Introduction

These tips might seem fairly simple on the surface but looking into them in a little more detail will hopefully outline their importance in game. There are a few important notes that I want to make first. There might be a lot of information here that either seems very obvious or something you may have heard before. The reason you might have heard this some of these tips before is because it’s just good/correct advice. My last little bit of advice before you carry on reading is to make sure you are open minded, this is extremely important when being presented with new information as it will help you understand a different way of thinking about the game.

“Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality” – Bruce Lee

Complex Champions

Now by the title I bet you are already thinking, my champion pool is just fine I can play all these champs. This however is (most likely) not the case, if you look at your champions that you have played in ranked over the season and you can see anything like the following: Vayne, Lee Sin, Yasou, Zed, Azir, Kalista, Riven and you are below high Diamond/Master, then you most likely should not even be attempting to play them in a ranked environment. Below is a clip of Rush (ex C9 Jungler, Challenger in Korea).

To summarise, in order to become better at the game, in terms of mechanics and overall knowledge, you should be playing simpler champions. I am sure you have heard this before, but why must you play less skill intensive champions to gain a better understanding of the game? This is because when playing a champion that is very skill intensive, Lee Sin for example, you are more than likely trying to focus on actually playing the champion to a competent level rather than focusing on the game itself.

An example of which would be trying to get the kick Flash combo off as Lee Sin, this combo is very hard at the best of times, yet a champion like Zac would be able to make the same sort of play while requiring significantly less mechanics. A good example of a laning champion that should not be played if you are looking to improve is Vayne. Vayne is a champion that requires perfect mechanics to perform well and will get beaten in lane by all other ADC’s, and as put by a very popular ADC streamer “Vayne is f***ing trash.”

To conclude, if you want to improve your gameplay and game knowledge, pick champions that have as equal impact in game than the high skill champ that are also easier to play. This is in order for you to concentrate on the smaller things such as CS’ing, map awareness and team fight positioning. A good example would be everyone’s favourite love to hate mid laner Annie. She's easy to play and extremely effective with a game changing ultimate that is simple to land.

Champion pools in ranked

On the subject on what champions you should and should not play, you should also consider how many champions are in you champion pool when going into a game of ranked. This can be a struggle for some players but having around 2-3 champions in each (primary and secondary) role will help you improve a great deal. The reason this will help you improve is pretty simple, the more you play of a certain champion the more proficient you will become, sticking to 2-3 will allow you to have some flexibility all while becoming proficient on those champions.

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” – Bruce Lee.

An example of a Silver players champion pool for Mid lane and Top lane could be as follows:

Mid:

Annie
Lissandra

Top:

Darius
Malphite
Trundle

Kills don't always win games

This again looks pretty simple on the surface. However, I am sure we have been in those games where there are 10+ kills on each side before the first tower of the game finally falls. Now that does not initially sound like a bad thing, but when you look into it a little further it is really just showing that the players in that game can’t capitalise on the lead of picking up a kill and translate it into objectives. Objectives win games, Towers, Dragons, Baron’s, Inhibitors and the Nexus (funnily enough) enable you to win games. Using kills to take objectives which grants pressure and global gold for your team is way more important than running after the duo bot lane through their own jungle towards their base.

If, for example, you are able to secure the mid tower after killing the enemy mid laner, you will be allowing your team to do so much more, rather than if you just kept killing the mid laner over and over. You would be allowing your own Jungler better ganking paths towards the top and bot lane, your support could ward much deeper, you would have easier control over the Baron and Dragon as the enemy team doesn’t have a tower to fall back to if you want to invade and many more things that maybe not be initially apparent.

In short, taking objectives really does help you win games easier and quicker than kills do. Kills only enable objectives which lead to wins. Towers grant global gold for your team and Dragons grant a global buff for your team.

Recognising your own mistakes

What I am about to say might sound a little odd, 90% of deaths are your fault in one way or another. This could be down to you miss positioning, over extending and many more reasons. There is no use displacing the blame on others when in reality it was more than likely you reading the situation wrong or just being silly. Recognising why you died is very important and allows you to not make the same mistake again, and act accordingly next time you are in the same scenario.

If you look at many big streamers in Twitch you will find a lot of them talking about what they could have done better when they had died, which is one of the reasons why they are such good players. Most will be able to understand why they made the mistake and not displace the blame on others for their own mistakes.

Conclusion

Following these small and simple tips will really help you climb the ladder, but another small and even more important thing that a lot of people seem to forget sometimes, is to have fun. In the end it is just a video game and if you are not having fun you are defeating the objective of playing. Do whatever it takes to make the game more fun for yourself as these tips I have given you are only suggestions; you can also mute everyone in game if that helps you.

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