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[Can you help me?] 1,272 ranked games, 627 Wins, 645 Losses. Playing a little over a year.

J0HN C3N4··6 votes·4,281 views

As the title suggests, I've been playing for a little over a year. I have 1,272 ranked games of which 627 are Wins and 645 are Losses (49% win ratio).

  • Since I did my 10 unranked games back in season 3 I've been Silver elo, I got put automatically in Silver 3.
  • On season 4 I got placed on Bronze 2 after the 10 placement matches and made it into silver within a week or so.
  • I've dropped from silver to as low as Bronze 3 (with 0 LP) and made it back up and the highest I've made it to was Silver 3 about 80/90ish points.
  • I've without a doubt have improved as compared to when I first played I can now tell a lot of things about the game situational-wise.

But still, I'm silver...

I am here to ask for help. At this point, I don't know what to look for and I fear I may be stuck as silver for ever. I want to climb up the elo ladder and my wish would be to at least get gold this season. I tried but failed last season and missed on the Elise skin (even though I don't really play her).

Could anyone give me any pointers as to what to look for to improve on? I know there's multiple guides out there and there's tons of streamers who teach people how to play better but I still feel like I'm missing something crucial.

I don't want to end up quitting the game because I can't get better at it. I hope this is taken with a grain of salt and that I don't get bashed because some may find my words to be bad. Thanks for your time if you read this.

P.S. There is no TL;DR.

14 Comments

Bassett3 votes

Hi Mazinger! This is my first season playing League of Legends and I was initially placed in Silver 5. I couldn't believe that I was Silver material! I soon dropped from Silver 5 to Bronze 1 and then to Bronze 2. I was stuck in Bronze 2 for months and months. The problem was, I wasn't good at ANY roles and I wasn't trying to become great at one champion. I began to use thresh a lot and I've brought up my win rate with thresh from 20% to 45%. I win 70% of my games as thresh currently. I still couldn't get out of Bronze 2, however. I began to buy champions from different lanes and tried playing at least decent with every role. In the past week, I climbed out of Bronze 2 and went on a huge winning streak and I'm at my promotionals for Silver 5 now!

While I'm probably not as good as you, here are my tips to sum it up.

  • Try to master a champion
  • Choose one champion for each of the other roles and try to be proficient with them
  • (I do this and I feel like it has an impact on my win rate) Compliment your team mates when they do something right. If you guys are down, just say something like "guys, we're only down 5 kills. Play smart and don't chase! We can still win." *NEVER give up on a 4v5. You'd be surprised at the number of 4v5's my teams have won.

Besides these tips, it may be wise to read up on a few guides for the champions you want to master. Know your limits with each champion and know the match ups and how you might fare against them and make decisions based off of that.

Wish me luck on my promotion series tomorrow! I'm on a 5 game win streak (/)'-')/) ~Rymdkapsel

EDIT: I am now Silver! Woo!

Hyrum Graff3 votes

I would work on your CS.

I looked through your recent games, and it seems like you often end the game with around 150 cs, no matter how long the game is.

To me, this suggests that you're doing an OK job of farming in lane (but you can do better!), but once laning ends, you stop farming entirely.

  • When the enemy has a wave that's pushing up to your tower, your team should send someone to go clear it and push back. Otherwise, you're losing gold and XP, and your tower is taking damage. Usually it's the adc or apc who does this.
  • When you are seiging an enemy turret, or they're seiging one of yours, go farm the jungle in between waves (if it's safe), or if you're a fast enough champ, head over to another lane to clear that wave. If you're just standing around outside their tower, that's wasted time/gold/xp.

I also noticed that the champs you're currently playing in ranked most of the time, aren't the champs you have the most games played on, total.

  • Pick 3-4 champs and play them almost exclusively.
    • One will be a jungler, who can also go top
    • One will be a mid laner, who can also go top and/or support
    • One will be an adc
    • If your mid laner can't support, one will be a support.
  • Now, pick TWO roles to main. The vast majority of the time, you'll be able to get one of your top two roles. You should still be able to play the other roles, but you want to specialize in two.
    • For those two roles, make sure you have 1-2 backups each, in case your main gets picked/banned by the other team, or one of your team in a different lane.

I noticed that you have a lot of games as mid and support, so I'd suggest you make those your two main roles. You've had a lot of consistent success on Karthus, Sona, and Thresh; You can look here to see your stats on all champs.

I'm really a fan of specialization: I've played Karma in literally every position (yes, including bruiser karma jg and apc karma bot).

