Climbing the Ladder

The vast majority of participants in this sub are here for one reason; they want to have a higher solo queue rank. The questions and methods vary, but that's the point of most of it, isn't it? And hey, it's not a bad sub. Many questions are answered to the point, and succinctly. The biggest problem I'd say is atrocious grammar. (You people know who you are!)

But, the fact of the matter is that there's a lot to do with this game that has nothing to do with the game. My favorite post of this kind is a variation of “how do I not get mad at people who make me mad?” My apologies, but most of us aren't really qualified to answer that question, unless you've got plenty of life experience or a psychology degree that no one knows about.

So, I'm going to get my thrity-year-old ass typing and try to help you out. Here's a bunch of stuff that you probably won't hear elsewhere that can help you. Tips are in boldface, so you can just skim through and read only those if you want. Enjoy.

There's no need to convince yourself that you're better than your rank. You already are better than your rank. League of Legends isn't soccer, where the outfielders (that's everybody but the goalkeeper) have relatively similar roles and skillsets. Everyone can run, pass, defend, and use their head. It's much more like baseball, where the players' skillsets are all over the place. Half of the players can't hit (pitchers), the other half can't pitch (everyone else), many players can't field (designated hitters, pitchers, and most overweight power hitters), many players can't run (anyone who bats third through eighth), and so on. In baseball though, that's understood. No pitcher is really expected to be a good hitter. Instead, pitchers are measured on their merits as a pitcher, and most everything else is ignored.

That's not the case in LoL. Your rank is the result of every ranked game you play, and that means you have to suffer the consequences of not only the ragers, trolls, and idiots, but also other circumstances. For example, can you really play each position equally well? I bet you can't. I'm willing to bet that most of your success comes with one position or one champion; if you took that out, your record and rank would be much worse than it is today. This isn't a bad thing, no one expects you to be good at everything. Well, actually, most people will expect you to be good at everything, but ignore those mouthbreathers. The point is that your current rank is an average, and it includes those games where you played out of position, had disconnects, or what have you.When you're playing your best game in your best position, you are better than that average. No two ways about it.

Elo Hell exists. It's just a few bad games you remember. Have you ever heard of confirmation bias? This is the thing that kicks the shit out of people in all walks of life, not just in this game. It's the phenomenon where people look for things that they want to believe, find them, strengthen that belief, and then go look for more things that they can believe. US politics is crippled by this, along with most major industries. I bet even your family has one person that just won't shut up about something they believe, and they LOVE saying “see? What I've been believing all along is TRUE!”

In LoL, the fact of the matter is that most players are losers. I don't mean that the lose games, but I do mean that they're ready to. I know you've seen it; when one player trounces another in lane, it's NEVER because the trouncer is good, it's ALWAYS because the victim is bad. The narrative is “I'd be so much higher if my teammates weren't bad”, and people LOVE proving to themselves that this is true. People think about it, put energy into it, and reap the returns. It takes effort and is noteworthy. Right now, I bet you could tell me a story of a game where there was just this one idiot on your team that fucked everything up, and if it weren't for him you'd have won that game easily.

But what I bet is that you can't tell me a story where the opposite happened. Do you remember a game where the other team was hamstrung by one idiot who singlehandedly threw the game for them? What champion was he playing, and which were you playing? How exactly did the laning phase go? Etc. Unless this game just happened today, I bet you won't be able to tell me, because almost every human being remembers the bad stuff more than the good stuff.

Climbing is the result of making better decisions than your opponents, over time. There are two types of decisions in LoL; “noncombat”, which is everything outside the actual game (runes, masteries, champ select, etc) and combat (laning, combo execution, rotations and objective choice, etc). All you need to do is make the right decision for this game here, over and over. That's all there is. This is not a super-reflexes game like competitive fighting games, where players will scratch and claw to get a 3-frame window (that's one twentieth of a second) of advantage time. It's more akin to chess, where the better player is better because of the decisions he makes. There are mechanical needs and it's possible to swing a game by being a badass with the mouse and buttons. But, for every game that is swung by a Reddit-worthy play, there's a boatload of much less interesting, simpler games where the best team won just by pressing advantages and backing off when they're unlikely to succeed.

Now, I know many of you watch pro streams and the like, where you see these guys keep coming out on top over and over again. But, the truth is that you're not going to win every game, so don't expect to win every game. In fact, you don't need to do much more than a 50% win rate. Not 50% +1, 50% will do. So, just keep making the right play, don't sweat short term results, and in the long term it will work out. After all, did you know that...

The ranked system is on your side. Really, it is. I've tracked over 200 games along with my LP movement, including a rather amazing stretch where I played about 60 games without winning or losing three in a row (and went 50% throughout). Know what I learned? If your rank is right where your MMR thinks you should be, you will win more LP per game than you lose. I've tested this a lot and can confirm that if you're where you're supposed to be, you'll win about 20 LP and lose about 17 per loss. What this means is that if you can maintain a 50% win rate, all you need is time. So...

