Just hit 300 Total Mastery, and I have a headache - Some observations and the lessons I've learned
Observation number 1: Oww
Observation number 2: So I wanted to prove to myself I'm not just a one trick and I've gotten 7 champions up to Mastery 7 and Warwick up to Mastery 6, working on him to break the 7 club. In doing so, I ended up learning and relearning a lot of habits and strategies relevant especially to the Jungle role but also to Top Lane and even now Support. Doing so has done a pretty good job at diversifying a lot of older strategies I used to have in each role.
_________-
Farming Junglers vs Ganking Junglers
I'm a Yi main first and foremost. The most comfortable (Jungle) champions I play are Yi, Shyvana, and Warwick. I have a good sense of clearing my Jungle and counter Jungling, as well as Splitpushing and Flanking, but for a long time it was only on those champions.
Sejuani and Volibear made no sense to me when it came to getting an S. I was really good at ganking on them and I was really good at being a glorified Support on them, but I would often have ridiculously low CS counts with my high KDA, something like 7-2-12 and only 76 CS. Took foreeeeeeeeever to get S's on either of them. It took me so long to master them, especially Volibear, that Volibear now sits as my number 2 highest Mastery champion when he started off as my 6th or 7th highest. I even left the Jungle to play Top for a while to force myself to farm, but I'm not that good at Top Lane honestly. I played a few Yi games to get back in my comfort zone and I watched a pretty cool video, and suddenly, everything clicked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAFkLNnUAJ8
Using this video as an example, I'm Anda. Actually I'm far worse than Anda in terms of the Jungle pathing because this is just one game where he more or less was forced into bad moves; I consistently would run around not clearing my camps efficiently, and then be caught doing absolutely nothing for minutes at a time since I'd always have my eyes peeled trying to force a gank instead of clearing my camps cleanly and waiting for opportune moments to present themselves. Every game. I had to break my habit of mentally treating Ganking Junglers and Farming Junglers as wildly different creatures and I ended up combining my playstyles for both to end my 40+ game streak on Volibear and get Mastery 7 on him and be a better always fed Jungler as a whole.
Lesson Learned: Even Ganking Junglers need to farm. Instead of awkwardly pathing around my camps to try to gank every possible second, I should clear my camps efficiently so that as they are respawning, I can have a dedicated time to Gank, Counter Jungle, deep ward or just back. While sacrificing my own farm for the snowballing of others may have its purpose in some games, having a strong backbone of gold and levels allowed me to better keep up in the game and be a major presence for the entire game, instead of a glorified Jungle Support.
Matchups in Top Lane
So my two main Top Laners, ignoring if I get really bored and want to play Xin Zhao or Yi, are Volibear and Garen. Slow, immobile, punch you in the face Juggernauts that absolutely can not survive ranged matchups ever.
Except funny enough, some of my favorite games are when I get "counterpicked" hard by a Gnar or a Jayce. Early levels are obviously painful but if I survive long enough to get boots and rush a Righteous Glory or Youmuu's Ghostblade, it's not that hard to just outmuscle most Ranged matchups. These counterpick situations however did a good job at forcing another lesson onto me: I need to seriously change my entire playstyle based on the opponent.
I used to have just one playstyle the few times I played Garen in the past. Shove lane as slowly as possible, every time the opponent gets anywhere near me to CS I drop a sword on his head, and the moment minions are under tower I run right past and proxy farm. It doesn't matter who I played against (largely because I only played Garen top into easy matchups) and it wouldn't matter what was happening within the game, I would just do the exact same thing over and over and for the most part I would do pretty well. Just not S rank well. Forcing myself to play against bad matchups however ended up having me question how I can optimize for any given matchup. A fellow Boards member wanted to play Volibear Top Lane and I commented on just how flexible Volibear can be, but honestly, I don't think it has anything to do with how flexible Volibear is or isn't (though I still contest that every statement I made in that post is accurate), my experience with Volibear being very flexible with a lot of Runes and items is because I was forced to reevaluate how I played every game. While I didn't change my items very much since I liked Full Tank Volibear, I must have changed my runes literally every game I played with Volibear top lane. I've ran Grasp, Glacial Augment, Aftershock, Guardian, Press the Attack, Predator, and I think I even ran Spellbook once on him, all for different situations. Now as you might know from my last point, none of this really helped me get my S games on Volibear, but it certainly did come around when I had to get Sona her S games and now reorganizing my Runes, my items, and even my entire playstyle is something regularly ingrained into how I play.
