i should just give into the inevitable and play orianna every game again

winning is fun, going 0/10 is not despite how enjoyable khalista is to play

cannot wait for the new champ select. decided im not playing ranked anymore until it comes out because its just such a headache having to deal with the same old bs of everyone arguing over who gets what role.

really not looking forward to that. forced meta is bad for the game

Yup.

Very rarely if ever do I have problems in champ select.

What's the deal with the new solo Q, you call out positions or something beforehand? And what do you mean by forced meta? As in, we shouldn't be pseudo locked into having a top/mid/jg/adc/sup? I don't see that being much of an issue as virtually every game is like this anyways. Maybe I'm missing something.

you pick two positions before you queue up, and you're given one of them. and yeah, forced meta as in you're forced to choose from these verbatim: top, mid, jungle, bottom, or support.

not sure when the last time i saw a solo q game not adhering to those positions - probably when i watched zizek stream and pick double jungle as last pick 9 months ago.

I usually see non-meta setups when two fellow bronzies (well, silvers, but same difference) fight over a position in select and just lock their champs anyway and try to steal cs while continuing the fight in all chat.

This post may cause some controversy, but while I'm not the best LoL player, I have been playing since beta and I have experienced essentially every iteration of the game since its inception.

While I don't believe that any point in the game is uncarryable, I do believe that there is a segment of the ranked ladder that is more prone to variance than others. In my experience, it is easier to carry a team in high bronze (II, I) than in low silver (IV,V), and once you pass the low silver, the game becomes much easier, and wins and losses are more determined by your individual performance. Maybe this is akin to the fact that I main support and that as I go up in rank the play of ADCs gets better, but in my experience in all of my years of league, the low silver elo range has been the worst. I made it to gold 4 in S4, and I was in bronze in S1 (which was kind of the equivalent of silver now), so I don't know how it is above those ranks but in that range of elos that I have been, I can say conclusively with thousands of games to back me up that low silver has the worst, most toxic, most likely to feed, troll, afk, etc players of them. I don't mean to say that it is a form of 'elo hell', but I do know that a vast majority of players get put into the low silvers after their placement series. If I recall correctly you can lose 6/10 placement games and still be silver 4. I won 7/10 and started in s2. My theory is that since so many people leave their placements at low silver, you see more variance and deviation in peoples' respective levels of skill. I wonder if there is some kind of graph or chart to back this up. I also wonder what rank most brand new, fresh level 30 accounts end up at after their first placements. Even Riot has admitted that the placements arent a guaranteed way to determine what rank a player should be at, its just kind of a springboard for the process.

Any thoughts? I'm not complaining or anything, I'm just making an observation.

Another question for you guys in higher rank:

At what elo range do you start seeing consistently better play from your teammates? It seems like there hasn't been much of a change of team skill between silver 3 and gold. What do you guys think?

Well it's obviously easier to get better when you are in Silver than when you are in higher elo. People make extremely big mistakes that are super easy to take advantage of, in higher elo these edges get smaller.

That being said, I have an easier time winning in Diamond 5, than I got in P5 and lower. That's simply because I'm not very mechanically gifted, my edge comes from coordinating my team and people in lower elos simply don't listen if they think something is wrong.

That's different in Diamond, when you make a call, people follow, they will blame you if the call was bad but usually when somebody makes a call people just do it. The first time I really thought people are good was when my elo peaked at D2, it felt like people there had good mechanics and decisionmaking and overall was much more "stressful" to play. When baron vision gets dark it's really scary, that's really not the case in lower elos where baron etc. can be dark for 10 minutes and people disappear and you are like "well baron is gone" and they just ended up doing nothing.

Ordered a 144hz monitor, primarily for CSGO, I'm wondering if it'll be even noticeable for league.

I believe I am in a similar situation as you. I think I am good at map awareness, and good at knowing the 'right' plays to make, but so many people in silver just do their own thing, and my mechanics aren't good enough to make up for it. How did you get to where you are? I mean I practice CSing all the time and I NEVER get any better. After 5 years of this game I can still barely manage 130 CS in 20 minutes and thats with no resistance. Thats pretty much why I relegated myself to support (and jungle as a backup). How do you get to diamond as a mechanically deficient player?

Play 1 champ.
Play it in the jungle or support.
Dodge all games you dont get your champ/role.
Source: Got Diamond 1 doing this, multiple times.

Also , play mechanically simple champs, or champs that last hit for you almost - eg annie/malzahar. Annie you can Q minions for free mana cost if you last hit it, and malz space aids will kill whole minion waves later, similar w/ cho gath top once you get a few ranks in a skill+item, it'll clear a whole wave for you.

How do you avoid the crazy LP penalties from dodging?

Also how do you keep yourself from being bored to tears playing the same champ over and over?

Which jungle champs tend to work best at lower elos?

I used to play and love gangplank (He got me to gold in S4) but they changed his kit since I came back to the game. Given that I am a bad mechanical player, is his new kit substantially more difficult than his old one? Is he viable in the jungle?

LP don't matter, MMR matters. For example if you got 0 LP and your MMR is super high, you won't be demoted. You also start winning much more LP, like up to 40. You might skip promos etc. LP are pretty much just there to make you feel good.

