Chmpion Evaluation: Sion

Champion Evaluation

What defines a champion? When someone mentions a champion what automatically comes to your mind? Perhaps the persona built for the character(Teemo, Draven) or how its kit is very cohesive (Zed, Syndra). When it comes to the champion Sion, only one thing really comes to mind. How did this champion pass its design phase? Being one of the original 40 champions is not a saving grace for this guy(maybe being one of the first four is) as Riot displayed that they were able to create multiple characters with cohesive kits. I'd argue that Sion is the only one without one, how did Riot go from creating great kits like Anivia, Karthus, Blitzcrank, etc to this? Now when I attack this champion I'm not saying that he isn't viable but I believe he needs to be changed so that his kit works like an actual kit.

Sion, the Undead Champion

Sion's current viability is always brought to the table when discussing a rework on public forums. I firmly believe that how viable he is, is completely irrelevant to whether he should receive a rework or not. Being viable isn't something that should never take precedent for deciding whether a champion should be made or reworked. Champions are made months in advance, even if they were to be made for the current meta its quite possible that they'd be unviable in competative play by the time its released. A more appropriate question to ask is, "Is there any chance that this champion would make it through the design phase today?" The answer is a resounding no in my opinion, I don't see any way that Sion would make it through the design phase without being scrapped or changed. This is where things get difficult because Sion just can't be deleted from the league and forgotten, he needs to be changed so that his kit works like one.

Sion's Passive

No matter what path you take to rework Sion, its clear that his passive needs to be redone. Riot has started to phase a few things out of the game, namely global skills/passives and RNG based skills/passives. Since its unreliable, the passive has to have a lot of power to make up for that. Sion's passive is very RNG based, so lets try to normalize it first before we do anything with it to see if its any good.

Feel No Pain
Sion has a 40% chance to ignore up to 30 / 40 / 50 damage each time he is hit by an autoattack. The damage reduction is calculated before armor and percentage damage reduction benefits are taken into account.

Lets use 100 autos to change this to a normalized passive.

Since it procs 40% of the time, its reasonable to say that it would block 40/100 autos, or 40% of those autos. If Sion's passive procs 40 times which allows him to ignore 30 dmg, he ignores 1200 dmg in all. We want to take out Sion's passive, so we make it so that he procs his passive 100 times (instead of 40 times) while ignoring the same amount of damage. 1200 dmg divided evenly amongst the 100 autos is 12 dmg ignored each auto.

Feel No Pain
Sion ignores up to 12/16/20 damage each time he is hit by an autoattack. The damage reduction is calculated before armor and percentage damage reduction benefits are taken into account.

Now that we got rid of the percentage chance we can start to really look at whether the passive is useful or not. In a teamfight the previous Sion may proc every time which makes him seem a little tanky or it may not proc at all and the passive is worthless, but now that its normalized the passive seems very weak. Blocking 20 damage isn't anything late game and percentage damage reduction benefits are taken into account. While it does technically scale, we need it to scale into lategame effectively and this can be done by blocking a percentage amount of damage.

The average base damage of a level 1 is 54 among the 116 champs. This means that at the start of the game Sion can block up to 22.2% of the base auto damage from champions at level 1. We'll use this number to help us create a new passive that scales into the game but blocks a percentage amount of damage.

Feel No Pain
Sion ignores up to (20/25/30)% damage each time he is hit by an autoattack. The damage reduction is calculated before armor and percentage damage reduction benefits are taken into account.

While it may seem like a lot, it should be taken into account that the percentage amount blocked is effected by percentage damage reduction.

We'll use this version for the passive for Sion for now.

Sion's Kit  

To edit his kit we must know what path we're planning to bring Sion to, whether it be a mage, assassin, support, etc. In my opinion, Sion best works as a fighter. Sion's abilities require quite a bit of mana because they have a lot of damage and utility. The iteration of Sion I've thought up will be using rage instead of mana and his skills will be changed because of it.

Q - Cryptic Gaze
ACTIVE: Sion's gaze terrifies a single enemy, dealing magic damage and stunning it for 1.5 seconds. 

Now this skill scales with AP very well, incentivizing people to build Sion with AP. I want Sion to scale off AD, so the first thing we can do is make it scale off AD. It now scales off AD, requires no mana and does magic damage. This skill has a little too much power, especially since it makes it hard for people to itemize against Sion. We can change the skill a bit to make it more in line with the rage mechanic.

