A little bit of background about myself... I've been playing league on and off for around 3 years since early season 2. I took a break for most of season 3 and resumed playing again in season 4. I'm fairly competent at all positions (by this I mean I don't expect to be a liability in any role if I need to fill at my current elo) but I'm strongest at mid and least experienced at ADC.

I reached plat 5 about 2 weeks ago after a long breakeven stretch at mid/high gold. I'm making this post because I'm currently on a massive losing streak where it seems I can't win regardless of how well or poorly I perform. It seems as though every single game I play in I either have a troll, an afk, or simply every lane feeds and feeds hard. This is frustrating to me because I basically consider myself good enough to consistently carry (from mid at least) if the game is either close or if we are losing slightly. I can sometimes turn around games where we are losing significantly. But I can't turn around landslides and it seems I have to consistently do that in order to simply string a couple wins together. I believe I am very rarely the reason my team loses. I know there are shades of grey here (you can argue not carrying hard enough is the "reason" the team loses) but I guess I just mean that I hardly ever throw games that are at least even.

I try to be very honest and objective in my evaluation of my play and I'm aware that excessively blaming your team is an extremely common pitfall that prevents you from seeing your own mistakes and improving. I watch streamers like nightblue3 a lot mainly because I think he has a great philosophy: basically whatever situation you are put in, it's your responsibility to do your best to carry. I'm continuing to work on this but at the end of the day I just can't do enough in the vast majority of games I'm put in. I want to progress and believe I'm possibly good enough to be in high plat or low diamond but it seems as though every game I'm put in... I hate to use the word "uncarriable" but that's how it appears to me right now.

I'm not saying I believe I'm some challenger level player that is just getting held back by teams. I certainly have room for improvement. But at my current level, I'd say I outperform my equivalent 6/10 games, go even 3-4/10 games and underperform (slightly) 1-2/10 games. I lose hard almost never. Maybe once in 40 games. I know there are many barometers to measure performance but I think it's at least something. I'm 21-31 over the past 52 games and I'm pretty sure that type of dismal win % would continue even further back.

I work hard at the game and as a somewhat competitive person I enjoy improving and I obviously enjoy winning. But these stretches where it seems I have to consistently singlehandedly hypercarry almost every game are taking a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for me. That combined with the constant arguments and negativity that happens in almost every losing game has me strongly considering quitting.

So I guess my question is... does matchmaking suck or do I suck? Any good players out there just get these completely ridiculous stretches of games or is it only me? I do my best to be optimistic, try to focus on my play and not the outcome but I can't be too much of a Pollyanna about it because at the end of the day I want to win and it ****ing sucks losing over and over and over and feeling like there's not much I can do to change it. I mean maybe I'm just bad and am completely delusional about my abilities but I really don't think so. Summoner name is t0oPerfect on North America. Thanks for reading.

CI, sounds like you've reached your current approximate skill level, nothing to be ashamed of you're currently in the top 10%, pretty awesome. Sounds like you may have potentially overshot it a bit and your MMR could be correcting itself.

There's not a lot of evidence to support this, it may be true it may not be true, there's no good way to judge this besides results. As I pointed out you're doing great (top 10%) yet because your perceive yourself to be better than your current position (and just from an unbiased perspective you have no evidence to support this except comparing yourself to streamers). That creates frustration in my experience.

This is a subset of the problematic mindset I was talking about, if you want to climb you're only concern should be the gaps between how you performed and how you could have performed. A good KDA or lane is not represented of performing and it will skew your thinking. Going 2-0 and +30cs in lane is not be default a good game if you could have gone 3-0 and denied 20 extra cs. On the flip side, going 2-7 can be representative of a very well played game where you identified you had a small chance of winning and took big chances to get back in it.

Also, something people often don't think about is their rotational knowledge. Do you know the right objective, play call / know the timers every single game and communicate this to your teammates? Do you direct them with pings? Do you call in ganks and time wards?

Performance at the level you're aiming for goes far beyond the factors you're looking so you aren't correctly perceiving your impact.

I watched one of your Annie replays that was available on op.gg (you went 3/4/4, third replay:
http://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=t0oPerfect

