I mean all those concepts are not reall secretive, just googling "trading in lol" gives results like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnE6tiHElSc

or this video of lanecontrol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cg_OBO14u8

You said you watched a ton of videos,streams etc. it just doesn't really reflect in your play and other silverplayers are aware of these concepts as you can see in this thread.


or you could just look "Janna vs Blitzcrank" on youtube up and look how pros play the matchup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oLrUmMw-IU

As you can see, they indeed start E and he constantly shields the vayne while she autoattacks the opponents. He is also much more aggressively positioned to possibly autoattack.

I think I'd like to add at this point, after having devoted over an hour to watching that Janna game:

If you still think it's your teammates holding you back, it's not. Accept that you're silver at best and it'll help start the learning process. Like, everyone here is saying stuff to you that the majority of silver players already know, and almost all the players in gold perform in game on a regular basis. Your argumentative stance of "You can't just tell me to do something, you have to explain why" seems more like a cop-out than you not truly understanding the why's when everyone is actually explaining the things to you.

Also, one last thing before I have to go for the day... At this point, the 1 on 1 coaching seems like it's the only way to hold you accountable to learn. What I mean by that is that you are taking all this info and since we are all anonymous ghosts on the internet, you don't feel guilty not taking the advice, whereas if I was standing right there, maybe you'd feel like an ******* for ignoring all the good coaching. We all feel like you're ignoring our efforts to help, and it's really frustrating. It's like we're re-writing the whole manual on how to play every time we post and you're tossing it aside and saying "Just show me, already! Harumph!"

you're not going to learn how to become plat or whatever from reading a few posts on 2+2, you need to learn how to learn, or hire a coach.

Exactly, this is what they trill into your head in probably every University in the world. That you have to learn how to learn. For games, I constantly ask myself questions.

"What could the Blitzcrank do to me lvl 1?"

Answer : "Nothing really, unless I get hooked"

Result : "I can auto him freely if I dodge the hook or stand behind a minion"

Nobody had to teach me how the Janna vs Blitz matchup goes, I've never played Janna nor have I really played Blitz or support much, nobody had to tell me how to play the matchup. I came to that conclusion myself by thinking and you certainly should be able to come to easy conclusions like that yourself. Yeah I did do the mistake not knowing what skill to start, but I still knew that if you start shield that you have to communicate to your ADC that he should go for early trades with shield.

The problem is always that people just autopilot, as a pokerplayer you should know that. People tend to just play and not think.

Sorry guys, I know you're all trying to help. I appreciate it. Know that first and foremost. You guys could be doing anything else with your time and you're trying to help me out. Like I said earlier... my profession has always just been a gift. I've never had to try to learn to be a musician. Someone has always just told me what I need to do and I could either do it or figure it out on my own. The little things here and I can't figure out I have a coach... and that's how I've 'learned to learn', so to speak. I literally didn't pick up a school textbook through my whole college career. I listened in class and just kind of retained enough to make Cs on my tests (in everything other than music).. So yeah my learning skills might not be all that hot. Poker was the same way for me. I was a losing player until someone taught me one on one. (LarryLegend actually did) I read all the books and videos etc and I had the same results as league.

I played a Janna game to compare. I'm also in Silver.

http://www.replay.gg/search/na/RicinCig#2049116679

This game may have been winnable if we had all decided to try to stall until 50 minutes but unfortunately mid got out of control a bit early. I'm sure there are a ton of mistakes in here but there were a couple of nice plays (in spoilers) I think that show how Janna can help carry games.



Would love any feedback if people are willing. I've been playing more adc lately but the lane dynamics are the same from either side. And I thought it would be fun to compare 2 Janna games at similar elos in the thread. Thanks!

Figured I'd also post a couple of mistakes I know I made.

Took a bit too much harass in the early laning phase. Should be a bit better at going for the harass at better times.

I should have been able to cancel a couple of MF ultimates that I didn't because of misplays or bad positioning.

Had some bad positioning on the second(?can't remember if it was 1st or 2nd) Jayce roam bot and bad decision making on who to target in that fight.

I'm sure there's plenty more there though.

Put selfcast on a hotkey, so you can shield yourself quicker. You take too much harass by going forward too aggressively and you never shielded yourself. When you play Janna, communicate with your ADC that you will shield him and that he should go for trades with shield on.

At 3:45 the MF totally oversteps, you have every spell up and your ADC has still jump. You exhaust her and she will die there.

Later on you have sightstone, but don't use it for a longtime you should've warded the bush over tri.

I guess you were the one who spampinged the Jayce, he clearly saw you there and was still not scared and I don't think you had vision on jungle or information where the Elise is. Your mid was really useless as well and Yi/Janna isn't all that scary either. I'm not even sure if I would wanna take a fight 3 v 1 there. It ended up being disastrous with you doing several pathing mistakes.