Put in your time. It's distressing to see the posts that say “I'm nervous about playing ranked”. Quite frankly, you're not going to climb if you don't play. Furthermore, we've already established that everyone's better than their rank, if they play their best game. So, if you're in a good mood and thinking you can play your best right now, get in there and play.

Noncombat decisions are the most important ones. No, not those. Earlier, I described “noncombat” and “combat” decisions. To be blunt, this sub is almost entirely about noncombat decisions: build advice, runes and masteries, what champion I should play, etc. While that's all fine and dandy, there's other very relevant decisions that you're making that I bet you're not even aware of. For example, are you about to play a ranked game with a champion you're not as good as your best with? How about deciding to play ranked instead of practicing with a friend, or even alone against bots? How about deciding to play without even knowing what your champion can do, like the Gold player I did a replay review for last week that didn't know he could use Caitlyn's net to jump through walls? The truth is that this is life, and life's not like a video game, where you do something over and over until some experience bar fills, and then poof! You're better. That's not how it works. Here's how it really works:

You need to practice; mechanically and mentally. The truth is that you can spam games all you like, but getting better means that you need to automate all of your actions. I don't mean macros or botting, I mean that you need to be able to do all of the little things automatically, without thinking. When playing Singed, do you get your autoattack off while the other guy's in the air from Fling? Can you still CS well when the gas is making the minions die at inconvenient times? How about tossing an opponent over a wall when you're being chased? That's champion specific, but what about global skills like checking the minimap often, buying wards and finding time to go drop them, or analyzing the teamcomps and deciding what your strategy is for the next teamfight? (Hint: If they have a Katarina, you need to deal with the Katarina.)

Furthermore, are you even prepared to make the right decisions? For example, take your main champion, whoever it may be. Against every opponent you could conceivably see, are you prepared to play the matchup? You'd better be, because if you don't know what to do, you will make wrong decisions, and you will lose. If you're not, get in there and find a good guide. Championselect.net isn't good enough, it doesn't tell you what to do. Hell, even most guides are trash, and don't tell you what to do. Fortunately, there are some good ones. For example, here's InvertedComposer's Singed guide. In the matchup section, he tells you if it's a farm or bloody lane, what items to emphasize, and general pointers about the matchup. That's a good guide. After all, if you climb by playing your best game, improving your best game will just let you climb further and faster. So, take the time to improve your best game.

Play your best game. If you can't, play another game. This piece of advice is actually a two-way street. Sometimes it's you that will hold yourself back. If you're playing mad, tired, scared, or distracted, you're only hurting yourself. But, you can also be thrown off your game through no fault of your own. Let's say you're a good mid player; but what if you're picking 5th? Best of luck getting mid. Or, what if you're really good on a champ, but they have a common hard counter and you can't pick them first? So, you need to be versatile and not have these things happen. You don't need to play every role well, but you need more than one and one of them should be support. Why support? It's the least popular position. So, if you get stuck with it, this way you can at least be useful. I'm sure you've all see what happens when one team's support is competent and the other's is not. Other than that, bring a couple of champions with you to champion select, in case your champ gets banned or hard countered. Or, better yet, be comfortable in hard counter situations. I had about 400 ranked Singed games last season....do you have any idea how many fucking Teemos I saw? Well, it got to the point where I wasn't afraid of that bastard anymore. Want to pick Teemo into me? All right. See you at level 6.

But what about yourself though? If you just got robbed last game by a ghastly throw by someone who ignored you pings and just had to clear that jungle camp, trading the entire game for about 60 gold, you've got to prevent yourself from taking that into another game. Some people say to quit after a loss, or at least take a break. That works for them, and it may even work for you. For me, I go into team builder and play the champ I want in the role I want. It's my form of LoL stress relief. It works for me. If it doesn't work for you, find something that does.There's a whole world out there, from the internet to real life, that you could be experiencing instead of playing LoL while pissed. Do yourself a favor and don't play LoL pissed.

Play your lane in LoL on Easy Mode: Kill those caster minions!

TL/DR: If it is practical to do so, and you don't have a good reason to keep the wave in the middle, kill the enemy caster minions at every opportunity.

A lot of lower elo laners sure seem to enjoy making it harder on themselves, having to spin in circles waiting for their minions to get an enemy minion low before right clicking, ensuring that they have to compete with their own minions for every CS. By putting so much value on not missing CS and being very obvious about it, one of three things happens:

• They get the CS and nothing bad happens.
• They miss the CS due to poor timing.
• The opponent(s) will land free harass because they see the opportunity for it.