:50 - You didn't drop your trinket ward or support your teammates trying to figure out where the jungler was starting.
1:55 - Annie vs. Ziggs the first level 2 will be very relevant but you sit back and don't even auto the minions. Position near his tower and starting auto'ing immediately.
2:05 - You have 1 low melee minion here while Ziggs has two and ready to be auto'd. Your AA range is 625 vs. his 550. You need to at a bare minimum be in a position to trade here to force Ziggs to use a Q / take damage. If he uses his Q to farm you would have 6 seconds to position aggressively while being 100% safe to auto minions and get the faster level 2 or get free trades. You aren't dancing to avoid a potential skillshots (admittedly not critical because you are positioned too far back).
2:27 - You have your stun up and you use it to farm instead of trade while Ziggs is positioned aggressively. At a bare minimum you have a free trade here. Furthermore, he gets a free auto on you without you trading back after his Q is down (you have 75 greater range and 10 more move speed).
2:35 (minor) - You eat a free Q because you aren't dancing, you even took the cs with your Q so you had lots of flexibility to dodge so you weren't watching Ziggs positioning.
3:15 - Lee is invading red against Nocturne, the moment you decide to roam all we know is that Nocturne has pulled off red. At this point Lee is completely safe assuming you keep vision on Ziggs but the enemy team has the advantage (their laners are closer to a potential engagement). I disagree with roaming here and I would instead focus on shoving your lane hard to make Ziggs think twice about roaming (you could have roamed to bush to see if Lee needed to W to you then gone back to lane when you had the additional info). As we get more information Riven gets a positional advantage and Lee is guaranteed safe. Ping them off and shove lane. Furthermore, the way you handle it you roam up (I believe costing you either 1 or 2 cs then when you get in a favorable position to collapse on Nocturne with Lee with your stun up you bail back to lane. It's worse than either roaming or not roaming because you paid the cost while not committing to get the benefit. You also had full vision to know that you had the positional advantage.

To be continued...

Another note as it was close to the others, I'll review more later:
3:40 - Extremely debatable trade. Going in was going to guaranteed lose you 1 cs (you would have ended up losing 2 disregarding the chase afterwards) while you will also be positioned in a way that you won't easily be able to drop minions aggro (making more likely the trade goes more even making it unappealing). The biggest mistake here however is after the trade you have 3 ranged minion aggro on you and you TURN BACK IN while ranged minion aggro is still on you.

Alternatively, you could have just auto'd down your minion in back while saving your stun and had a much more appealing trade opportunity after your forward CS died seconds later.

More analysis:
4:45 (after the chase) - First, you should have placed your trinket behind you so you could have taking a more efficient route / backed earlier. Given the route you ended up taking (behind red) you should have backed but it's debatable what to do here, there's a siege minion wave coming but Ziggs has blue (thus you're likely to give up a lot of farm regardless). Either way I think you should have backed 100% after the siege wave (you stayed for 2 more and missed most of them) and Lee was in position to pick up a lot of the cs anyways. You also missed the next siege wave based on your timing (siege waves come once every 3 waves).
5:00 - It's just clear you aren't using your auto to farm very well. Various instances like you should have been softening at least one minion caster minion when farming under tower.
6:20 (first buy) - I strongly disagree with the 2nd Doran's, you are solidly behind in xp/gold and Ziggs is not really going to be in range to engage at this point (he will be harassing you from a larger wave most of the time at this point) it's also very likely he picks up his blue buff soon (and there will be a disparity in timing because of Lee's early invade instead of doing blue) making this more extreme. Your Lee has shown very poor decision making based on his gank when you were very low so a gank / counter gank fight is not what you should be aiming for either. Boots are the clear choice to help your dodging of Zigg's harass. I'm not as familiar with Annie builds but based on the comps I would not recommend going into RoA when behind like this (Nocturne going FF, Vayne, Ziggs, Lulu, Nami) into your (Lee, Cait, Thresh, Riven, Annie) and you definitely shouldn't buy a ward on this back if that's what you're doing (in general if you're down like this don't buy a ward, Ziggs however should be buying wards). Because you're behind your power spike is going to be delayed until the portion of the game where their comp really shines. Boots is an inefficient buy if you can't go the health crystal so you could also just go 860 gold AP item for death cap.

Follow up note on the item analysis:
-If you had backed at the correct timing (either after the fight or 1st siege wave) you wouldn't have had enough for the 860g AP item so you would have just gone boots + 2 pots (3 if you feel like you would struggling farming and dodging skillshots based on what you've seen from Ziggs or you just need more room for error). Then you could have had a boost in gold to try and get a Needlessly Large Rod on your next back.

6:55 - Really good ward over the wall after you saw Ziggs trying to back (note he hasn't backed yet and still is on his original Doran's Ring). You should have had your trinket up a bit further to spot out Nocturne going from his wraiths to top river. You however did not immediately hard shove the wave with your W at this point after you saw Ziggs had backed off which is a serious mistake given that you know Ziggs badly needs to back at this point and you can guaranteed deny him a wave with a bit of mana (or draw out Nocturne).

7:10 - The roam. Really no reason to think this will work, you have no flash which would be the bare minimum required to make this effective given the position of the bot lane. Furthermore, you're not really that time inefficient staying in lane by the time you left the 2nd enemy could have been dirty farmed at their tower which is particularly nice because at this point you've seen Nocturne and you know their 2nd blue is up thus you will force inefficiency with Nocturne's time if he's trying to pass off blue.

