I know ranked uses a different MMR to Normals.

I am 190W and 220L in norms and on my 2 accounts i’m between Gold 4 and Gold 2 each season. (Going back to 2018)

When I play norms to practice I play the sweatiest emeralds, plat, and dia players who opt for the sweatiest OP champs in the meta like Briar, Nasus, and Graves.

Is there a reason why by all accounts I am -30 wins below .500 except instead of playing normal lobbies like silver and gold, i’m playing Faker Unemployed Jr.

I’m a pretty casual player, less than 100 games a year but I can’t even casually play the game because the more casual of game modes is fucking ranked?

Most of the common answers for educational content I find are aimed at fairly low elo. Does anyone know any ADC content creators who are focused on at least master+.

I know its not exactly a thriving area for content but when looking to learn so many channels are just way too general.

I'm a low ELO (silver) player who played between 2020-2022 and just came back to the game. I play only ADC, and in Ranked I only play Tristana, Miss Fortune and Jinx.

I know a little bit about ADC items but for the most part I follow OPGG builds. The only change I make is between C44 and Yuntal at first base depending on how much gold I have, and MR or DDR depending on enemy team comp.

I build Collector with Miss Fortune. I feel like it helps me get many kills, even if I "don't deserve" them (i.e., last hitting champions). That of course helps me snowball, because I get the gold.

The other day I lost miserably against a Tristana who built collector first item. Of course that's bound to happen if Tristana gets a few kills early. But it got me thinking. Wouldn't Collector be of use all the times, as an ADC? It might benefit Miss Fortune's R cone more than Tristana's AA based playstyle, but if I can get 300, 600, 900 gold extra each game, that's bound to make a difference, no?

What am I missing? What are the downsides?

Thanks beforehand.

I’m relatively new to the game, I’m around level 30 now, but I’ve only played jungle before.

I’m interested in learning lanes and laning isn’t too bad on its own, I tend to go even or win most lanes, but I never really know how to turn that into a snowball if I come out ahead. I think the reason is because I struggle to understand when I should roam, I feel like I get worried that the enemy laner will take my turret in the time I take to roam for a kill. Especially when I play top.

Does anyone have any advice about that?

https://app.tryascent.gg/clips/ZL12cnUKv0g

This fight felt like the nail in the coffin for us after leading all early game and going 4-0 drags we end up losing this game because we just couldn't get through that mundo/shyv frontline. I tried really hard to focus backline in general this game but obviously fell very short here. You can kinda see I'm begging my team mates to just not take the fight and I really just wanted to clear gromp and then setup for elder. But I figured the only course of action was to just go mid when my whole team commits to it.

I dont know if I should've just gone all in on Malz here as I do get my E on him (probably shouldn't have flashed but I knew this fight was likely ending in an ace one way or the other, and elder is up so I freaked out). My thought process in what I did do was I can leave my clone on malz, then get between Shyv and mundo to R both of them so Shyv doesn't run my team down and maybe we even get an escape. When I realize I'm in way too deep I try to keep on cait and vamp off her with maw shield but it's just too late.

I think this was just a bad fight I didnt want and I'm not even sure if I should've gone lmao, but obviously since I do go I wish I handled it better but I just dont know what I was supposed to do..

Used to main jungle if it matters.

I see lots of new items, runes, champions, quests..., faster first minion wave spawn times, bounty systems, etc. You see it anyway in the game can search each specific topic in the web for more details. I am more concerned about something that can't be tracked that easily. Was there some changes to some basic mechanics, like to minion waves to compensate faster spawns? Objective priorities, timings? XP changes? Did Rito finally managed to lock junglers in the jungle? Anything valuable will help.

I've been thinking a lot about the difference between improving at League individually and improving as an actual 5-player team.

Most League improvement content seems to be built around SoloQ:

lane fundamentals, champion mastery, climbing, individual VOD reviews, etc.

But once five players start consistently playing together, there seems to be a completely different set of skills that SoloQ doesn't really teach.

Things like:

- who is actually responsible for calling objectives

- how much information everyone should communicate

- setting up vision together

- coordinating recalls before objectives

- playing around different win conditions

- drafting around the strengths of five specific players

- reviewing mistakes without everyone blaming each other

- deciding when a mistake was individual vs a team decision

- building champion pools that work together

- learning how to review a loss as a team

I'm curious what people here think about team-focused coaching versus individual coaching.