Q - Axe Raze

FIRST CAST: Sion beings to wind up his axe, gradually increasing its damage and maximum range over 1 second. While in this state Sion cannot attack or use his other abilities and his movement speed is slowed by 15%.

SECOND CAST: Sion slams his axe to the ground, dealing physical damage to everyone around him and stunning enemies for 1 second. 

This skill would scale off of bonus AD, range would be 100 - 400 (maximum). 18 second c/d starting.

W - Death Caress

ACTIVE: Sion surrounds himself with a shield which absorbs damage for up to 10 seconds. After 4 seconds, if the shield has not been destroyed, the ability can be cast again to explode and deal magic damage to surrounding enemies. It will explode automatically after the 10 seconds have passed.

Another skill that incentivizes people to build AP on Sion. Being that it is a shield, we don't need to make it scale off AD but it would be nice to make it scale off his fury. 

W - Death Caress

ACTIVE: Sion consumes all of his fury and surrounds himself with a shield which absorbs damage for up to 10 seconds. After 4 seconds, if the shield has not been destroyed, the ability can be cast again to explode and deal magic damage to surrounding enemies. It will explode automatically after 10 seconds have passed.

This skill would scale similarly to Tryndamere's heal, increasing the amount of shield given to Sion depending on how much fury his has collected. Scales with AP as well, the AP scaling increasing with the amount of fury Sion has.

E - Enrage

Toggle: While toggled on, Sion has increased attack damage at the cost of some health for each autoattack. While Enrage is active, Sion permanently increases his maximum health whenever he kills a unit with either his attacks or abilities. This effect is doubled against champions and large units. 

I think this would be a good skill to implement his fury, since its already a passive. We can still give the same feel of the skill by letting it give free AD. The part about increasing the maximum health will be removed though.

E - Enrage

PASSIVE: Sion's basic attacks grant 2 fury and passively generates 1 fury every second. Permanently grants Sion attack damage, granting a larger bonus per fury gained.

It would most likely be something like 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 attack damage plus 0.1/0.2/0.3/0.4/0.5 AD per fury.

R - Cannibalism

ACTIVE: For 20 seconds, Sion gains bonus lifesteal and 50% attack speed. Additionally, Sion's autoattacks will heal surrounding allies for a percentage of the damage dealt. 

This ultimate has a ridiculous amount of power. This is part of the reason why Sion's first two skills scale with AP, if they didn't Sion would have too much power. Since our skills scale with his fury/AD, we're going to have to strip a lot of power from this ultimate. However, we'll try to leave some so that it feels similar.

R - Cannibalism

TOGGLE: Sion consumes 5 fury per second and no longer generates fury passively. Sion gains 10 / 15 / 20% lifesteal and his auto attacks steals 5% of enemy champions movespeed (up to 15/20/25%) for 2 seconds.

Sion has a lot of trouble because he can easily be kited. His stun is a small aoe around him so it makes it hard for him to catch anyone. However, with this ultimate once he does catch an enemy he can stick on his opponent much more easily.

Reworked Sion:

Passive - Feel No Pain

Sion ignores up to (20/25/30)% damage each time he is hit by an autoattack. The damage reduction is calculated before armor and percentage damage reduction benefits are taken into account.

Q - Axe Raze

FIRST CAST: Sion beings to wind up his axe, gradually increasing its damage and maximum range over 1 second. While in this state Sion cannot attack or use his other abilities and his movement speed is slowed by 15%.

SECOND CAST: Sion slams his axe to the ground, dealing physical damage to everyone around him and stunning enemies for 1 second. 

W - Death Caress

ACTIVE: Sion consumes all of his fury and surrounds himself with a shield which absorbs damage for up to 10 seconds. After 4 seconds, if the shield has not been destroyed, the ability can be cast again to explode and deal magic damage to surrounding enemies. It will explode automatically after 10 seconds have passed.

E - Enrage

PASSIVE: Sion's basic attacks grant 2 fury and passively generates 1 fury every second. Permanently grants Sion attack damage, granting a larger bonus per fury gained.

R - Cannibalism

TOGGLE: Sion consumes 5 fury per second and no longer generates fury passively. Sion gains 10 / 15 / 20% lifesteal and his auto attacks steals 5% of enemy champions movespeed (up to 15/20/25%) for 2 seconds.

