Best method for getting better?

[Torture]

Hey there internet peoples!

I'm incapable of not taking games seriously (I swear there must be a medical term for it!) and over the years I've played quite a few. I've never been totally cutting edge, but I've always fallen in that sort of 'top 10%' bracket that covers the people that are good, but not memorably good.

I remember when I was sitting in bronze in SC2 I started watching Day 9, I started practicing build orders, focussing on macro, slowly increasing my meaningful APM by constantly scouting etc. and over the next couple of months worked my way up to high plat and eventually diamond.

Now, LoL right now has me beat. I've done my stint in bronze (and deservedly so) and made the conscious decision to get better, but unlike SC2 it just doesn't feel like any work is helping. I began by focussing on CS and managed to reliably get to 75 by 10 mins and 160ish by 20mins. I made a solid list of 3 champs per lane and worked only with them for a while to ensure I was getting some experience and I both read and watched guides and tried to set myself objectives based on what I learned.

And after a few weeks, I'm still bronze 4 and most likely soon bronze 5.

So, is it just a case of keep playing and somewhere I'll turn a corner, or do I start a new account and do the whole 1-20 against bots just to polish my CS and laning phase? or?

How do you actually practice in a manner which yields results?

[Deleted]

LoL is a game where you just smash your head against normals and ranked to get better. Keep on spamming. I have over 5,000 hours on LoL, and many people have similiar. Just experience-wise you won't be able to beat those kind of people. Look at sites like solomid.net or mobafire ( not as good as solomid.net ) for builds and just keep practicing. 9 times out of 10 it's how you trade that will win the lane.

[Deleted]

LoL is a game where you just smash your head against normals and ranked to get better. Keep on spamming. I have over 5,000 hours on LoL, and many people have similiar. Just experience-wise you won't be able to beat those kind of people. Look at sites like solomid.net or mobafire ( not as good as solomid.net ) for builds and just keep practicing. 9 times out of 10 it's how you trade that will win the lane.

I know I'm already unhealthy sitting at around 1-1.5k hours with all my games together, how the fuck do you manage 5k hours on 1 game?

[Jordaen]

I know I'm already unhealthy sitting at around 1-1.5k hours with all my games together, how the fuck do you manage 5k hours on 1 game?

It's about 208 days played, and I have a hundred more than that played on WoW alone. Not to mention my sims, my brief time on LoL, d3, torchlight 2...

OT: I always play support. I want to ADC or top lane so badly but I just can't get CS while I'm melee, and when I'm ranged I get too aggressive. I've been told that it's just practice practice practice. It is frustrating, though, to spend so much time and only get fractionally better

[juzalol]

Mobas are games with huge amount of variables so getting more consistency to
your games helps a ton.

Playing same Role / Champ.
Playing with same people.

If you solo queue your only option is to just grind the games out I'm afraid. In the end
what makes a good player is the amount of situations you have been in and are familiar
with.

You said you played SC2. It's a lot more straight forward in SC2. You get 2 raxed, you
learn to deal with it. You get 6 gated, you learn to scout / deal with it etc.

But if you go mid in the first game, then support bot and then go back mid again but
against a different champ and then jungle you aren't really getting anywhere.

So yeah, consistency.

[vep]

It's not really consistency as much as it is knowing how to react to a situation. When do you poke? When do you push a lane? Is that ward in the bush good enough against a Zac jungler? Top lane is being aggressive and is pushing the tower, where do you gank from? Is there a stagnant situation where nothing happens? Do you split push?

There's just so much to know about the game. But it comes down to knowing your champion's limits and when to counter attack or when to fall back and farm.

But the utmost important thing to remember is: NEVER EVER let them freely push your lanes. I've lost too many games because my team wasn't pushing lanes and instead just pushed mid all the time.
Action and reaction, bro!

[Deleted]

Elo Hell doesn't exist, i played on my friend's bronze 4 account, i'm personally silver 1, and reached silver v in 2 days.

[Deleted]

the problem I find is that my lane opponent is either really good or really terrible, so it's hard to actually learn stuff. you either get beaten easily, or you are just owning them. neither of those really help you as you are either so frustrated at being beaten, or killing them so easily you make many mistakes that would normally kill you.

