Welcome to The Fundamentals for Improving at League of Legends as an Average Player in which I, an average player, will elaborate the process of improving and therefore climbing the ranked ladder in League of Legends. In this first article, I will explore resources and information available, and how you can make a plan for your improvement using those resources.

Why does this need to exist? There are a multitude of websites, articles, videos, and other resources out there to help you improve your game, but none of them are made by players like you. Shouldn’t that be a good thing? After all, who wants to read a guide to improving by someone who has been hardstuck Gold since Season 3, right? For the most part, you would be right, but I have years of experience in coaching, teaching, competing, and learning. I have years of experience with competing at the national level in Track and Field and trained with Olympic athletes. I have coached Track and Field and swimming for several years, and for the last 4 years I have been a software and technology trainer, training thousands of people to use technology to be more efficient. I’m going to apply many of the learning and training techniques that I have developed over the past years to my improvement approach for League of Legends. I’ll be providing you insight into what works and what doesn’t, tips and tricks I use to stay focused, and the simplest, easiest steps for you to follow to improve as well, from the perspective of a player in the same shoes as you.

Let’s start at the beginning...

Preparation

Before we can have any hope of improving, we need to come up with a plan. The first step in creating a successful plan is to accurately assess where you are currently:

For me, this journey starts in Gold IV, while I peaked at Gold 1 earlier this season. I have been Gold rank since Season 3. While technically I am in about the top 25% of players, I’m the definition of hardstuck. Next, let us look at my champion pool this season:

I clearly have some standout champions in my list. How is it possible I dropped from Gold I to Gold IV this season when I have well over a 50% win rate on my top 3 champions?

Oh yeah, I have played 84 champions in ranked this season. Oops... So clearly one of the biggest things I can work on is sticking to a smaller champion pool, and probably to just one role as well.

Alright, time to move on to step 2: Setting goals.

I, like many players, have the wild pipe dream of working in esports. While there are certainly ways to get involved without being a high-level player, if you want to be a coach or direct support staff member, chances are you need to be very good at the game. So, my goal is to be a Challenger level player in less than 2 months! Just kidding, your goals need to be realistic, and attainable, so you don’t get discouraged. You can always set more after achieving them! Keeping this in mind (and being very realistic about my current level of play) I have set myself 3 different goals for the near future:

1. Getting to Plat IV by the end of this season (ending my Gold4Life status)

2. Getting back to Plat IV early in Season 11

3. Getting to Diamond IV by the end of Season 11 (!)

While Diamond IV is a far cry from being able to work with any esports teams, it is a realistic, but tough, goal for me in that timeframe. Once I get there, I can look for the next milestone I want to achieve towards my end goal. One thing I’m keeping in mind with these goals is that these are a reflection of my level of play, so when I’m saying I want to be Diamond IV in Season 11, that’s giving me a year to go from the top 25% of the player base, to the top 2.5% of the player base. That means I need to get 10 times better, which is why it needs to be a longer timeframe, because that definitely is not happening overnight. So, we have our goals, and an accurate assessment of where we are currently. Now we can begin with the preparation to achieve those goals.

Resources:

Chances are if you have tried improving in League of Legends, you have already done a Google and YouTube search or two. Maybe you have even thought about paying for coaching, or a site with dedicated learning content to help you improve. There are a lot of resources out there, and it can get pretty overwhelming. Let me break down my experience with a few of the key resources out there, and how I think you should approach them for the best chance of improving.

Paid learning site (Skill Capped, ProGuides, etc.)

These learning sites are amazing sources of information, they have incredibly detailed videos on specific topics all made by players with the highest level of game knowledge and understanding. Sometimes the amount of information here can be overwhelming, and that can actually play against you. Having all this knowledge about how the game and different mechanics work is great, but if you can’t apply any of it in your own game you still won't improve. I recommend using sites like this to answer specific questions you have as you work on your game. For example, if you are working on kiting and trading as an ADC, Skill Capped has an amazing video on binding attack move and target champions only. This is great knowledge if that is specifically what you are working on improving, but if you are working on jungle tracking and my warding in my next few games, that video isn’t going to be nearly as impactful. I would recommend using these sites only if you have specific questions and want a resource to get extremely detailed videos on those topics to then apply to your gameplay.

