Overcoming Plateaus in League of Legends

Jun 6, 2016
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You deserve to be exactly where you are at this point in your League of Legends career. No amount of junglers camping you, toxic teammates, disconnects, or AFK allies can change that over a large enough sample size. Where you stand right now in terms of LP is exactly where you deserve to be. If you didn’t deserve to be where you are now, you wouldn’t be there. This is an important concept to understand in order to improve. If you don’t fully agree with the first sentence of this article, you’re unlikely to get any better at the game.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. League of Legends is a video game. You don’t have to reach a certain ELO in order to have fun. Some people play the game strictly for enjoyment while others enjoy the challenge of becoming a winning player. If you fit into the latter it’s important that you are constantly aware of your strengths and weaknesses in order to understand what you can do to improve further.

Playing to Your Strengths

Champion Mastery

What are your strongest roles in League of Legends? Dynamic queue has removed the need for you reach a sufficient skill level for all 5 roles. Find out which two roles you are best at, and enjoy playing the most. Then pick out 2-3 champions you excel at, or want to master. These are your core champions that you will stick with through thick and thin unless they get nerfed into the ground.

Once you have put in 20-30 games playing one champion you should be able to understand what’s possible. What do you enjoy about your chosen champion? What don’t you like? Chances are a few items in the dislike column can be removed through altering your play style or adjusting your itemization.

If you haven’t yet gone through this process, you should do so now. Narrowing down your champion pool is almost a sure fire way to improve at League of Legends. You must be willing to endure difficult losing streaks as you improve at your selected champions, but it pays off in the end.

Taking Inventory of Your Weaknesses

Garen FB

If you don’t know what you don’t know, learning can be difficult. Taking inventory of your weaknesses is crucial to improving at League of Legends. You know those moments in-game where you attempt to make a play, just to die moments later? The ones where you know you messed up, but you’re not exactly sure why what looked like a perfect play in your head turned out completely differently? Those are important moments you need to remember.

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League of Legends doesn’t have a replay system, so it’s important that you make note of recurring problem areas you notice in-game. If you’re really set on improving you could look to record your own games, or even just make a quick note every time you die on the Rift. Over time you’ll have a long list you can comb through for recurring mistakes that need to be addressed.

Dying isn’t the only problem marker. Any time something happens differently than you thought it would, make a note. By becoming aware of mistakes you didn’t even know you were making you can begin to aggressively improve at the game.

Deleting 1 Mistake At a Time

With a list of problem areas in your hand, you are now equipped with the information you need to improve. If you try and erase all your mistakes at once you will get nowhere. The key to real improvement is taking things slow, and really focusing on 1 mistake at a time. Dedicate a couple games to each problem area to ensure the mistake gets erased permanently.

The process to getting unstuck in League of Legends is relatively simple to understand, but involves a lot of work to follow through on. There are no shortcuts. The three step process of playing to your strengths, collecting your weaknesses, then ironing them out one-by-one, is the key to constant improvement and overcoming plateaus. As long as you are constantly keeping note of what is going on in your games you will have a constant stream of data to work with.

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Jamie Jacobs
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Jamie Jacobs is a bot lane main who once won 17 consecutive Janna games. His favorite champions are Thresh, Kalista, and Bard. Jamie writes about competitive League of Legends and the professional gaming scene every week at Esports Edition.
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