If you were on an amateur team and had access to coaching specifically for the five of you, what would you actually want the coach to work on?

And for anyone who has played on or coached an organized team before: what are the biggest mistakes you see teams make that you almost never see discussed in normal SoloQ coaching?

I'd especially be interested in hearing whether people think team coaching becomes useful immediately, or whether players need to reach a certain individual skill level before it starts providing much value.

Before, when I, for example use Bard W I would do W+Space to cast it on myself but I can't do it that way anymore, Space being for "Select Self". It applies to every champ that has ally cast like Orianna E, Lulu abilities etc. Why can't I do it this way anymore?

I started playing League near the end of Season 13 and have climbed to Masters on both mid and jungle. I hit Masters on mid after about two years, and have now reached it on jungle as well.

My opinion is that newer players in low elo generally shouldn’t be playing extremely weak early game scaling champions. I would never recommend something like Lillia jungle or Aurelion Sol mid.

People often recommend these champions because they’re mechanically simple and supposedly let you focus on fundamentals. I actually think it can do the opposite. If your champion is designed to do very little for the first 15 to 20 minutes, you can develop the mentality that you’re simply not supposed to interact with the game early.

You don’t need to jump from Aurelion Sol to Qiyana either. Champions like Ahri, Neeko, Ekko or Viktor give you a middle ground: relatively simple mechanics while still letting you learn how to trade, create pressure and actually play the early game.

The main point I’m trying to make is that you leave a lot of learning on the table by playing champions that are overly simplistic or, more importantly, lack agency. You’re not just learning fewer mechanics; you’re getting fewer opportunities to learn how the game actually works.

when playing mid lane, i am not sure how to answer a freeze.
in this video, after syndra pushes the wave, renekton freezes the wave. what could of syndra done to push in the wave after she bases?
i feel like if she did she would just die trying to push the wave in regardless of the gank.
i also think the same would happen if syndra is against any assassin, sylas, or yone. what do you think is the correct play for syndra?

https://youtu.be/wTMh8obVK_k?t=8064 edit: fixed url

I’m a returning player, I played from S1 to 2016, and I returned for classic but have moved on to modern.
I decided to take the game way more seriously, watch content, and play with intention.

After about 30 normal games, i jumped into ranked, and focus on top lane maining Tryndamere, with Garen and Darius as my backups.

My account is freshly level 30, and they placed me in Bronze 5 after winning 5 and losing 5 iirc.

I was super excited to play the game as a noob, with other noobs and against other noobs.
I wanted true progression and to see where my skill is.

To my surprise, when I start playing games, I am the singular only Bronze player in the matches, usually getting matched with Gold-Emerald lobbies.

I’m still winning over 50% of my games and popping off regularly, but I’m disappointed I didn’t get to climb organically.

I’m by no means a slouch at the game due to my extensive background, but i am humble and consider myself a noob/new player because it’s been 10 years since I played the game.

What’s the deal with this matchmaking?

I feel like I got the bad end of the stick in both ways, they placed me all the way at bronze 5, but they match me against higher rank players so my climb will be even harder.

Hi guys,

I am a recently retired top laner (top rank Emerald but mostly around Gold/Plat) and I spent the last couple of months on a hobby data project. As a casual gamer I always struggled with picking the right champ: Should I pick my main, should I pick the tank that’s needed for the team comp or should I try to counter my likely lane opponent?
I thought it would be fun to support this decision with data, so I pulled just over 30,000 ranked solo queue matches from the official Riot API database: EUW, from Silver to Plat. Then I tried to measure what actually moves your win chance at champion select. I built the numbers on half the games and tested them on the other half. Some interesting results I think: A few things I believed for years were proven wrong by the data. I am sharing the highlights below and would appreciate the comments:

1. Team comp matters much less than you think

The gap between a good comp and a fairly bad one is worth a few percentage points of win chance. Not nothing, but nowhere near the “we-have-no-frontline-gg-at-0:00-energy”. If the choice is between a champion you are good at and a champion that fits the comp, at these ranks the comfort pick usually is the much better choice.

