Improving at League of Legends is very simple. This is a claim you won’t hear from many people, but in this article, I’ll discuss my theory behind improvement and why so many people find it difficult to climb and achieve a top level of play.
Have you ever considered why it is seemingly so complicated to improve at League of Legends but so straightforward to get better at other things? Whether it be Volleyball, Chess, or competitive esports, there seems to be a mindset specific to League of Legends players that differs from all other competitive activities which has and will continue to forever plague the competitive League of Legends community.
Before continuing forth with this article, it’s important to note that this article is intended for those who are dedicated to achieving a high level of improvement, reaching a competitive level (i.e. looking to play high school, collegiate, pro, etc.) or improving as a competitive player (a current high school, collegiate, pro, etc.). If your intention with League is purely for fun, the content within the article will not be very relevant to you.
I’ve seen countless cases of people who wholeheartedly want to climb and improve and yet become stuck in the same rank and skill level for multiple seasons in a row. On the other hand, I have witnessed some players have a meteoric rise and climb multiple ranks per season. Skill stagnation is an extremely common occurrence, but it shouldn’t be regarded as a necessity of improving as it often is—rather, this should be regarded as an issue. It is practically never the case that some players are naturally Challenger players and others are just destined to be in Iron, and the mindset of high ranks being unachievable appear prominently in League and are completely untrue.
Large skill growth and competitive level play are both very achievable and require a mentality that mimics that of someone trying to achieve a top level of anything—whether it be academics or competitive sports. Most people view League as nothing more than a game, but those who intend to achieve high levels of improvement or play competitively should not view League as such.
As an example, most people who play basketball will elect to play games with friends for fun, with the exception of maybe some practice. Contrarily, those who want to play Varsity level basketball, for example, will spend countless hours practicing and running exercises on their own to improve their individual skill. The general idea being that casual players play and practice differently from competitive players—but in League, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
In League, casual players tend to just spam solo queue, but so do competitive players. The common mentality exists that competitive players should just be practicing and grinding the same way any casual player would—just instead, doing more of it. Where in reality, this mentality is far from what it should be.
Mentality in high-level competitive League should match that of any high-level competitive sport or activity. Thus, practice and improvement should be done the same way—through individual competitive techniques rather than through continuous play, which would be reminiscent of casual play.
Moving forward, I will address why current improvement methods of spamming solo queue is both inefficient and ineffective, and then I will discuss how instead to improve at League, and my philosophy behind improvement and practice.
Oftentimes, when I coach a player on a team and I assign them a new Champion to learn or practice, their first response is always, “Okay, I’ll spam it in solo queue.” The predominant, if not, exclusive method of individual improvement is continuous solo queue, on occasion coupled with some VOD review. This is deemed as the default and perhaps only method to learning and improving. Because it is the status quo, people don’t really question at all the efficacy of the actual method and will usually just default to it. I always end up telling my players that spamming solo queue is not effective at all for learning or improving. So why do I believe this is so ineffective? I’ll go over a couple of examples to display the reasoning behind this claim.
The difference between a casual and competitive volleyball player is apparent in what they do during the time spent on volleyball. A casual player might just play games with friends, whereas a competitive player would spend the vast majority of their time practicing individually: working on fundamentals such as footwork and technique, or even training their physical strength, vertical jump, or serve accuracy. Playing games continuously, while fun, wouldn’t be what would lead to large and quick improvement. In fact, most people spend a lot of time on the nitty gritty fundamentals before approaching competitive games at all.
As another example, if you wanted to become better in mathematics, potentially to compete in math competitions or for academic purposes, you wouldn’t just take a test a hundred times without studying. It is true that you would eventually learn over time, and you’ll no doubt be better after hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of tests, but it is generally agreed that this would be time-consuming and non-optimal. The far better method would be through learning the fundamentals first, understanding the material and practicing. In harder problems, such as those with multiple steps, you might have to learn how to do one step at a time, practicing each step and mastering it before moving onto the next step.
It should become increasingly evident why spamming solo queue is not an efficient way to improve at all. In the long run, after hundreds or thousands of solo queue games, you may eventually improve at the game, but it is not only extremely inefficient but also has its major downsides such as repeating bad habits without knowing otherwise. I believe this to be the leading reason as to why skill/rank stagnation is so common in League. People who spam solo queue will tend to reiterate the same mistakes and bad habits over and over, with marginal differences in play game to game. If someone were to play at a Gold level, for example, how can one expect to suddenly become Diamond by playing the same way over and over?
When practicing to achieve the top level of sports or competitive activities, the road of improvement is very apparent. League should be treated similarly—at the beginning, learn the game fundamentally. Just as it is important to know the rules and basic strategies of, for example, chess or volleyball, it is similarly important to understand the way League functions as a game. Similar to a difficult and complicated math problem, you need to approach it one step at a time, practicing each fundamental aspect and mastering it before moving onto the next. This is where the basis of the idea of my improvement technique comes from—working from the bottom up, and isolating and refining each fundamental aspect of the game, whether it be CSing, movement, or game knowledge.
When learning chess, the first step is to learn how the pieces move and the basic rules of the game. Afterwards, you’ll want an understanding of the basic tactics and mating techniques which will help you gain an advantage or win the game. There isn’t a reason to start studying complicated openings or strategies without learning the very basics.
Similarly with League, it is important as a competitive player to understand the basics—from how much gold and exp you are receiving from minions to simply what your champion does. I commonly hear people learning new things about a champion that they’ve played for a long time that they could’ve known from simply reading the abilities or the champion wiki.
