r/summonerschool

Was playing mid, had a lot of kills, roamed bot and got a double kill, I realized I had 300g bounty on me, and that the support damaged me last, so I didn't walk out of the tower range and died to give support the bounty. I thought I was going to die at some point anyway so I would rather give the bounty to the support. Was this inting? I still lost the game so was wondering if this was a mistake

In pro play, everyone who needs to farm can keep up perfect or even higher cs. That means the mid laner and adc, who are pretty much always at perfect cs. Top laners tend to be around 8-9, but can go above perfect depending on the champion. And lastly, junglers always have 7-8, which I believe is the appropriate amount for a jungler - and this is still with objectives and teamfights. Even if the players are behind, they still keep up very respectable cs scores - just subtract 1-2 cs/min from the numbers (that is, if they lower cs at all). I'd say this is true for most of the pro play I watch, I don't really watch non-pro high level content but I'm assuming the same can be said.

As for how this relates to my low-elo self, having perfect cs is a distant dream. In my experience, it involves perma-farming, stealing teammates' waves and hogging the jungle pretty much all the time; and that's an impossible task, because just taking one minion or camp would flip off teammates. But I'm specifically confused as to how ALL of the (relevant) players on BOTH teams can have such good cs; not to mention their constant teamfighting and counterjungling. If anything, it feels like the biggest obstacle standing in the way of perfect cs is teammates competing against each other for who gets first dibs.

Important note to avoid misunderstanding: I'm not trying to make fun of any rank, and I hope the title makes that clear.

I've recently started watching S2024 Iron spectates out of curiosity. After analyzing their CSing, some minimal micro mechanics, combos and builds, I swear: this is how Silver used to be back when I started playing more SoloQ (2020ish?), or even low Gold. Same plays, same strategies, same mistakes. Today's Iron/Bronze players are actually very decent and knowledgeable compared to the AVERAGE/DECENT players in the past, which raises the question... Did everyone get that much better at League that even the statistical bottom of the ladder is actually good?

I wanted to further test this opinion, and watched some of my favorite 2016 high elo highlights. I'm not sarcastic when I say that the "outstanding" outplays and combos they used to do back then are a daily or even game-to-game occurrence in today's Platinum, the rank I'm usually playing with. (To quote a former pro player: back then, a Lee insec or Gragas bomba pingpong were considered top tier OTP micro. Today, almost every main can do those combos.)

So my question is, how did this happen? Why is today's Iron yesterday's Silver? Why is today's Bronze yesterday's Gold? Why is today's Plat/Emerald yesterday's Diamond+? Did we, as a community, improve that much? Is this an extreme Flynn effect? Or is my brain simply fried and I'm imagining things out of lack of knowledge?

Hello guys, I'm really struggling with wave management. I know all the concepts but really struggling to implement them. How do you make your laning plan and how to make it accordingly to your and enemy jungler and to your laner. Walk me throughout your thought process and what to take into account from the draft and loading screen. And everything you say please note that I only play Garen so make everything according to Garen and I'm emerald/diamond so note that. Thank you.

Which class or specific champions would allow someone who "deserves higher elo" to have the biggest outcome on the game if played on an equal level? Engage, Enchanter, Warden or Mage? Or should I just pick what my comp needs? I guess if someone was to boost as support they would only play engagers and roam but is that true?

From what I gather:

Engagers can dictate the pace of the game and lane, but if their team falls behind it becomes a lot harder to have agency afaik.

Wardens can win lane and protect carry and have good teamfight and have some engage/pick tools, they're kinda a mixed bag.

Enchanters can have consistent and reliable low death games, with agressive double range laning phase, but if they don't have a solid carry they lose and often times other roles don't draft engage.

Mages can potentially solo carry but probably have a shit comp and adc is tilted from champ select. Basically often hurting the team so that they can have more damage themselves.

I'm simply unsure what it is that I'm doing wrong. Only my four most recent matches are ranked. My Samira match was truly just me playing badly, I earned that loss. The other three, I don't know. Is it a macro issue? As Jhin my primary goal is to farm like hell and be present for any teamfights at objectives. Besides that, I play for my bot tower, and then rotate mid, farm and drop mid towers, fight only when necessary, convert won teamfights into epic monsters and towers. I know it's a very simplistic, very Bronzie gameplan, but from what I can tell, it's the correct way to play in this elo.

