Struggling on where to begin in your improvement? Wanting to find a new thing to focus on to raise you up from Bronze ELO? Tune in to this guide and find out what you might be lacking.
During their seasonal climbs, League of Legends players often end up hitting a wall. They struggle to find what it is they can do to improve, or feel like they’re playing well, but the results aren’t showing. Often, it’s easy to blame your teammates or even Riot for your lack of Ranked success, but more often than not, the problem starts with you, the player, before anyone else. You are the most persistent and consistent factor in your games, so in an effort to cover all your bases, it’s important to adopt a learning and improvement-focused mindset to help you overcome any block in your ranked progress.
With a lens on the Bronze ELO bracket today, we’re going to help unpack what players within the Bronze Tier need to focus on to really advance their games and make it to Silver before the ranked season ends. We’ll be going role-by-role, covering one major point of improvement and explaining why it’s so important to put this lesson at the forefront of your mind.
Now, some of you may have looked up other lessons that drive home that you must understand Wave Manipulation to succeed as a Top Laner. We don’t entirely disagree with that sentiment, but within Bronze ELO games can be more easily controlled and dominated through straight-up winning in a one versus one scenario and snowballing the game from there. So, with that said, we think Bronze players should focus on proper trading in Top Lane and utilizing those winning scenarios to take advantage of their opponents.
What are some great windows to trade around in Top? Well, it largely depends on your matchup. Top Lane is notorious for being a counter-pick focused lane. So, in Draft, if you can secure a lower seed in the Draft to hopefully counter your opponent, the better off you are.
But, typically speaking, great windows look like the following:
The above situations are very broad but are good lane-based moments to look for. If your minion wave is larger than the enemy’s and you're slowly pushing into them, fighting them is a great window as your large wave will add on to your damage, especially if the enemy tries to stay in the trade for an extended period, which is a typical bad habit in lower ELOs.
Lower ELO players also, typically, don’t think about their resources. They either push waves constantly, draining their energy or mana, or they eat poke without thinking about any follow up consequences such as an impending all-in. When your opponent is just eating free damage, wasting their abilities on the wave, and overall just not ready for your all-in, watch for when big abilities are down or resources or when resources are low to pull the trigger.
Tangentially to the above, movement spells such as Flash and Ghost can decide who wins a trade in Top as it allows you to stick to your opponent for an extended period. Most Top Laners favor longer trades. If these spells are gone, or an enemy is missing their key movement/escape tool, then it’s a great window to get aggressive on them and start running them down.
Look for these windows, and your particular Champion’s power spikes to make big trades. Study up on your Champion and decipher if they’re an item or level-based Champion. Play towards reaching that point before you interact with your enemy. Think about what tools your enemy might have to turn the trade against you should you both be at equal resources. As you work through these, you’ll eventually come to recognize the exact moment you can take over a lane.
Jungle in lower ELOs can truly take over the game if you start establishing an understanding of the role at a higher level. Junglers within lower ELOs typically tend to have issues in multiple areas since the role is so complex, but perhaps the simplest thing we can recommend is to think about balancing your ganks and objective control.
You don’t want to spend all game just full clearing and chasing down your own personal items. You want to be putting pressure on the map, forcing mistakes from your laners through your sudden pressure, and even securing deeper leads for yourself or your team through ganking. But, on the opposite side, you don’t want to over emphasize ganking to the point that you ignore your camps. Some Champions might be ‘gank focused’ but that doesn’t mean that they only unlock themselves through ganking. You still need to temper your ganks with farming to stay at or ahead of your opponent to be useful at later stages.
So, as you decide on your Champion during the draft, consider what your team has available and what your team needs. If you’re seeing little to no information, selecting a Jungler that farms effectively might be a great idea as you always know you can rotate through your camps quickly to be in positions to gank early if opportunities present themselves. Champions like Shyvana or Udyr come to mind in this regard.