How various champions function, what different runes and items do, or how much gold and exp minions or camps give stay stagnant every game (naturally with some changes, although rare, during patches), and as such, knowing this information is all critical to being a top-level player. Simply studying this data that is easily accessible on the League wiki will permanently benefit your future games and your overall core understanding of the game.
Reading online and watching pro games or top-level games are some of the definitively best ways to individually improve at macro and general game understanding.
Improving micro is different from macro in the way you would ideally want to approach improving. Mechanical improvement can be akin to a shooting drill in basketball or a pitching practice in baseball. The critical idea when it comes to micro and mechanics is, similar to in any sport or competitive activity, isolating skills and practicing them through various exercises and drills. I’ll address various different examples of individual mechanics within the game and the ways in which one should approach improving upon these.
CSing is one of the core mechanics of the game. When CSing, the ability to CS even an uncontested wave is difficult in its own regard because champion auto attacks (as well as their abilities) vary in attack damage, attack speed, and even missile speed. (If all champions had the exact same damage output and attack speed, CSing would be substantially easier as there is no variance between champions). Missile speed is the speed in which a champion’s auto attack animation leads to damage connecting to the target which in turn will, like all the aforementioned traits in a champion’s auto attack, impact the timing of the attack to properly last hit CS.
When it comes to coaching players on CSing better, the most common exercise that I assign is playing Soraka. Soraka’s auto attacks are the slowest missile speed in the game being 1000 speed with the average in the game being roughly between 1500 to 2000 speed. The reason that practicing CS on Soraka is so effective is because of her slow missile speed and low base AD. CSing in itself already is difficult in its own right, but playing Soraka adds an unprecedented layer of difficulty. The philosophy that I have behind practicing, which is a mindset that exists in many sports, is that practice should be more difficult than competition. For one, CSing effectively on Soraka is extremely difficult. After mastering the ability to CS on Soraka, playing any other champion, whether it is an ADC, mage, or tank, will, in comparison, feel substantially easier. To go even further, an exercise that I find is very effective is CSing on Soraka in the Practice Tool with no items and no damage runes. This applies even more difficulty to CSing on Soraka, and by continuously practicing and mastering the ability to CS with extremely low AD and the aforementioned slow missile speed, you’ll be able to CS much more accurately on every other champion.
Junglers don’t often have to CS and thus, while the previous exercise may be helpful in some scenarios, it doesn’t have nearly as much practical use for junglers as it does for laners. That being said, junglers need to instead be able to clear efficiently. This means both balancing a healthy clear while being as fast as possible to gain tempo. Jungling is all about tempo and efficiency and, comparatively to CS, junglers have a lot of agency in their ability to clear their own jungle. I’ve seen players have hundreds of games on their main champion and yet have a nonoptimal clear of anywhere from 5 to 20 or more seconds. What I would assign instead to students is to watch pro players or optimal jungle-clearing VODs alongside playtesting the clear in the Practice Tool. Afterwards, continuously clear the jungle in the Practice Tool until you are able to clear consistently at a perfect or near perfect speed and efficiency.
By being able to clear at an optimal pace, you are giving yourself essentially a permanent advantage every single game you play in, not just the beginning of the game, but every single time you clear a camp. I’ve seen players play hundreds of games on one champion only to have their clear speed improve minimally or not at all. In the time span it takes to play just one or two games, you could practice optimizing your clear speed giving you an inherent advantage and a further understanding of the jungle and the way it functions.
Unlike the previous two mechanical skills I discussed, isolating the skills of dodging, skillshots and practicing aren’t as simple. There is no Practice Tool mode that allows you to practice dodging, and as for skill shots, the closest replica to an actual in-game simulation is shooting a stationary target dummy. For this skill, I like to use an extraneous resource called LolDodgeGame. LolDodgeGame is an online simulation which mimics the movement and dodging that occurs within League, and, while it is far from perfect, it is the closest thing that we have right now to isolating these skills.
The mode that I assign to all my students is the skill and dodge mode ranked difficulty where you are only permitted to use mouse movement and Q, the skillshot. (Flash and E dash are not permitted). After a while of practicing on LolDodgeGame, I often see improvement of score in the thousands along with feedback that their movement within League itself feels more accurate and fluid. I would like to mention, however, that LolDodgeGame is unfortunately only very effective if you play on a low ping in which the games feel similar, otherwise, it might even hinder your League gameplay. In the future, it would be very beneficial if they did add a setting where you could change the ping to simulate League a bit more.
There are countless exercises to be created and utilized that are not mentioned in this article. The aforementioned exercises are just a few of the countless methods of improvement that can be utilized in your climb to reaching a top level of play.
The aim of this article isn’t to say that solo queue is objectively bad, because it isn’t. It is just that the way that players utilize solo queue as a resource is very ineffective. Solo queue does have its benefits. Like a test, it has the ability to show results of learning and figure out what you need to improve upon. Solo queue is also an excellent way to put all the pieces together and put the skills that are being learned into practice—similar to playing in a volleyball game. There are many reasons that solo queue should be implemented into your practice, but it shouldn’t be the main, let alone sole form of practice.
Every other competitive activity or sport is an indicator that, at least at a competitive level, we should alter the way we approach improvement and learning in League of Legends. Spamming solo queue game after game is, simply put, not effective at all. Playing a lot of solo queue is, in essence, letting yourself improve—but isolating and refining skills is forcing yourself to improve. If you are truly dedicated to improving and achieving a top rank or playing at a competitive level, most of the time will be spent doing the boring and repetitive work that nobody wants to do. It is very akin to any sport as the practices and drills aren’t fun, but still are very necessary to playing competitively. Just because League is a video game doesn’t mean we should view it any differently.