This is a very common type of mistake, when you're behind like this early you need to focus on minimizing the gold differential between you and your opposing laner. By roaming you actually increase it. Unless you blew out bot lane and picked up a dragon or tower this wouldn't have been worth it even with a kill (and it's too optimistic to expect that from this situation). By my count this cost you 3 melees, a siege minion and caster, took pressure off Ziggs/Nocturne to hand off an easy blue and cost you xp. Even trading for a kill wouldn't have been very profitable (if at all).

8:25 - You should have 100% seen Ziggs place his trinket ward on top side bush and seen Riven roaming to gank and pinged him off. It worked out but this was a clear mistake.

8:53 - Nami dies and Lee is bot, you should hard shove the 2nd siege wave and call your bot lane to shove/dragon. VERY IMPORTANT as this requires no mechanics it was just an important play call that anyone could make.

9:15 Same comments as before, shove immediate using W. Debatable back timing, at this point Catalyst isn't going to be a huge part of your lane sustain and you could have gone to blue and called over Lee and gone back to lane. You buy another green ward (haven't used first making that buy inefficient despite the fact you roamed through dragon) and a pink. Given that you're still going RoA your first priority needs to be getting RoA asap (boots would still be ok though given I think it should still have a significant impact on your lane). Wards here are clear mistake, at this point your lanes are doing fine and you won't be able to safely get deep vision on Nocturne by yourself so there's little that wards will even do at this point.

I would have gone Blasting Wand but it's not a huge deal either way at this point.

10:15 - You start roaming when bot lane is already lost. Best way to mitigate their mistake is to be ready to hard shove the next wave. Using your pink when they've just double killed your bot lane and you are 4v1 is a waste.

11:00 - Good presence at the dragon (although they shouldn't have given you credit if they were aware of the death timers). Only reason you had to blow flash was stepping back in after they showed they were going to defend their pink but didn't have dragon started. As long as dragon wasn't started you benefited the most from stalling so your positioning in that instance was too aggressive.

11:15 - I would have gone back to dragon in this instance, you could have zoned Ziggs away from his team and it should have been a dragon for your team given how much dragon aggro the other team took and the fact the Cait + Thresh were back to support. Likely lost objective, very significant.

So I went pretty in-depth and we can get deeper and look at late game rotations at some point but a quick summary at this point:

#1 There are likely some very easy things to change that will increase your impact a large amount. I would look very carefully at your decisions to not hard shove waves, back timings, early roams and itemization choices. None of these will be very taxing to your in game multi-tasking so should be easy improvements with a bit of out of game study.

#2 Work on your lane presence and trading is going to be hugely impactful, every game at least pull up the first 6 levels of laning and go through it slowly in a replay. Think about the type of matchup and how you could have been more impactful.

#3 Consider the impact of your champ pool and role decisions. It seems like you main mid but have mained top in the past (with your highest number of games on Nasus with a 60% winrate). In the past two weeks in ranked you've played:
-Annie
-Nasus
-Janna
-Akali
-Irelia
-Nautilus
-Ziggs
-Elise
-Warwick
-Jinx
-Amumu
-Lissandra
-Blitzcrank

Essentially, we know for sure that this isn't optimal. You also seem to play a lot of Annie (51% winrate over 88 games) and Ziggs (48% winrate over 48 games) with limited success however over the last two weeks you're 6/11 wins on Nasus (~55% winrate with a 60% overall winrate over 159 games).

Bottom line is your champion decisions alone are strongly going against the goal of increasing your ELO. If you really want to move your ELO up immediately take Nasus top every time it's available. When you don't get top focus on playing things like Blitzcrank support (64% winrate over 25 games) and Amumu jungle (63% winrate over 32 games) and avoid your champion choices like Janna, Thresh, Elise.

Now it's totally fine to not have an immediate increase in ELO strategy in mind if you would like to main mid instead of top or expand your champ pool. It's completely reasonable to have a 3-5 champion pool at your main position and apply them based on comps, matchups, etc.). Do realize though that this will take time and limit your ability to climb ELO in the immediate (likely even tank it).

Also, just take note that if you play champions like Annie mid instead of for example Ori/Ryze/Lulu types you will be subject to more variance based on matchups and your reduced impact in lane in a tough matchup. Annie is never going to perform great against a Xerath/Velkoz/Syndra type laner while she may be extra good against the Yasuo/Akali/Talon/Fizz types. Can you make it work? Sure but long run it's probably more productive to pick a meta laner that has a stable to good matchups against the meta possibilities and abuse superior knowledge/skill/execution rather than having an unstable lane experience based on matchup.

Can I also just mention that if his overall winrate is something like 55%, losing an extra 5 or 6 games out of the 52 games he mentioned in the OP isn't really THAT far out of variance, is it?

No it´s not, bad runs happen there can most defintely be someone how deserves to be much higher but just runs bad in matchmaking. My "smurf" was p1 and in it`s diamond promos while my "main" was gold league struggling to get to my platpromos. I just ran like cancer on that acc.

cwar,

Thanks so much for taking the time to review a replay and write out such a detailed analysis. I really appreciate the time and effort you put in here.

