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Tips for Ranked games? Here's my ear:

Jotunheimr·9/26/2015, 7:57:25 AM·1 votes·466 views

Hello all! I have recently started playing ranked, and my first league I was placed in was Silver V. I recently got demoted to Bronze I. I tend to do reletevly well in blind pick games, but in ranked I tend to fall short.

My mains are: Olaf, Mordekiser, Pantheon and Udyr. I've recently taken interest in Volibear and Riven as well, and will summon them more to the Fields of Justice. You can see that my perfered play type is an in your face, hard hitting bruiser, but can also choose to be tanky if needed.

In a good amount of ranked games, I tend to almost kill the enemy but tend to die first anyways. I try to make up for it, either snowball a few games, or fall off hard. When an enemy team provides ganks, I get slaughtered every time unless I build Life Steal(Olaf), or AP or AD(Morde). With Voli straight tank, and back in the time of Udyr and Pantheon, it was attack speed, AD, and movement, with some defensive items, too.

I've recently been warding surrounding areas as well for vision. In ranked, I either do really well, or very bad. I don't like falling off so hard in ranked games, and feeling like a detriment to the team when I do. Any tips, Summonors?

PS-My favorite build: Ravnous Hydra, Bloodthirster, Blade of the Ruined King, Dead Man's Plate, Youmuu's Ghostblade, and Boots of Swiftness. This is my go to Olaf build, and think it would also be amazing on Udyr, and especially fantastic on Aatrox.

8 Comments

OhBoyItsaMegaman9/26/2015, 3:14:53 PM2 votes

Being demoted from Silver to Bronze is quite rare. It looks like there are some fundamentals to the game that you haven't quite learned. Judging from your history, many of your games end with you having very few kills or assists and more deaths than anyone else in the game. I believe this is the result of a.) doing poorly in the early laning phase, and then b.) playing aggressively from behind.

Both of these things need to be fixed. You need to have at least a chance of beating your opponent in lane (otherwise your team is always going to be at a disadvantage because of you as the laning phase ends). And you also need to know how to "get carried"—that is, how to play conservatively when you do get beat in lane, so that your team can still get a victory without you ruining it.

Some of this is just a matter of practice. But even months of practice won't necessarily help if you're missing key information about how the game is played. I would recommend checking out some of the videos on UNSWLoL. Here's one about how you should fight your opponent in lane. It is mostly applicable to ranged champions but the basic idea works for melee as well.

You might consider recording your games with something like replay.gg so that you can show them to us. This will help you identify the major things that you're doing wrong.

Sìel9/26/2015, 8:39:14 AM1 votes

From the sounds of it, it seems like your playstyle is an aggressive all or nothing type. Which isn't a bad thing, but it's hard to really judge where you should back off the fight to recover since you don't have any recordings of yourself

Olaf, from what I've experienced/seen does best just building tanky with maybe 1 offensive item so he can still do decent damage when his E (ragnarok) is on cooldown. But it also depends on your opponent and the enemy team.

As for dealing with ganks, I assume you're always top lane, if you aren't warding the river or the tri-bush (the bush slightly above the river where there are 3 arms of it) then you should work on that so you can avoid ganks. As for how you're actually dealing with the ganks, it's hard to tell you what to do since, again you have no recording.

AyRe CoNteMpT9/26/2015, 11:29:04 AM1 votes

i sadly have to inform you that none of your champions except udyr is an all-inish type of champion and also none of them is a bruiser.

olaf is a supportive bruiser at best, but more of a utility/damage tank. he has many weaknesses and few strengths which are not easy to use without exceptional champion skills.

mordekaiser right now is worthless, so no comment on that one. sorry.

pantheon is SUPER worthless as his playstyle is very complex and his powers are extremely early-game based and dont scale at all. he sadly is one of leagues weakest champions right now.

volibear is only viable in jungle but suffers the same fate as pantheon. his early power is very high and he is almost impossible to out-brawl before level 8 or so but he instantly falls off and becomes somewhat useless because of the way he deals his damage, which is quite low after the early midgame stages anyways, and also because of his utility which is very situational and easily countered.