You can go pretty far without that last one happening at the lower levels. But once you meet someone who actually is smart enough to bash your skull in when you stick it out like that, you're gonna have a bad time.

Your laning phase will go a lot more smoothly if you work smarter, not harder. Let's go over a few things, and you'll see how to make laning so much easier on yourself.

You have to do damage to the wave to get your gold.

The more damage comes from your minions, the less damage you have to do to it.

Duh, right? Just had to lay these out first.

The biggest source of damage the minions produce is from the caster minions or the tank.

The three caster minions will outdamage one tank minion, but with two minions, the tank will do more.

The caster minions have fewer hit points, and are typically not attacked until all of the melees are dead.

You'll often get that one melee minion of yours who will break off and chase the casters once melee minion #1 dies, but he does next to no damage. Otherwise, the caster minions will be sitting there, killing your minions, unmolested. What this means is that if you attack them first, you'll get all three CS...how can you not? Nothing else is damaging them, so there's no way anything can take it from you.

The caster minions are the main deterrent for landing auto attacks on your opponent.

I've played a lot of Nasus top, and it always slays me how often I'll get players who select Ryze or Teemo, tag me with an auto right in front of my casters, and wonder why they lost the trade as I lifesteal it back, my caster minions blast him, and he then pulls back to take a CS. If he bothered to take out my casters first, or even just one of them (and I have no hope of preventing him from doing so), I'm now in huge trouble. I'm at his mercy as I can't retaliate on his trades. I IMMEDIATELY have to retreat. A good Ryze then stops pushing and sits in the middle of the wave, knowing I can do nothing but watch as Q stacks disappear in front of me. Eventually, he pushes a big wave to my tower, and now I have to let him pound on me as I try my best to get all I can as my tower eats even more of my precious Q stacks.

To illustrate it even more, watch this Leaguecraft video, 35 minutes in. PhRoXzOn explains how to get by as a melee v. ranged. When you watch the video, Swain is CSing passively as Riven tries to scratch out all she can....my god is Swain @#$%ing this up. He's letting the caster minions live. If he takes them out immediately, Riven has no hope of getting any early CS. How will the melees get any of Swain's minions low? They won't. With the casters down, he can then auto + E instead of just E, and actually do damage to Riven past her shield. He can also auto attack kite forward if he can get in range, taking minimal melee minion damage as he lights Riven up. When the minion wave pushes, he can then choose to either harass under tower or lay off due to gank risk. And, if he and his team bothered to identify where the enemy jungler started at level 1, he will have all the information he needs to decide this question correctly: If the enemy started top, he will soon be going bottom and the gank risk is minimal.

With fewer caster minions, an opponent will have a deficit of damage to the wave. He will have to provide that damage himself to get his gold. With more caster minions, you will have a surplus of damage to the wave. You can spend more resources on attacking the opponent.

Some of you are saying “duh” again, but you should be saying “EUREKA!” This is the most important part of this post, and the point I'm trying to make.

If you've built a wave, the other guy now has to choose to spend his resources (autoattacks, cooldown timers, and mana) on either the minions, or you. He can only do both if you're dumb, such as standing next to minions for Ziggs to bomb or behind a minion for Lucian to Q. So, if you're not dumb, he'll have to shoot your minions. This means he can't spend those resources on you. Now, if you've got a bigger wave, you can then do all sorts of things. You can spend mana and cooldown timers on shooting your opponent, because you have much less to do to get your gold.

Getting your gold is easier, and you'll have so much less pressure on yourself. The other guy has to; he can only get any gold from you by killing you, and you're not dumb enough to let that happen. So, he has to concentrate on the wave, and he has to live with your freedom to harass. There's no two ways about it, you're now at a huge advantage in this lane.

“But the lane will push!” some people will say.

Good.

All sorts of good things happen when the lane pushes. I've already described the pressure to CS that the opponent will have when you do. Also, having less pressure to CS means you have free time...which you can then use to your advantage. Are other lanes pushed against and does a roam have a chance to work? Boy, I bet you're glad you'll lose no CS while you do roam! How about using this time to take a quick pit stop, and bring an item back to lane? It's just going to get easier the sooner you get that chalice or pickaxe, and you won't fall behind because the lane is pushed. You can also take this time to deploy good, deep wards, which will allow you to throw a harass party for your opponent for quite a while, or bottle them up as you can see any roams coming immediately. And, if you can actually land that harass...even more good things can happen. If the jungler does gank, one of his laners will be crippled and he himself will be underleveled (unless he's 2 and you're 1). You can win. If the enemy laner is crippled, you have a chance to complete the most devastating play in solo queue: the pre-6 dive. Nothing will break the enemy laner's spirits faster than seeing even their turrets won't stop you. And finally, you can take this time to raid a jungle camp if you've got nothing better to do. Pad that CS total, and get some more gold to boot.