It's possible I may be relying too much on my own subjective evaluations of my play. The thing is though, results aren't everything. Like poker there is variance involved. For example my Ziggs stats on the t0oPerfect account... Ziggs is actually my main. I have another gold 2 account with a 60% Ziggs wr and a 7.6/4.4/7.8 kda over 200 games. So I don't feel as though the stats on my main are wholly representative of my ability.

It's not like I never admit to mistakes either. I know when I **** up and I make a point to remember my own **** ups the next time I want to rage about someone else's mistake. So I think I'm a better judge than most in this regard. It is probably impossible to be completely unbiased of yourself though.

But I guess this is the root of a lot of my frustration... it's very hard for me to tell the difference between what's bad luck and what I need to improve.

Great advice here. Performance should be evaluated relative to what's optimally possible for any given game, not some predetermined standard.

Yes I highly value objectives and even more so recently. Early dragons are so so important and at my current level you can often sneak one in because the enemy jungler frequently just isn't paying attention.

I do my best to communicate with my team but naturally this is a two way street. For example in that game you watched I believe I attempted a roam bot, pinged it several times, but my bot lane backed off before I came instead of trying to bait/engage so it ended up in some wasted time. I dropped my ult anyway mostly out of frustration that the thresh didn't initiate when he saw me coming.

I do understand that outperforming your lane isn't the only metric to examine which is why I added the caveat. I suppose I included it because imo that should probably be the most glaring and obvious sign that you're in games above your ability... simply is the equivalent position on the opposing team consistently doing more to carry the game than you are.

Maybe this just isn't a useful comparison to make however. It is kind of a self centered perspective because the focus is on me, whether or not I deserve to lose and "fairness" rather than what I can do to carry. I guess when I'm losing as much as I am it's a pretty natural place for me to take it however and I honestly believe that I do better than the "other guy" in the vast majority of my games in any position but adc (which I rarely ever play).

There are some exceptions of course, I do get outplayed sometimes. I've also had to stop playing champions like warwick because my team dies 7 times before I'm level 6 and the game is out of control before I can do anything to help. My bad I guess .

The bottom line though is that I'm just completely fed up with the apparent lack of a relationship between my results and my performance. If I get outplayed, fine. I deserve the loss. Let's move on and it's a great chance for me to improve. But the amount of the mistakes I'm making and the magnitude of the ones that I do make are simply not big enough to translate into a 40% winrate over a sizeable stretch of games.

In fairness maybe I should point out that I have experienced the flip side of this type of streak too. I went from gold 3 to plat 5 in about 4 days. I didn't have a single feeding team and I had quite a few that did very well. I probably even got carried a few times. Then I hit plat, I got stuck in another rut and here I am making this post.

Let's go into some gameplay specifics...

I don't have a replayer or anything so I can't talk about very specific trade or warding decisions but I'll try to give some general thoughts about why I made some of the decisions I did. Again, thanks so much for taking the time to look through it and give your thoughts.

A couple notes about the Ziggs/Annie matchup:

I'd say it's unfavorable for Annie pre 6. The reason for this is the Ziggs Q outranges the Annie Q so it's a bit like playing Annie vs Orianna. If he sees me coming in for trades he throws a q and kites backwards. I'm stuck chasing him through minions trying to land my own damage and if I don't it's free for him. I mean if his positioning sucks you can be aggressive but I didn't think that was the case with this Ziggs. My strategy here is to stay even until 6 then look to all in him with one spell rotation and ignite.

Annie's biggest weakness is her lack of an escape. That combined with the short range on her W is a big part of the reason she often opts for RoA... she has to get in fairly close to do damage and has some trouble getting out so the tankiness becomes extremely valuable.

So the fact that I don't like the matchup against Ziggs pre 6 and I don't want to put myself in a vulnerable position by pushing the wave unnecessarily are the two reasons I played passively early here and didn't auto minions/take more aggressive positioning. It's entirely possible I was a little careless though and that's something I might need to work on.

I agree that the roam to red didn't turn well and I got a bit caught between two decisions. I wanted to help Lee, then it looked like he was backing off so I returned to lane to not miss cs, then they re engaged. It ended up with a blue for Ziggs which is just cancer and very hard for me to sustain against (which is why I decided to rush catalyst instead of damage... I basically just needed to be able to stay in lane as much as possible to not let his advantage snowball). That was the reason for the 2nd doran's as well. I valued mana and health over damage here.

I do remember csing terribly this game. This is rare for me as Annie. Blue buff Ziggs does make it difficult however.

I do think my roam bot was fine if the thresh had made a strong engage. I agree that I took a risk here. If I roam and nothing comes of it yes I put myself further behind. However because I was losing lane anyway I decided to try for it. A kill would put me back even with Ziggs OR I could get bot lane rolling to try mitigate the fact that I was behind. Annie is very strong at this point and a vayne/nami lane has two excellent targets. Unfortunately it didn't work out.

