Ranked: Getting out of ELO Hell

Starting this blog I wanted to play different champions and see how I liked these champions and consider buying them with IP or not. I have tried out many different champions including Tristana, Taric, Sona, Blitzcrank, Malphite, and a few more. I really liked Taric and have picked up the support role in many games that I have played in ranked. I have played over 100 games in Bronze tier V and IV. I have been stuck in Bronze IV for the past few weeks. Bronze is considered ELO hell because it is hard to get out of and move on to the next tier. I have realized that as a support you don’t receive many league points for winning a ranked game. The way to get out of a division is by accumulating 100 league points by winning games. Then after getting 100 points you play a promotion series where you have to win the best of three matches to move onto the next division. After completing many promotion series you are able to get out of the tier that you are in. ELO is the ranking system that League had in place for the first two seasons that showed where you stood among your peers in ranked.  I have been reading up on how to get out of my predicament. Here is a source if you would like to view them as well as reading this post.

Click here to go to source.

From this reading I have realized that I need to go back and review my own game play. I never had a problem of blaming my teammates for any losses and have always striven to do my best as a support by providing a distraction from the ADC who I am supposed to protect and providing sight for the team.  I try my best to do my duty.

I have also been using championselect.net which is a website for deciding champions which are best to use for a team composition as well as finding the counters to different champions. I have also started to use lolking.net to find out the rating of my teammates to see if they will be doing well and find out who to be helping the most. During the actual champion select you can figure out if your team is worth playing with. If they don’t look so good as in win ratios and the role they are trying to play is not the one that they do the best in you may decide to leave. Leaving is only ok if you really believe that you don’t have a chance at winning the game. For ranked you only lose 3 league points for the first time that you leave queue. After that you lose 10 points.

This video is also very good at teaching the basics to getting out of bronze such as getting objectives and correctly farming minions.

As always I hope that this post can help you get to the rank that you want to achieve.

GLHF

Types of Champions

Within League of Legends there are different types of Champions that you can choose from. Certain Champions are more fit for certain jobs/lanes. More recently the meta(strategy) of the game has changed to allow for switching of lanes during professional games. In lower level games the current meta is for a team to have a 1 top laner, 1 mid laner, 1 jungler, and 2 bottom laners.

The top laner is usually a Champion that has relatively good sustain and can duel another Champion successfully 1v1. Viable top laners are Singed, Darius, Malphite, Shen. These are just a few viable top laners. The job of the top laner is to be tanky or a damage dealing initiator.

The middle laner is usually an ability power Champion who deals lots of damage and helps the team later on in the laning phase of the game by roaming to other lanes to help secure kills. A good mid lane Champion has a good amount of crowd control, which is the ability to slow, stun, or disable an enemy Champion. They should have a good amount of burst, which is the ability to use many abilities at once to take down a lot of an enemies’ health. Some viable Champions are Karthus, Diana, Lux, and Zed.

In the bottom lane there are two Champions. Generally you will have a ranged attack damage carry and a support Champion. The attack damage Champion’s role is to get a lot of farm and kills in order to help win team fights. Viable Champions are Ezreal, Kogmaw, Caitlyn, and Miss Fortune. The role of a support Champion is to help the attack damage Champion secure kills. Support Champions also give the team vision of the map. Viable support Champions are Sona, Taric, Thresh, and Janna.

The last position on a team does not have a lane but rather roams the jungle which is the area on the map between lanes that has monsters that can be killed and give gold. The jungler’s role is to get ganks which are plays made to catch a Champion off guard and to help the lane that is ganked get ahead of the other team. Viable junglers are Jarvan IV, Zin Xhao, and Nasus.

If you would like to read a more in depth version of this post you can read this guide.

http://www.solomid.net/guides.php?g=15698-pastoulio-generic-build-guide#chap4

I hope you are able to read further and are able to choose a role that fits you.

What to do With Influence Points

Some of you may be wondering what Influence Points(IP) are. They are the points that you get from playing a game of League. Influence Points allows you to purchase champions without having to spend actual money on Riot Points(RP). To spend your IP you  can click on the chestbox icon in top right of the League of Legends interface. Then going to the left side and selecting Champions to view the pricing of champions. This section also allows you to search for champions based on their pricing, type, release date, and alphabetical order.