In other words, pushing the wave is great. All sorts of good things happen. Precidely one bad thing can happen, getting ganked. But, for that to happen, you need to do all of the following: push, not ward, not watch the minimap to see it coming, not harass well, and not use your escape and flash correctly when the gank does happen. So, if you do get ganked, don't delude yourself and say that it was because you were pushed. A lot of other fails had to happen too.

Even then, there are a few good reasons to not push a lane when you can. Say you're Renekton, a lane bully with no ranged abilities. You're a poor scaler, so just getting the CS isn't enough, you want kills. You won't get them if the lane is permanently pushed; all you can do really to harass under tower is clip them with a lucky Q. So, when you run the other guy off the wave out of fear of dying to you, you then want to zone them off creeps and not push. It'll push eventually, but you can cost them some CS first, and get an XP advantage. I wanted to make sure to mention that in the TL/DR.

“But what if I can't get to the caster minions?”

This is a much better question. Sometimes it's just not possible. Nasus, for example, has next to no hope of getting to the enemy caster minions safely. He'd have to E, which does little damage and eats through mana like candy, or the other guy would need to be an even MORE passive laner and let Nasus auto attack minions freely. If that's the case, you don't need my advice to beat him. So, you can't risk your safety to take the casters first. Trading HP for CS by itself is almost never worth it, and exposing yourself to an all-in like that is even worse; he'll have casters to help while Nasus' casters are too far back to participate. So, don't prioritize the casters if you can't get to them safely. That's why I included the words “If it is practical to do so” in the TL/DR at the top.

I'll also touch on not conceding freezes here. If it's "practical" to get to the casters safely, it's for one of two reasons:

• You have the range to do it.
• You and your opponent agree than you'll win in a trade or all-in, so he'll back off when you step forward.

In both of these situations, you should be able to prevent a freeze. If you see your opponent trying to freeze, you should just kill the rest of his remaining minions to break it. In other words, make sure to take the time to push your minions into their tower. A good player will still get the CS, but he'll then have to lane with you in the middle again.

How to Win Games With Only a Sightstone

TL/DR: Here's a guide on how to win games with only a sightstone.

“I know one thing. When you all run up on him, you best be more.” - Omar Little, The Wire

Let's try a little thought experiment.

Let's say you're in a LoL tournament with a substantial cash prize for winning, but nothing for second place. You and your friends find yourselves in the finals. The organizer comes up to you guys and explains this tournament and its really weird rules. In effect, the final game takes place with 25 minutes already on the clock to start and most champions having gold and items already. The outer towers are down but the rest are up, and both teams have one dragon. You then have a choice of which team to play on: 

1. Team 1 has everyone with two items completed.
2. Team 2 has everyone with THREE items completed, but one champion is AFK. They're not allowed to play, and Team B has to make do with four men.

Which do you choose to play as, for all the money?

I bet you took Team 1, didn't you? So did I. Let's face it, this is something we already know: numbers trump items and gold. That's the point of ganks, to have a fight where you outnumber them. That's the point of wards, right? To make sure you're not outnumbered.

But, a running theme amongst warding guides is that they're defensive; they'll just let you see the bad man coming. Instead, you should be seeing your wards, and your sightstone, as an offensive tool. In other words, not only should you use them to avoid fights when outnumbered, you also need to pick fights when you outnumber them. Here's how you can go about it:

THE BUS SCHEDULE

I really like how they added the buff timers to the scoreboard, and if you see the buff die, you get the timer kept for you. I call it the “bus schedule”, because when that timer runs out, their jungler's gonna be hit by a bus. Obviously, this works for dragons and barons too, but the highest percentage plays are on the enemy team's buffs.

Think about it. Their team will certainly pull together for dragons, barons, and sieges, but very often the jungler will be taking second blue alone, at worst, he'll have his midlaner with him. Since that midlaner was just in mid, we'll know. The jungler almost never has any help taking red, it's usually either him or his ADC there alone. All we need to do is have three or more men in that sector of the jungle at that time, and we'll get a kill. From there, we can roll it up into a dragon or tower. You know, as long as we don't miss the bus.

SEVEN-DEUCE

The buffs are on five-minute timers, and appear at 1:55. Typically, the first buff dies shortly after 2:00, although it's more like 2:30 these days. That means the next buff will come around 7:30, the one after that at around 12:30. In other words, when the minutes on the game clock hit 2 or 7, the buff is spawning soon. Think about that...

TWO-MINUTE WARNING

Let's be frank here, trinket wards suck. One minute isn't long enough to make a tangible impact. On the other hand, the three-minute sightstone wards are great. Three minutes is six minion waves, plenty of time for the game dynamics to change.