Edit: I'm nuts and forgot my OPGG.

What's the idea behind bork vs kraken as a first item on ADC's? They both seem to be good in long fights and both give ad and attack speed, so what makes one better than the other on certain champs. Bork is better than kraken as a first item on twitch, but I never see anyone go bork on something like jinx or lucian.

Just played a game vs a Nasus as Jayce mid. I don't play top, but I used to. I'm in Emerald after just getting back into the game.

I picked Jayce knowing that he has the poke to shove Nasus out of lane and keep him off of cs.... except, that must have been dated knowledge. Now Nasus just didn't care about anything I did? I couldn't shove him out of lane cuz his hp regened too quickly. Then at 6 after first base, he literally just E ult ghost Q and I got ran down from center midlane. Couldn't do anything. Phase rush didn't last as long as his E and the knockback from jayce E was nothing due to ghost.

So I'm banning Nasus like a scrub in emerald now, but I don't understand. Has this meta changed and now ranged characters into tanks doesn't work? Should I expect al osing lane against any similarly auto pilot champ? Literally nothing I could do.

I know many people consider Naafiri to be boring compared to other assassins but if you want to absolutely annihilate low Elo 1v9 wannabes then Naafiri is amazing.

A bit of story. I am a jungle main playing usually lillia and currently Taliyah. Not the most committal champions. But sometimes there are those comps where especially lillia isn't very good at all. "Those comps" are usually very damage heavy but have relatively little utility and cc. Anyone on the enemy team is a squishy and the most durable one is probably a Warwick. Ranged toplaners like Teemo, carry supports like Velkoz (why can't he be mid god dam it), you know, tons of champs that die once a leaf lands wrong on him, but can deal insane amounts of damage.

Lillia can't do much against those champs because she is weak early game and once team fights start becoming more common, she cannot even walk up for a q without loosing half her healthbar. There is just too much damage. A honest and fair fight is just not feasible against something like that. So, what could I do against those comps?

I knew that I needed to learn playing something that is able to quickly reach and oneshot the enemy backline. I mean, technically it isn't a backline if there is no front line, but whatever.

I know Naafiri isn't a jungler, but honestly, playing mid is sometimes way more chill anyway. The gameplan is relatively simple. First, farm until you get 1200 gold for tiamat (a wave clear item). Push slow, you want to be as close to your tower in the early game as possible (although once the minions come under tower you should push faster). Poke the enemy with q whenever he does try to take Cs or to attack you. The dogs will hunt him down, giving additional damage. Meanwhile look at the map and see if other lanes are pushed under tower. If they are, start fast pushing into the enemy tower and ping the lane to go for a roam. In low Elo especially 3v2s or 2v1s are basically free wins every time. Low Elo also loves to perma fast push because most players don't consider the danger of a Gank and how vital it is to be next to your tower.

A all in looks basically always the same: R if available, then w on the most squishy target, then if they run away, finish them off with your q (it does actually a lot of damage if you land both). Use E if you need to, the gap closing can be very vital. If items or summoner spells with damage are available, use them right after your w, the damage can sometimes be the difference between life and death. Ignite and profane Hydra are the most common ones. Remember that you are a assassin, you are mostly about burst damage, but long drawn out fights are a weakness of you. Squishy champ classes like mages, marksmen, enchanters or other assassins are often free kills if you just engage first. Others like tanks, juggernauts or divers are very hard to burst and you should only all in them if they are at low percent.

Usually you will Gank the bot lane more often than top because bot contains the more squishy champs, but if the enemy plays a ranged top laner like teemo, vayne or Kayle (she is melee before level 6 but the same rules still apply because kayle is very weak early), then a roam to top can be actually way simpler and it also detilts your own top laner because ranged top laners are the most annoying matchups in the game and especially vayne top is hated so much, there is a entire subreddit devoted to post videos of vayne dying. After the roam, return as quickly as possible to your lane because you want to collect CS before they crash Into your tower.

Besides that, do what every good mid laner does. Rotate for objectives and otherwise farm up.

