How to Get S Ranks in League of Legends
What does it take to be the best player you can be and how can the Mastery Ranking help you improve?
Does your rank accurately reflect your skills as a League of Legends player? Can you honestly determine how good you are at a Champion? Riot’s implementation of the Champion Mastery System is not just to brag about your Mastery Points on your favorite Champions or see how many hours you have spent playing Teemo (hopefully 0). Riot created this system to incentivize trying your best by rewarding players they deem to perform exceptionally well in any game! The reward is a Hextech Chest for the chance at free skins!
So, with such a rewarding system, many players want to get the best rank they can in every game. Thankfully, Riot has gone a step further and laid the groundwork to help value your performance to reflect your improvement on the ranked ladder more accurately!
Despite the Champion Mastery System being around for years now, players still don’t understand what they need to do to get that S rank to unlock Mastery 6 and 7; get a chance at free skins, and even improve your matchmaking rating!
What is an S Rank?
Like most grading scales, or at least tier lists in games, the grading from worst to best is D, C, B, A, and S. Each letter has three degrees of minus, neutral, and plus, depending on how much you deserved the ranking. Therefore, the worst rank is a D-, and the best rank is an S+.
Determining your rank depends on many factors that we will get into later, but it’s essential to know that it’s not as simple as having the most kills or a lot of CS. The rank caters to all positions individually to have the same chances of getting the ranks to not favor some playstyles over others. Nevertheless, it’s easy to see how playing a carry Champion can put more control in your hands to get you to the point of dominating the game in a way that will get you that desired rank of S+ and a shot at a free skin!
Why Aim For the S Rank?
Of course, there is enough reason to aim for an S+ to get a chance at a free skin because free stuff is always excellent! Another fair reason for seeking the S rank is to show off your new Mastery in games and with your friends. But, none of these are why Riot developed and released this system in the first place! The goal was to incentivize players to always try their hardest!
The idea is that if players want free skins or a high mastery, they will need to play well! On top of this, the Champion Mastery System quantifies what is deemed to be qualitative and can help create a better picture of how skilled you are! By quantifying it like this, players are more incentivized to think about each of the components that impact that game’s rank and, in turn, think more about the game and how to get into a better position than they are! Whether it’s noticing your CS is low or that you are dying too much, knowing how much of a toll these can be is a great way to promote a better mentality towards the game.
Of course, this will develop a future-focused perspective to help create a more appropriate team environment for everyone to enjoy as well! Often, the most toxic and tilting scenarios a player can encounter occur because a teammate is flaming them for their mistake. When considering the stats needed for the mastery ranks, players understand that the damage is already done and instead think about what they can say to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Dwelling on the past will not help the future outcomes in the game, and incentivizing players to think in this manner through the Champion Mastery System is a fantastic win-win scenario!
What Impacts your Champion Mastery Score?
KDA
First and foremost, your KDA. The KDA is not the stat that is a make-or-break for your Champion Mastery Ranking, but it’s one of the easiest to see when things are going well or not entirely on track. It’s critical to realize that it depends on your role on the team. Supports should not, and therefore are not, expected to get as many kills as the bot laner. However, they should get a lot more assists! For example, Vayne will have a better ranking at the end of the match than Leona if both have a KDA of 8/3/5, assuming everything else is insignificant. However, Vayne with the same KDA, but Leona had a KDA of 3/3/12 might be a different story.
Creep Score
In the same light, the role matters a lot for a stat like CSing. A general rule of thumb is that Supports expect to get around 1 CS/min, whereas the Marksman expects to get closer to 7 CS/min! In the same vein, the Marksman might have a Mastery Score hindered by having a CS/min lower than that threshold, and the Support could have theirs interfered if it’s significantly higher than their threshold!
Personal stats
Another big part of the Mastery Score is the essential stat percentages of your team’s damage dealt, taken, kill participation, etc. A high-impact role like the Jungler expects to have high kill participation! Alternatively, a split push top laner will not wish for more than a handful of kills and assists in a given game. It does, in fact, even get influenced by the specific Champion played, as you might be thinking! For example, Soraka will have an easy time getting assists because of her global heal on her ultimate ability! Jarvan IV should have a high kill participation score. After all, he has excellent ganks, and using his Demacian Standard near an ally will result in an assist because it provides them with an attack speed buff!
Your Champion Popularity
It’s also important to know if the Champion played is insanely overpowered at the moment. If they are, on average, doing better than others, the S rank will be more challenging to reach than others! On the flip side, if the player is playing something with an abysmal win rate like mid-lane Ezreal, it will be easier to get a high-ranking score for doing the same work!
Your team participation
The next part of the Champion Mastery Ranking that people underestimate the value of is their participation in the team effort! Essentially, if you are taking part in getting Dragons, that is great! If you are not, that isn’t good! Of course, it’s even more intricate than that because a top laner on the opposite side of the map probably shouldn’t help with the early Dragons in the same way the Jungler does!
Wards
Despite it being crucial for Support, warding, and specifically destroying wards has a massive weight on the Mastery Score! It is effortless to spam wards on cooldown with the trinkets, so it’s not as valuable to place wards. On the other hand, removing enemy wards off the map is incredibly valuable for denying vision and, therefore, heavily incentivized in the Mastery Score System!
Game Length
The factor that plays a more significant role than people realize is the game’s length! All previous stats noted are significantly impacted by game length for obvious reasons! For example, while a top lane Nasus might not have high kill participation or Dragon killing participation, he will be expected to have destroyed several turrets! If the game is longer, it will be easier to have an accurate picture of how well Nasus did when you compare to other Nasus players. However, the shorter the game, the more variability there is in determining how well you played statistically. Therefore, you’re not likely to get such a premium rank as an S+! The longer the game progresses, the less your base stats like KDA will matter, and the more your Champion’s specific win condition and expected progression throughout the game will matter!
Champion Mastery Affects Your MMR
Finally, the most important reason and factor to consider about the Champion Mastery Score are how it catalyzes your MMR. Essentially, despite losing, your MMR will go up if you manage to get a high ranking, even if you are losing LP! So, even if you believe the game is lost, it’s still worth trying your best because you can still be rewarded for your efforts, even though it may not be as easy to see! Implementing this into the Champion Mastery Scoring features helps Riot incentivize committing to the game regardless of how it is progressing because there is a benefit to trying hard even when you lose!
Conclusion
There are many factors involved in this calculation. Too many to truly make any guarantees of what strategy will get you the best results. The best advice is to simply consider what your role and Champion should do at every point of the game and to do that exceptionally well!
Of course, it’s easier said than done. As long as you follow the general trajectory of what is expected of your position and do your best to stay ahead of that trendline, you’re well on your way to hauling in those S ranks, cashing in on some free loot, and hopefully, launching your MMR into the stratosphere!