Now, if your wards last three minutes, when should you go ward to make sure you get to the bus on time? The answer is 2:30 to 2:00 ahead of time. Not 3:00, because if the victim is late, your wards will disappear before you're ready. Not much later than 2:00, because your wards lose their worth once the objective is taken and you can only have three out at a time; might as well be losing wards with little time left when you replace them elsewhere.

GANK MY LANER, I GANK YOUR JUNGLE!

One of the most important things a jungler has is his threat that he may be anywhere; and he loses it if he shows up on the enemy team's minimap. If he shows top, bot lane knows they're safe as long as the mid laner's still on screen.

If I'm supporting and I see that the jungler's top, I can't do much about it four minutes in and haven't backed. I don't have teleport, and I'm not going to drop my ADC to go drop a one minute ward somewhere. However, if I've got my sightstone and I see the jungler gank, I thank him; his jungle's mine. In three wards, I can light up half of it. If it also happens to be 2 minutes before a buff's gonna spawn, I thank him more. He's just given us a kill, a buff, and a dragon.

NOT THE TARGET, THE APPROACHES TO THE TARGET

It's convenient that both buffs have bushes next to them to put wards in, huh? Don't ward there though, that's lazy. You already know that the objective is where they're going, so you don't need a ward there itself. Instead, ward the pathways to the objective to see them coming. For example, If I'm attacking the blue buff, I'll ward as follows:

Mid lane access path to wolves (ward can see wolves)

Five way junction behind blue buff

Three-way junction between mid lane and blue buff (can see hallway midlaner takes to blue buff)

Attacking red, we have:

• Raptor bush edge (ward can see raptors)
• Curved bush across from red (can see red and krugs access path)
• Choice of clearing between raptors and river, or side lane tribush. Depends who I see as a bigger threat, mid or bot lane.

With deep wards like these, you'll see anyone well before they're to the objective in question, and they'll last long enough to be there when the objective's up. Practice it in custom games, and you can be in and out of their jungle in seconds. You can be back to hold your ADC's hand in no time.

HERDING CATS

Okay, going to drop the wards was the easy part. Now, how the hell do you get these solo queue yahoos to come to the bus stop? Well...

I'm going to level with you here, I don't have a surefire way to get a solo queue player to pay attention. They're like cats, and if they happen to see the red dot of a laser pointer? Sorry son, you're not going to be able to get their attention.

However, I can tell you what grabs their attention. Mainly, it's farm. Try as I might, I can't get a grass-eating vegan to stop planting potatoes, but if they're not farming at the moment, it's not that hard to get them to go chase a kill. The exception is junglers. As long as they're not Trick2g fanboys, they're used to looking for enemy champions to eat. I have a high success rate by saying “VI! Enemy blue 90 secs, wards deployed.” They look at the timer, see the fresh wards, and they seem to be appreciative of having a play all laid out for them in a minute.

So, my attempt at a solution: Waveclear.

Fuck the pushing lane, I want my ADC to be ready to go in a minute or two. I don't want to miss the bus. So, I'll do what I can to get his laning time minimized by hitting high-health minions. We don't need to harass that much, just hold onto that health and mana. Hopefully they don't stop to back when the bus is about to arrive. /sadpanda

When it's time to go catch the bus, ping all of the applicable laners (use a red ! ping, it's the most attention getting), then flag ping the objective. If you've got the deep wards down, even bronzies can see that the target's there, and that he or she's alone. And like I said, you can't get them to stop chasing farm, but you CAN get them to go chase kills. Might as well use that power for good, by providing them with one or two targets, completely surrounded by vision.

AMBUSH BUSH

Naturally, this works with every timer. Since you swapped your yellow trinket for a red once when you got your sightstone (YOU DID DO THIS, RIGHT!?), you can also clean a bush. Naturally, this is a great way to set up ambushes. If you know they have an objective timer, you can instead forgo taking the objective and just set up an ambush on the way. It doesn't happen often in solo queue, but those of you know that when it does, it almost always works. Flag pings are your friend. Also, if you aren't sure that they have the timer, you can always “slip up” in all chat:

/all drag 1 min

/all oops

Oh, the other team will come to drag in about 45 seconds. Sweep a bush in 35 seconds, and watch as you get multiple kills. And then the objective. You know, because it's there and you're all alive.

SUMMARY

Remember, numbers trump gold and items, so the point is to be less concerned with the gold and items. Instead, try to find situations where enemies are typically alone. In your next game, try it. Watch yourself and think “can the other team ambush me here?” If they're not on the minimap, they can. Ask yourself, “If they're all in that bush, do I live?” Probably not.

And finally, ask yourself this:

“How do I get that fear into my opponents?”

How To Actually Develop Those "Mechanics" You Hear So Much About

TL/DR Here's a list of mechanical errors and ways to fix them with practice.

All right, enough's enough. Time to talk about mechanics.