volibear is a very nice situational pick if you are last or secondlast pick so you can pick him into comps with low mobility like leona lucian rengar garen victor but since many popular champions have alot of mobility and/or somewhat long-ranged cc like janna, ahri, ashe, jinx, caitlyn, darius and most other mid/support champs, volibear has an almost impossible time of getting onto his targets without having to flash, and even then a flashQ is much lower range than most ccs and its also up only every 4 minutes at best. it ALSO makes it harder for your allies to follow up your engage so volibear is to be picked carefully and should not neccessarily be mained for easy climbing.

to climb, i can only recommend you to play straight forward strong champions. as you seem to like strong bruisers, for toplane that would be renekton and darius, both are built on ravenous hydra + steraks gage.

for jungle, its a bit harder because of the neccessity of jungle items of which none supports an "all in" playstyle and also most champions who jungle (not to say: all) are more utility based at some point instead of fighting based.

T RexHasTinyArms9/27/2015, 12:32:17 AM1 votes

TLDR; specific practice listed in last paragraph, justification for why that will work is above

So I'd say lolking.net or na.op.gg the people you're playing with in ranked and check their rank. If you were demoted silver to bronze (or gold to silver etc) then at least the way rito said it was that you have to have MMR a full tier below your rank, so you may be playing w/ people like bronze IV and bronze V. I had the issue of doing okay in normals and being crushed in ranked when I first started and part of that is probably the same issue I had; low nomals mmr. Look up the summoners you play against in normals and I bet most are unranked or bronze, so you have an easier time in normals than ranked. That was my issue at least.

In bronze a lot of it can come down to practicing the basics. silver III or so is the 50% mark for accounts if I remember right, which means below that is a little less than average rank, and above that is slightly better than average rank. If you're playing mid to low bronze players then it should be well below average ladder rank, and you can have a big influence on the game just by improving to average or slightly above average on the basics. For instance I played a TON of heimer this season and made it to gold, but start losing lane w/ him to players in the gold III to gold I range, so my Heimer skills are decent but not great. I played him in some bronze games (my normals mmr is probably still bronze and definitely was until I played some normals this season, and I had a second account from leveling w/ my friend) and absolutely crushed most games bc people don't judge damage well in bronze and so I could usually tower dive for a kill at level 6 and would be up 15-20 cs plus a kill after first or second buy and so my advantage was huge from there bc I just kept pushing it.

Things to practice:

-CSing; no one can cs in bronze, try to average 60-70 cs at 10 minutes, it's not great but it will be FAR better than anyone in bronze and will probably add up to a kill or kill and a half in terms of gold advantage from CS. Practice in customs if you need to, or just try to improve in ranked if you don't like customs (like focus primarily on cs for the first 10 minutes of a few games and see how high you can get w/out giving up a kill to your enemy)

-Judging damage and trading; People don't judge damage well in bronze, if you take half your HP in burst from a champ, don't stay in lane at 25% hp w/ no pots to heal up. Similarly, notice if an opponent is fighting you and doing = damage but you have more sustain (pots, life steal, a heal in your kit, whatever), or if they are consistently taking more damage when you fight and don't have more sustain. If either of these is true, fight when you can, it will push them out of lane or get you a kill. Often learning this takes time.

-Learn to control minion waves; you should know how to freeze a wave just out side your tower, so if you can freeze and they can't push enough to break it the enemy has to come up more in lane to cs; this makes them easy to gank. Also you should know whether your minions will hit their tower or not after you get a kill/jungle ganks and forces them back. If you can you always want to shove the lane to tower when they are dead or leave, because they will lose cs and exp to the tower killing minions faster. Search Youtube for a channel called "how to top lane" for a good explanation of how to do this.

-Learn to use your mini map; Don't just ward, actually notice when someone is walking over your ward. If you ward enemy jg or take scuttle and you see their jg ping it for players not looking. I'm shit at this, but try to look at your mini map every 5-7 seconds w/out letting your lane play getting worse. It's hard to do, and I forget this a whole lot, but you'd be amazed how much it helps. You'll notice the support leave bot lane and maybe check dragon or play a little safer mid lane and suddenly you can contest drag instead of giving it for free, or not have a death bc you got ganked. You'll notice the enemy jg go into your jg and ping to collapse and suddenly you have a kill you would normally not get, plus their jg is behind instead of yours.