So first of all if i have just turned lvl 30 so no past ranked history, what is the best approach for provisionals?
Duo queue with a skilled friend. Winions. Best of luck.
i am not speaking for everybody else, this is just from my experience:
i'm pretty new to league myself. i've been playing since may 2014, and i fell in love with the game pretty much lol and i remember being afraid of ranked when i hit level 30 and decided that i should just put it off. but then on a whim, i decided to go solo. i finished, i think, 6 and 4. i was placed into silver ii.
ranked, imo, is nothing to be afraid of when you're starting off. it's a good way to see just how good you are yourself in the game. i think that you should go for it. don't treat the games like normals, though. your teammates and enemies are both trying to rank up (at least most of them), and it's a ladder that you have to climb; so the games are only going to get harder as you gain ELO
but before i post this reply, like, what i learned the hard way: widen your champion pool a little bit. i think that you should main a role with a few champions (however, i think that one or two champs should be optimal) and you should know how to play every other role with one or two champions to a decent level. i mained jungle for so long that i forgot the other roles. also, when i did play normals for practice, i wasn't trying to see what i could improve on exactly. i just winged it to see results magically show up. i fricking ended season 4 as silver v with like a 19 and 30 record however, now i know better, and once i feel very confident with playing this game again, i'll head back to ranked
ALSO, no, you can't queue with plats unless you're like a division below, i believe. (bronze can queue with silver, but not with gold; silver can queue with gold, but not with plat; et cetera [please correct me if i'm wrong]) also, even duoing with somebody of the same level, erm, you could say that it raises the difficulty.
Have fun on the rift, friend.
p.s. watch the pros and learn from them if you want to (i recommend voyboy for mid/top, nightblue3 for jungle, krepo for support, and geranimo for adc) if you find that there are people in ranked who refuse to positively communicate, just mute them and just continue playing to win (you'll still see each others' pings and positions, so that's enough. douse the flames. don't feed the trolls) always think about what you can do better. don't blame your teammates too much. recognize their mistakes, yes, but think about how you could end up carrying the team or start calling shots as the support)
p.p.s. set goals. my goal for season 5 is plat iii. :D i believe that i'm not bad at this game. i know what to do. i just need to start playing the game like it.
inb4 don't listen to this silver pleb inb4 you can't inb4 yourself
You can only duo with bronze/silver/gold people if you're doing your placements for the first time.
I encourage solo really. It can be frustrating to have an idiot feeder/dcing teammate and the temptation to bias it with at last one person you know is reliable, but it does odd things to the matchmaking so you (or your other 3 teammates) will probably find themselves out matched because the advantage the increased duo communication offers is probably not enough to offset the skill difference.
If you have a plat/diamond friend who has a silver-ish smurf then while you 'could' do that and they'd probably be able to carry the games for you, but I think it's more rewarding and probably better for your league growth to do it yourself, and you really don't want to be placed somewhere where solo you'd just feed repeatedly.
You should keep your expectations in line going in. Placing in bronze is very typical for first time placements, and a good chunk of your placement games will inevitably feel 'unfair' because someone fed or disconnected. Don't let it get to you, and believe in your abilities at that point and know that if you really are better than bronze, you'll be able to rise out. I feel like climbing out of bronze is a good rite of passage for many people, as it's prone to force you to learn patience with terrible people and/or rise to a skill level where you can carry in spite of fail teamwork.
The usual preparation for ranked (know all the roles to at least a playable level and a handful of champs for each one) and knowledge of game mechanics and so forth of course still applies, but for the choice of solo versus duo, I encourage solo.
As a note: I am currently unranked. This list is my own personal guide to at least some of my intentions for myself before I begin trying to rank.
Know the roles. I'm not saying get ready to slavishly follow the meta, but understand why the meta exists. If your mid picks an assassin, and your support takes Fiddlesticks, and you've got a Nidalee jungle? Your team is expecting the top laner to be a front-line/initiator.
Play it all. You don't have to be the perfect all-around player, but be capable of adapting. You aren't always going to get your main role. It happens. Be prepared to fill other roles - you don't have to be the star there, but you've gotta be able to muddle through.
Prioritize. In general, surviving is more important than getting a kill. Objectives are always more important than individual kills. It's often more important to cs well than it is to get lots of kills. Actually, think of kills as the cherries on top of the everything-else-in-the-game sundae.
Learn to ward. Pay attention when your jungler ganks - especially if it's an effective gank - and start warding his gank path all the time. Buy a ward every time you go back, no matter who you are. Once you've learned good places to ward, buy pinks or use a red trinket to check those places. Remember: the only time you waste gold on wards is when you don't place them.
Learn to synergize. If you're on ADC, you need to pick a champ that works well with your support, or your lane is going to suck. On a larger scale, looking over what your team as a whole is trying to do can let you build into that. One of my favorite matches involved me picking Jinx into a comp with Sona, Amumu, J4, and Ziggs. We outright dominated teamfights by sheer virtue of synergy - if Amumu or J4 ulted, Ziggs and I would follow up to basically wipe their team with a handful of abilities. We were all friends and talked about our picks beforehand, which you won't be able to do, but knowing what to expect from champions (see #1) and understanding how to fit your pick into that can do amazing things.
To summarize a lot of this, I want to offer a concrete example:
I played this match on Thursday with a bunch of friends. What started as a pile of random picks (starting with my Cho) shifted quickly into a Yasuo comp (See #5 - in this case, all of our champs except Sona included some form of displacement to trigger Yasuo's ult).
It started pretty rough. Yasuo was camped hard by the Taric jungle, and couldn't survive in lane, while Jinx was dominating our botlane. As we shifted towards teamfighting (and I started roaming), Yasuo began farming and split-pushing (See #3 - he had so many deaths that he wasn't giving much gold, but tearing up towers while we pressured and farming waves allowed him to build up massive amounts of gold).
It wasn't long before he started joining in with the rest of us, and thanks primarily to Sona's wards (see #4 - I think she had more wards placed than literally everyone else combined), we were able to get some solid picks to start turning things around for him. It didn't take long after that before he was able to destroy their team off of nearly any knockup that hit - and between Cho'gath's Q, Draven's E, and Shyvana's R there were a lot of them. By the time that match was through, we had absolute dominance.
Now, obviously, that's not going to be enough to guarantee you a win in every match. And there's certainly a lot of things I didn't mention - mechanics, mostly. But those are the things that people - especially those at low ranks or who feel stuck in ELO hell - tend to miss. Hopefully it helps, at least a little.
