User blog comment:Lukeatlook/Never Go Full Meta/@comment-4834593-20140715081440/@comment-15244341-20140715102606

Lulu is pretty much proving by herself that kiting mages screw 90% of the melee top laners. Kennen is still a greta pick against so many top champions too. So I'd say utility mages with some level of surviveability are viable top picks. Also, unlike carries, they don't suck balls at assissting ganks.

Assassin+mage in bot lane is bad, because mid champions (mages and assassins) scale with levels harder than they scale with gold, but they also need gold to stay relevant. Sharing XP is a big deal in the way bottom lane works right now. Supports usually need few gold and don't really care about being a bit underleveled, since they can do their job of protecting the ADC with bare bones items and levels. ADCs scale way harder with items than they do with levels, so they don't mind sharing XP as long as they are the only ones getting farm in lane. Two midlaners sharing both gold and XP is just going to set them back, even if they get kills (which against lanes like Graves+Leo isn't even guaranteed).

Carries that can be played top lane against most bruisers are basically Quinn, Vayne and probably Ezreal (blue build, most likely). Of those three, Ez has to go for a really weak early game build that some tops can easily exploit. Vayne is hard as hell to play top lane, only works on very specific matchups (no renek, no Darius, no Jayce, no Rengar...) and even those are mostly skill matchups. Quinn is probably the easiest of the three, but she is pretty mediocre in teamfights and her ult is basically useless 90% of the time. Any other carry is going to get camped and dived by all the Lees and Elises to oblivion, since most carries can't fight for crap until they have +3 items and would never survive a 1v2 against strong early champs.

Mid bruisers seems sort of weak to me too. They would probably get poked and the kind of roam the popular mid laners provide is way better than the kind of roam top laners provide (TP ganks are mostly an exception, sonce they allow going into a fight from weird angles almost as a fight starts).