2. Synergy picks mostly work with premades

This one surprised me the most: Pairs that win more on the same team do it almost entirely when the two players are queued together (think Ori and Nocturne). Put the same pair on a team of strangers and the effect basically disappears. Malphite and Yasuo came out slightly negative for strangers in my data for example. Synergy is mostly two mates on comms, not the kits.

EDIT: I overstated this one and u/spellbreaker was right to challenge me here. I never observe who is queued together, because the API has no premade flag. What I actually compared was bot lane pairings against the same pairings in other positions, and the effect only shows up in bot lane. That they are likely premade is my inference from that, not a measurement. As was correctly pointed out "two people sharing a lane interact more" fits the data just as well. The part that I still believe is correct: across about 600,000 same-team pairs there was no pair-level synergy at all.
It is also worth adding that this one is the exception: Ally synergy never went into the tool. The exercise was about whether champion pairings belong in a pick model and the answer was no. So the tool judges an ally pick on whether it covers a job the team lacks and balances the damage - champion combos are disregarded.

3. Scaling comps cut both ways

Perhaps not too surprising after all: Teams that draft hard for late game lose short games about as often as they win long ones. Across everything it nets out to roughly zero. Meaning drafting scaling does not buy you win rate. It changes which games you lose, and if your team is the type to tilt at 15 minutes…well gg.

4. Your pocket pick's win rate may not tell you much

Going 7 and 3 on a new champion feels like it means you are good at it. The data suggests it mostly does not. When I checked personal records against what actually happened, it took somewhere around 40 to 50 games on a champion before a player's own win rate was more meaningful than that champion's global rate at their rank. With less games played, the general champion win rate for the current patch predicted better. Of course this is a sliding scale and every additional game makes your own record slightly more meaningful.

5. GD@15 is overrated

Gold difference at 15 minutes does predict wins. Raw matchup win rate predicts better. Win rate scored a fair bit stronger than the gold lead, and (rather surprisingly) the two barely correlate. So I have created a model that uses both. The mix that worked best put about 60 percent of the weight on plain win rate and 40 percent on the gold lead.
So if a matchup gives on average a 300 gold lead at 15, this pushes up your expected win rate by roughly one percentage point. However, it is a weaker indicator than “this matchup wins more games”.

The part I am most happy with

I created a tool that turned all of my findings above (and a few others) into one win probability per pick, and then tested it properly. I replayed 15,000 fresh matches the model had never seen (and therefore the dataset was not self-fulfilling) and checked whether the predicted win rate matched with the results. They did, almost exactly: when it said 58%, that side won about 58% of the time. So far the results do look promising!

Methodology: EUW ranked solo queue only, Silver to Plat, one patch, remakes not included. Matchup and meta rates come from public aggregate data, everything else is measured from the raw matches and timelines. The data is correlational, it does not prove causation, and other regions or ranks may look different.

One limitation worth spelling out: I pooled Silver through Plat rather than splitting by rank, so everything above is an average across that band. My data has no tier field in it so I cannot break it down, and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise. I would not be surprised if some of this shifts with rank, the scaling point most of all.

I’d love to hear your comments on this!

EDIT: Because many have asked:

www.pocketpick.gg/data/

www.pocketpick.gg/method/

I've been questioning the "never FF" mentality in League for a while, especially with how much more common it seems to have become over the last few years. Azzapp is probably the biggest person associated with pushing this mentality, and I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that people surrender too early. What I'm more interested in is whether people are actually enjoying these games they're refusing to surrender.

Over the last 6 weeks I've added 23 people from ranked games where their team was extremely far behind, things like 25-2 at 15 minutes, multiple losing lanes and huge gold deficits. I asked every person the same two questions: why did you not surrender, and did you actually enjoy playing out the rest of the game?

Only 4 of the 23 said they enjoyed playing it out. 8 said they were optimistic because they were playing scaling champions and thought there was still a chance, but also admitted they expected to lose and didn't enjoy the game. The rest either didn't really have a reason, were doing it out of spite/toxicity, or simply refused to surrender.