Practice. Remember that a guy without Hands made it to upper gold and there is several one handed players in mid Diamond. Mechanics don't matter all that much unless you missplay really really badly.

And also, you have to think while playing. Sometimes people just autopilot through the game, ask yourself questions, like "Who has the better teamfight,scaling,skirmishing, lanematchups etc." and drill buzzwords like "visioncontrol, minimap" into your head. Something I did with a friend in Sc2 when we played together was that every couple seconds we would just randomly say the word "minimap", eventually that led to us staring at the minimap.

Also people tend to look for mistakes others do, rather than what mistakes they do themselfes. A single ward of a support can make the difference between Baron being taken or you acing the opponnent team in the attempt.

Different champions have different playstyles, with Udyr, my speciality is vision and objectivecontrol. I can't count how many two man barons I took, by constantly clearing out opponent vision till at one point there was an opening. Or by using specialtactics, by proxying waves and buying time for the team.

You main Taric, Taric is good for doing picks, so clear vision sit in a bush with your team and stun and kill somebody.

Years of serious sc2 play conditioned me to stare at the mini map. I just have a "sense" where the enemy team is at all times. Very useful.

Unfortunately I'll often ignore this sense and face check anyways.

Caw caw caw surprise, they're in the bush?

nah on fiddle you cant even come remotely close to face checking. you need to play like you're made of glass (you are). im extremely cautious with him.

When you ask for jungle politely, you get it a lot, probably 8/10 games, so you have to dodge less than 2x a day if you're playing hardcore.

I enjoy playing high risk high reward allin champs, so I find fiddlesticks a lot of fun, mostly if my team doesn't feed like ****s, then I will get an opportunity to win the game with a good ult. Feelsgoodman. Find the champs that you enjoy to the level you could happily play 10 games on it a day, pick one of them.


Go do something else in the dodge cooldown - 5min is nothing, 30 mins I workout, 60 min I workout, on a 3x dodge? I play a smurf instead. As nisash said - LP is irrelevant.

Champ is irrelevant at low elo.

Gangplank has barrel mechanics now, but imo if you really enjoy a champ to the point you can spam hundreds of games on them - play that champ.

Noob friendly point and click champs are generally what you want when you are bad mechanically. Garen, Xin, Amumu, Annie, Malz, Ashe, Taric.

Keep it simple stupid applies here.

One of the big reasons I found success on fiddle is because there are a lot of areas where making the correct decision is hard, but making the correct decision can win a game. What fiddle helped me with is that either I'm in a good situation to fight or I'm in a bad situation to fight - the champions abilities make it very clear that if my ult is down and my flash is down GTFO.

There are tons of situations where people make positioning errors, or leave/commit to fights they shouldn't, by playing fiddle I feel like all the grey areas are taken out of that process and it makes it easy for me to make better decisions.

^ doesn't WW belong to that group of pnc champs?
He certainly is my absolute favourite champ.

Anyone got tips for WW's jungle kit item build order?

I have been struggling a lot to make him relevant. I was used to playing him effectively in early/mid S4 before I left to return now. But his items have changed dramatically.

I have tried a few build paths as shown on lolking and pals, but seem to be consistently behind the power curve with him. So I'm either screwing up the item build order, or (very well likely) play him too inefficiently to keep up with the other champs.

The latter will correct itself, but a better item order would certainly help that.
It feels that the jungle item is just so darn expensive that it significantly delays the other useful items (such as wit's end, tank items, etc).

haha

What I usually do when I'm near a dangerous bush (a bush with potential enemies in them), is that I walk like nothing is going on but then when approaching the bush (not going straight at it but passing it from a side), I juke the bush "predicting" that an enemy is there

Cost like 1s, but it's worth it in the end

build tank, do not initiate with ult

win most of your games

I don't understand why you think its so bad to be silver, just a game. climbing without dedicating a ton of time usually requires one trick ponying which if you don't like doing just don't

no one looks down on you because you are not gold, or not anybody worth caring about. getting to diamond is more trouble than its worth, esp if you dont' enjoy spamming the same champion over a thousand games

testing out new stream http://www.twitch.tv/karakstarcraft

with new pc

might turn on and off a lot as i tweak settings

nice throwback

possibly the same reason that I do - as nisash said, in higher elo if you make a call people listen. it's more of a team game.

Everyone talks about "carrying yourself" out of bronze/silver. the concept of carrying yourself in a 5v5 game is inherently not conducive to a team game which is what the fun of league is about.

it gets boring watching toplaners keep pushing to 3/4 lane or past enemy dead tower with not even a trinket ward. It gets downright annoying when they keep dying and raging at our jungler (even when i'm not jungling) b/c he "doesn't gank".

nisash talks about his udyr vision wars, i'd like vision wars to be a part of my games more than just clearing out the enemy support's wards. i'd enjoy not being the one buying 90% of my team's green+pink wards every game. Yes, it would make the game harder if my team AND opp team warded whereas I have an inherent advantage in silver because no one but me buys wards, but it would add another dimension to the game and make it more interesting and fun and force me to improve as well. etc etc, i could keep going but i've already made a couple lengthy posts on the topic when the whole jah plat propbet joke was making the rounds