Two general tips:

  • Buy wards, no matter what role you are, and remember to place them. Even if it delays your build. They WILL pay off.
  • Every game, shoot for 0 deaths. You'd be surprised how big a difference not dying makes, even if you have to go back slightly more often.
    • I'd rather have a 5-0-4 teammate than a 25-8-6 teammate, because the second one may have given the other team up to 8 shutdowns. I don't want to play vs a Katarina who has 8 shutdowns under her belt, even if I have a 25-8-6 jinx on my team, tyvm, because Kat's going to be able to pop ME and snowball the game. I'd much rather have a 5-0-4 jinx, facing an underfed Kat.
Tbarbz2 votes

master a champion, by mastering 1 champion you would know exactly what you can do helping you carry yourself a little better.

RiotMeddler3 votes

Agreed, focusing a bit more on mastering some particular champs/roles can be really valuable. Playing a broad roster's not a bad thing, but really focusing on a role or two, with a few champs per role, can give you a lot of insights you'll otherwise miss because you're spending more time learning the champ you're on each game.

Looking at your stats for example you seem to do well with some ADCs (Graves, Twitch and MF) and some supports (Thresh, Sona, Karma) you've played a decent amount. Focusing on bot lane might work well as a result for example, both to improve your overall play and get you into a higher division.

Couple of other minor things from looking at your recent games:

  • Most of the time you've still got a Yellow trinket by game end. Suggest grabbing a red a bit more often - yellow's great early, but the vision control red can offer late game can be extremely valuable, especially around dragon/baron.
  • If playing support I do highly recommend grabbing one of the gold income items. If in doubt the Coin/Talisman line's always a solid choice, given its income is hard to miss and Talisman's got an extremely powerful active, even if your timing's just something like activating it whenever a team fight starts
J0HN C3N42 votes

Ty for going so deep into pointers. I really appreciated. Both you and Tbarbz.

Decrit2 votes

I also want to state that, among all your champs, prefer to pick those who have an high impact on the teamfights. For example if you pick Master Yi, Yasuo or Lee Sin you might carry and get ahead, but when late comes you are not able to do so much into the teamfights and if other lanes don' t do well/the players are total d***s that sits mid for reasons then you can do very few.

Instead try to pick champions with high-impatc and indipendent teamfight power: for example the few times i played Zyra, one of my main supp, or Leona if not winning at least i make an huge impact either early and late game thanks to the ultimates that drops many useful CC's that gets the enemies that are out of positions and allow me to win the game. Other examples might be Orianna, Lissandra, Ryze, Skarner does not sound bad if you manage to play him. Sleepy now, bad memory.

Then again i am still bronze, because i dared to do ranked in S3 and i wasn' t very capable yet ( even now i am 300% more skilled than s3 and still not great, so imagine... ) AND because i like to pick Mordekaiser, that may win lane and has high tf potential but only if the team works around with him, and that does not happen very much in solo for obvious reasons. plus university that elocaps me, but now i am making excuses!

Good luck OP!

Polaritie2 votes

Focusing on one or two roles in particular helps - they have different goals and patterns early and mid-game (though late game tends to be "teamfight" or "split push" for basically everyone).

If you get good at the general play of a role it makes picking other champions who play it much easier. Play a lot of jungle on one champ and you'll do better on junglers across the board (with the caveat of course that jungle has relatively high variety in playstyle, compared to other positions). Of course, this can also help with learning what kind of actions to expect from enemies in the role too - like knowing Lee Sin loves to go for your red early (I see Lee going for my first red more than any other champion).

LunarianFox2 votes

You seem to be very focused on self-Improvement, Best I can say is to try and keep a notepad or something where you write down any mistake, be it judgement call or mechanic you do during the game. I used notepad for this along with the game clock (usually at a safe time to write). and I was pretty amused at how many "shouldn't have been here" notes I saw. Others worthy of note is "Forgot to time the ward/flash". and many "low CS for X minutes".

Finnical2 votes

I am indifferent to ranked play, I prefer more casual modes. But when I played ranked I was placed in I think Silver 3, and I believe I climbed to Silver 1 before I lost interest.

The best advice I can give is that the boring stuff matters almost more than playing a teamfight well. Your CS is one of the single most important things you can focus on. Your game will just go better if your CS is higher because you will have more gold. As a support, you can focus on staying near someone who is farming at least part of the time to leech experience, or focus on keeping enemies from poking your ADC so that his CS will be good.

Other boring stuff includes warding aggressively WITHOUT DYING TO DO IT. It is very easy to charge out to drop mad vision and end up getting caught and dying. Have a ward at objectives BEFORE they spawn so you can see if the enemy goes for them. The timers you can see when you hit the tab button will tell you when that dragon or baron will spawn if your team has seen it dead.