This is my reworked version of Sion with some insight as to why I changed some things. Feed back would be appreciated!

After some feedback from the reddit thread located here, a second updated version of the kit was made.

Passive - Feel No Pain

Sion reduces damage taken by 2% + (0.05/0.1/0.15)% per fury missing. 

Q - Axe Raze 

FIRST CAST: Sion beings to wind up his axe, gradually increasing its damage and maximum range over 1 second. While in this state Sion cannot attack or use his other abilities and his movement speed is slowed by 15%. Releasing the skill before the charge is complete consumes no rage and stuns enemies within a 200 radius.
SECOND CAST: Sion slams his axe to the ground to launch himself at the targeted area, dealing physical damage to everyone hit and slows them for 2 seconds. This consumes 30 fury.

W - Death Caress 

ACTIVE: Sion consumes 30 fury and surrounds himself with a shield which absorbs damage for up to 10 seconds. After 4 seconds, if the shield has not been destroyed, the ability can be cast again to explode and deal magic damage to surrounding enemies. It will explode automatically after 10 seconds have passed.

E - Enrage 

PASSIVE: Sion's basic attacks grant 2 fury and passively generates 1 fury every second. Sion gains 0.1/0.2/0.3/0.4/0.5 AD per fury.

R - Cannibalism

ACTIVE: Requires at least 70 fury to use. Sion consumes 5 fury per second and no longer generates fury passively. Sion gains 10 / 15 / 20% lifesteal and his auto attacks steals 5% of enemy champions movespeed (up to 15/20/25%) for 2 seconds. Once his fury is depleted, the effects wear off. Sion's passive is deactivated while his ult is up.

Improving Your Level of Play

League of Legends is a game in which ten players called summoners summon a champion to fight for them on a battlefield known as Summoner's Rift. The summoned champions start off on opposite sides of the map, five on each side which form a team. The map is divided by a river and each side belongs to the team that starts out on that side of the map. Each team has a base where their nexus, a giant crystal the enemy team wants to destroy, resides. The objective of the game is to destroy the enemy nexus which means victory. There are several towers that must be destroyed before the nexus is targetable so you have to take them out as well. Everything else is optional. Optional does not mean you don't have to complete said tasks to win the game, it simply means you don't have to do it to win every game. However, to complete every game you must destroy towers and the nexus.


Tasks required to win:

• Destroy Towers
• Destroy a Inhibitor
• Destroy Nexus

Optional Tasks:

• Kill Enemy
• Use Wards
• Acquire Buffs
• Farm minions
• Destroy Inhibitors
• Everything that isn't required

Now that we have the basics outlined we can focus on how to improve your level of play.

Better Equipment Helps

I'd like to say that getting better equipment doesn't matter, but it does in some cases. If you ever reach the point where you wanted to do something in game but found yourself unable to do so because of mechanical limits it may be time to upgrade your equipment. Your regular mouse just isn't going to do it anymore and turning up the sensitivity in the options isn't a permanent solution. You'll want to get a 3500 dpi mouse (more if possible) and turn it all the way up. You could most likely get a lower mouse moving as fast as a 3500 dpi mouse by turning the sensitivity up in the game options but it'll be inconsistent. Once the game is over you'll return to your regular mouse speed and switching between the two (and more if you play other games at different mouse speeds) just isn't good.

Play a mouse movement game

If you get a new mouse games like osu! will really help you adapt to your new mouse speed movement and master it. If you're looking to move in game with better speed and precision then games like osu! really do help you in this department. Something that isn't done often in league of legends is warming up. Playing a few games of a movement game before you jump into queue will rid you of sloppy mechanical play in the first game of the day.

Thats as far as it goes for trying to improve your play outside of what goes on in the game. Lets be frank though, that shit don't help much. Having better mechanics means nothing if you don't know what to do with it so what you really want to improve on is what goes on mentally during the game.

Who gon' stop me?

The way you play a game is decided by the game's objective. If you've forgotten already, the objective of league is to destroy the enemy nexus. To destroy the nexus you have to destroy the towers around them, to destroy those you have to destroy an inhibitor and to destroy the inhibitor you have to destroy three towers infront of it. I doubt anyone will argue against this even if they run into lane thinking about how they're going to kill their lane opponent. I understand that if you kill your lane opponent you can destroy the tower, however you're limiting the way you think. This kind of thinking is what bred the saying "win lane lose game". Well shit, of course you lost the game. Winning lane =/= winning the game, so stop trying to win the lane. Start trying to win the game so you can start your path to being a better player.