A lot of people seem to think that this is the part of the game that you can't train, like size or running speed in other sports. You either have it or you don't. Well, those other sports are right, you can't make someone taller. But here...they're wrong, and I'll show you why.

Go get a piece of paper and write your name three times as you normally would, but quickly. Do it as fast as possible.

They may not be pretty, but they're probably legible. Now, switch hands and do it again, using the hand you usually don't write with.

Looks like a train wreck, doesn't it?

But hey, it's supposed to. You're either right- or left- handed, maybe even ambidextrous. But, there's the hand you write with. You've been using it your whole life. The other, non-writing hand, gets used almost never. The ratio of writing experience between your writing hand and non-writing hand may be hundreds of thousands to one.

If you'd like to see about developing off-hand writing skills, you can go here, but let me save you the time: you practice. You just keep doing all of your writing with your off hand until it starts looking legible.

Fortunately, League of Legends requires typing (that you're already kind of used to) and right-click mousework, where your hands are probably less used to. I bet you do most of your normal left-clicking with your index finger, while your middle finger gets used less. Furthermore, unless you like to share your feelings with other drivers in traffic, your middle finger just isn't used that often in life.

But hey, that's good news. This means you can train it better.

So, I'm going to try and provide you with some knowledge about mechanics and practice. I'm going to start by outlining mistakes and explaining what they are, and then include a solution for each mistake. Fortunately, many mistakes can be fixed by one solution. I'll try to outline them all.

CS ERRORS (Slivering, Late-hitting, Splitters)

We'll start with what everyone thinks about with “mechanics”, simple CS errors. For the most part, you can click a dying minion and not get the gold in one of three ways. You can sliver the minion, meaning it has a sliver of health left after the auto and another creep takes it. You can do the opposite and late-hit the minion, where your champion's auto attack animation starts. Finally, you can lose a minion to a splitter. What this means is that two minions are dying at the same time, and you can only auto one of them, while the other dies while your auto attack is on cooldown. You'd have to use an ability to take the second.

Solution: Watch the caster and tank minion projectiles.

If you're going to lose a minion in lane, something on your team stole it from you, and most likely, it will be the higher-damage caster minion. That's what you're competing with. Fortunately, the projectiles are visible and relatively slow. You can see them coming. On top of that, you've been shooting minions recently and can see how much damage your shots do, even exactly if you have the combat text on.

So, when in doubt, you look at the caster projectiles. If the remaining HP is high and you might sliver it, wait for one or two more projectiles to land, then shoot it. If you're risking a late hit, get your bullet or punch there before the casters do.

Finally, regarding splitters: the minions don't really change targets away from a minion that often unless someone distracts them. What this means is that a splitter actually has some development time, and if you are watching which one your casters are focusing (or two in the case of a splitter), you can auto attack one of them early. This ruins their HP balance, makes one die after the other, and makes both of them easy to collect.

CLICK TIMING FAULTS (Auto Cancel Faults, Missed Auto Resets), ABILITY RECOGNITION

I've seen a lot of lower ranked games where the players are playing excited, with high pressure. Their actions-per-minute (“APM”s) are higher than they're comfortable with, and they make erratic movements. One is the auto cancel fault, where they intend to auto attack something but move before the animation completes, canceling it. Jinx is notorious for this, as her quick “tzzzt” minigun attack is easy, but her “fuh-woomp” rocket launch takes longer to fire. If you're used to quick shooting with the minigun, you can very easily cancel a rocket shot. This is pretty costly, as her long rocket range means that this auto attack was probably free damage on the enemy, but you lost it because you clicked too fast.

Another issue is if you're playing a champion with an auto attack reset, such as Wukong, Nasus, or Vi. Each of them have abilities that empower their next autoattack while taking it off of cooldown immediately. Naturally, you want to use these abilities immediately after a previous auto attack, so the reset saves you as much time as possible. But, use it first, and you will save no time. Use it too early, and you may even cancel the previous autoattack, which is damage you deserved but didn't get on the enemy.

This last one may be unrelated, but the solution is the same: recognizing when your opponent uses an ability. Playing the cooldowns is paramount if you want to succeed against a competent laner, and making sure you don't miss it is important. Also, most of those bastards are you know...trying to kill you, and will use their abilities when you would be otherwise distracted (taking a CS for example). If your eyes are focused on your CS work, you could very well miss it.

Solution: Turn the volume up

We've already established where your eyes are, either on the caster minions or the minimap. Your eyes are doing a lot of work, and the more pressure you put on them, the more likely they are to miss key information. Instead, use one of your other senses: hearing.