Even MORE boring stuff is being efficient with your time in-game. You need to have as little dead time as you can; If you aren't doing anything you've already messed up. Think ahead a little, know where you need to be.

EVEN MORE BORING STUFF: When you see that ADC shoving bot lane and your whole team is at top, it is usually the wrong idea to have your entire team 5-man gank that ADC (which would be fun). When your entire team ROARS down to bot lane to catch that stupid noob ADC, a smart team will shove top and mid even harder, and that ADC will probably escape since she has a smart team who warded your jungle. So you and your entire team just wasted lots of time that could have been spent farming, warding, or coordinating for a gank or objective. If that ADC is shoving that way send either one fed champ, an assassin, or two men down to stop her. BE CAUTIOUS THOUGH; this can sometimes turn into a 5-man gank from the enemy team if they've already pushed into your jungle. This is where LOTS of wards comes in handy.

Phew, that last part got complicated. Hope that helps!

tl;dr - You need better CS and wards. Don't waste time, be efficient.

PaladinNeph2 votes

better TL;DR:

be polite. be efficient. have a plan. kill everyone you meet.

Undaunter1 votes

For two seasons in a row I was hanging around bronze II level. Every game I would call and play Graves. All I did was chill until level 6, then let hell loose. Which worked more often than not, but my cs was crap and I was never positioned correctly in teamfights. Then, preseason 4 started, and I took a few hints. Even though Graves was my comfort champion, he was not the best ADC in the meta at the time, so I picked up Caitlyn. Then, I got really freaking good at last hitting. Despite having a bad record on Caitlyn at the start of the season, I picked that up really fast; by the time season 4 started my Caitlyn record had hit 26-14, and my average CS for her went from 140 to 200.

My games suddenly got a lot easier. Caitlyn's range was no joke and I got free poke all day against the bronzies. My former experience with Graves had taught me that poking was a gift from your opponent, but Caitlyn changed the game up tons. The massive farm I pulled in let me get an IE before the first dragon fight. And when I plateau'd somewhere in Silver 2, I decided it was time to pick up another main champion, and stuck with Katarina. That just meant so many more games where I relied on my own abilities and confidence, and a champion like Katarina worked perfectly for this level.

...One more thing though, if you really want to get a clue on how to play better, try playing or watching a much higher elo game. Duo up with your Gold 2 friend or something. (Don't share account though). I have a plat 2 friend who taught me a TON about league. There are many things that happen in Plat+ games that you will never see in Silver games, and I'm not just talking about warding. Look at their chat, look at the pings, look at the ward placements, watch them move, cs, harass, look where their ad carry is, look at how they rotate, and how the recalls are timed. There are going to be lots of elements of teamplay, but also lots of individual skill to be learned.

Perhaps for me at least, I've felt that:

bronze -> silver carry yourself out with individual skill. Whether it be by CS, mad plays, littering the map in wards or calling the shots. In these games, you can seriously generate a ton of winning power by yourself.

silver -> gold you can still carry yourself out but you'd need to have high gold to low plat level mechanics; cs, playmaking, awareness. If you don't have those, then do this: ENCOURAGE your team through POSITIVE words. From the VERY START, get your fellow players' game on with some funny, motivating, winning banter. It will not only calm down your nervous teammates (who may be in promos, on a losing streak, or about to blow over in steam from previous games), encourage THEM to feed the positiveness back with responding chatter of enthusiasm, and overall, seriously help you guys play better.

I'm almost plat, and from what I can tell there is a lot more teamplay involved. I'm starting to see those level 1 LCS map movements and ward placements, lol.

http://oi61.tinypic.com/2dt9i1g.jpg

Trinityunicorn1 votes

check out unswlolsoc on youtube. They really breakdown a lot of information. maybe you'll find something that no one has explained to you. Good luck.

Goumindong1 votes

A lot of other people have told you to master champions but that advise is not that good. Its equivalent to "be good at a champion". And well yes, if you're good at a champion you will win more games than if you're not good the platitude neither tells explains why its happening or tells you how to get there.

Anyway a bit about me so you know where I am coming from. In Season 2, I ended up at 1450 ELO (about silver 1 today), 50 MMR short of rewards (So no Vicotrious Janna for me :( ). In Season 3 i meandered around roughly doing the same thing until I came upon some really good advise. In 2 months i went from silver 1 to plat 3 and have hovered around there ever sense.

Specifically this advise was

1) Stop playing when you lose

It instills bad habits in your play. Repetition is memory and you play like you practice. If you repeat bad habits in your games you are practicing bad habits. Tiger woods had the same comment on bad golfers. He said (unspecifically) "you can tell a bad golfer by the way they repeat their swings after they shank one, good golfers forget bad swings"

We want to forget our bad habits. This is regardless of how well you played. Because of the second aspect of losing games.