If you can't drive this mentality into your head, then I'll tell how you can. You need to go straight up your lane blasting Who Gon Stop Me on repeat with your sight set on their nexus. As soon as you see your lane opponent chosen in champ select (or confirmed at the loading screen) you ask yourself, "Who Gon Stop Me?" Mind you that who gon stop me does not mean "who is going to try and stop me", it means what it says. Who WILL stop you, if that answer is ever no one then you'd better be all over their towers. This question is THE question you need to ask yourself if you want to win the game. It works in every single situation, do not question it. Enemy Yi backdooring nexus towers? "Who gon stop me?" Well obviously if Yi destroys your nexus, you can't destroy his. He is stopping you, so you have to eliminate him. They stop you in every game you lose and fail to in every game you win. If you fail then you fix what was wrong and try again. If you had the choice to lose lane every game yet still win, would you take it? I'm not saying that learning how to win lane is a bad thing. It simply means that if you're trying to learn how to win games, winning lane isn't what you need to learn how to do first.

Conscious Play

Before you start trying to win anything, you should know that your play isn't going to go up a division just by reading this guide. You get better with practice and twenty games doesn't count as practice so it will take a while. Its important to know what you're practicing though, which was the whole point of the previous paragraph. Learning League is like learning anything, except its on your own. You don't have a teacher (most likely) so you have to do some self learning here. Pretty sure self learning isn't taught but its pretty easy to get the hang of. You simply do, and when you fail you make an assertion as to why you failed and how to correct it. As long as you can say you didn't play the match perfectly, there was something you can learn. When you play a game just pick one mistake you noticed in your gameplay and then guess why that mistake was made and how to fix it. I say guess because it doesn't have to be right- its important that you just make a guess. It'll be an educated guess which means that it was based on the knowledge you already have for the game. If you guess and its wrong, you've lost nothing because you were wrong the first time (which is why you made the mistake). If your knowledge is poor at first you'll get a lot wrong but no one else is going to tell you what mistakes you made so this is something you have to do. You don't have a teacher to do this, so you have to do it yourself. Its like fighting a hard boss on a video game, you try one thing and fail. So you try another and fail, and another and another until you beat the boss. League didn't come with a manual on how to play the game perfectly, meta knowledge and all that stuff came from experimenting until something worked. Once you start getting a few things right your next guesses will build off of the previous guesses that worked. It'll snowball until its much easier to guess what you did right and what you did wrong.

Failing

You should never settle because you're afraid of failing. If you don't fail you won't get better, its just that simple. Contrary to popular belief, reaching diamond doesn't unlock the ability to create plays with characters. You don't become diamond with Zed and unlock the ability to do that awesome Ahri play you saw on youtube. I know people will say things like "Stop doing what X does on stream, you're not diamond" but fuck them. They aren't interested in getting better, so you keep doing it until you can. Faker didn't play Zed the first game and was amazing with him because he was diamond. Albeit he was better than a bronze player with Zed but he wasn't youtube highlight reel good. He played him, failed with him, corrected his play until he could. If you're mid sin and you're thinking "I can probably kill him if I do X but I'll probably fail." then you should do it 100% if you're trying to get better. No if ands or buts about it, just do it. You WILL fail, but it won't be in vain if you learn from the experience. By the time its your 50th time doing it, you'll have no problem executing it. You never see the fails on highlight videos, just the end result. That lee sin thats failing ward jumps horribly isn't going to be forever if they keep at it, eventually they'll perform them reasonably well. It may sound contradictory saying this after putting so much emphasis into going after towers but playing to win and playing to learn are two different things. Once you have the proper playstyle drilled into your head then learning other things is only natural.

Conclusion

Learning should be done in normal games, ranked is where you should always tryhard. You may want to dive your enemy laner instead of getting the easy tower in ranked but unless you know you can do so 100% and get the tower you shouldn't. As long as you're not trying to lose in normals, failing is fine. However playing dominion with characters you aren't familiar with goes a long way. All in all, if you're having fun as is and your level of play isn't an issue to you then don't worry about getting better and just play for fun.