The main way to get IP is by playing games of League, but there are ways to get more IP per game. One simple way is by playing normals matches rather than playing bots because you get more IP from playing normals and ranked matches than you do playing bots matches because they are technically easier than a normals game. For more information on how Riot factors things in to reward the points you can go to http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Influence_Points

In the store there are also sales, where Riot puts a few champions on sale for a week. These sales allow for people to get champions up to half off. I have been working towards getting Caitlyn this week because she is only 4800 IP when she is usually 6300 IP. I am currently at 4488 IP and hope to reach the price before she gets off sale and goes back to her normal price.

Some champions are cheaper because they can be easier to use than others as well as Riot wanting people to try out different types of champions to determine what type of champions that the player might like. I suggest getting either Ashe, Annie, or any of the other champions that are 450 IP to start off with and getting comfortable with those character before buying a big ticket champion like Quinn. Riot also has a few champions free every week to allow people to try out champions for a week before deciding to buy the champion that they may have been considering for a while. Some people instantly buy a champion for reasons like aesthetics or interest without trying the champion out first. This can be ok if it works out, but it can be bad if you do this for every champion. Riot allows for 3 refunds of champions for full IP. This refund has to be completed before 90 days of buying the champion.

I hope this helps you with your Leaguing.

Win Ratio

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Win ratio is the ratio between the number games that you have won to the number of losses. In League of Legends the match ups between your teammates and your opponents depends on your level and partially on your win ratio in normal matches. Normal matches being the games that you play before reaching level 30 and start on ranked matches. This can affect the level of the players that you are playing with in that they may not be as skilled as you are. This can cost you a few games, but there are way around that. One easy way to win more of your games is by playing with people you know. They could be people that you met online in game or friends that also play League. The key point here is that you will want to be able to communicate with your teammates better and playing with people that you know allows for better communication. You can also use Skype to talk while in game to call out plays better because you don’t have to type out what you are planning to do.

Another way to improve your win ratio is by playing with the Champion that you do the best with in terms of winning games. Find a few Champions that you do well with and stick to them until you feel you are proficient enough with that Champion or get bored with them. Becoming good with more than one Champion is necessary because it is possible that someone else will choose the Champion that you wanted especially if you choose a fairly over powered Champion that people don’t know how to counter.

Best of luck in your search for your Champion and in your games.

Game Play

A good way to understand the game a bit better would be to watch pro players on streams or with the upcoming LCS watching a few live games. The LCS is a huge tournament that is world wide and has all of the best teams competing. You can watch pro players solo que (playing by themselves) or watch replays of LSC or IPL tournaments on Youtube. A good place to find streams of good players is on http://www.solomid.net/streams.php. They feature streams of pro players who stream their live games. On their streams you can comment on the video while it is live and more than likely others will be watching too who would be more than welcome to answer any questions that you might have about the stream. I personally think that watching pro player solo que is better for personal improvement. This is because the solo que streamers will be more focused on one Champion as apposed to multiple Champions where it can be hard to understand what the individual Champions are doing throughout the game. This being said, watching a team play is not bad because it gives a better understanding as to what to do in terms of being a team and playing like one. Other good places to watch streams or old videos would be:

http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/League%20of%20Legends

http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/videos

http://www.solomid.net/videos.php

I hope this helps improve your game.

Guides

For a while now I have been using Mobafire.com and solomid.net to find great guides for champions that I had never played before.  Mobafire.com is great for guides and help on gameplay for specific Champions. They have a bar near the top of the page that has all of the Champions that are on free week. This is helpful for new players who don’t have much IP or RP to buy new Champions.

If you are just getting into League of Legends or have been playing ranked for a while now, this guide will help you understand team composition better along with viable champions to play. I highly recommend that everyone reads this guide, though I do caution that the humor of this guide can be a bit offensive depending on the Champions that you like. The guide is also very humorous for the more experienced players and I hope that new players will stick with League of Legends long enough to understand Pastoulio’s humor.

http://www.solomid.net/guides.php?g=15698-pastoulio-generic-build-guide