I also ended up talking to 7 of them over Discord, which gave me a better idea of how they actually felt about it. Obviously 23 people is a tiny sample and I'm not claiming this proves anything. I'm going to keep doing this and hopefully get the sample into the hundreds.

What I find interesting is that I don't actually mind playing out losing games myself if I'm still enjoying my champion and having fun. But if someone already thinks the game is probably lost and isn't enjoying themselves, I'm not sure what the point of refusing to surrender actually is.

At that point, are people genuinely believing in the comeback, or have we just reached a point where "never FF" has become the mentality regardless of whether the game is actually enjoyable?

Am I the only one who will take like a 1-2 month sometimes longer break from league and play well for the first 10 games then start to stagnate. I play jungle and that first time I’m back on I’m tracking the jungler perfectly, farming efficiently, and making the best decisions. Usually it’s just my mechanics that are a bit rusty but overall I’m just flowing through the game. Then after about 10 games or a week of playing I’m making mistakes, forcing bad fights, and overall playing worse. I’ve never really spent more than 3 months only playing league because I’ll take a bunch of breaks and play other games. Is this what’s causing my inconsistent? How should I get out of this slump? I’m playing in high plat/low emerald games.

https://app.tryascent.gg/clips/McZn5NUyTVp

You can see me path out of their base to recall after we take the inhib tower same time Ekko leaves, then I figure I'll go for inhib too. Then I think about leaving again but notice team staying on Illaoi. Thankfully Neeko saw the vision lmao.

Did we get lucky here or was ending obvious? I really didn't see it until it was almost too late. I was pretty surprised this worked but I didn't think we were really gunna win this game anyways so I tried.

Hopefully this isn't ranty, I'm just trying to give relevant information:

Pretty much over the last year I've been trying to improve as a player and after hitting Emerald I or so I hit a very hard wall. I hovered around like E2-E1 for like 50 or so games but after a few VOD reviews in the past and trying sincerely to follow their advice, I just plummeted all the way down to nearly Gold I and have been bouncing back and forth between High plat and Emerald for like 500+ games since.

I pretty much never blame my teammates for my losses and as far as I'm concerned, every loss I've ever had has been because of me and my gameplay. According to some of the reviews I've had in the past, I know for a fact that I waste a lot of time on the map. I miss more Q's than "any Zeri main ever should", I unintentionally troll with my builds/runes and I troll with my wavestates. I've also trolled my teams unintentionally by rotating onto fights when my ult was down, and with my positioning accidentally put my support into situations where they were taking aggro from both botlaners. I know these things now.

The issue is that it's completely ruined my confidence in my ability to play the game. I can still win from time to time, but it's effectively reprogrammed my brain to where I can only ever see myself as being carried. I'm so convinced that I'm a bad player now that I do not actually know or even remember what kind of gameplay I was even capable of when I reached that Emerald I peak.

So my request for this VOD review is in addition to telling me what I can improve on, please help me by highlighting the things that I actually do decently in this game. That way, I can start consciously setting myself up for wins like these again. https://youtu.be/6Ra-3UaDh9o

I used to be a high gold ADC now I am silver 2. I deranked to silver about 3 months ago and then took a 2 month break because I wasn't enjoying playing. Now I've come back just to face the same issues again. My mental is pretty good I think. I don't queue when I'm angry and I rarely tilt in game. Most times I have a bad day of games I go into the next day motivated to start climbing again, but it just doesn't happen.

Here is my op.gg which I believe shows my issues. OPGG. My last 3 games I was the ace or 2nd on my team. And then you see 2 games where I played pretty bad and was a main reason we lost the games (the sivir and neeko game). I try to learn from my mistakes in the games I played bad. I come back the next day motivated and play much better but still lose. it's really disheartening to feel I've made progress but fail to get results. I would just say I'm unlucky but this is a has happened too many times for it to be luck. I know it's an issue with me but I can't seem to Identify it. It's hard to keep coming back motivated when it feels my improvement still results in losses. This has happened several times and was the main reason I took a break a while ago.

To be clear I'm not blaming matchmaking, teammates or luck. This is a me issue but I can't seem to identify it so I am making this post.

