Improving my League ability

PlayMakerChan·5/16/2015, 7:03:55 AM·1 votes·696 views

Every time I play League, I always end up with a poor KDA and low cs. I've practiced cs'ing a lot and I've been trying to play more strategically, but I always end up dead one way or another. My friends keep making fun of me because of my lack of ability. Does anyone have tips on champs to play that can go all in and just top lane/jungle/mid lane tips (my usual lanes) in general, or any experience or practice? I would really appreciate it.

In response to my original post:

The champs I play are Wukong, Master Yi, Xin Zhao and Garen, to name a few. But even when I build tanky for champs such as Garen or Wukong, every time one of my team mates calls for an initiation, I either miss it entirely or it backfires terribly. Also, would it be okay if I played with someone here on League so that they could watch what I'm doing and maybe see how I'm doing?

10 Comments

Jyoi5/16/2015, 7:11:55 AM1 votes

Could you give some of your main champions for each role?

I'm not a great top laner or jungler so I avoid bruisers in general, but as a rule of thumb for anyone is to understand the matchup to understand which items to start with or build first, and how to play the lane.

Antonok5/16/2015, 7:19:29 AM1 votes

Really depends on champ match ups, but a few general tips:

~ Don't fight in their minion wave. Specially early. It WILL kill you. Likewise, you can try to bait them to chase you into your minions and let them whittle them down some.

~ Practice last hitting and poking. Even if you feed a kill or 2, a good CS score can help balance it a bit.

~ If you do get behind, don't be afraid to buy defense items first and farm under tower.

~ Wards. Wards are your friend. If you have 75 extra gold when you back, buy a ward. It will save your (or a teammates) life.

~ Learn champions. The more you know about what your opponent can do, the better you can play around it. This includes general itemization as well. An early MR item isn't going to help against a fiora or jax for example.

Zmuecat5/16/2015, 7:24:10 AM1 votes

If low CS is a problem, keep going about it. Custom games for 5 minutes, aim for 20 CS, then 25, then 30. 38 is the max amount of CS you can get I believe.

Play the champions you love and keep playing them, but if you notice another champion keeps giving you problems (especially in lane) go into a custom game then some normals. It will give you most knowledge about their weaker points in time.

Look at the advanced match history after every game, or at least every losing game. Look at how many wards you placed, where you died, when you died. It can help if there is a pattern. It also lets you look at how others build.

If you die to your enemy laner early, buy defense. It works.

Can't give you any specific tips, but I've found that these have helped me plenty figure out what I was doing wrong and what my enemy was doing right.

Sid885/16/2015, 7:43:06 AM1 votes

For me the best way to learn counterplay against champs is playing the champ you wanna counter yourself. Its the best way to learn strengths and weaknesses of any champ and allow better understanding of your strengths too. For CS i'm afraid nothing you can do except practice in custom games. It takes a while but not a long time. Play against inter bots later cuz they try to poke you a bit and learning to CS under pressure is the key. Wards ofc.. Try and ensure you have one vision ward on the map at all times. Having three stealth wards along with that will give you and your team very good vision. Try and remember to upgrade your ward at lvl9. The upgrade gives you one charge of vision or two charges of stealth wards for the remainder of the game which is great! You can switch between them later if you want to.

As for champs, if you wanna go all in you might wanna look into tanks. Its their role to initiate fights for the team and use crowd control to disable enemy team and carries. Champs like Sejuani, Leona and Shyvanna are usually your 'Go all in' kinda champs (except shyvanna doesnt have a decent cc and mostly about peeling the entire team at once) But of course tanks have to be very responsible. Your team wont exactly follow you into a teamfight if they dont trust you. And initiating a bad teamfights can pretty much send your entire team to their deaths. At the same time its a lot of fun watching the enemy waste a whole buncha skills on you while you just dont die! xD

Jonus Farstrider5/16/2015, 12:38:12 PM1 votes

It really sounds like you're playing champs that don't fit your current play style and skill level. Try out something completely different, then later, come back to those champs you've been playing and you'll see a spike in talent. For myself, I started out trying to ADC and was getting blown up. My problem sounds a bit like yours, I liked an all-in style, but ADC shouldn't do that unless they have a flat out advantage in trading/cc. Same thing was going on with nukes. I swapped over to tanks and BOOM did I blow up the enemy team! It just fit with my play style so well, I was disruptive, I lived longer, I piled out damage. Later on, I started working on mages and found that I was quite good with several of them just from the sheer practice I'd put into LOL and the confidence boost of having had so much success on tanks (plus, having played against other champ types, I knew what they could and couldn't do, which benefited me tremendously.) After mages, I worked up ADC and did much better (still not the best jungle camp clearer, but I can gank hard core,) and, surprisingly, found that supports are possibly my best champs. Who knew? You sound like you're in the same boat I was in when I first started out, so I'd agree with the others that posted earlier, try out a tank (swing to bot lane until you're more practiced.) I'd suggest building health and armor/mr with a nice set of boots (counter the type of champ you're against) to get you started, then branch out a bit depending on the tank you're playing and the champs you're against.