Coaching

Coaching comes in many different forms for League of Legends; OP.GG reviews, VOD reviews, spectate coaching, duo in-game coaching, and more. Coaching is great to get you insight about your gameplay from an outside perspective. I would recommend using coaching after you have put in the work to improve on your own and hit a wall or a plateau. You can use coaching at any point to speed up the process, but there are valuable skills you might never develop as a result, and improvement takes a lot of work, no amount of coaching will change that. In order to improve as effectively as possible, you are going to need to put in the work yourself to learn how to VOD review your own games and identify the areas you need to fix. Will you do your own VOD reviews as well as a Challenger coach? Of course not. You still need to learn how to do it though, and it will be a valuable skill to have as you improve. My recommendation here is to take the time and effort to learn as much as you can, and put the work in to improve as much as possible on your own, and then take a coaching lesson or two when you just can’t figure something out, or need that outside perspective.

YouTube

YouTube is one of the most invaluable resources available as you are looking to improve, primarily because it is free, and is going to provide everything you need to get started. Just like the learning sites though, it has way too much information. I recommend finding one specific channel or series that covers what you are looking to improve in and stick with just that. This will help you from getting too many viewpoints or too many things to work on. One channel I highly recommend is Coach Curtis, as he does a good job of breaking down what you need to do by rank, without giving you too much to think about.

Improving

OK, so now that I have covered some of the key resources out there, how do we actually start improving? I am going to oversimplify things I have learned from learning sites, coaching, and a multitude of YouTube videos, and put improving and climbing into 4 steps:

1. Play games with intention

You need to be focused on improving every single game. If you aren’t 100% prepared when you hit that “Start Queue” button, then you won't get 100% out of that game. Before you start a game,e you need to have everything you want to happen and everything you want to learn in mind. Pull up some sticky notes or a notepad, write down what you want to learn this game. Is your cs per minute lower than it should be? Focus on improving that this game. Use an app like Porofessor or Blitz to keep track of your cs per minute. Don’t worry about winning or losing the game, focus on what you want to learn from that game. Improving is a long process, you can’t expect to immediately start winning games just because you are focused on improvement. After the game is over, watch the replay and pull your note from before the game up. Did you achieve that goal? Be honest with yourself in these moments, you are working towards an overall learning objective and an overarching progression, individual games are just a piece of the puzzle.

2. Stick with a narrower champion pool

This should be fairly self-explanatory, if you want to improve as an ADC, you need to be queuing up for ADC and playing a few primary champions. Don’t throw in the random jungle game or play a champion you’ve never played before. Stay focused on your end goals, and play towards them each and every game, starting when you queue up, and through champion select as well.

3. Fix mechanical and micro errors

This is where you will start seeing big improvements to your performance and stats. Focusing on things like CS, trading, and warding will make big differences to your lane and your game. If you come out of every single game having dominated your lane and having never died to a jungle gank, then you are clearly improving. If you can’t say that about a game, can you really say you did everything you could to win or improve? Yes! As long as you review afterwards and see what decisions you made that led to you losing that game.

4. Improve macro decision making

Stay focused here, although League of Legends is a team game, everyone struggles with that. Even pro and Challenger players have bad teams, but they still make it, your games are no different. Your macro decisions still impact the game, should you go bot and farm the waves until the enemy pushes your nexus? Probably not. Focus on your individual macro decisions, and try to influence your team when you can, but don’t get hung up when they don’t listen. You are with 4 other people who all have their own idea of how they want or should play the game.

Implementation

These are not concepts I’ve come up with, just simplified and adapted them to be easier to start with. So what does this look like in practice?

I created a schedule for myself to play because that is what works best for me. I am playing 4 games a day, Monday through Thursday, provided I do not have any major conflicts. I am playing only ADC unless I’m autofilled, and I have a list of 4-5 ADC champions I’ll be playing every game. This gives me some variety game to game, with the flexibility to adjust to certain matchups and team compositions. Each week, I will be setting a larger objective for my collective games. Before every game starts and after champ select, I will be setting a learning objective for that game and making a note of it. After each game, I will review my VOD and see if I achieved my objective, and review for any larger mistakes to fix for the next game. After I review each VOD, I’ll be doing some exercises to help reset between games before queuing up for the next one. Each week, I will review my progress towards my learning goal and be honest with my process. Is it working? Am I learning from my VOD reviews? What resources from above can I leverage to learn the skills I need?

Now take a look at your own gameplay. Are you thinking about what you are doing every time you queue up? Are you being honest with yourself about the roles and champions you can actually play? Build your own plan and stick with it! No matter your goal rank, building a plan will help you get there.

I will be explaining more on the process of implementing your plan and how to get the most out of VOD reviewing when starting out in future articles, so stay tuned!