Solo-Q Is a Jungle

For some reason everyone wants to reach high elo, but they aren't willing to do what is necessary. Most people will create invisible barriers preventing them from getting better and it makes no sense to me. The use the barriers to justify why they can't climb to the top while not realizing if they removed the barriers they'd rise to the top. Its like setting up a roadblock so you can't get to work, then explaining how you would have gone to work if the roadblock wasn't there. Does that make sense?

The Jungle

Metaphorically, Solo-q is the jungle of league of legends. Its not a person or a living being, so for the love of god stop trying to reason with it. You simply survive it, and you don't stop doing it until you stop playing the game. I'm tired of people trying to pioneer their own method of getting to high elo and say that all they want to do is be a challenger tier player. Frankly, they're lying to themselves or just being straight up disrespectful to everyone else. If they really wanted to get high elo, they wouldn't need to pioneer a path to do it. I'm not saying its wrong to do it, pioneer your path to diamond but don't do it under the guise of wanting to be a better player. If you got lost in the jungle would you choose that time to try and survive your own way? What would you do? Most likely you'd try to remember all the survival shows you watched and try to copy what you saw.

I mean, it is the jungle and the best way to survive in the wild is to adapt. Yet you rarely see anyone scouring forums on how to get better at league of legends using this basic skill. That person isn't going to attempt to adapt because adapting in a non-life threatening human vs human environment is harder to start. In the wild you can admit to yourself that an animal can find food better than yourself, so you'll follow it and eat what it eats. If a rabbit eats some berries I'd probably figure I can eat them too. When it comes to the game however some people would be hard-pressed to admit that there is something that can be learned from another player. "How did Kha'zix go 12/0 by twenty minutes? My team is such garbage. If they had let me mid Malphite like I wanted to I would have won against Kha'zix." Thats just the typical stuff you see in solo queue, and this is the wrong mindset for multiple reasons. I'm not going to go on and say that you couldn't beat that Kha with Malphite mid, that point is literally irrelevant to getting better. Its as if you're downplaying what the Kha has done by stating you could beat them.

This is where the jungle metaphor and adapting comes into play. You're in the jungle and you just can't seem to catch any meat. You might be stronger, smarter or even faster than some of the animals but they're not hungry like you. So what you do is copy what they do to catch the food they do. If they catch rabbits by flushing them of the shrubbery then catching them, you do it just as they do. You don't go on about how if you were the rabbit that shit wouldn't work on you or how you couldn't be killed as easy. You use the same techniques to pray on them- you adapt to the jungle. You don't go on about how you could have won that lane against Kha, you watch the replay and study the player. You note his every movements, you study his play like you're going to make a documentary about it and then you employ his tactics next game. You play Kha and do what he did, you adapt. WORST case scenario you get stomped, learn how to counter him and gain something new to adapt to. Its literally that easy, you just learn what stomped in your last game. Whether it was your teams mid, the enemy support or yourself. You study how that happened and do it next game. Once you got this down and gain all that freelo, you realize that you haven't even achieved your final form yet.

Normal Games

Now some people might think what I'm saying isn't really valid because my surviving the jungle metaphor is about a single person while winning games takes the whole team. If you were thinking that I can already tell you weren't thinking about surviving the jungle, you were just thinking about winning. Winning doesn't mean you're surviving the jungle, its a product of surviving. First of all, stop playing so much solo q games like normals if you're worried about your rating. Normal games are like street football(get a few friends, some nets and playing) games, ranked solo q is much more akin to organized football. Not in the team sense, but that the outcome of the game matters. Not to say you can't apply what I say in this post to ranked games, but most people probably can't bring themselves to it because at the end of they day they're trying to win the game and not improve. They may not take the extra risk which could be a huge learning experience because its a ranked game and that could really hurt progression. If thats the case it'd be much better to play normals to improve your gameplay, then ranked for the sole purpose of winning(or "tryharding" as some put it).