Also, possibly the best advice I can give is to not limit yourself on what champs you play (to start.) Try out every champ a few times, at least. Not only will you be surprised which champs you find "easy," but you'll get invaluable knowledge of their strengths, weaknesses, skills, opportunity windows (both for and against them,) and build paths. I just can't stress this enough. Playing a champ lets you know how to play against them......after all, you will know what killed you easiest, right? :P

Basic tips: If you're playing an ADC, glass cannon sounds wonderful, and can be if you've got the high level skill to pull it off, but a mix of AD/Defense runes will serve you better as a start. Same with items; getting one defensive item can lengthen your time alive, which will increase the amount of damage you output over a glass cannon. This principle goes for mid/top lanes, too. Glass cannons are just that, glass. A burst or sustain type opponent will thank you for it and walk away with all the kills and CS they could hope for.

If you're having trouble with CS in any lane, try to make it a priority over harass (unless the other champ is very weak against harass) and don't be afraid to use your AA AND your abilities to last hit. Since you're not harassing constantly, you now have more mana to dish out in minion farming. It's more important to get those cannon minions and their lovely gold than it is to hit the enemy champ who is just going to chug a health pot anyways. You should probably still harass a little to keep the enemy honest and from getting a bully mentality, but just ease back on it a little until you've gotten better. Also, click on the minion you're looking to target so you can see his actual health numbers (later, you won't need to do this, you'll be able to tell just by the length of the health bar,) and watch the numbers above the minions you hit. This will let you know how much damage you're doing currently in the game to a minion with an AA or ability so you know when to last hit. And prioritize minions in this manner if you have to choose: cannon, melee, caster. They're worth the most gold in that order.

Watch your minimap. Take every opportunity to watch it and keep track of where the enemy is. Combine that with some defensive wards and you should stay much safer in lane against ganks. Don't be afraid to B. It's better to B and come back healthy than to try and overstay because you're afraid to lose out on those last two minions. More will come. And don't overextend. Pushing a lane into the enemy sounds like what you're supposed to do (the whole goal of the game is destroy the enemy's base, right?) But often, it's not. You get far away from your tower and have to run all the way back, being harassed the whole way by the enemy, often dying. If you've got good wards and know where the enemy is (especially that pesky jungler who loves to come and cut your legs out from under you) and you've got a good leg up on your lane opponent, go ahead and shove the wave to do some damage on their tower, but keep farming. Farming is going to help you more as a starting player.

For champs, I'd try taking tanky bot laners, like Leona (cast that shield, sword in for a stun, stun them again, walk away as the shield does more damage and all the while your ADC does their bit from the back lines,) safer mid lane mages if you're determined to go mid lane (for example, Ziggs can harass and farm fairly safely as he has a mine field to slow champs/farm, a satchel to either knock back the opponents or knock yourself back towards your tower - preferably both, and a bouncing bomb to poke or farm,) or a beefy or cc top laner (Mundo is fun and not that hard to learn, but Maokai is much safer as he can harass, farm, and root while also healing himself with his passive for sustain.)

Lastly, read a few guides. I know, it's boring and takes time, but some of them are really, really good and have great tips for those specific champs. Just make sure they're not old and out of date. And you can also watch pro matches to see how they farm, when they back off or initiate, what skills they use in what order, etc.

Best of luck, and if you need ingame help, you can always look me up if I'm online and I will play a bot game with you to help work out some of the kinks.

T RexHasTinyArms5/17/2015, 3:29:46 AM1 votes

Feel free to add me and we can duo sometime.

TLDR; Learn the win conditions of your champs and play to that. If you have a bad KDA but that's what you needed to do to win, that's fine. If you need to get ahead and have a good kda then practice a champ or two as often as you can and really learn them in and out so you can win lane any time you get them.

You said you play top/mid/jungle a lot, and other than like gragas or yi, I can't think of a champ that is actually viable in all 3 (maybe wu kong and xin, but I don't like them mid really). I'd say focus on two of the roles and pair it down to one or to champs that can play both that you really want to improve on. Youtube games of those champs or find streamers who play them a lot and watch what they are doing in trades that get them ahead.

The best way to not die is to get ahead in lane and then make smart plays. Some times it won't work bc you need to initiate and even fed you won't survive. That's fine as long as it's worth it in the long run. I played a wu kong jungle game a while back, and I'm not great w/ wu kong so I did pretty bad early. However, I picked him bc we had a Yasuo mid and their synergy is stupid broken. I think it was before I go out of bronze, so no one warded the flanks, and I could clone from a bush and the get my dash from invis on to adc AND the ap carry at least 4 out of 5 times, and I died every time, but Yasuo was able to ult both of their carries w/ my armor shred plus black cleaver I had on and he just deleted them. I died a bunch and had a bad KDA but there were some fights we won only bc I got a good ult off, and the team was able to use that to clean up and win off it.