You should be familiar with practicing with your champion in custom games, but head back in there, make sure the sound is audible, and give it a go. Try to push your champion to the limits by canceling autoattacks while listening, and pinpoint exactly the moment when you can cancel and get credit (have scrolling combat text on, so you can be sure) and when you'll get a full cancel. After that...try it with your eyes closed. Attempt to shoot or punch the jungle wight 10 times blind, then open your eyes and see how much damage you actually did. If you did 10x you attack damage, great! You're all set.

To do this, you might want to use the shift key. Since you won't be actually able to see your click, fire at the wight once, move your cursor to open space (away from the wight). Without moving the cursor, shift-right click to shoot, regular right click immediately afterward. Keep shift-clicking again, to return to your AA cycle. Just try to use a move command in each, which has a chance of canceling your auto, but won't if you time it right. Also, you may want to find a LoL inclined friend to help you with this by watching over your shoulder.

As for ability use, this is actually the easiest one. I defy anyone who isn't hard of hearing to miss Sivir ulting with the sound on. But, as you play more, you'll develop the skill to detect ability use and respond accordingly. You will be VERY proud of yourself when you flash that ganking Lee Sin's Q when your attention was completely elsewhere a moment before, just because that “heeeeUH!” was heard and your brain knew what to do.

SKILLSHOT LANDING

I play a lot of Ziggs, and I am always quite embarrassed when I airball a Q. What's worse is when it bounces short, OVER the head of the target, and keeps bouncing behind harmlessly. I feel so bad when that happens; it's like I had a wide open receiver in football, and I straight out flubbed the pass.

Solution: Aim for the feet.

The search bar is a wonderful thing, ain’t it?

This game will score skillshots as hits if they intersect with the target's “hitbox”, which is the space they occupy on the game map. This hitbox is not the champion's body, in fact, it's where the champion is standing. Isometric points of view do this. So, with big skillshots like Syndra or Corki, aim at their feet, and you won't miss.

WALK FAULTS, DEAD FOOT FAULTS, SKILLSHOT DODGING, CURSOR LOSS

Here's four mistakes that don't seem all that related, but are fixable with the same solution.

A walk fault is the one misclick that can kill you. It's one of the scariest things that can happen to an ADC: you click on a target to shoot it, but you missed the champion and instead clicked on the ground. Instead of shooting from distance (what you wanted), your champion is now doing no damage and walking TOWARDS danger. Instead of shooting, you're walking forward...boy is this bad. This is how you turn being on offense with momentum into a complete failure.

The opposite is much less punishing. It won't singlehandedly ruin games for you, but you'll miss a lot of opportunites. It's when you've moved in, kiting forward, autoattacking as you go. You click the target to shoot, but instead of clicking the ground, you click the target again. As your champion is already in range, he or she will stand still and sit idly as the AA timer resets. This is a dead foot fault, when you want to be walking forward during the AA cooldown, but you aren't because you misclicked the champion instead of the ground.

On the other hand, skillshot dodging is paramount. You're on defense in this situation and you need to make sure that your opponent's shot will miss. There are very many skillshots that if landed once, will win lanes (Blitz hooks or Nami bubbles) or even entire games (Sejuani ults, Amumu Qs). Naturally, you need the presence of mind to drop what you're doing and get the hell out of the way. Even if you do see it coming, your cursor may be in the worst possible place, meaning you'll need to get a handle on it and put it where you need it to be before you can begin to move where you want, and this is time you may not have.

Speaking of cursors, here's another great way to make a fool of yourself on a grand stage. You're frantically clicking and acting, and then the teamfight starts. All sorts of lights and explosion happen, you see something that you have to respond to, and you go to click and...ummm...where's the cursor?

A lot of people have complained how bad the “yellow glove” cursor is in LoL, and how it's not readily changeable. If it were me, I'd like a bright, hot pink X, or some other obnoxiously loud symbol that I can't possibly lose track of if I tried. Maybe they'll let us do that in the client some day. Unfortunately, that's not really an option in the short term.

Solution: Short-length clicks with higher APM.

I have a friend that plays Dota and complains about us LoL players all the time, but there's one point he'll concede: controlling your champion in our game is so much easier than his. In his game, clicks are commitments, in ours, you can cancel almost anything.

So, you should be developing a movement style that naturally produces more clicks than needed. The more, the better. After all, you already spit out plenty of junk move commands in lane anyway, what's a few more? Here's the chance for that untrained middle finger to shine...get it to press the button more often.

The reason why is that clicks are NOT commitments, you can always take an auto or click to move back if it was made in error. By having a naturally faster clicking rhythm, your brain will not only get used to seeing your champion do the wrong thing (like a walk fault), and will already be operating at the proper speed to spit out another, proper click to correct it. In other words, it's not about preventing walk faults from ever happening, it's about being able to immediately correct them should you commit a click error. So, don't be lazy. You protect yourself from errors with a higher click speed, meaning that your opponents will have fewer errors to punish you for.