Or, a Champion like Jarvan might be more your speed as he can not only farm respectably, but he’s great at setting up his own ganks due to his flag-&-drag and his ultimate, all of which are great at locking down opponents in vulnerable spots. Additionally, he’s not too shabby of a teamfighter and frontliner as the game evolves too.
But, as an added tip, always keep your eyes on the minimap and take advantage of your function keys to check the status of each lane. Your camps don’t typically require complex kiting mechanics if you’re playing a natural Jungle Champion, so in spots where you’re just auto-attacking a camp, use those keys to glean on who has priority or who might be vulnerable based on the states of the wave at any given moment.
As you climb the ladder, Mid Laners and Junglers become deeply intertwined towards a team’s success. And this can be no different in a lower ELO bracket like Bronze. In Bronze ELO, a lot of Junglers simply follow the same pattern of camps depending on their side. Working their way from the Bot side of the map to the top side, ultimately ganking Top or looking to fight their opposing Jungler at the Scuttle Crab.
With this in mind, as a Mid Laner, you can always react to this pathing by being aggressive on the wave at around the 3-minute mark. This mark is typically when the opposing Jungler is looking to make a play Top or transition to the Scuttle Crab. Your aggressive play and push of the wave at this moment will allow you to shadow your Jungler and meet the enemy Jungle in river, oftentimes securing you a kill or netting yourself and your Jungler advantage in the next skirmish situation due to a forced Flash or Ghost.
Even on Champions that typically don’t play waves aggressively early, Champions like Viktor, ASol, or Veigar, if you can pressure your wave faster than your opponent, you can always step just out to support the Jungler on their side. Worst case scenario, the vision of you drops entirely and the enemy Jungler susses you out, and back offs. While you might not get the mentioned kill or assist, you’re still enabling your Jungler to have a smoother game. And when you work with them, they’ll often work with you on your next big call.
Again, like Top, the easy answer is to say ‘Farm for your power spikes’ but again, lower ELO players often put an over emphasis on fighting or expose themselves to free damage. CSing is one of the biggest traps for lower ELO players who don’t really understand their windows to CS safely in, and who will often pick bad range matchups for the sake of Champion familiarity.
So, the tip here is pretty simple. Dart your eyes between the enemy Bot Laner, and your allied Minions. If your Minions are getting low, you can easily suspect that the enemy Bot is going to step forward for that last hit. As they do, you can step up yourself and auto them as they auto your wave. Doing this over and over will constantly net you a health advantage. In time, you’ll have your opponent whittled to the point that they can’t interact with you, and you’ll be able to farm safely as any movement against you means they risk death or all-in from your Support.
Like we mentioned with Top Lane trading, playing around cooldowns is a huge aspect that lower ELO players often don’t think about. At Support, this is perhaps where the issue is most glaring. Be they stray hooks fishing for poor all-ins, random Janna tornados, or stray Lux and Morgana bindings, lower ELO Supports are notorious for ‘fishing’.
Fishing for damage isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re thinking in the mindset of our above tip and punishing last hits for guaranteed damage. Fishing with key abilities from max range though is just asking to be exposed. So, as a Support, when you load up on the Rift, think about the key CC ability that the enemy Support has at their disposal.
It may be the hook of a Thresh, Blitzcrank, or Pyke. It may be the binding of a Lux or Morg. It may be the kickball of a Milio, or the tornado of a Janna. Whatever it may be, quickly scan the cooldown using a third-party site to give yourself a timer to play around. As that timer ticks, you’re allowed to play forward and give your Bot Laner more room to work with and farm safely. Or, if you’re lucky, they don’t respect your forward play and open themselves to a poor trade where they’ll be lacking their primary crowd-control resource. Either way, stay active! Play around cooldowns and don’t be afraid to ping all-in if you think you’ve got the window to take a health advantage gaining trade in lane.
So, there you have it! A tip for each lane for all our players in Bronze ELO. We hope they serve you well, and we hope that you reach your goals by the end of the season! Stay tuned here at our website for more guides, discussions, and tips and tricks from our writing staff and our Pro-Players!