As far as some of the lane management decisions, I noted your suggestions but please remember that Annie has rather lackluster waveclear. It takes you 2 or more W's to clear (as you level it after Q and I had no AP at this point) and quite often the next wave shows up in that time due to the 8 second cd. You can also become vulnerable to ganks in this time if you're spamming cooldowns without having your stun up. If I'm playing Ziggs or Lux it becomes much easier to shove and I'd agree with your criticism here.

The decision to buy wards could have been a mistake. I figured since I was behind the least I could do was to try and maintain some semblance of vision control for my team but maybe I should have prioritized a core item.

The way I see this game... yes I could have played better. I could have cs'd better. I could have dodged a few more skill shots. Maybe some aspects of my itemization choices were questionable. I'll try to work on that.

But these types of mistakes are simply not big enough to explain the massive losing streaks I'm experiencing. I feel like I couldn't have done anything to alter the trajectory of that game. I think the reason we lost was the 2/16 bot lane combined with the Riven making some truly awful decisions while the Lulu had an enormous impact with her roaming and map presence. The Lee wasn't great but neither was the Nocturne iirc so I'm considering that a push. I know people say don't blame your team but sometimes it just seems like there's no getting around that reality.

I discussed #1 and #2 earlier, I'll talk about #3 a bit. Like I mentioned I'm a Ziggs main and I consider myself far better at that champion than any other. With his recent round of nerfs I've been looking to Annie who was my first main. I think she's very strong and under played right now. You are right that she has some tough matchups but really none of them are prohibitive when played correctly.

I played a lot of Nasus because I gave this account away for a year and when I got it back I needed to play a hypercarry to get it out of bronze. I'm a good Nasus but he isn't a safe pick early in the q and especially in games where I can't expect my opponent to suck. He also can't do anything to help his team until at least 20 min which has been a huge problem. I still pick him up if I'm a late pick or I see a good matchup. I am trying to expand my champion pool top to include more consistently viable champions (hence the Irelia/Lissandra picks) and I accept my winrate won't be as high when I choose to play those champions.

I do need to stop playing Elise. She's lackluster on both utility and damage at the moment. Blitz is certainly my best support, I think I'm a decent Janna but have had a lot of tough games and my Thresh does need work.

Thanks again for your posts. I appreciate the time you put in and I hope my explanations here will elucidate some of the decision making you saw.

No problem I'm glad you enjoyed my analysis.

To checkout the replay just go to this link and download the file (replay icon in the top right corner of the Annie 3/4/4 loss game I mentioned) and it should just play if you open it while your LoL client is open:
http://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=t0oPerfect

To respond to a couple of your strategic points:
-I understand why RoA in general is good on Annie, it was a poor decision here though. Your RoA timing was about 17:30 if I remember correctly which is very, very late against the team comp you were up against.
-In regards to the wave shoving, I'm aware Annie's W is not stellar at shoving ways but all of these shoves were champion agnostic, you weren't even auto'ing the waves to make it shove faster just waiting for Q's basically.

Once you get the replay running go rewatch this decision. You're purple side going bot lane with no flash. It's a very bad roam and representative of a very common, very large mistake. Thresh landing a hook to get a kill is not high probability (and based on the gold/xp cost of the roam you required at bare minimum a very high probability kill with potential for more). If I remember correctly they had at least 3/4 summoners and there was even a possibility it was warded. Furthermore, it's contrary to the plan to build RoA that you were executing into a scaling team comp. The math is very clear IMO.

Outranges but is a skillshot, as I outlined you weren't dancing at all. In general against Ziggs you want to be positioning away from your minions moving back and forth horizontally to Ziggs, it's nearly impossible for him to hit a Q in this scenario and if does throw a Q he will miss it a large % of the time giving you a 4-6 second window of pressure in addition to using up his mana (wave clear, trading resources). This analysis may not have been as impactful in this particular instance but overall this is going to have a huge impact on your early laning and your play demonstrated you don't see the opportunities to apply pressure for free.

The biggest mistake however was the 3:40 trade I mentioned, this one decision cost you 15 cs / xp very early in the game (representative of 60%+ of your overall cs/xp).

I'll just summarize the impact that could have been changed with relatively simple improvements in decision making:
-Riven doesn't die in the early invade putting Lulu very behind in lane against a Riven, Ziggs doesn't get blue saving you approximately 10cs
-You don't take the 3:40 trade and save yourself 15cs/xp staying in lane resulting in a RoA 4 minutes earlier (because you didn't buy the 2nd Dorans as well)
-You get the first dragon at 9mins (and thus they don't get the dragon later)

All in we're talking about at least a 3500 gold differential pre 15 minutes. That's a game that's pretty close to snowballing out of control in your favor. This game was extremely winnable.

Granted your team had made some poor decisions at this point but so have your opponents, gold was even as of my last note. Think about the impact that the extra gold would have had in denying the enemy laners of your teammates and mitigating their mistakes later on.