(BTW...lots of luck, Kalista. You and your “misclick to die” passive looks really dangerous to use in high level play...)

With regards to skillshot dodging, a high-APM style is invaluable, and even better if you naturally keep your cursor close to your champion. By doing this, you can change your champion's direction at any time, which is what you'll need to make sure that Morgana Q safely goes past.

To practice this, get a friend to lane against you in a custom game, and give him a skillshot champion. On your end, take some white masking tape and cordon off a square in the center of your monitor, big enough for you to move in any direction, and thin enough not to interfere with the display too much (I took one three-inch piece of tape, and cut it lengthwise into 4 narrow, three-inch strips). Lock your camera and lane against him for a while, only removing your cursor from the box when last hitting or firing a skillshot. Once you get used to this “fast and near” style, return to your unlocked camera and play normally. If you're using your ears to hear it coming as mentioned above, you’re all set and ready do decide which way to dodge and to dodge it.

Finally, the “fast and near” style will make it much less likely for you to lose your cursor. After all, it's near your champion. If you make a habit of returning your cursor to your champion after every time you take a significant movement (a camera adjustment, a long skillshot, etc), you'll always know where it is, and you won't have to waste any time looking for it.

KITING

In another of my attempts to pick a champion I can dominate games with, I recently gave Draven a try. If you can click correctly you'll wreck anyone. So I got into a few team builders and gave it a whirl. Naturally, I fell flat on my face. Simple laning took much more effort than I was used to, and when it came time to actually fight, I was making a fool of myself. I lost my cursor constantly, walk faulted all over the place, and generally embarrassed everyone who watched me. I've since returned to good ol' Caitlyn as my go-to ADC pick.

Naturally, this was a while ago. When I got used to playing Caitlyn more and I ironed out my kiting style with her, playing Draven with friends later became a cinch. What it came down to was using one of two kiting methods in different situations.

Solution: Rapidclick kite when attack moving forward, Attackmove kite when moving back.

“Rapidclick” kiting is the version where you just right click everything very fast. Right click the target to shoot, move the cursor, right click the ground to move, move the cursor back to the target, right click to shoot. This is not that hard if your mouse movements are small. If your mouse movements are large, you're begging to commit walk faults. So, it's easy when the target and the direction you want to move are the same direction; click the target, then click right next to him. Easy peasy. But, if you're running away, this style of kiting is too risky.

Instead, you can Attackmove kite when tracking backward. You keep the cursor in the same place, the direction you want to move in. When you want to shoot, shift click, a-click, or whatever you have the “attack move click” bound to in your key bindings. This minimizes mouse movement, thus minimizing the risk of a walk fault or a lost cursor.

In other games, “mechanics” means something else than it does here. In fighting games, it means recognizing when the opponent can't do something because of a particular choice they made. For example, Street Fighter 2 (Super Turbo)'s Zangief's spinning piledriver's move command starts with joystick movement AWAY from the opponent, a little more joystick movement, then pushing a button. If Zangief is walking TOWARD the opponent, how can he start the spinning piledriver? The joystick's in the wrong place. He'll have to move it to back to start it, meaning he'll stop walking forward, and you'll know it's coming.

In this manner, make sure you don't saddle yourself with Zangief's problem. Clicking tempo is much easier to control than mouse movement, so don't put yourself in positions for your cursor to be in the wrong place. Use the “fast and near” style in general, and make sure you use the right kiting style at the right time.

As an aside, there's a caveat about attackmove kiting: if you're running away from multiple targets, you may end up shooting the wrong one. That's a problem. In this case, you'll have to rapidclick kite. Good news...that's the next section!

RAPIDCLICK KITING, REACTION TIME

Solution: Play fast clicking games like this one.

Man, dat search bar.

Anyway, mouse movement, muscle memory, and rapid clicking are all learned skills. You weren't born with them, there's no evolutionary reason to have them, and you're not going to get them without practice. So...go practice. The link provided is to a flash game that you can play to practice. Write down your scores, and try to improve them.

As a side note, the reaction time version of the game is a little odd. It'll make you react to a stimulus with no warning whatsoever. That's not of very much use to us in LoL, as we know the champion we're up against, know what they can do, and can use tells and other information to prepare us for when we finally have to react. I tried to find some anticipation games, where you get a score of reaction time, but you're given warning of when the signal begins. Instead, try using a stop watch, and try to stop and start the clock on XXX.00 seconds. You can see which direction you miss in (don't ever do it early), and see how far late you are.

Well, that's all I got for now. Here are the tools you'll need to get ahead. I know it's the last day of the season, so if you have a ranked goal to hit tonight, go for it. But, come tomorrow, if you're still just queuing for games and not bothering to practice the skills developed here...well, it's your ranked career. You're the one who has to live with it.