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Is it possible to play too passively?

Volgaria·6/14/2015, 7:13:26 AM·1 votes·1,284 views

Just trying to improve some gameplay here, as I've bitched about many times already I've been losing a ton. I seem to have stabilized a little I think. Mostly I've been focusing on not dying. Looking through my match history, most of the time I've had the least deaths on the team while still doing decent damage and warding etc. What I'm talking about is one of the games we were doing decently, I was against a Kennen top (I was Hec) he was kind of zoning me but I was mostly keeping up in farm, couldn't get kills on him. But I did go bot and help them get kills twice, that game we were doing great but once we all grouped we started to lose team fights. Luckily, our Trynd was awesome at his job and was pushing turrets and got a few inhibs, we mostly avoided full on team fights and tried to keep them split up and that one us the game. Anyways, am I focusing too much on my own lane / performance and not helping other lanes enough if I get an advantage? Or not pushing my tower enough or zoning the enemy more if I get an advantage? I'm mostly trying to figure out what is losing me the majority of these games, whether it be bad luck, my performance, or both. Any tips to help me get back into gold would help, thanks (:

3 Comments

Their Jungler6/14/2015, 7:23:20 AM1 votes

Yes. Though, when in doubt, it is always better to play passively. Basically if your team has a huge opportunity and you don't take it, it can be detrimental. It also depends on champions. For example Vladimir Vayne are weak early game, so you have to play passively at first and then scale well late. Let's say you took out 3 of their team members and lost 1. Your Thresh died while their Gnar Azir Jinx did. Your team already lost all turrets outside the base. But now all their carries are dead and you should probably go for a baron or maybe a few towers. But instead you decide to keep farming because jungle is unwarded. That is wrong, since they have no kill potential even if they pick you up, since it's a 4v2.

Also, same thing for champions that are good early/mid. If you don't take advantage of that early level superiority, you will be outscaled. Or maybe they are taking dragon but you know they are low health and you are ahead in items. You decide not to go in because you don't think it's safe. Now you missed 2-5 kills and gave up a dragon because you were afraid, pretty much.

Also, a very common mistake is that junglers keep farming instead of ganking a lane that seems really abusable.

Basically, every time you play too passively, you are giving something to your opponent. It is obviously a matter of judgement and experience when to go aggressive and passive.

Lugg6/14/2015, 7:40:01 AM1 votes

Play passive until you can get some sort of an advantage and then abuse that advantage for all it's worth. If the other team is all bot tower diving your supp and ADC, take mid or top tower. If you poke your opponent out of lane, push the wave to the turret and either back or go help another lane. Doing things like that wins games at all levels.

Toastey6/14/2015, 9:14:39 AM1 votes

depends on the champ, depends on the matchup, depends on jungle pressure from your jungler and the enemy's. there are so many factors as to how to play a lane optimally, whether that be by aggressively trading with your lane opponent or passively farming and relying on your outscaling potential. you focusing on not dying is pretty good, but you need to know when you have to suicide bomb to secure a bigger advantage for your team. a good benchmark for getting better is looking at your overall game impact vs that of your lane opponent. if you felt like you participated more in your team's successes than your lane opponent did in theirs, youve played a good game--even if you lose. if you felt like you won your lane but your lane opponent ended up doing huge amounts of work for his team, figure out why. figure out what he did to be that useful even when playing from behind, and most importantly, figure out what you can learn from his performance. even when you play a good game, go back and think about your mistakes. when did you make a sub-optimal play? how much did it cost you and your team? what would have been the optimal play to make? over time you'll improve your decision making just by thinking about it.

always think about how your team would optimally play the game at any given moment, what you have to do to get to that optimal condition, and how to execute that plan. then, think about how the enemy would optimally play the game, what they have to do, and how you can stop it. it's chess.