A Guide on How to Improve as a Player (and climb in ranked)

So I've been playing since Season 2. Season 3 was my first ranked season, and I did horrid. Season 4, same thing. In Season 5, I finally got to Silver and Season 6 got to Silver again. The thing is that I always felt that ranked more or less "dragged out." It felt like a boring, painful process that I had to go through every season. Don't get me wrong, I WANTED to climb, I just was unable to. Back then, I used to say "Well, I got really bad teammates, there's nothing I could have done to change it." A year later, I finally realized my errors, and fixing them made me feel much better at the game and helped me as a team player. My answer to losing a ranked games used to be "Our jungle is shit, our ADC is so bad, this game is rigged, LoL purposefully fucks me over, these champs are completely unbalanced" Sound familiar? I want to help people that were and are in the same position as I was; you were good with your champions, but you personally as a player, just weren't cutting it.

My first word of advice: You don't need to carry to win a match. There are people that are meant to carry, and then there's people that are meant to help people carry. You don't personally have to carry the game to win it; This applies for ANY role, not just support. I found my hugest power spike when I realized this simple fact. I was a support main at the time, but I played Mid a lot because I didn't like supporting in ranked. I was playing "carry" mid laners, like Syndra or Ahri..... The problem wasn't that I was bad with them, it was that me, as a player, had a support subset; I wasn't meant to carry, and I don't do well under the pressure of carrying. This is perfectly fine. After I had this realization, I started playing Karma mid and instantly fell in love with it. I never really carried any games, but I knew that I was helping my carries get through the game successfully.

The second thing you should learn to do is not to assume ANYTHING. Never assume that you will carry, never assume that your jungler is going to go in on something, never assume that the enemy won't gank you.... Assuming is what gets you killed and what makes your team fall behind. It doesn't matter if your Xin Zhou didn't go in when you thought it was an obvious kill, you shouldn't have ASSUMED that he saw it that way. With this, is my next key point: Make sure you communicate with your team about every little thing you do or plan on doing. This improves clarity between you and your teammates, and makes macro play overall much easier. Your mid laner just used flash? Ping that he used flash. Maybe your jungle will see that and say "Oh, thats a free kill" and it will lead into a great play, but don't ASSUME that he will gank just because you said that. People aren't aware of things 100% of the time, and thats a completely human flaw, and likewise people don't have to listen to you either. In scenarios like this, the best thing to do is play around them. Yes, you heard me right, you play around that person on your team who you consider to be "stupid". The reason is, that its much harder to make a stupid play if everyone is with him. You see your ADC split pushing and they won't group? Tell your team to group on the ADC. You might not be able to control him, but you can control how you deal with the situation.

This leads to my next, huge point. Whatever you do

DO NOT TILT

NO EXCEPTIONS!

Likewise, do not ever yell at your teammates for doing something stupid. At most, maybe politely tell them to do something different next time; If they get mad at you, just drop it. Don't continue the verbal fistfight. If a teammate is being absolutely toxic and there's just no way you can handle him, then mute him. Its pretty well known that if you tilt or yell at teammates, it just makes the game harder. More friction between your teammates means an even higher chance that they'll stop listening to you or anyone else, which is no good for the team. If you start tilting, just remember: losing the game isn't the end of the world. You always have your next game to try and win, and that diamond banner reward isn't gonna just vanish from existence because you lost one game, its always there. And if you can tell you're tilting, for god sakes, DON'T PLAY ANOTHER RANKED GAME AFTER. If that match goes bad as well, it just makes it even worse on you and results in rank fatigue that makes ranked so boring and painful.

My next key point is builds. No matter what champion you are playing, there is always a "core" build and then generally 2 slots for "adapting". If you don't know your champions core build, you will likely suffer. If you don't know it, I highly recommend using op.gg as a source for your core items. But this isn't really what matters. Order of the items you build, and when you build them, is what matters. The key thing is to anticipate and analyze a match. Lets say that you're mid vs a Zed and he gets first blood on you. If your an AP champ, it might be worthwhile to build Zhonyas components instead of rushing Morellonomicon like you usually do. Likewise, if you're vs a burst mage, it may be worthwhile to build Banshees first to counter their huge burst. Don't feel locked to any specific build, league is about adapting. Likewise, don't pay attention to JUST how well your lane is doing. If you're Magic Damage based and the top laner on the enemy team is an issue and building MR, its likely a good idea to start going for a Void Staff. For one, it means you deal the max damage you can to him from the get go, and for two it means you dont have to worry about it later when its already probably too late.

The next thing you can do to improve your gameplay is abuse Map Awareness and understand opportunities. Whenever you go back and buy items, if you have 75 gold left to your name, buy a control ward and place it somewhere. It gives your team valuable info, and can be used later in-game to deny vision on key objectives. But the big thing is to keep tabs on the enemies. If you see the enemy jungler top, you know that its safe for you to go in on your mid laner, or maybe roam bot to secure your bot lane some kills. Likewise, you can use this same reasoning to judge A LOT of things. If your bot lane and top lane are pushed to their turrets, its pretty safe to assume that if you're pushed that your the next target for a gank, or if you're playing jungle you can say "I should head mid, cause its the only lane pushed up enough for the enemy jungler to gank. " You can also use this to select fights. Yesterday, I played as Leona in a ranked match, and the enemy team had a Yi that was fed to high heaven. Eventually, we started doing teamfights, but had lost every teamfight up to that point. Then, I saw something: We were all grouped mid, positioning for another teamfight, and Yi briefly peaked out of the jungle in botlane. Immediately, I pinged that I was going in and flashed into their team to start a teamfight, because Yi wasn't close enough to contribute to the fight in time. We killed all 4 of them, and then secured baron and went for a final push to win the game. By using my knowledge of their positioning, I pressed an advantage that was otherwise left unseen by the rest of my team. This is why making sure your teammates trust you is crucial. If I had been an ass to my teammates the entire game, it would have been highly likely that when I went in for that play, that they didn't follow up, and if they didn't we probably would have also lost that game. But because we got along and didn't yell at each other, we made the optimal play: The one that closed the game and gave us a delightful, glowing blue sign with "Victory" on it.

My final point is on who to play. There's some people that just play one champ, and then there's others that have a counter for every single laner they go against. As much as I hate saying "meta slave" it, picking up a few meta champions can be an amazing addition to your arsenal. But I have a better word of advice: Never play a counter to a champion and assume you'll win. Once you get so good with a character, counter matchups go from that to skill matchups because you've learned to play against them. A good scenario I could use is from a match I did earlier yesterday. I played Lux into Annie, knowing that I counter Annie. Even though I knew I countered Annie, I did two key things: The first thing I did was take barrier; Even though I knew I countered Annie, she's still a burst mage and it was the respectable thing to do. After that, I got into game and the enemy jungler ended up ganking and catching me out, giving Annie a kill. Instead of saying, "It was a fluke, I can easily win this" I told myself it was intentional, and WILL likely happen again. Then, instead of rushing Morello, I went for Banshees Veil first which ended up saving my life more times than I could count in the upcoming fights.

All in all, these are all the things that helped me climb much faster this season than I have other seasons, and made it not feel like such a bore and make me miserable. I'm only Silver 5 now, but seeing how fast I got from Bronze 5 to Silver this season and how much I improved as a player, I think that with what my knowledge set is now, that I can probably get to gold, or if I'm lucky maybe even platinum with a little persistence.

GL, HF, and enjoy your games on the rift, and I hope these simple tips help you to climb faster and less painfully as well!

Queen of Heals