Ranked Guide Part 2

Climbing the Ranks in League of Legends - PT2

However, before getting too it, we are first going to focus on the mindset. Many players in Bronze are quick to call out KS when somebody finishes of a kill. League is a team-based game so getting a kill is more important than who gets it. Over the course of a game, you might want to donate kills to your carries, but that is not the focus right now. Before reading on, I suggest that you completely remove this word from your vocabulary; there is no such thing as a KS.

Following will be a list of tips I highly recommend working on, in order to improve. Bare in mind however that to improve you need to do your absolute best, but to win you just need to do better than your opponent does.

• Sticking to one champion This is always the first thing I recommend players in lower leagues, even though it is in direct opposition with something earlier stated. The reason for this is focusing on one champion and learning their abilities, cooldowns and limits by heart, will free up your mind to focus on many other essential skills that need to be learnt as well. This is a huge advantage to swapping champions every single game, and thus having to learn  16 cooldowns, abilities and limits over and over again while also trying to focus on last-hitting and winning lane. If you can master one champion relatively quickly you are well on your way to work against that diamond tier!
Let’s say you have played Ezreal for 10 games in a row, you will automatically start to remember his cooldown on Mystic Shot, which means that you will free your focus from looking at cooldowns every so often and instead can focus on last-hitting and harassing better. Some good tips on how to pick the right champion, is to pick something relatively easy to play. Click on a champion icon in your profile, and you will see the bar labeled “Difficulty”; the lower the better. Second is to pick something that is not often banned and/or played by other players. Picking a champion that does not have skillshots will also make your life easier. Annie is a great example of an easy-to-play champion with no skillshots that is rarely, if ever, banned or picked. I also highly recommend that you start out trying this champion in a custom game, to get a feeling for auto attacks, ability ranges alongside with cooldowns and damage output. Custom games are also a great playground to focus on last-hitting.
Bare in mind that this does not mean sticking to one champion, and only playing that one champion forever and ever. But make sure you have at least 10-20 games with a champion and you know the limits of said champion before branching out to play more champions.

Advancing through the tiers - League of Legends Ranked Guide

In the following chapter we will (finally) go in depth on how to improve through the different ranked tiers! The chapter has been divided into five subsections each of which describes how to raise from a certain bracket to the next, and what you as a player need to focus on to make that improvement. The sections will be constructed as stacking skills. That means that skills required to pass from platinum into diamond will be elaborations of skills already described in the lower tiers. New focus points and skills will also be introduced but they will all be connected in some way. It is possible to read a later chapter if you already have a high understanding of the game, as it is assumed, you will already know the simpler things taught in previous tiers.

Additionally in the book I will not be talking about mechanics much as that is something which is easier learnt from experience. Knowledge on the other hand can be taught so that’s the main focus of this guide. Improving the league you are playing in and thus playing against better opponents will also increase the rate at which you improve your mechanics. Better opponents equal better learning. That being said I will include some advanced tips and tricks that should be translated into mechanics in a later section of the book.

Bronze to Silver

Find yourself frustrated? Are you stuck in bronze with poor teammates, and seemingly no pattern in your match history, which can help you figure out what you do right and what went wrong? Does winning and losing seem to be occurring randomly, and are you not in control of the outcome of every game? Maybe you’re even trying to improve, but simply spending your time poorly by focusing on improving certain aspects, which are only netting small results. No matter the case, this chapter is for you as a Bronze player, who wants to make the climb into the next ranked tier!