Hunger & Thirst

You can survive thirst seven times over before you have to survive hunger. A lot of people are thirsty for some form of online validation. How many people who are trying to raise on the ladder drop the line "I don't play X champion because its FoTM/I stopped playing X champion because its FoTM" like thats a good thing. Those people are going to hit a brick wall in their play and won't overcome it anytime soon. Those are the people not willing to adapt, simply because they let their ego get the better of them. Those people have so little hunger, no, they've run into the negative amount and now they're thirsty. They're thirsty for validation from other people because of what they do or do not play as if that gets them some sort of respect. They're letting that thirst get in the way of what they want. You don't want to be recognized for what you play, how you got to where you are but the kind of player you are now. Stop with the thirsty habits and watch the replay of that Jayce that dominated your last game, copy and apply to your next game. The only pro player I know that was famous for this was Chaox and he got clowned for it sometimes as if it was a bad thing. He'd state how X was OP if he got stomped from it and proceeded to only play X. You need to adapt that kind of mentality to evolve in this game. Most high elo players have it because as soon as they get stomped with something or see an item used in an intuitive way they're already q'd up and ready to try it out. "OP" shit is like wildfire in high elo as far as I've seen on streams, as soon as its introduced its beaten until its apart of the meta and finite counters are in place.

The biggest thirst(and hunger) enabling mechanic in my mind is the league system, or any rating system for that matter. It a breeding ground for negative thoughts such as being better than another player. Your rating means literally nothing once your in game, and yes, I know this is said a lot. Said so much people just take it for granted and don't really think about it. That 12/0 Kha might be rated silver, but he may have been playing like a diamond player that game. He may forever play the rest of his games like a bronze player, or silver, but lets just say he played like a diamond player that game. He gave your team such a beating you surrendered at 20 minutes, the only reason the Kha didn't have over twenty kills. Your rating doesn't set a cap on your play in a game. If that was the case you could never get any better or worse. That number is nothing, stop overplaying its value. It simply states how far you have come up the ladder, thats it. Knowing it doesn't mean the level at which you will play that game, realize you can always learn something from players in games. Don't use rating to prevent you from getting better, use what you know will you games. From experience, you know that Kha dominated your team and you will use said Kha to dominate others.

I haven't even talked about hunger yet, most likely because it isn't needed to climb the ladder. Its something you have or you don't, not really something you can manufacture as its natural. Hunger can be triggered by pretty much anything, but you can get up and one day decide you're going to hunger for X. You don't play league all your life, never watch a game of Dota, know nothing about it and then wake up the next morning and hunger to be the best dota player of all time. Hunger is much stronger than thirst, I mean if you really hungry to get better you'd already be playing OP heros and things such as pride for not playing them wouldn't even come into the equation for you. I mean real hunger, losing sleep at night because you couldn't do something you thought you could so you stay up thinking of what went wrong. So hungry that you hate/admire wildturtle because he has three accounts in the top 5 of the challenger tier. Just the thought that the only real thing preventing him from having 50 accounts and preventing anyone from becoming a challanger is that it may not be humanly possible. You may not see that as a reason to hate/admire someone but its probably because you're not hungry. Its like there is 50 spots to a university and the university allows you to take multiple tests and take up as many spots as possible. They have 50 tests, they all are different and one guy just gets the highest mark on all of them and gets all 50 spots. Its not even that he's currently smarter than you, its that no matter what you do, no matter how much you study and that ONE person is always ahead of you. Its one thing to know that there will always be someone better than you, but to know that there is one specific person who will always be better than you is something else. When that person has no advantage over you, and they're effectively letting you know that they'll always be better. Its that kind of competition that breeds hunger.

tl;dr Stop feeling sorry for yourself, adapt to the jungle and stop being the food for the people who do adapt.

Team Practice

There seems to be a common misconception about how easy it is for a team to train. It isn't just scrimmaging, watching replay of said scrimmage and then correcting the mistakes in the teams play. That may work, however there are far more efficient ways of getting better as a team. Scrimmaging is just a means to an end, the platform on which you decide what you practice. By itself scrimmaging is nothing but inefficient(it will still get the job done, but very poorly) and it promotes bad habits, this has a lot to do with the infrastructure of the scene you currently play on. Its why I believe Korea will always be ahead of every other scene, simply because their infrastructure is so good. Note I will not be explaining Koreas infrastructure, mainly because I don't know it but I'll be explaining what I believe to be at least a basic infrastructure.

