League of Legends is one of the world’s most popular games, and for good reason. It’s initially very inviting to new players looking to dip their toes into the MOBA genre. Though as one gets deeper into the game, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the complexity and frustrations of competitive play.
This guide is made to help you on your journey of improvement. Whether you’re struggling to get out of Iron or chasing your dreams of Grand Master, there are always new lessons to be learned.
Check out our 10 tips below to start raking in the LP and start your climb!
1) Find and Master Your Mains
League has A LOT of champions, 163 to be exact, as of the time of writing. For a new player, that is a daunting pool to select from. For new players, our advice is to first find a few mains. These are champions that you understand well and are comfortable playing.
This can take some experimentation, so don’t stress if it takes you some time to find your champion vibe. Enjoy the exploration and variety, and you will naturally come upon some favorites soon enough.
Once you have some favorites, it’s time to master them. You should understand your main’s abilities inside and out. Does your Q fly over walls? Can I squeeze in an extra auto attack between my ability combos?
Here’s where you can do some research, YouTube is filled with champion guides. Take advantage of these free resources to enrich your knowledge and truly master your champion.
Getting to know your champion thoroughly will have a huge impact on improving your overall play and especially your Micro, which we will get more into later.
2) Master your Role
League of Legends has 5 roles to choose from. Choosing one or two roles to master will make you a much more effective player. For beginners, we will explain the roles in brief below. If you’re a seasoned player, jump further down the section to get some tips on mastering your role.
Top Lane
The top lane is typically filled by a bruiser or tank champion, though in the current meta, some ranged champions like Teemo or Vayne viable are top lane options. (Though you may get flamed for the off-meta pick, reader beware)
We like to think of Top lane as the Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones. You are the lone protector of your lane. Your main goal in the early game is to farm and stay safe.
Dueling in the Top lane early against your opponent is risky. Feeding your opponent will get you rolled, while getting fed will make for some easy LP. Additionally, you have to keep a careful eye out for jungle ganks; vision is crucial, as over-extending even once could spell disaster for your team in the long run.
In the late game, Top Laners are usually either engaging in team fights, soaking up damage and tying down their opponents for teammates to take out, or split pushing lanes, destroying towers and inhibitors to break down enemy defenses.
Give Top Lane a try if you like playing big tanks with lots of crowd control and a usually slow early game.
Mid Lane
Mid Laners are at the center of it all. They are responsible for their lane as well as roaming to help other lanes and secure objectives. Mid Lane is usually filled by mage or assassin champions, though some like to poke down their enemies with marksmen. In general, these mages or assassins prefer to burst down enemies with quick, devastating combos.
Mid-lane is for the hyperactive player who likes having a lot to focus on. You will have to keep an eye on your mini-map to watch for enemy ganks, chances for you to gank, or teammates looking to secure objectives.
Try mastering Mid Lane if you enjoy being in the center of the action and have the confidence to handle it.
Bottom Lane / Carry
Two words, Glass Cannon. Bot Lane champions are made to be low health and have high damage output. Most often, this role is called ADC (Attack Damage Carry) because it is most often played by marksmen champions who deal huge amounts of attack damage in the late gate. Some people bring mages into the Bot Lane; then, you would be called an APC (Ability Power Carry).
The role of Bot Lane is meant to farm early game to hoard items and level up quickly. Then into the mid and late game, the Bot Lane should use their power gained from farming to blow through enemies in team fights. The role is also called Carry because the expectation is that you “carry” your teammates to a win with your high damage output.
Bot Lane requires good CS (Creep Score), meaning you need to last-hit as many minions as you can. You also need to watch out for the enemy team looking to disrupt your farm, poke you down, or all in you for some easy gold. Your support follows you into bot late to protect you and keep the enemies off your back.
Give Bot Lane a shot if you enjoy a high-risk, high-reward role and don’t mind being squishy.
Support
Support is a vital and often underappreciated role in League of Legends. It’s also the hardest role in terms of being able to climb quickly.
We like to think of Supports as the glue that holds the team together. Your main purpose is to aid and protect your Carry, to help them power scale.
Supports often have a lot of utility and crowd-control abilities. In laning phase, the Support uses their abilities to disrupt the enemy team farming and protect the Carry. In the late game, the Support role is vital in team fights, either helping engage or protecting the team with shields or healing.
Enchanters and tanks are most often good in this role. Supports don’t farm, often relying on starting items, kills, and assists to gain gold. This means they are usually a bit behind the team in terms of gold and items. Good support players are selfless, putting their team before themselves.
Main support if you like being integral to your team’s success and enjoy the selflessness of the role.
Jungle
Jungle is the most unique role and my personal favorite. Jungle players aren’t responsible for a lane; instead, they play all over the map. Junglers don’t farm lane minions; instead, they have their own jungle minions that spawn periodically around the map, called camps.