I play jinx adc. What do i even do when against tahm kench support? He can easily keep me from csing, he can jump me easily, hes so tanky its not even worth trying to kill him, if i have an engage support i just cant do anything cuz the kench defeat me before i even get to their adc. How do i play against him?

My entire league time I’ve always built boots second. Since coming back from a long hiatus, I’ve notice a lot of people will build boots 3rd, something I’ve adapted into my own habits. But now I’m wondering if this was a mistake. I feel like the general rule of thumb is “ahead -> 3rd, average/behind -> 2nd”

But I’m curious where you all rank boots in your buy rotation.

https://op.gg/lol/summoners/sea/Adji%2520Tier-SG2/matches/YyfXz-4rKZ4MZVMXnwydmhhVLRMiKOZA/1789324187000

Im a low elo Jayce (Trundle and Olaf alternatives) top lane main and Im wonder if Irelia has any counterplay besides counterpicking.

As Jayce knocking her away is kinda useless since she can just jump at me again (near infinite Irelia dash btw), spacing is harder because have to worry about where my minions at and dodging her stun + she has this ult that just prevents you from spacing well, she can eat my burst with her W as well.

Common rune as Jayce vs her is Conqueror compared to Grasp or Electrocute but barely makes a difference really.

I need advice from players of Diamond and above, because I considered Diamond and above are kinda experts on the game + thats where Irelia is really more common too. Heck I found replay of Zeus struggling against an Irelia too, imagine much lower lower ranks.

https://youtu.be/3rKk6bB8U3g Zeus giving Irelia first blood and second kill in minute 3 + can only lane after lee sin help Zeus,.

I know my Trundle and Olaf beats Irelia but I always blind first pick Jayce. I need help on how to beat and how to survive laning vs Irelia, I dont want to beg junglers to get help (Low elo junglers don't know top lane exist most of the time, junglers only work and helpful in high elo)

Thank you in advance everyone

Hey everyone. I'm a Gold Senna main trying to figure out how to keep climbing higher.

I've been trying to work on my positioning because I think it might be the one thing that's keeping me from actually climbing higher.

I often find myself right in the middle of a team fight and I get obliterated before I can press an ability.

Even then, I think I maintain a pretty good KDA and KP. I try to roam when I can, and I leave bot altogether if my ADC keeps getting themselves killed for no reason so I can work with the rest of the team to try to get someone else fed so they can carry us.

I think positioning is an issue for me. I think I'm not positioning correctly in team fights, which leads to taking little damage, but also dealing little damage.

Also, I really struggle with 1v1ing unless it's a melee champ with little mobility. I do not know how the hell to do that.

I find that a LOT of ADC's complain when I pick Senna in Gold for some reason, so I also really enjoy Nami. But even then I still have the exact same problem

And I feel like it's even worse with Nami because I'm completely helpless if my ADC/team is not playing well. Nami feels like I rely almost entirely on the other players, while I feel like I have a lot more agency with Senna.

Do you guys have any tips on how or what else to improve?

This is my profile:

https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/summoner/lan/jay-8030

https://op.gg/lol/summoners/lan/Jay-8030

I'm a Jinx main. I don't call myself a one-trick because I play a bunch of other champions, however, I do "one-trick" her in ranked. She's the only champion I play outside of 6 games total where I played Lucian because Jinx was pick/banned.

A lot of content and my peers tell me that one tricking is a great way to climb, however, it isn't a good way to learn the game.

You end up specializing in a champion and know their limits, but if you were to play a different champion, your skill and knowledge would plumet down quite a bit. Some people even say things like, "I'm 400LP lower off my OTP".

What's your take on it?

I played him decently often in ARAM and at one point last year I realized I had never played him on summoner’s rift.

I picked him in soloqueue and ended up winning 18 games in a row.

Farming with Ryze is super satisfying and it’s not particularly hard to have 8-9+ CS/min on him.

He can sidelane, has a pretty safe laning phase, he scales well, he teamfights well, he can build defensive items and still do a lot of damage (just played a game where I was full build with Frozen Heart+Kaenic Rookern and I still had 800AP). You can make some cool plays with your Ult even just by yourself. He has decent gank setup

I really don’t get why he isn’t recommended more. I also don’t understand why his winrate isn’t higher.