The reason why Naafiri is so good in low Elo is because the enemies don't have any idea of how to counter a champ that bursts them down so quickly. And that is because the counterplay against assassins isn't mechanical but macro-based, something that lol never bothers to teach you at all. However, Naafiri has still weaknesses, and those mostly come down to her simplicity. She is essentially a stat checker in the sense that she checks the enemies stats and if they are low enough, they die. There is not much mechanics involved here. But in my opinion, she is not only a stat check, but also a matchup check. So many players just want to play a 1v9 hypercarry that one-shots everyone and forget this is not a 1v9 but a 5v5. Which brings me to the biggest lesson here.

You are not a hypercarry or even a regular carry. You are a assassin. Those are specifically ment to kill enemy carries but not much else. You enable your teammates to carry. If you get so fed that you do a Penta, that's great, but it isn't the norm. You are still part of a team. Think like Naafiri. Alone you stave. Together we feast. The only thing you do is your job in a bigger project that is the game that you are currently playing. You don't kill only for the gold. It's nice, but it's not all. You also kill to help your allied laners to farm savely and deny the enemy champs farm, putting your team further ahead. With every kill, your team snowballs and the next kill becomes easier. In the end, you care about Ressources. Exp and gold. And I mean for everyone, not just you. That's also the reason why you want to fast push before a roam. Because your minions are all Ressources you need and if your wave gets pushed into the tower, your Ressources die.

I am by no means a aggressive player. Porofessor even says I am quite a passive laner. I have below average kills, but I also die quite rarely in lane currently because I learned lane fundermentals and spacing. I have still much to learn and train, but it's sometimes kinda shocking how little the other players think about their team and their positioning and their role in the game. It's the first things I learned through playing jungle, but Midlane is arguably the more chill way to play, which is vital for me, who sometimes starts loosing champion permanence when I am too stressed. Naafiri is such a good start for learning assassination, because it's all about macro. Find isolated targets and oneshot them. It's as easy as that. And low Elo has no idea how to stop that because nobody does ever bother to teach them such simple yet vital things as "don't perma fast push for no fricking reason" and "teams need tanks to protect their carries".

If you follow those simple rules, pick her into a squishy comp, which are quite common in soloq and your allies don't die 20 times in the first 5 minutes you should be able to win games more often than not. But I encourage you to learn more about macro and how to coordinate with your team. Maybe try out helping your jungler contest scuttle crab, something like that. It can be so rewarding, and is actually extremely important if you aren't a mechanical god.

I’ve seen so many guides talk about simple strategies with waves to push a lead such as cheater recall, but they never explain what to do when these tactics are used against you.

If others are also learning it, you’re not going to be the only person in the game attempting to use it.

So, say I’m playing bot and our 2v2 is much weaker than the enemy 2v2 level one. They know this, zone us off the wave, set up a cheater recall and come back with a small item advantage and full hp/mana. What would be the best course of action I can take to get even/ahead from this point? Thank you.

Hey guys,

Ever sinve this new season started i feel like somethings really off with my gameplay. Last season i hit dia relatively comfortably with around 60% WR on my main and relatively high ones on my back up champs aswell.

This season its been a tough struggle and i tetherd on the edge between E1 and D4 all season long , recently demotign since i didn't knew LP regress over time in Dia.

I feel like everythigns kinda off my deaths are higher , my damage is share is mostly very low when im playing mages , my cs got worse i started losing too matchups i normally win and i don't know what im doing wrong.

If i switch it up and play different champs its not that bad and i actually can perform rather well , esp. on champs who always have a certain value even if behind.

I kinda wanna have the feeling again to be good at a certain champ and not get fucked over every game i play to a point where im not enjoying to play the champ anymore since they feel so different for some reason.

here's my for reference , id appreciate any help tbh

I know it is supposed to be an advantage. And an opportubity to freeze. It's just that during the bounce back, they will build a slow push, getting a level advantage. I cant harass them or I'll break the bounce back through minion aggro. I also cant hang around overextended and cs because the jungler exists. Once it is in the middle of the lane, they have a level advantage and minion advantage so I cant contest. By the time it is near my tower I just cant freeze and they get a free reset.

