheating up towards the middle of the map in case a fight breaks out. Waves spawn every 30 seconds, that means if you clear the wave in 1-2 seconds you’ve got 28 seconds to do other stuff before the waves meet again. If you have a botlane with no engage who just bounce waves, its going to be tough though, hope your jungle can carry.
It really sucks being 20-25 minutes into the game, being a tempo midlaner, and then getting shuffled down to botlane while your botlane bounces midwaves because they have absolutely no clue what they are doing, its just something that comes with having to play midlane in 2023.
You can stick with your team a little more if you have engage. If you have no engage, midgame is going to be extremely difficult. Pick champs who can start fights, its okay to drop waves every once in a while if you come out ahead on grouped fights.