[Neponc]

Solo que is all about carrying your team, you have to assume everyone on your team is terrible, and build them up from there. I almost only play hypercarrys in solo que or rarely champions that stomp my lane. Knowing match ups for your lane is also a good idea too. Like picking ezreal in to caitlyn for example(This is bad!). You can also try leading your team, if you want to do it that way. Having some sense of direction is a good idea, knowing what do it and when is also a great bonus, keeping tabs on your lanes cool downs and if flash is up, can you out play him here? Where did I last see the jungler? oh shit two bottom lets rush barron. At low elo though its all about how hard you can carry, as you move up you should be getting placed with better teams who aren't so... well bad

[ddsad2212]

I cannot agree less about just spamming games. There are so many players with huge amounts of wins that are, lets not sugar coat it, terrible at this game. I have 700 normals wins or something and I hardly got better for the first 500 or so. When I started to think and analyze my play I started to improve very very quickly.

What you need to do is work on one thing at a time. Be it trading or Csing to start with and then move on to more complex ideas from there. I'd suggest keeping to a fairly low champion pool but not just focusing on one position as over all building up a basic knowledge of the game as a whole is important and it is possible to carry from all position (8 in a row in ranked solo as support solo winning the duo lane, so ya I find support as the easiest role to carry in).

One more thing to do apart from focusing on one part of your play at a time can be to look at your replays and see if you made any dumb mistakes that were just generally bad. Sometimes I'll go in or make a call and it will go horribly, then after watching the replay I can easily see what the problem was or what information I incorrectly assumed. This has lead to me getting much better at guessing where the enemy jungler is and when it is fairly safe to go in.

Over all Lol takes time to get good at, but just spamming games without thinking is never the way. A player joined a top korean team within 3 months because he knew how to play games and he knew what it took to get better .Yet some players will play 20,000 games and never be past bronze, it is all down to how you focus and how you practice. Practice does not make perfect, Perfect practice makes perfect.

[Zorohon]

As you get more experience with the game, you will begin to notice more and more mistakes that your opponents are making. You should then be asking yourself: "How can I take advantage of these clear faults in their play"? Exploiting the weakness and mistakes in your opponents, and recognizing your own can be a big part of improving as a player.

Overall, keep working on CS! Ideally we should all be striving for 10CS per minute, so for example 200 at 20. A more realistic goal to work towards may be 100 CS per 15 minutes .

Also keep a positive attitude, and look to improve yourself. Don't frustrate yourself because your teammates are ramming themselves into 1v5s, you are there to improve yourself so focus on that goal.

[bobsmith06]

Elo Hell doesn't exist, i played on my friend's bronze 4 account, i'm personally silver 1, and reached silver v in 2 days.

he never said anything about elo hell at all he was asking how to get better, your input sure is valued here.


cs is the most important thing for you to work on, That and finding a lane which suits your play style for me that is mid lane. Every game I tell the lobby i prefer to do mid lane but can do anything. From there i found a few champions that really i mesh with, as far as their play styles and how to work with them. Again for me, these champions are akali and ahri. They are my go to champs and i spent a good couple hours in custom games by myself learning to cs on them just by farming how easy it is to clear with what items etc
An example of this is once i get a NLR on ahri if i do 1 auto to each of the shield minions then q it clears the entire wave. its little things like that. i also play alot of games against my friends that know how to play each of those champions hard counters. so i can see their damage at each level and the ways i can exploit mistakes, for instance baiting a Q from lee or a Q from diana so i can engage more safely. you can also practice in bot games to get your distance on your skill shots down. how far they travel etc. Again it comes down to managing your lane and knowing when to farm and when to gank.
Another example it takes 50 seconds after i get level 6 on akali to get 3 charges of my ult it takes 20 secs to set up in bot lane so if i get my second charge head to bot lane i know that im ~2 levels higher then they are setting myself up perfectly for a double kill to snowball myself in lane. or when to push your wave then go to the jungle to get the wraiths for the extra gold/xp the more you practice it the more it becomes second nature..

[Deleted]

he never said anything about elo hell at all he was asking how to get better, your input sure is valued here.


cs is the most important thing for you to work on, That and finding a lane which suits your play style for me that is mid lane. Every game I tell the lobby i prefer to do mid lane but can do anything. From there i found a few champions that really i mesh with, as far as their play styles and how to work with them. Again for me, these champions are akali and ahri. They are my go to champs and i spent a good couple hours in custom games by myself learning to cs on them just by farming how easy it is to clear with what items etc
An example of this is once i get a NLR on ahri if i do 1 auto to each of the shield minions then q it clears the entire wave. its little things like that. i also play alot of games against my friends that know how to play each of those champions hard counters. so i can see their damage at each level and the ways i can exploit mistakes, for instance baiting a Q from lee or a Q from diana so i can engage more safely. you can also practice in bot games to get your distance on your skill shots down. how far they travel etc. Again it comes down to managing your lane and knowing when to farm and when to gank.
Another example it takes 50 seconds after i get level 6 on akali to get 3 charges of my ult it takes 20 secs to set up in bot lane so if i get my second charge head to bot lane i know that im ~2 levels higher then they are setting myself up perfectly for a double kill to snowball myself in lane. or when to push your wave then go to the jungle to get the wraiths for the extra gold/xp the more you practice it the more it becomes second nature..