I do this against other players as well when I get killed early and it works great. The only counter is someone with good waveclear like sion or riven that can quickly trim the wave without dying. Im not sure how to approach this as I play low waveclear champs.

Beaucoup des gens disent "ne jamais abandonner, si on abandonne, on va perdre". Mais je ne suis pas complètement d'accord. Si je n'abandonne pas, je serai en colère lors de mon prochain match, et j'ai plus de chances de perdre. Je pense qu'on devrait abandonner quelquefois. Ce n'est pas amusant de jouer si on ne veut pas.

Que pensez-vous?

Hey guys, this is a question i see being posted a lot so i’m gonna give my two cents on the matter

For you to convert your leads into wins, you have to abuse the leads as best as you can and keep your bounty for the longest you can

That means that if you’re a top or maybe mid laner and you have a early level advantage, you need to keep the enemy away from his exp source while keeping an eye on where the enemy jg is

People on lower elos often don’t value their life enough when they have a bounty, so if you’re split pushing you have to know where the enemy is before going forward or if you’re fighting you NEED to be sure you’re not gonna die before commiting to the fight, if it’s iffy or you don’t know where the rest of the enemy team is, back off

Last thing: using your champions strenghts, if you’re a fiora for example, you might not want to group up with your team even if you’re the only strong person on the team. If you’re an orianna, you have to juggle farming with helping your team

This might be obvious to many but i’m bored and i thought this could help somebody, also leave other tips in the comments if you want to ;)

Okay so what is the general gameplan to play against Yasuo ADC as Vayne, Draven or Aphelios? I don't play ranked so all of these experiences have been on normals.

I usually don't play aphelios so I'm willing to let it chalk up to my inexperience with the champ. I was trying to play Aphelios cause I kinda wanted to, so I played him on Quickplay and got hard stomped in lane. It was a yasuo and karma vs aphelios and soraka.

But it's very important that I need to know a gameplan going into that matchup as Draven and Vayne. It's like he outtrades me on melee range by dashing onto me, deletes my axes with W. Can't properly poke him without him posing the risk of getting dived/dashed on to. I don't even wanna risk taking minion aggro to fight him cause early game ADCs feel so squishy. So I want to play the most passive laning phase and just farm to get ahead most of the times. So the point remains; idk how to play into the yasuo matchup cause of his passive shield plus windwall fucking up all my trades and ending up with me getting chunked out.

About last night's game, my support who is a 200k mastery 7 aphelios main started flaming me saying I was a coward for not following up on a play, but I felt like I should have been farming the cannon wave that was infront of me. I sometimes don't want to take fights which feel very unfavorable to me cause I feel like I might miss out on farm plus pose the risk of almost dying because of that. It legit tilted me that my soraka was saying she knew better. I flamed her a bit because I was tilted and I'm kinda feeling shit about flaming her but whatever.

So how do I deal with yasuo ADC and possibly supports who don't want to be on the same page as me?

Edit: I genuinely don't want to be the toxic main character syndrome ADC Guy in the lobby. I just felt like I got attacked and reacted emotionally, now I kinda regret it. I'm rethinking that I might even have fucked up sometimes but yeah I would rather be clean and feel good about it without flaming someone, so there's a introspection to that.

I am Iron 3 and working on improving. I main top and OTP Darius. I was hoping to get some feedback on how to improve my decision making. Assuming that I'm winning lane, I generally wait until I take down t1 turret before walking cross map for dragon. The thought is to work on continuing to deny agency to the enemy top laner and help jg control top Jung while grabbing XP and CS. Assuming a relatively even gold state for my team and my enemy team, does it make sense to try and force a 5v4 or 5v5 at 2nd dragon if Im able to get to a shoved lane state? That seems to be a coinflip in my games and a champ on either team seems to begin a snowball at that point in the game by getting a double or triple kill. I typically work on freezing my lane to set up a slow push during a lead to keep the enemy top laner exposed for another kill and to deny farm/xp instead of risking a gold and XP loss to hoof it over to 2nd drag. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks!

Is there a tool / spreadsheet for calculating the expected DPS you can deal and take if you enter the champion and items you're using?