The Problem

Communication is a key component to getting the most out of a team and should be developed before anything else. You can't create a team and just end up with structured communication, its obviously something created. Your team doesn't just end up explaining their lane situation in an ordered fashion at specific times in game naturually. You get together as a group and set clear and concise rules for communication. Saying "You need to communicated your situation more to us at X point in the game" is vague, and is not going to get the results needed. "When we lane swap, every 20 seconds say outloud your tower HP." is much better, and will display much better results. Don't leave it up to the person to decide how they are going to communicate, as a team set out rules on how you will communicate. When there is a communication error it makes it much easier to fix, as you know what you didn't do and what you must do to fix it.

After the terms have been made, you scrim. You don't scrim in this situation to win those games or get better at the game itself. Any mistakes other than miscommunication ones should be effectively ignored, there should be no emotional energy spent on anything but miscommunication. By doing this you're putting a mental focus on miscommunication, building a barrier in which you must cross to trend into other parts of the game. Its like a coach telling a team their not touching any of the equipment until they do X. X is now whats in the way of you and what you actually came here to do. If you focus on other mistakes, the importance of miscommunication in your mind is undermined and it will be corrected much later(or not even properly, the team may let little miscommunications slide) even if you were to correct more miscommunication mistakes this way. If you can't fix your communication, you're much better off finding a team in which you can.

Later on com practice can be used as warm-ups and can be used as a punishment by a coach for getting lazy with communication. Now, you may be thinking that getting lazy with communication can be warranted in some situations but it never is and should always be corrected. You have team A and team B, Team A is much more experienced than Team B. Team A practices a team comp which needs their top laner to 2v1, so the top laner does but team Bs bot lane decides to freeze instead of push. Team A agreed that their top laner would say the turret health out loud every 10 seconds after the 2:15 mark. Since they don't push to the turret, the top laner decides he doesn't have to do this until they do. Now the rest of Team A doesn't know whats going on in that lane anymore and they've built their game around that knowledge because its the base that they use. Its a constant in every game and it may hinder their gameplay without it, no matter how useless the information may seem. The information isn't actually useless because if the top laner says his turret health is 2500 every ten seconds he is effectively telling everyone they are freezing the lane.

Learning a Team Composition/Strategy

So the team has mastered communication and they can finally move on to the fun stuff; team compositions. At this point you should realize that time ingame you don't account for is black space, just like the fog of war when you don't have vision. Its simply an unknown, something you leave up to chance. If you want the best chance of winning, for every team comp you have you should at least have a general outline for every minute describing what each team member should be doing. It sounds like a lot to remember, but each individual player only has to remember their roles. You should know at what times you are vulnerable and play to accommodate that, doing things like giving up dragon(by not warding/ignoring it) and leaving it up to the enemy team to take what you leave them. Your main concern when learning a team comp should never concern the enemy team or your interaction with them, the main point of this practice is to perfect your side of it. An example of this is if your team decides to run Blaze's early wave strategy. You would practice rotating your players properly, wave clearing mid and having your top lane last hit. If the enemy mid laner is playing badly in mid, you wouldn't capitalize off of it and kill him multiple times then roam. Thats not apart of the plan, you would simply enable his mistakes and continue as planned. Why? Because its what you're putting an emphasis on, learning the team comp. If your team solely wanted to practice that they would go into a game, execute it, surrender and then move on to the next game. You're not interested in winning or stomping the other team in lane. You simply want to get your execution on the strategy down, and that's what you practice.

You don't need to practice against teams your level for most things. If you do not need an enemy response to practice it, then the calibur of the enemy team doesn't matter. Things like going for early dragons, counterjungling, etc don't NEED a response from an enemy team.

Creating/Changing a Team Composition/Strategy

This is the last step in the infrastructure, and its very complicated. I don't know how this phase goes really, but I'll just touch on the obvious because this step is needed to wrap up the blog. This is where all the analyst data and theorycrafting comes into play. The theorycrafter and analyst use data to make strats and then the team uses the strat in a scrim against an opponent their level. The enemy response goes back to the data analyst and theorycrafter and they use it to make the composition stronger.




That pretty much sums up my blog on team practice. While it may not be the best infrastructure, its better than just jumping into team queue with your team and hoping for the best. At least this way you can log your progress more easily and fix what needs to be fixed.

How do I become a better AD carry?

"What AD carry should I play to carry out of bronze?"