Losing games makes you negative. Negativity begets negativity. You just lost a game, maybe it was your fault maybe it wasn't. Now you're unhappy and you take that out on others. Maybe intentionally, maybe not. That makes them unhappy. They play bad. You lose more. We call this "going on tilt". And its a real thing. The key to avoid playing on tilt is not to be able to realize you're on tilt and stop playing. Its to stop playing before you go on tilt.

You cannot downplay the importance of this. If you're unhappy because of the last game you will be less likely to trust your teammates. If you can't trust your team mates you will, by your inaction, turn their good plays into bad play. If you turn their good plays into bad you will not think this was your fault and you will get more negative and even less trusting. Which unsurprisingly leads to even worse play.

If you can definitely not do this, or you're a professional and you have to play that next game, then go right ahead and queue up. But for most people they cannot help themselves, they do not realize they're doing it, and the only obligation they have to play another game is themselves.

2) Analyze Every Game

One day later sit down and look at all the games you played. Watch replays if you can get them(Riot please, for god sakes finish this). Turn enemy vision off. Ignore your teammates play and focus only on yours.

The goal of this session is to find 10 mistakes that you made in each game. "Missing a CS" does.not.count. These mistakes can be mechanical (missed my combo, failed my flash, right clicked instead of attack moving), strategic (built the wrong item, was in the wrong position on the map, got picked, didn't ward, didn't buy pots, leveled the wrong ability), or tactical (went into a fight i should have been running out of, didn't flash an ability i should have flashed, put a skill shot in the wrong direction, was in the wrong position in a team fight). But you should find at least 10. That doesn't mean you should stop at 10. Find as many as you possibly can. The next time you play focus on not making those mistakes.

If you can't find 10 you're wrong. Look harder. If you still can't find 10 then you can't get any better. So go find someone who is better than you and ask them to find 10. They will find 10 easily. If they can't find 10 then you've peaked. You haven't peaked. God find 10 more mistakes.

The purpose of this is to do two things a) get you to focus on your game and your game only. Especially while you're playing. And b) to make sure you don't make those mistakes anymore.

  1. dedicate time to practicing champions and farming

I am apparently out of space and will continue this by replying to myself

Goumindong1 votes

3) dedicate time to practicing champions and farming

This is the last thing you need to do in order to get better. Before you start playing with a champion you want to understand their animation and animation cycles in an intuitive and muscle memory type way. This doesn't mean you have to have mastered the champion but it means that you should not be making mechanical mistakes due to not understanding how the champion moves.

Functionally when practicing we want to shoot for 80 CS in 10 minutes with zero items or ability use(and not pushing the wave) If you can do that farming normally then you can do that in games.

This isn't an in game metric. This is a practice metric. In game the sign of a good CS'er is not high CS, its getting every CS they attempt to get. Before playing we want to be at that point where we will not miss CS we attempt with high liklehood. We want to ensure that we know when to press buttons in order to make our combos (I.e. just how much wait do you need a ryze in order to not interrupt his cast and auto attack animations before they go off)

Practicing in custom games is how we do that.

You played nearly 1300 games of ranged last season (or over a full year). That is a lot of games; over 3 games per day. I am willing to bet that you played a lot of those games on tilt and that you didn't analyze those games. If you played half as many games and spent the remaining time analyzing and practicing i guarantee you you would have a much higher rating.

edit: the point of this is not to give you more or less obvious advise. Most of the advise in this thread can't really be taught or understood from just listening to them. "CS better and be better at champions" Well thanks, that really helps me. I want to know how to CS better and be better at champions. That second part is key. And while there are likely a number of things that you do or don't do that you don't understand are mistakes

Mistakes: Full list of things you almost assuredly don't do properly Not warding enough (not buying pinks) Not being at team fights Not buying HP pots Not buying Mana pots Not combat warding Not warding chokepoints Not paying attention to the minimap Not understanding your combo damage Not understanding the enemies combo damage Doing nothing when you should be doing something Chasing when there are objectives on the table Chasing when enemies are missing Chasing in general, singed especially Not following teammates Not peeling for strong teammates Fighting when you're weaker Fighting in disadvantageous terrain Not understanding what is and isn't advantageous terrain Not upgrading your trinket Not purchasing the right trinket for your position and the list goes on.

But me just saying "do all these things" doesn't help you. Because you don't see yourself making those mistakes and don't take them to heart. Watch your games and understand and you will get better.

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