I didn't find anything in the wiki, and everything I found on google so far was a few seasons out of date.

If you know something like this, I'd love to see it!

if not, then I might consider building it for myself and sharing it (assuming i figure it out)

Thanks!

Let's say if I play mid lane and I play ahri into a bad match up like akshan and tristana who gonna outtrade me and force me to play safe pretty much the whole lane phase and on top of that they have an assassin jungler like kha'zix or rengar, or an AP assissin, damage spread is not the point here.

In this situation even if I won't be able to proc aeri too well into this ranged champions and electrocute is the bigger key stone on ahri, would it still be a good idea/viable to pick the aeri keystone to give me acess to the scaling sorcery tree runes since lane will be difficult while open to myself the chance to pick resolve secondary for the extra tankiness Vs their bursty champions?

Thanks for reading 😀

Hi guys

I was a master rank support last season and a half ago and came back to league after a long break but want to learn top. I hit masters playing enchanters on one account and then playing hook (mostly blitz) on another, I won most of my games through support being very impactful on a macro level and having control of the vision game. I've tried getting smurfs to learn the new role but the accounts just get banned for being botted, one account I reached around low emerald whilst the other got to about platinum before being banned. I've started playing on the blitztank OTP account and playing top lane where I got sorted to emerald with pretty crazy MMR. I've won a few games and lost a few games and arrived at around D3. Long story short I just get pelted in lane and am really struggling to stay motivated to learn when I just lose lane because of my lack of mechanics. I understand wave management and its theory but still fumble on execution. A lot of the games I win just because someone else gets completely fed and carries me but rarely do I feel like I'm making any impact, especially since I lose lane so much. This is especially so when I play against OTPs or top laners who play very aggressively (Aatrox, Urgot, Darius).

I'm trying to learn with really simple champions like Garen, Mordekaiser, Renekton and tank top laners.

What can I do to try and brave through getting creamed every laning phase with a learning mindset? It's really difficult because I just feel outclassed a lot of the time.

Context: not complaining. Wondering if we need a new strat. I am low silver 2 seasons in a row and duo botlane. (I'm support, my adc plays cait)

So in season 13 I climbed to silver duoing botlane. We have a lot of success in laning and usually that translated to my adc just shredding through enemy team all the way to nexus. Now this season we had trouble making this work, despite having even more success in laning phase. so we switched to mid top and climbed to silver again pretty quickly.

Is it just me or is winning botlane not as impactful in season 14? Like it seemed like a fed adc in season 13 was just gg, at least with my duo. I'm not complaining that adc is weak, it more just seems like it's not as much of a wincon to have a fed adc late game anymore. A major issue I see is enemy team just focusing adc and especially mages (syndra, akali, veigar) just breathing on my adc and blowing them up even with enchanters.

Would love to know if it's maybe a macro problem or just not using our lead correctly, because there's adc mains in all the highest ranks, so obviously it's possible to climb from botlane.

Whenever I watch pro play, it's unusual if I don't see at least one person take Biscuits and I have seen many pro play games where 3/5 or 4/5 members of a team have taken it. I think it's a very good laning rune that I like to pick up on Sona and Aurelion Sol because if they sustain their rough laning phases they're set up for a very good game, but pros seem to just grab this on almost every champion lol.

What makes the rune so good to warrant this amount of attention, when there's a myriad of other options from other trees?

i feel like whenever i try to make calls or suggest things to my team they don’t listen and the shit that they do costs us the game. i try pinging and typing and trying to be positive and raging at them but no one listens. no one cares. everyone does their own thing.

any tips?

I asked recently about how to set up ganks as Tristana mid and basically got told to perma push and invade instead. I decided to try that - we've been killing the enemy jungler on their second buff. It works extremely well!

But now I'm wondering what the next step is? Should we try to kill them when their gromp respawns? I'm just wondering how we can take this advantage and push it even further, hopefully to smother the enemy jungler enough that they become useless.

Other than the obvious of taking objectives, of course. Going to work on diving next as that was something else others suggested but I'm curious how else to keep invading the enemy jungler. Is it just warding and killing when you can or is there some way we can try to make it consistent, at least in the early game?

Thanks in advance, all of your advice was very useful last time! :)