This guide will get you to look at a few different ways at how players can reduce the amount of deaths they have in their games, whether their impact is noticeable or subtle, and should help improve your chances at winning!
The first thing I look at whenever a player wants me to look at the OP.GG is checking the number of deaths they have on their most played champions, as many I’ve had in the past that reach out have high average death counts on their profiles. This guide is intended mostly to be a starting point to get a few different ways to look at how players can reduce the amount of deaths, with some being more direct in their impact while others are more subtle, but all of these should help improve your chances at winning your games and climbing!
The easiest way I find to improve one’s play is to start from the beginning and work on small things before focusing on things in the later game. You can’t worry about how teamfights go at twenty, thirty minutes if you can’t get to the point where you can properly play fights because you die a lot in lane. Thus, it’s important to first understand how to improve your wave management and understand how you should play your lane. There’s two concepts that can especially help you, the first being understanding where your team, and more specifically your jungler, is making plays at. If your jungler is ganking bot or killing the dragon and you’re playing top lane, the chances are the enemy team will try to gank you or get a Rift Herald in response.
It’s important to understand this type of concept and when your part of the map is either weak side or strong side, which refers to whether the jungler is on your side of the map (strong side) or on the side of the map opposite from you (weak side). The reason it’s important is because this allows you to adjust your wave management and make more informed decisions on where the wave is. If you’re on the weak side of the map, you generally want to keep the wave on your side of the lane where you will be at less risk of a gank, and it’s important to also conserve as much health and mana as possible so you can’t be dove under your tower either. You want to generally just focus on farming and making sure the wave doesn’t get pushed into the enemy when you’re on weak side, because if you don’t let the play from the enemy team get made on you and your team succeeds in their play, then you have a net win in the long run which greatly increases the chances of winning while also reduces the deaths you have in your game.
This is the second concept mentioned in the previous point, which is having knowledge of the matchup and understanding when you are strong in the matchup versus when your matchup is losing. Sometimes matchups will just be hard winning throughout, but there are many matchups where champions will essentially “take turns” having control of the lane. It may be a certain item or level spike that you may need to achieve in order to start having control of a matchup where you lose early, and what you want to do in order to more easily achieve that is avoiding putting yourself into a position where you can most safely get to that point. This relies on the previous wave management tips to avoid things like ganking, but it also is on you to understand trading patterns and when you are at disadvantage in a trade.
As an example, say you’re top lane and playing Irelia. Your clear advantage in fighting comes when you have Ionian Fervor fully stacked up, and so what you want to do to get the best possible fights is to have a few stacks of it built up before you try to fight someone. This concept is fairly simple to understand on its own, however, many players assume when they have winning matchups that they can just do whatever they want and there is no way they can lose the matchup, even though that is not always the case. It’s important to be considerate of what you can do and what your opponent can respond with even when you have “unloseable” matchups, as a bad death where you lose several waves of experience and fall behind in levels and gold as a result can turn even easy matchups into trickier situations.
Likewise, if you’re in a losing matchup but you know the matchup well enough, it can be much easier for you to avoid dying during the hard parts of the matchup until you hit your spikes where you start to get an advantage. This is why it’s important to focus on playing a few champions so that you begin to understand the ins and outs of each matchup for that specific champion, and you can figure out ways to patch up the weaknesses you may encounter during your games.
This one’s a very hard concept to grasp because oftentimes players just want to simply mechanically outplay their opponents and hope that they play every fight to perfection. However, getting this concept down will greatly reduce your deaths during fights and allow you to contribute much more heavily to teamfights and potentially carry games as a result. This concept is especially important for ADC players and players who play high damage control mages like Azir or Orianna, but it can apply to any position/role within the game. This section will break down a few different ways to play fights, and although it may not be all encompassing for every champion, it will give you an idea of how to approach fight positioning.
For example, if the role in your game is to keep the enemy team from diving your carries and you’re playing a champion like Leona, your instinct may want to be to dive in with abilities like Zenith Blade on the enemy carries. However, it may be better in cases such as these to instead focus first on keeping the enemy divers from killing your carries and then prioritize CCing important enemy carries so your teammates can catch them out. Doing this will not only reduce the deaths of your carries, but your own deaths as well as splitting fights where your damage dealers are being dove while you are solo diving in the enemy carries will generally result in you dying for no real reason.
