Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Silver to Gold

I wrote on my previous post on how to get from Bronze to Silver.

Here are some tips on how to get from Silver to Gold in League of Legends.

If you are in Silver congrats, you've gotten out of Bronze and hopefully never have to deal with Bronzies again. Silver is where you feel 'average' as a player but who wants to be average right? You have the drive to get to Gold and be better. Like bronze you get a lot of silver players trying different champion and weird picks that are not in meta.

In Silver you will find most of the time the lane that snowballs first will dominate the game. How do these people snowball? You will find that in Silver a lot of players value kills and tries to get as much kill as possible. For example, you are being harassed by Lux, you are losing lane you don't just try to fight her and feed the opponent.

So what do you do in that scenario? Sometimes we just have to fall back, farm and be passive to get your CS up or wait for your jungle to g
ank. Ever heard that knowledge is power? Having this knowledge can help you win games, many times I have seen players with good mechanics but their in-game knowledge is poor which results in losing the game.

So here are a few tips to get you from Silver to Gold.

1.) Don't lose lane
What that means is not play aggressively and win by the number of kills. Sure these are important but if you watched the pros play they rarely try to win their lanes rather they focus on CS and punish their opponent mistakes. Don't have the mindset of just winning the lane by killing. Good players can come back even when they are behind in kills because they are focused on CSing their lane.

2.) Map Awareness
In Bronze people rarely pay attention to the minimap, in Silver start to have the habit of looking at the minimap. CSing and and warding should be something you are already doing well since you are in Silver. Learn to look at the minimap and make plays. If an enemy is missing from a lane ping and let your team know, follow them if necessary. If your jungler is being invaded go help him.

Support- Usually you do most of the pinging to make sure your team does not get ganked or do something silly. Your goal is to set up vision control for your team.

Jungler- Have a lance presence, don't just farm all game. If an enemy uses an aggressive jungler like Lee Sin , it's highly likely he will invade or set a gank at level 3. You'll have to decide to ask your team to play safe as you farm or try to counter gank him. Try to snowball the lanes, gank the lanes that has no SS (summoner spell), they're easy kills. If an enemy is pushing the lane, try ganking them and even though you don't get the kill and a flash is burnt it's wurf. Getting your Katarina 2 kills early will allow her to snowball and win the game.

3.) Play around objectives
This is really important, playing around objectives allows you to apply map pressure and have gold and item leads. In general objective should be the 1st Tier Turret, Dragon, 2nd Tier Turret, Inhibitor, Baron and then Nexus. Of course depending on how the game is going objectives might change , and this comes through experience playing.

An example of playing around objectives is you have a huge fight bot, the jungler ganks, Top Lane tps and you guys won the fight. What's next is quickly push the turret then get the dragon (or the other way round) . Once the turret is down this gives you the luxury to roam and gank.

OR if the enemy is taking dragon and you're too far away from dragon what do you do? Instead of walking to the dragon , leave it and start pushing the turrets. This is a term called 'Trade objectives'

And lastly keep practicing and improve on your last hitting. Once that becomes second nature, you can focus on other things such as harassing or capitalizing on your opponent mistakes.

Hope this helps! If there are any questions feel free to comment and ask away or if there us anything you would like to see on this site please comment below :)