Bottom line, the advantages you gave away early were worth at least a 5% winrate overall. That's enormous and applied over time would completely mitigate your struggles and likely get you to high plat / low diamond.

Cwar! Nice review!

Ok let me add my 2 cents in to this thread t0oPerfect.
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Your annie has hit a brick (you should know that u need to adjust your champ pool each season) annie back in the days was insane, now lets be real there are way better champs then her!

As cwar said before, thresh is a big nono for u sir!

Solo Q support is more of a gamble, either u do it well and u have a bad adc, or u make mistakes and ruin the lane.

This is why your Blitz has 65% & janna 35%, i would not give up janna, just adjust your runes & masteries a bit (and play way more defensive).

Nasus is currently the metabreaker for top lane, he counters so many top laners (alistar-nidalee-maokai) By just farming it up to late game.

Irelea is OP, keep on playing her, and change your 'annie mid' to orianna

Your stats at mid are telling me you really hitted a brick mid lane... (no offense we all get bad teams up to diamond 1)


Let me ask u this, if u were to play against a diamond 1 what role would u like to get?! (and im pretty sure uwould say top)

cwar,

I'm on a Mac and having difficulty with the replayer but I'm going to try to get it to work and consider what you said. I have to admit I disagree with a lot of it right now but since I'm the one who asked for help I'm going to try to keep an open mind.

I think we played a few games together like a year or so back when you were first getting into the game didn't we? Sounds like you've gotten much better, congrats. Still a jungle main? Have you hit diamond yourself?

beig,

If I were to play against a diamond 1 I'd want Ziggs mid for sure because that's where I'd be most confident in my matchups. There's too much counterplay to Nasus top and too much can go wrong too fast with little hope to recover.

sorry my question was wrong,

Lets say u get offered a propbet with another player to win the most games over a sample of 1k ranked games.


What would be your prior pick? 2nd, & 3th?!

At my current level I would say mid followed by top and jungle. If I were able to do the bet in mid gold or lower I'd say top followed by mid and jungle.

I'm not sure how you think Nasus "counters" Nidalee and Maokai. Those aren't particularly easy matchups. Nasus certainly outscales them both but if you fall behind even slightly in those lanes it's going to be a nightmare. I'd say Nasus really only "counters" champions like Jax and Tryndamere just because wither is so devastating to their kit and neither have a particularly strong early game to start snowballing.

I also don't think Annie mid is an issue right now. Like I said in another post I think she's very strong and underplayed. She's at nearly 60% win on probuilds and a lot of that is mid.

open your mind for feedback, because u are currently blocking it, i have been stuck in silver for 300 games, yet i have reached diamond 1 multiple times. (i have the feeling you are kinda tilted looking at your match history)

Mid lane is THE lane with the most potential to make or break the game.

U know why?! my friends told me what my problem was, i sucked with way too many champs. They told me my karthus is godlike why didnt i kept on playing him, which i replied to with, **** karthus hes so boring!

And i fell in love with the champ once i knew what my true power with karthus was.


Ok then you say your annie is decent, now what i want u to do is play a game and during Early-Mid-Late game (in a game with no camping of enemy or your jungler)

I want you to chek out your farm & kda

And calculate howmuch better 'your annie' is then your oponent if you include 13 farm = 1 kill or 2 assists , if u play breakeven vs a plat X, im sorry but then u are where u belong


Decent mid laners on diamond = 150-180 farm+/20minute mark.


Im telling u, and others will tell u aswell your nasus stats are sick(one of the best i have seen in ages) and he will be your ticket to diamond.

my lolking

http://www.lolking.net/summoner/euw/...6#ranked-stats

you know this game is super swingy right

I've lost 10 in a row before, 14 out of 15. I've had a streak when I won 20 out of 21. Yes league is generally self correcting unlike in poker but if you have a ~50% winrate its the same random walk like in poker and swings are insane.

Yeah, this is why I like to play it! I feel like mid is the position with the most carry potential. You can roam, invade, gank, farm your jungle, help with dragons, etc. There are just a ton of options at your disposal. Of course this means you have more responsibility as well.

I am not trying to block feedback or anything... not trying to be rude and I do appreciate the input but telling me to play champions I'm good at feels like someone telling me to make sure my runes or masteries are correct. I'm like yes I know that. But I will note your suggestion to re evaluate where I think my strengths and weaknesses lie in champ selection.

Yes you are right I am a bit tilted .

For farm numbers I aim for ~100 cs around 13 min and ~200 cs around 20 min. These are ideal numbers for me and if I'm near these marks I know I'm doing well. I generally keep this pace with Ziggs especially if I'm able to pick up an early blue and do wraiths and I frequently farm nearly as well with Annie but admittedly I have been having a tough stretch with her recently. She is less consistent due to her vulnerability to ganks and she has power spikes and troughs due to some of her itemization choices (specifically RoA).