Junglers have a lot to be responsible for. You play the most important role in securing objectives like Dragons, the Rift Herald, and Baron Nashor. You need to ward and protect your side of the jungle against enemy invaders looking to kill you or steal your camps and buffs. You also are the main ganking force for your team, looking for opportunities to ambush an unsuspecting enemy laner.
Assassins, tanks, and bruisers do well in the Jungle role. You are a make-or-break member of the team in this role. Don’t be surprised if you do really well or really poorly to see some “jgl diff”’ messages typed in chat.
Give the Jungle role a try if you enjoy playing the entire map or if you don’t perform well in lanes against opponents.
Back to Role Tips!
So you have a main role in mind; now you have to master it. Learn what your main champion is best at in your main role. Are you a front-line CC fiend, or are you a back-line healer? Are you better at roaming or staying put for the long haul? Matching your champion to your role will set you up to use your kit to its maximum potential.
Each role is different, and it’s up to you to maximize your team’s success within your role. Don’t try and fill the shoes of other roles; not only will you be stepping on some toes, but you will also be less successful than your teammate.
For example, say you’re playing support, and your ADC is struggling, dying, and falling behind in CS. Giving up on them and trying to farm yourself into a Carry will only further weaken your team. Stick with your role and try to help get them on the right track.
Who knows, maybe all they needed was a little help to come back and pop off in the late game.
As we said with your main, research your role. There is a treasure trove of knowledge out there on what makes a good Top Laner or a good Jungler. Spend some time studying your role, and you will feel the difference you make in the game.
- YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: How Much Do Pro Gamers Make?
3) Know Your Matchup
Believe it or not, the game starts as soon as you find a match. Champion select is a crucial part of the game, and learning how to adjust your strategy before the game starts can make the difference between a tough game and an easy “ff 15” stomp.
In champion select, you need to watch what everyone else is doing. What champions and spells are your team and the enemy team picking? What’s missing in your team’s composition? What can you exploit from the enemy team’s composition?
Most importantly, you need to assess your match-up. If you’re playing Top Lane and the enemy team locks in Garen, open a web search tab really quick and figure out his strengths and weaknesses. Does he counter your main? If so, pick a different character you’re comfortable with to counter him.
Knowing your matchup in your role and as an overall team will give you insights into what your strategy is for that game, whether it be an all-in rush to end the game early or a slow scale-up for a late-game steamroll.
No two games of League of Legends are the same; A new strategy should be formed in each champion select screen. Do this, and you’re sure to have better game outcomes.
4) Bans Matter
In the same vein as matchups, who you ban in champion select has a huge impact on the game. Most often, players leap to ban the most OP champions of the current patch. While this strategy is a safe bet, it isn’t always the best move for your game.
Say, for example, you’re in a patch where everyone is SICK of dealing with Yasuo players. Lucky for you, one of your mains in Vel’Koz, who in this patch stomps Yasuo. In this case, you don’t need to ban Yasuo, even if he can tend to feel OP in lower elos.
You can take him on and beat him down with your good pick and use your ban on a different threat, perhaps banning one of your dangerous counters instead. Using your ban effectively will dramatically change the experience of each of your games.
5) Minion Management
Minions play a huge part in League of Legends. They are a central part of the gold economy, provide lane control, and help push against enemy defenses. Knowing how to use minions effectively in the early, mid, and late game is crucial to your team’s success.
An important note, though this tip doesn’t directly apply to Junglers, it’s still good information for them to know. Minions are often good signals for ganks or dives, and a good Jungler will use this information to their team’s advantage.
In the early game, Laners need to last-hit their minions to farm, but also need to decide how to manipulate the wave of minions to their advantage. You can either slow push, fash push, or freeze the minion wave.
You can slow push by leaving up to three enemy minions alive in each wave. This allows your wave of minions to slowly build in numbers. Slow pushing is an effective tactic to set up a dive with your jungler, making your opponent lose out on a lot of minions worth of XP and gold.
Fash pushing is simply taking out minions as quickly as possible, pushing your wave toward the enemy tower. You do this to move your wave quickly after you either kill your opponent to deny as much farm as possible or when you plan on resetting to spend gold or roaming to another lane.
Freezing is ensuring that the minions stay in the same place, close to your tower. Again, you do this to make your opponent lose out on gold and XP or to set up an easy gank from your jungler.
Understanding how to use the wave to your advantage will allow you to keep control of the lane and keep your enemy laner on their heels.
Is your enemy low on health and out of mana? If you’re sure you’re safe from a gank, then fast push your minions in to get some easy plating gold; your enemy can’t stop you. Are you wanting to just sit back and farm in the early game to scale? Freeze the wave close to your tower and rake in the gold.
Use these minion management tips to keep your CS high and to position properly in your lane–Now, winning your lane just got a little bit easier.