Well, if he said he's bronze 4 and wants to improve, i only assumed silver v would be a vera realistic goal for him to strive for. Anyway, as I said, I carried through bronze hard, i played jungle 90% of time and mostly with master yi, this was done for several reasons.
Firstly, jungle gives you most control over map, this is very important for getting dragon/baron, and stealing enemy buffs in bronze is sooo easy. Secondly, master yi is very powerful right now, and he's a very strong split pusher. And thirdly, when he gets enough fed, he can and will carry games. Rest of jungle games, I played lee sin and malphite once when he wasn't banned and enemy team took yi so I counter him hard.
And when I didn't jungle, i played couple of games with anivia who is my main so I carried those aswell, despite anivia not being ideal choice for carrying games. If you have any further questions, ask away.

[Torture]

Well, if he said he's bronze 4 and wants to improve, i only assumed silver v would be a vera realistic goal for him to strive for. Anyway, as I said, I carried through bronze hard, i played jungle 90% of time and mostly with master yi, this was done for several reasons.
Firstly, jungle gives you most control over map, this is very important for getting dragon/baron, and stealing enemy buffs in bronze is sooo easy. Secondly, master yi is very powerful right now, and he's a very strong split pusher. And thirdly, when he gets enough fed, he can and will carry games. Rest of jungle games, I played lee sin and malphite once when he wasn't banned and enemy team took yi so I counter him hard.
And when I didn't jungle, i played couple of games with anivia who is my main so I carried those aswell, despite anivia not being ideal choice for carrying games. If you have any further questions, ask away.

My objective isn't promotion, my objective is to get better at the game.

To give an analogy, in SC2 anyone can learn to 6 pool and just repeat it over and over and over. They'll likely get promoted to silver, if not gold just by rinsing and repeating, but it won't make them any better at the game.

If I used your strategy I'd get to Silver only being able to play Master Yi jungle, which wouldn't really represent 'getting better at LoL'. I'd much rather spend more time in bronze and get promoted once my overall game improved than trying some little gimmick just to reach silver.

There has been some really good advice overall in the responses here though, thanks for that guys, appreciated.

[Riboe]

I can't really say something that hasn't been said, except for this:

Start following Cloth5.com. Not only do they post a lot of interesting articles, but some of them are about how to get better.

Two recent blog posts from Cloth5: League of Legends, Dota 2, and You: Why Being a Multi-Gamer Makes You Better and 10 reasons you should be playing Osu!

That last link brings me to my other point. Osu! is a free game and it's great if you have a bit of time to waste. As far as I know, many of the professional LoL players plays Osu! to improve their mechanical skill level.

[Rampant Rabbit]

Learn from your mistakes, and don't rage.

[Deleted]

My objective isn't promotion, my objective is to get better at the game.

To give an analogy, in SC2 anyone can learn to 6 pool and just repeat it over and over and over. They'll likely get promoted to silver, if not gold just by rinsing and repeating, but it won't make them any better at the game.

If I used your strategy I'd get to Silver only being able to play Master Yi jungle, which wouldn't really represent 'getting better at LoL'. I'd much rather spend more time in bronze and get promoted once my overall game improved than trying some little gimmick just to reach silver.

There has been some really good advice overall in the responses here though, thanks for that guys, appreciated.

No offence, but you're probably shit if you're playing in bronze 4, and saying you don't care about promotion is saying you don't care about winning, and hence that you'd rather have 20-1 score and lose than 6-6-12 and help the team win and that comes across as selfish.

Also, if you think you'll learn anything from playing vs low bronze players, you're deeply mistaken. You'd probably get eaten alive in silver, let alone somewhere higher.

[lakisa]

SC2 is 1V1 so your skill cap matters, LoL is 5v5 you need more luck in matchmaking than skill just give up and play normals less raging.

[bobsmith06]

ok the last two posts were completely uncalled for, he is here asking for help and you insult him outright, and tell him to play normals. seriously you are gloating about silver which is still the bottom of the barrel help the guy dont bash him.

[Deleted]

ok the last two posts were completely uncalled for, he is here asking for help and you insult him outright, and tell him to play normals. seriously you are gloating about silver which is still the bottom of the barrel help the guy dont bash him.

I offer him several strong advices and he calls them gimmicks...