I appreciate the compliment about my Nasus stats and I will seriously consider playing him more often.

In terms of the champion selection perhaps it's just more productive for me to show my personal champ pool and reasoning (some areas are more refined than others) and it might help you make improvements based on the leveraging the thought process. I focus a lot on early game strength in all roles as compared to others here on 2p2 tending more towards scaling and I'm willing to take safety in side wave management over pure stat scaling in jungle/top as I feel well done rotations are superior to team fighting in solo queue.

Overall strategy:
I focus on 2-3 metrics per role and generally choose champions that have stable to good meta lane matchups overall. I also do currently avoid the most mechanically complex champions as I'm improving my laning / team fighting and I figure I have enough to worry about.

Top:
Nidalee (100% of the time whenever not banned)
Ryze
Kayle/Teemo (emergency backup)

Factors I look for:
-Early strength in lane to draw jungler presence / get early towers or kills
-Safety in split pushing or scaling
-At least modest wave clear (can be item dependent however)

Explanation: I'll play Nidalee any chance I get, contrary to popular belief I don't think she is mechanically complex but rather strategically complex, low ELO players don't utilize her for rotations and it shows in her winrate (45% in Bronze, 55%+ in challenger). For me Nidalee has an ideal mid/late game in her ability to manage side waves safely and rotate quickly/safely. Unlike most Nidalee players I'm looking forward to her nerfs so she's banned less because cougar W being the core reason I feel she's strong in solo queue. A potential replacement could be Gnar but I've yet to test this.

Ryze is simply quite good in lane and brings great scaling, very straight forward.

Mid:
-Ahri (when available except into Kass, Talon types)
-Kayle (emergency backup)

Factors I look for in mid:
-Kill pressure in lane
-Early 2v2 and 3v3 strength (scrappy dragon fights included)
-Excellent wave clear

Explanation: Ahri has a 52% winrate at all levels despite being a high skill cap champion. I'm willing to play high skill champions if they have popularity and high winrates as it shows their power level is relatively easy to achieve. Ahri has what I look for in a mid, kill potential in lane and great early 2v2 and 3v3s. She does have tougher matchups but they aren't so difficult as to not be stable and her excellent 2v2 and 3v3 strength still gives you the potential to go off. As noted, shoving waves in after good trades / kills in lane is very important to me.

Other viable alternatives could be things like Syndra, Lulu and Ryze that fit my metrics but I've yet to test them.

Jungle:
J4
Pantheon (backup J4)
Elise (AP needed)
Wukong (if I felt I needed scaling which is basically never)

What I look for:
-Great pre-6 gank potential
-Late game presence relative to all pre-6 ganking junglers (consider the strengths of scaling, CC, hard engage, split pushing)

Explanation: J4 is the perfect solo queue jungler in my mind. His early ganks are elite and get stronger after 6 which should be used to capture dragons/towers. His late game is strong relative to his early strength with scaling tankiness, potential multi-person knockups and hard engage. He also is a very safe managing side waves and clearing them relatively quickly.

Pantheon is J4 but worse so only taken when J4 is blocked, his late presence is significantly worse. If my opponents have very defensive / safe lanes I will play Wukong (rare though).

Support:
-Lulu
-Zyra

What I look for:
-Lane presence is huge for me at support, being ranged is a huge advantage in solo queue and let's you pressure opposing ADCs
-2v2 and 3v3 strength / scrappy dragon fighting
-Some damage to close easy kills

Explanation: Lulu is just the best at winning small scale fights when her ult is up. She also brings nice early damage while still decently scaling into team fights with her utility stacking nicely with Mikael's. Sona is another potential option here but untested. Zyra brings the early presence with weaker 2v2 and 3v3 fighting but great late game presence and more damage.

ADC I avoid whenever possible at the moment but:
Trist
Jinx

Ok so I got the replay up and running. Upon reviewing this game, I actually believe I played rather poorly. My positioning in general this game was just awful. Generally I don't think it's this bad and it's rather unfortunate that the Ziggs matchup is mostly all about positioning.

Anyway I'm able to address some specifics now so let's do that...

The red invade. This could have gone better. I went to go help. I saw that Nocturne had become aware of our presence and had decided to head off to wraiths/the bush near mid tower so I thought the little skirmish was over. I also HATE wasting time roaming so when nothing came of this I basically said "**** it I'm out." I didn't expect my team to engage and it turns out this was one of those hyper aggro ****** Rivens (she provides abundant evidence of this through her later decision making). So yes I misread this situation. I thought nothing would develop and headed back to lane. By the time the fight started I decided it was too late to go back to try and help so. I think this simply boils down to poor communication between myself and my teammates. A few pings from any of us would have helped to clear up what were trying to accomplish. It was a one for one trade which I guess is fine but it resulted in a blue for Ziggs which is certainly not fine.