Lesson Learned: Matchups will always throw something new at me. Instead of trying to use one set strategy over and over again, especially if that strategy fails against certain matchups, I should know how to adapt my build and strategy to meet the situation demanded.
Counter Jungling...as a laner
The ways I came to my playstyle on Garen and Sona had radically different causes but they came to the same conclusion, so I group these two together. Basically though, I learned that whether I was losing (Garen) or winning (Sona), I have a lot of opportunity to leave lane and do something somewhere else.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm not a good duelist in Top Lane. Even with an almost lane bully like Garen, it's really easy for me to test my luck against enemy laners and find out I will lose the fight and die if I do that. Forcing me to play a losing lane is a good way to starve me out. Maybe, you on your armchairs say to yourself, if I just play safe I can survive long enough to win the game. Well sure, but I don't want to win the game, I want to get an S. Being half starved on CS and definitely having 0 kills is not the way to go. Now I don't know if this is something more inherent to Garen( or Volibear)'s kit but one death and knowing I'm not going to win any fights any time soon does not mean I've already lost lane. It's still easy to regain minion control, I just can't fight the enemy laner head on. My strategy at that point is to shove the lane, and just leave. Do something somewhere else, usually ganking mid, and try to make it back before my tower explodes. Hell there are some games where I let my tower explode because I know then at least I could farm and if the enemy top keeps pushing that deep that early, he's a sitting duck for Ganks which can put me back in the game. Of course though, this and that are two separate points, I just want to leave lane and find opportunity elsewhere in the map. Eventually, I became conscious of the fact that the one with minion control can basically do whatever the hell they want, and the best move is to ward the enemy Jungler and make them miserable.
Sona, on the other hand, was an issue of dead time. Enemy laners in lane? Great, time to harass them nonstop with my Q and get my 
procs going. Poked them out or we're shoved in and I can't reach them? Great, I'm just sitting here doing nothing. I played Sona immediatley after finishing my Volibear games and the lesson of wasted time and taking advantage of opportunity was still on my mind. So i did what any self respecting 325 movement speed hyper squishy support would do. I left lane, went deeeeeeep into the enemy Jungler, and poked him. That and warded his camps. In this way, while I didn't necessarily reduce the amount of downtime I had, I was able to turn high pressure laning into pressuring the enemy Jungler and slowing him down for my entire team. Even as a support, I had a say on the state of the entire game by finding and annoying the enemy Jungler early into the game. I did have the unfortunate issue of my ADC picking fights even when I was gone, but Solo Q and all, there's only so much I can control.
Lesson Learned: Even during the laning phase, leaving lane and roaming is a powerful tool to help recover lost lanes or push substantial leads. I shouldn't waste my time watching myself slowly lose as my enemy laner I can't fight freezes me off my minions and starves me. I shouldn't waste my time sitting in an empty lane watching my ADC auto attack minions all day. When the situation demands or when the opportunity calls, leaving lane to influence the rest of the game is more than just a Mid or Jungler thing but is something I should watch out and take advantage of even from the side lanes, be it a losing Top or a winning Support.
Now some of this might sound obvious to you, but seriously, I was a Master Yi one trick. For all my eyes, I had a really limited perspective and sense of experience with these things. Being able to experience them myself, branching out to different champions and challenging my playstyle in all sorts of different ways, really helped me develop my style of play across all of these champions, and I'm only going to learn more lessons to carry on to the next champ as I get Warwick and Naut and ADCs and Mid Laners and so on and so forth up in my repetoir. And, hopefully, those of you still reading learned a little bit too. I hope this post inspires you to break out of your mold and try to get someone new up to speed with your main, and I hope you guys are able to learn your own lessons and expand your abilities and perception of the game as you challenge yourself in new ways.
Maybe I'll make another post like this when I hit 350 total mastery points. I hope you all enjoyed me sharing everything I learned.