For a role such as ADC, the role is actually not as complex once you understand that most AD Carries fall into a few subclasses and generally have similar play styles to one another. For example, AD Carries such as Tristana, Ezreal, Lucian, and Kai’Sa all have their own niches within their subclass, such as Ezreal being very poke oriented whereas the other three tend to want to get in other people’s faces, but they are all aggressive team fighting AD Carries. You want to be doing as much as you can on these types of champions and playing further up in fights, making use of your high mobility on these champions to then disengage from fights or go in if you see a good opportunity to make a fight/game winning play. However, you wouldn’t want to generally play this way on someone like a Jinx or an Aphelios until fights play out a bit more since you want to get enough hits off until you either get a nice AOE combo on a champion like Aphelios or a reset like on Jinx’s Get Excited! ability. You also have some champions like Jhin, Ashe and Varus who are more utility based and so they may sit further back in a fight and look to poke or use their CC abilities to enable their teammates to then go in or make a pick off of your CC.
Of course, this isn’t to say that every ADC fits into a subclass or that just because they fit into a subclass in some way means you have to play them that exact way in every fight, but it does start that thought process of how you want to approach fights when look at your team composition and how your champion functions within that composition versus the enemy composition. If you’re playing Aphelios like you would Lucian, you’re probably going to be dying a lot more which makes getting to your item spikes a lot harder and thus reduces the chances of you being able to carry a game.
This one's for all my support players out there!
I see a lot of support mains die for no reason when trying to go to ward the river or jungle, and it causes a lot of pains for the rest of your team since now they don’t have any vision and they are now down a player too which opens up the enemy team to making riskier plays. This can be sometimes tough to avoid as sometimes you are just really far behind and are unable to do anything, but there are times where you can avoid dying while looking for vision, and it’s actually more simple than one may think. A lot of the avoidable deaths that supports have when looking for vision that I see stem from them trying to contest the vision solo and getting picked as a result. But how do you fix it exactly? The obvious answer would be to simply say to have your teammates walk in with you, but that would be oversimplifying the concept. Specifically, you want to make it easier for your teammates to walk with you to contest vision with you.
How do you do that exactly? The best way to accomplish this is to ensure that the lane you are occupying first gets pushed out. This will cause the enemy team to have to respond to the push and collect minions, because they don’t want to simply let go of the free gold and experience, nor will they generally risk letting you take a tower for free. This then frees up whoever is in your vicinity to come with you to contest wards while the enemy carry is occupied, which puts you at an advantage if someone does try to stop you from getting wards down and you can likely get good pressure or even pick kills if someone on the enemy team overcommits.
Of course, it is worth mentioning again that this can be easier or harder depending on how the game is going, but be sure to get in the mindset of first helping your teammates out with getting lanes out so that they can then help you out in return, which then helps everyone on your team, including yourself, by having the information your vision provides or denies the information from the enemy team.
This last one is a bit more advanced, but knowing where you should go on the map once you get out of laning phase is very important in order to avoid a lot of unnecessary deaths out of laning phase. Oftentimes in higher levels of play, teams will default to sending their bottom lane to the mid lane, their mid laner to whichever side of the map they’re looking to get the objective on (ex: If Dragon is up, they’ll send their mid laner to the bottom lane), and send the top laner into the lane on the opposite side of the objective with Teleport available. However, this should not be the end all, be all when it comes to lane assignments and picking where people should go. One should consider what the champions on their team can do and would prefer to be in the map state they’re currently in. For example, say you have a Camille or Irelia as your top laner. They would want to be in the side lane, because their champions function better when they have more space in the lane to work with and run people down in, whereas in mid lane they are less effective because there’s less space to chase people down.
A tougher example of this is having a type of control mage mid. Some, such as Viktor, aren’t too bad on the side lane due to the fact that they can clear fast and they have some tools to protect themselves. Others, such as Ziggs, who lack that defensive capability, however, are very bad on the side lane and can be incredibly vulnerable to those higher mobility enemy champions or even to ganks and roams. In cases such as this, it is better to keep these types of champions in the mid lane rather than sending them to the side lane once you finish laning phase, because they can clear waves very well and they are a lot safer in the shorter lane, and instead you can send your bottom lane to the side lane where you want to control a specific objective. This can also catch some teams off guard as they may autopilot and send a solo laner to match your bot lane in an instance such as this, and you might be able to get some surprise kills because the enemy team may not adjust quickly to that play.
Additionally, some ADCs are also capable of side laning on their own, and you can sometimes simply have your mid laner function as the duo with the support out of laning phase. ADCs such as Ezreal and Lucian who have high mobility and damage are fairly safe on the side lane and can match quite a few champions, however it can be easier or harder to do depending on the enemy champion they’re matching. Sometimes it can be best to simply group with your team, and only go to catch waves when they’re pushed in and in a spot where you aren’t in danger of being dove or ganked.
These tips should hopefully get you started on understanding what may be the cause of higher death counts in your games, and begin working on dying less consistently in your games. Remember that while kills are important to get, avoiding death is just as important, if not more so, and being able to fix that problem should get you to start climbing up in ranks!
Stay safe out there, and best of luck on the Rift!
