How i started my climb

Hello, My name is Zyorhist, or Zyo for short. I am typing this to tell the story of how I suddenly have been climbing up through the bronze ranks. Though I'm not silver yet, and don't know if I will make it out, there are some things that I learned, and changed about my play that immediately changed how I do in game. Because of these changes to how I play I have found that what used to be a difficult game seems easier than it had in the past. Some of these things are controversial for some as they are out of the meta and some are things that I had heard before but never made sense of. So here goes;

The first thing I had to learn was to properly cs. Yea I knew what it meant to get creeps and earn gold for doing it, but learning to PROPERLY do it was something else. I started this learning process after seeing a challenge on the forums to see what cs you could get by 10 minutes. I knew without a doubt that I could get 60+ in 10 min, because I do that in matches all the time, so how could it be hard. As I started the challenge I realized that csing without runes, masteries, and items was not only more difficult but it was MUCH more difficult and made csing near impossible until I got used to it. A couple games later I was hitting the 70-80 mark by 10 min. This practice made it easy for me to cs in game. Having thought I learned a lot about csing I decided to take it to the next level, I added a lane opponent, where I started figuring out sweet spots to shoot skill shots and pokes between hitting minions. This has created a lot more dominance in lane when I am against real players. The biggest thing here was the fact that I was given the rule that while farming you CANNOT kill your opponent, nor can you take the turret before the 10 min mark. This taught me to not only harass well but also know when to chase and when not to.

Having completed the cs training that I had been challenged to do, I started asking questions about how to further improve my game. Stutter stepping became my next focus. Sure I had heard about stutter stepping before and honestly I thought I was good at it, but I had a game against a vayne that could stutter step like she never stopped to shoot, I realized I still needed a LOT of practice. Having been so obviously dominated I started working on stutter stepping. I asked a friend of mine to run rift practice matches with me where I set it up for me to have slightly more move speed than him (say 10-15) and would chase him up and down river to see if I could get one more hit in than the last run. Eventually I got to where I was confident in my timing and could get a number of hits in without stopping to run the animations.

Though I know my stutter stepping still needs work I stumbled across another bit of information that greatly helped me in my pursuit of improvement. This was a post about armor and mr in accordance with effective health. I had always known that defenses provide a damage resistance and that the more resistances they had the harder it would be to take them down, but when I found the statement that armor/mr increases effective hp by 1% per point everything suddenly made sense. I could see that someone with 45 armor effectively had 45% more hp against my adc, I then was able to make decisions on my build paths to deal with this reality. I came to the understanding that every time I shot someone I needed to understand why their lifebar was either chunking away or being whittled and how I could change that in response to what they were building.

Build paths then became obvious to me as well. I had read everywhere about how build paths should be dynamic and ever changing but never had I understood how to know what will be more effective in a match. The conversation about armor and mr made me realize when building LW would be more effective than the statik shiv. Or vice versa. I have played games recently where zed gets LW when the enemy team doesn't have a single armor item amongst them. This then led me to realize why defenses are important for all roles. As an adc main I know that my mains run to about 1.7k health at lvl 18 with my general damage build. And as such to be effective in my defenses I could have up to 140 armor to make the most of my health. This meant that making decisions on the fly about what would be most effective for me when I need that extra defense was important for me. Lately I have been scrutinized about the fact I have had thornmail on my adc, but my argument remains the same each time it is brought up. The armor it provides fills the need for armor, plus the enemy adc, and jungler cant burst me down without a thought. Because of this itemization choice I have lately been able to 1v2 ww's, adc's, yi's or anyone else. Though this isn't something that I rush on adc and don't get every game the understanding that it can be beneficial to me was something that really helped a lot.

My next realization was when I learned the importance of attitude. I have never been a rager, and I typically will ignore the chat if someone starts raging. Though this didn't mean that I wasn't thinking a lot of things about my team when I thought they were making bad decisions. When I heard a streamer state that there is nothing you can do about your team and you can only improve yourself I started thinking differently. I started asking myself why did I stay when my team left. It was no longer, why did my team leave me. This also led me to ask the questions that my other players were probably asking themselves. Things like why didn't mf follow me in, or why do I have to be the only one putting down more than one ward at a time. When I started thinking like my allies I then started working to best suit them.

Then I started looking at champions. I heard that counters could decide how the laning experience went and I had known why certain champions countered each other, but I never really liked trying to play tristana for the second time ever in a ranked match because someone told me she was the best choice for my opponent. When I decided that I could stop my opponent with play alone I decided that no matter what I would attempt to go even in lane even if I got countered. This made it apparent that even when I'm countered as my main, my opponent gets over confident and it becomes really easy to stop them before they get going. I had also been the type that learned 3-5 champions of every role, and keeping up on them was becoming more and more stressful as my personal skill was increasing. Instead I took a good hard look at what I should know as a player. I decided that I would have 2 main roles, where I could do my best and have extensive knowledge of the champs in the pool for me. This led to me having 4-7 champions that I could main in my two roles, and letting myself have 2 in the other roles that if all else failed I wouldn't feed in lane. Having such a heavy focus on my two roles has led me to having a lot more power when laning because I had a greater knowledge of the mechanics I had and was against.

Though this decision led to me getting down when I didn't get my roles I then understood one of the most important things about champion select. This was to remain calm even if I didn't get my desired roles. I know that I had enough skill that I wouldn't feed in the other lanes, and while I may not dominate lane, I could atleast do well enough to provide help in some way during the match. Sure the only thing I get off in a team fight is a spell or two with brand, but I guarantee one of them is my ult and it will hit their team. That in and of itself is contributing to the fight. Maybe I didn't land my stun, but I know the damage will be there to help everyone else. Knowing this made it so I could be comfortable with the process of champ select and not getting my choice. I also knew that it would be my turn eventually to get the role I wanted and when I got my turn I would do well with my choices.

As I said at the beginning, these things haven't immediately moved me out of bronze, but since I started working on myself I have steadily been climbing the ladders. Now that I post this I assume I will be getting a lot of flame about my ADC Thornmail, but hey it works for my playstyle.