- READ ALSO: Best Gaming Setups
6) Improve Your Macro
Macro refers to all of the big-picture parts of playing League of Legends. While you’re playing, you also need to be absorbing massive amounts of information and then plan a proper response. Macro is all about awareness and strategy.
You need to be tuned into your minimap; what are your teammates up to? Where do we need to set up our vision? Is now a good time to take Baron? All of these questions are part of your Macro gameplay.
Improving your Macro comes from experience and study. A great way to improve Macro is by post-event analysis. Let’s say you’re playing top and pushing without vision into the enemy tower, and suddenly, you’re ganked from the jungle and die in a 2 v 1 fight.
In this example, your mistake was in your Macro play. Did you ward the jungle before pushing in? Did you know where the enemy jungler and mid-laner are? Pushing into a lane blind without information on enemy locations is extremely risky, and that decision is what got you killed.
A player with good Macro would ward the jungle and wait to push until they knew where their enemies were, greatly increasing the chances of a successful push.
Developing your Macro is essential to becoming a good League player; as one climbs the ranks, the Macro game becomes much more complex. Getting a good macro will help you make “Galaxy Brain” plays and climb the ranks with ease.
7) Practice Your Micro
The opposite, but equally important to Macro, is Micro gameplay. This simply refers to your ability to play your champion. Mastering your mains is an example of improving your Micro. Micro encompasses things like how well you hit skill shots, knowing when to use abilities and spells, your CS, kiting, and the efficiency of clearing jungle camps.
To improve Micro, you just need to practice, practice, practice. Experience is the name of the game here. Improving your Micro will provide an insane return on investment.
A Xerath who can’t hit an ability to save his life goes 2/4/12 in a game and is moderately useful. A Xerath who lands his abilities gets big stuns and ability combos and goes 15/3/25 instead.
The proof is in the pudding for Micro gameplay; if you get better at playing, you will climb the ladder easier
8) A Monk’s Mental
At this point, we have to address the elephant in the room. League is… tilting. REALLY tilting. When you get put into a complex and competitive game that goes for 15 – 45 minutes, there are bound to be frustrations.
Getting upset is human, but learning how to manage your emotions is essential to being a successful League of Legends player. There are some realities of the game you need to accept, and we will lay a few out for you:
- Sometimes your teammates will feed hard
- Sometimes you will get flamed in all chat
- You’re going to get your butt kicked sometimes
- You will get mean people in your games
Lucky for you, there are solutions out there. The mute button is a lifesaver for your mental. In fact, if you know you’re sensitive to criticism or smack talk, it’s probably best to just “/mute all” every game.
If you’re being flamed or getting frustrated at a teammate, it’s best to just refocus on your own performance and game. You can’t be responsible for how your entire team plays. Just trying the best you can is all you can do.
Next, typers beware. I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten free kills by ambushing an angry enemy typer. If you’re looking to truly climb in ranked games, spend less time typing and more type focusing on the game.
Keeping a level head is a tough part of the game. Lucky for you, there are resources to help understand your emotions and how to manage them. The game developers are so aware of the anger this game causes that they have made a Tilt Test to help players identify and manage their emotional response to the game.
We don’t have the perfect solution for getting your head straight, all we can say is try to keep a Monk’s Mental, and it will help you climb.
- RELATED ARTICLE: Are Aim Trainers Worth It?
9) Solo Que Awareness
Alright, this is our own special Macro tip. Trying to climb in Solo Que is frustrating; you never know who you’re going to get on your team. Instead of getting frustrated by the inconsistency, we like to think of it as just another part of Macro gameplay.
As the game develops, keep an eye on your teammates. Try and pick out the better players on your team and make a point to follow and work with them for the rest of the game. If you have one or two teammates struggling, try to minimize the damage they cause.
The same rules apply to the enemy team. Maybe their support is terrible at positioning, so you let your whole team know that they have a weakness to exploit.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that you’re playing with 9 other human beings, all of which have strengths and weaknesses.
Learning how to identify and act on these differences in each game will lead to a more rewarding Marco strategy and winning more games.
10) Keep Learning
Every star of every sport will tell you the same thing; you can never stop improving. Even Grand Master League players work to continue learning and improving themselves in the game.
Every moment of the game has a lesson to teach. In each game, you can take away new knowledge to apply to the next game. That’s what getting better is all about. There is no such thing as failure, only opportunities to learn.
League of Legends is hard. It demands the quickest of hands and the sharpest of minds, but if you’re willing to put in the effort to learn, practice, and reflect, you may be surprised by how high up the ranks you can go!
Final Words
There you go; these were our top 10 tips to climb like crazy in the League of Legends. We really hope this has been helpful to you and if you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out.
Did we miss something? Let us know in the comment section below. We love hearing from you!
Be the first to comment