The 3:40 trade. This is quite nearly disastrous as you are correct to point out. I don't really have an excuse for this one other than I overestimated my damage and underestimated his. I turn back in a bit of a panic... I'm basically thinking "**** **** ****... should I just all in???" I'm lucky this didn't result in a death but it put me very far behind and removed all pressure from Ziggs. I think I may have been a bit tilted here and trying to force something to happen that wasn't there.

I got hit by too many Ziggs Q's. My dancing shoes weren't on this game.

My positioning for the first dragon. I get hit by a satchel, take too much damage and have to flash out. Derp. I'm not ready to say that's the only reason we gave up dragon however.

A couple things I still disagree with you on:

My itemization. I finish my rod at 16:20. That's on the late side but it really isn't the end of the world. I can't agree with your suggestion to rush damage when I'm losing lane to a Ziggs getting blue. It's just suicide imo. Even with the catalyst 2 Qs were about half my health. Yes I got hit by too many but I'm never going to dodge all of them. Imagine if I had a blasting rod instead. I'm never getting in close unless I want to flash all in and he's just going to poke me down and zone me. Honestly I think going early damage here is a big throw. Boots may have been preferential to the 2nd dorans. I'm OK with my decision to buy some wards.

My roam bot. My lane is pushed and Ziggs is in base when I decide to do this. At this point I can stand in lane twiddling my thumbs, I can farm wraiths, or I can put in a gank attempt bot. To me the latter is very clearly the correct decision.

If you are feeling inclined to do so, re watch what's happening bot as I'm running in for a gank. For whatever reason they're pushing the wave which is stupid if someone's trying to gank. Thresh then misses a hook and so puts his Q on cooldown. Nami and Vayne decide to use this opportunity to engage. Now, Thresh uses his lantern to disengage from the skirmish. Imagine instead if he drops his lantern for me and they extend this fight as long as possible. This is such an easy double kill into dragon I'm tilted watching it again. Jfc.

Your suggestion to position more aggressively/trade with Ziggs early. I just don't think it's a good way to play the matchup. You're right that moving horizontally is the correct movement pattern and I'm a bit careless here. The thing is though Ziggs is never going to throw a Q until he sees me moving in a direct line for him which is how I have to move if I want to try and trade. Then like I said I take free damage or I'm stuck chasing him like a dummy. My solution is to play passively and not even engage in this little type of skirmish because I expect to lose. So you're right that I'm passing up on opportunities to be aggressive. That's a willful choice, not a lack of awareness. I have a lot of experience here but I'm willing to defer to your judgement if you tell me you're a diamond mid main or like secretly SKT T1 Faker.

You say I should ping off the Riven roaming mid when I see the Ziggs ward. I can't agree here... our cc/all in potential and her mobility renders the fact that he has vision of that bush completely irrelevant.

I didn't notice any mistakes as far as my lane management/back timing upon rewatching the replay.

Anyway to summarize this game... it's actually somewhat even for quite some time but then my team just decides to throw at ~20 min. I'm a part of this too. Riven is top which enables a free dragon. She then makes a stupid all in decision and dies. Vayne shows up mid and kills me faster than I can blink. I think my team decides to like 3v4 them after that and most if not all of them die. Riven respawns and immediately dives into at least 3 enemies to all in the support and dies again. GG WP.

So yeah I didn't play great. Generally I believe I perform much better than this. I made more mistakes than I thought I did which actually makes me feel much better. But I didn't play terribly either. Hopefully my point is clear... I feel as though every game is like this. I'd say I had from a neutral to slightly positive effect on this game even though by my standards I played poorly. It's true that I need to aim for more. But a neutral to positive effect shouldn't be an insta loss and it is because my team just ****ing threw and it seems like they do every game. I know I need to focus on what's in my control and the mistakes I am making and just grind it out. But can I just say it ****ing sucks? It ****ing sucks, it's really frustrating, and I'm sick of it.

I don't think rod is a good item on annie, 2x dorans into deathcap. I dont' think shes a rod based mid laner at all, I can't think of matchups where I would rod. Also i think deathcap is the reason shes viable, becuase she can get deathcap void real fast

Ok if you guys are telling me not to go RoA I can definitely experiment with cutting it. I do love it though. Deathcap is definitely core and it would have helped me in teamfights but I think it would've meant I get destroyed even harder in lane. So if I went damage early I probably would have gone for a dfg in this particular game but idk I can definitely try some different build orders. Rushing sorc boots instead of catalyst also could have been a good option here I think.

I don't think RoA is not an option but it's situational and if you're on pace to hit a 15+ RoA I would go with a different plan. Furthermore, you really need to avoid any fail trades if you're going RoA as it will set you very far back. Catalyst is a nice option in lane against the poke-y lane matchups like Syndra, Ori, Ziggs and it gives you a lot of objective control with the extra beef and extra mana to shove lane.

Simply based on their comp though (even assuming you weren't behind early) I'm probably less happy about RoA as you need to take those early fights at dragon convincingly based on the comps.