The ranked ladder in League of Legends is a competitive, intense experience. It is an environment built to test the skills, intelligence, and mental fortitude of those who queue up. How does one separate themselves from the pack and climb the ladder? These tips will help you to lay the foundation and begin your path forward with a combination of in-game mechanics and out of game mindsets.

1. Control Wards

Control Wards are one of the most powerful items in the game. Just one item can create distinct zones of control for your team. Control Wards can help you secure kills, survive ganks, and secure objectives.

Make sure that you stock up on control wards whenever possible. Stocking up is not the only important factor, you must be able to effectively and dynamically use these control wards. Too often will players set down a mediocre Control Ward and leave it down for the rest of the game. With a few habits, you can beat this practice and keep down effective vision that is relevant to the current game state at all times.

The most important habit is to always keep a Control Ward in your inventory so you can control vision whenever it is needed, not just off of resets. The next habit is to always ward key locations, Control Wards should be in locations where you can move through key pathways undetected as well as control where your opponents will want to make decisions. This means you want to cover important intersections with control wards. The final habit is to be able to constantly move your wards to match the game state. Your Control Wards should match the ebb and flow of a team’s control over the game. When you are able to push leads as a team, you should have control over vision that reflects that and protects your push. When you are being pushed into, you should give yourself control over vision that can allow you to catch overextensions and flank the opposing team while they push.

2. Win Conditions

It is important to understand what your team should do in order to optimally win the game. Different team compositions have different avenues to best win the game. Look into what your team does best and what the enemy team’s weaknesses are. A team composition that has strong engage with high DPS carries should look to teamfight after directing gold into their carries during the mid-game. A team composition with a strong dueling carry and four champions that can kite back well, such as Ezreal, Gragas, and Janna, should look to create a strong split push win condition where their dueling carry is funneled gold and play a steady pressure heavy mid-game. Compositions that have assassins or artillery should look to pick and poke opponents with no loss to own team to create opportunities for objectives and more kills. Sometimes a composition’s win conditions can change depending on how the early game goes. If a team’s win condition is based around a split pushing top laner but the bot laner gets fed and the top laner gets shut down, then you will most likely have to change the plan from that point forward.

Ensure that you recognize these win conditions as early as possible and play accordingly. Funnel any resource you can towards your win condition and don’t make impulsive plays that hurt your ability to play for the win condition. Don’t make plays outside of your team composition’s window of opportunity and don’t make plays without the lead carries of your team in position.

3. Understand Your Role

Just as it is important to understand your team’s best avenue to win the game, it is also important to understand what you can do to best allow your team composition to win. As a featured carry of a team composition, you should focus on optimizing your economy and keeping yourself accessible to your team during key objective and teamfight timings. It will take smart rotation timings and cautious pushing to manage this. As a playmaker for your team, it is important to ensure that your featured carry is able to efficiently put out DPS during fights and objective plays. As a tank playmaker, such as Zac, your job is to soak damage and create cracks in the enemy’s position.

As a carry playmaker hybrid, such as Irelia, your job is to find key targets in the enemy’s composition and strike, then when they are vulnerable to create openings for your team. Utility characters can work to peel and keep their allies alive, with priority on their featured carry. Don’t attempt to play outside of your role. Work hard to help every player fulfill their role. These roles are only optimized once you can work with your team to make them all shine.

4. Understand Your Skillset

If you are focusing on climbing, then it is important to play what you’re best at. Practicing new roles and playstyles is good but will hurt your ability to climb and shouldn’t be done immediately in ranked. Instead, focus on putting yourself in positions that you have been in often. If you are used to playing a scaling carry and hitting a mid-game power spike that allows you to carry teamfight after teamfight then focus on that. If you are used to playing an early game roaming style that can take over the map, focus on that. Do not spread yourself too thin by trying out a new style without sufficient practice and understanding.

5. Play for Improvement

A concept that is hard for many solo queue players to accept is that ranked should not be played for the sole purpose of LP. If you are working seriously to climb in League of Legends, then you shouldn’t want free LP. LP is an indicator of growth not an agent for it. Improvement is the goal of climbing in League of Legends. In order to climb, one should improve to reach the level of play that they are wanting to be ranked at. Review games with your own play and mistakes in mind. Go into games focused on your own gameplay and no one else’s. These practices will help you to stay driven in your games and clean up mistakes which will enable you to climb as a result.

6. Limit Your Champion Pool for Comfort

Champions have a lot of intricacies and mechanics that are unique. It takes research and understanding of the game in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of champions. After that, it can take a multitude of games of practice to be able to execute upon these and understand limits. You are going to be at your best when you’re comfortable. When you don’t have to think about how to use certain abilities you will be able to execute quickly and efficiently. Sometimes, it is worth it to pick something that has a worse time with or against certain situations. 100 games on a sub-optimal pick will almost certainly be better than a couple on the new flavor of the month meta champion if your goal is to improve fundamentally at the game and climb.

7. Practice Minor Mechanics

It is important to be able to react to any situation quickly and efficiently with the correct play. Generally, this does go well with keeping a small champion pool. It is important to understand how all of your champions abilities work together and ensure that you can correctly time combos so you can optimize damage and other mechanics your champion may have. Don’t be scared to jump into a practice tool to practice these mechanics. Combos and mechanics with specific timings should be second nature to you if you are bringing a champion into ranked. For example, Ekko’s trading is at its most efficient if you can animation cancel his Timewinder (Q) with his Phase Dive (E) but you need to make sure you can always do the combo quickly. There are tons of mechanics like this in the game and if your champion has these, then you should be able to understand them and execute them quickly.

8. Self Responsibility

One of the biggest traps you can fall into when attempting to climb in ranked is blaming others for your loss. With the pressure of LP on the line, it can be hard to admit your mistakes. However, you must be able to admit and review your mistakes in order to stay level-headed from game to game. Blaming others takes focus away from your own play, and as a result, will lower gameplay quality.

Blaming others also has the side effect of in-game toxicity quite often. Typing while you play takes your focus and the focus of your teammates off the game. Even when a teammate occasionally makes a mistake it is important to understand that your climb is what is important. Instead of calling out the big mistakes your teammates make keep calling out the little mistakes you make and take responsibility for every game.

9. Don't Play with Mental Fatigue

If you play with a focus on improving and climbing, you should be putting effort in. League of Legends should take a lot of focus over an extended period of time and this is something that can cause mental strain. Rome wasn’t built in a day and you won’t always make it to your next milestone in one day of playing. Keep this in mind and cut the grind short once you can notice mental fatigue. Take the extra time you have to practice mechanics or play games for fun with friends, but for your sake and the sake of your LP stay away from solo/duo once the fatigue hits. Climbing is all about being at the top of your game and consistently being faster, smarter, and more efficient than your opponents.

10. Take Care of Your Physical Health

While League of Legends is a video game it is important to keep yourself in good physical shape. Improving is a difficult thing to put your body through so it needs all of the tools you can give it to function well. A healthy diet, lots of water, and a consistent sleeping schedule will work wonders at keeping your brain fully active and working at its best.