How to Read LoL Match Stats: KDA, CS, Vision, and Damage Share

The Tab screen at the end of a match is dense with numbers, and most of them get misread. KDA gets all the attention, but a coach evaluating the same game pulls from at least four independent signals before forming a judgment. This guide walks through the four that matter most for solo queue improvement — KDA, CS per minute, vision score, and damage share — and how each behaves differently across roles. Read this before pasting the JSON into ChatGPT or Claude; the AI's feedback gets sharper when your prompt mentions which numbers were anomalous and why.

KDA is an outcome, not a cause

KDA (Kill / Death / Assist) is the most visible stat and the most overrated when read alone. Two players with identical 8/2/12 lines could have produced totally different games — one snowballed lane and built the win, the other stat-padded after teammates broke the enemy mid. Treat KDA as a downstream signal and read it together with CS difference, vision, and roam timings to recover causality.

The single most useful KDA breakdown is death timing. Two or more deaths inside the first eight minutes usually points to a lane-setup or matchup-knowledge problem. Deaths after the 25-minute mark in objective fights are more often a macro or item-gap issue. "You died twice" is not a coaching insight; when you died is.

CS per minute is the cleanest lane-skill metric

CS counts every minion and monster you last-hit. Total CS depends on game length and is misleading; the comparable form is CS per minute (CS/min), which captures wave control, attention, and how much pressure your matchup is forcing on you.

Platinum-level "solid lane" benchmarks:

• Top / Mid: 7.5–8.5 CS/min

• Bot ADC: 8.0–9.5 CS/min

• Jungle: 5.0–6.5 CS/min (minions + camps)

• Support: 1.0–2.0 CS/min (you should generally not be taking minions)

What actually matters is the gap to your matchup. Your 6.5 CS/min versus their 8.0 is roughly 60g per minute of disadvantage — about 900g over 15 minutes, the cost of three Long Swords. When you prompt an AI, telling it "CS difference vs lane opponent at 14 minutes was −22" is far more useful than "I had 110 CS at 14."

Vision score: zero is a red flag for every role

Vision score combines wards placed, wards killed, and the time-on-map value your wards generated. It's a core support metric, but it also reveals whether non-support roles are participating in the map at all.

Rough 30-minute benchmarks:

• Support: 60+ (80+ is excellent)

• Jungle: 35–50

• Top / Mid / ADC: 20–35

An ADC or mid below 15 vision score is almost always a player who isn't buying control wards before drake and isn't scanning before tower dives. Vision is not exclusively a support job; one control ward in the river before an objective contest can flip the entire game.

Damage share: the value KDA hides

Damage share is your portion of your team's total champion damage. It's the cleanest way to evaluate carries (ADC and AP mid) because it captures the contribution that KDA can't see — sustained pressure in fights, even when you don't land the killing blow.

Role expectations (even split across five players is 20%):

• ADC / AP mid: 28–35% (the team's damage core)

• Top fighter: 18–25%

• Jungle: 15–22%

• Support: 8–15% (5–10% if tank)

An ADC sitting at 18% damage share — even with a clean KDA — was not providing the team with carry damage and probably played too far back in fights. A support at 18% probably wasn't playing an enchanter; that's a draft signal, not necessarily a player one.

Combine the four into a story

Single metrics mislead. A 2/8/4 support with 90 vision score, eight control wards, and the highest damage-taken on the team is doing the job — the KDA is noise. When you export a match through LoL2LLM, the JSON already includes these four signals plus the matchup and role context, so a prompt like "evaluate against role expectations and lane opponent, not raw KDA" is enough to get a coach-level analysis from Claude or GPT.