That Dragoncall was terrible, your mid just died, the fed Jayce was walking towards you, you had no vision on Elise so best case it's 3v3 against the fed Jayce. That call should've been spampinged and ignored. Then another amazing call that should've been spampinged to not fight the Jayce there.

The exhaust on the MF was bad, she just used her ulti and there is a 9/0 Jayce, you want to exhaust him not her.

After that Jayce comes bot again, visible on ward, but you don't seem to realize that and give up another doublekill --> Work on your mapawarness and look at the minimap.

Then for some reason you decide to chase them 2 v 3 when they got everything up, first I thought you chased 2v2 where I already was like "Elise could be there and they have zerokillpotential there", then I saw that the Elise was actually visible.

I stopped watching from there, don't think that particular game was winnable your yi and mid were really dumb, your ADC was decent though.


Summary:

-Bad use of cooldowns, it felt like you haven't played Janna much. In early laning you failed to use your cooldowns at all and it didn't look like you were comfortable on Janna.
-Exhaust/Flash use was poor, you could've pulled the trigger early game and killed the MF easily and later on your exhausttargets.
-Bad mapawarness:

First the pathing against Jayce, where you should've known that the Alistar should be back in lane by now and even if not you couldn't have done anything to him.
The Dragoncall that seemed like it was initiated by you(The botlane), Mid just died and fed Jayce was walking towards you, no vision on Elise.
Then when Jayce walked over the ward, you missed him and gave another doublekill.

This just isn't true. It's true that I haven't been playing regularly in silver or gold for a few years, but I usually play normals with people that are lower Elo than I am and I can definitely carry these games.

More recently, I've been playing normals with one of Aesah's friends and her friends. She's been playing ADC and I'll play support. Her ADC skill level is likely silver, if not lower - she is almost always the lowest damage output in the game despite playing ADC. However, if we're facing golds in lane, we're likely going to stomp lane.

If I were supporting in silver, I'd likely have an extremely high winrate. There would definitely be unwinnable games, but far fewer than if I were playing at my actual skill level. I mean, the average skill level across both teams in many of the normals I'm playing is probably platinum, yet it's not uncommon for me to have the highest damage in the game as a support if I'm playing a damage based support (Brand, Sona, etc). If the average skill level for everyone other than myself was silver, it wouldn't be close.

A good support is going to time their auto attack harass when the enemy ADC is going to last hit. Thus, the ADC has to make a choice and either hit you and miss the CS, or take an auto attack for free. This is how you execute a positive auto attack trade.

I'm watching your Janna game now after spectating your Vel'Koz game previously. You are just not threatening and there's no deceptiveness in your play. You tend to use your abilities and then just hide in the brush or behind your ADC (which is really poor positioning) and do nothing, which makes it even harder to land your abilities because the enemy can easily predict when you are going to use them again (you are only moving into an aggressive position when you are using your abilities). You would instead prefer to be pacing around, bluffing that you are going to use an ability or auto attack, so that it protects the times that you actually want to use one.

You also didn't win the race to level 2, something we talked about previously. Instead, your Vayne got hooked and almost gave first blood when you guys were still level one and the wave was about to crash tower . Your combined failures at level 1 helped to create this scenario.

In summary, you need to be applying a lot more pressure for your ADC. It will simultaneously protect your ADC while causing the enemy lane to make mistakes. It's difficult (but possible) to do it with defensive supports like Janna, but very easy to do on aggressive supports like Vel'Koz.

Thanks. What do you use for selfcast like Shift + (Q,W,E)? I should try that out.

I rewatched that 3:45 fight. Makes sense, I'll need to work on that.

Definitely map awareness was bad.

Pulled up some S3 stats, when I was playing the best league of my life. More proof that supports can carry. Meta has changed and you probably couldn't do it with these 2 supports anymore. But until you can stop criticizing your teammates and identify your own mistakes even in the games you win, you won't climb the ladder.

I think shift is defaulted to smart cast not self cast. I can't remember the button for self casting unless I'm completely confusing something here.

I use smart cast in all situations with a very few select exceptions.

Pretty shirt shift + key is self cast.

Just use whatever button you want.

alt and key is self cast. but yeah you can map it to whatever

since you typically only want to self-cast one spell, i put it on "g". with kayle you have two, so ult went on "t"

I just alternate normal cast and self-cast on shift+key and rebind at the beginning of each game. So if I'm playing Thresh, I'll make sure shift+E is bound to normal cast. If I'm playing Morgana, I'll bind shift+E to self-cast. It was pretty easy to get in the habit of checking my binds while running to lane each game and I don't want to have to bind any extra keys (can't get used to using alt).

i been playing ori so long alt e is second habit, changing keybinds every game seems sub optimal, just spam morg for a while