This is one of the, if not the most misguided questions asked about the role. Its a really myopic question that really isn't worth asking one way or another. The question proposes that the ability to carry a game comes from the champion and not you(your game knowledge), the summoner. I'm probably going to sound condescending in this blog post quite a bit but as you know, everyone was once in this position. You have to ask yourself what you want out of the question. Do you really just want to carry out of bronze and get stuck in silver? You'll just be asking this question for a new tier, if you ever get there. Do you want to become a Challenger tier player? Do you really believe an answer to that question will get you to that tier? The question you want to ask is "How do I become a better AD carry?" because the answer to this question will get you to whatever tier you want.

I'm not trying to say champions are irrelevant when it comes to winning a match up or that learning a the FOTM AD won't get you some LP. I'm just pointing out how minuscule that amount of LP is compared to what you could be getting if you focused your attention elsewhere. Before you start focusing on the unknown and unpredictable aspects of the game you should have a strong pillar to hold you up if you fall. A pillar based upon game knowledge dealing with static elements of gameplay within league. If you haven't clued into what I'm saying, I'm talking about the basics of the game. Last hitting, harassing... all that good stuff you've heard a hundred times over. Oh, this is going to be one of those blogs that tells you everything you "know" already? Well I'm not sure how well you know it, but I'll break it down for you bit by bit starting with the two main concepts in this game;

• [1]Opportunity
• [2]Pressure

[1]Opportunity

You ever go on a stream and watch a Diamond Division game or higher and wonder why it looks like their playing a completely different game? Going on the basis that the two main concepts of the game are opportunity and pressure, you are playing a different game. An opportunity is exactly what it sounds like: a chance to invade, harass, cs, kill, put pressure and just generally making the game easier for you. If there was a program that could run replays and then highlight all the opportunities in the game you'd see a metric ton more in a bronze game compared to a diamond game. The program would light up like a Christmas tree if it processed a bronze game. Imagine if you had that program and were able to run it in game, it would be so easy to carry the game because it would be basically telling you the best steps to take to win the game.

Well guess what, this "program" runs in the minds of high elo players all the time. Not only that, but their program is more advanced as they are able to rank which opportunities are greater than another. They can tell when its better to cs or harass(in cases where they can only do one in the span of say, a second), take a tower or go for an objective like dragon. When they go on a smurf and climb the ladder, every game they play seems easy because they have this program running in their mind(If you had it wouldn't the game be much easier?). To get better at league, you'll want to acquire this program.

[2]Pressure

This game is similar to games like Samurai Warriors or Dynasty Warriors in a strange way. They are games of pressure, and in those games there is a little bar in the bottom or top corner with the color of your team beside the color of the enemy team. The colors push, or pressure one another until one dominates the other and that struggle accurately represents what goes on overall in the battlefields of the games. That bar could easily apply to league of legends: every time your team take an opportunity you pressure the opponent, which pushes your bar forward while theirs recede and vice versa. Obviously the bar would fluctuate pretty frequently in the beginning, taking its big first dive when a turret gets taken or first blood is given up. You should get the general idea though, pressure decides the way the game goes and pressure is made by seizing opportunities.
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Now that you have some basic knowledge of how the game flows, you should be ready to apply this knowledge to your AD carry role. It should be apparent that the champion you play has little to do with getting you out of bronze than you first thought. Don't get this wrong though, the AD carry you play now becomes more important when you have this knowledge. Each champion has their own set of opportunities that you can utilize to your advantage. For example going in Level 1 with pantheon vs a mid if the enemy gets too close, as soon as they get in range for your stun and an opportunity raises and you jump on their face and get some decent damage off. New opportunities arise when you're playing Ezreal as an AD carry because you have Q to harass with. When Fizz hits level 2, you better back up because he sees an opportunity to go in and all in you he will.

So, how do these things apply to the AD carry role?

• [3]Laning Phase
• [4]Team Fighting

[3]Laning Phase

Here is where your knowledge of your character can really make you shine. You may not have noticed, but its your knowledge of your character and your enemy that let you know whether or not there is an opportunity. You want to harass while not getting harassed back. You want to CS while making it difficult for the enemy to CS. This is a LOT harder than it actually seems, everyone does it to a degree but people in higher tiers do it better. It simply takes a lot of practice to learn how to harass well while getting a reasonable amount of CS, you just have to be constantly pressing your limits in lane. HARASS HARASS HARASS(protip: you know you're harassing enough when the enemy ADC says "get off my dick bro") unless you know FOR A FACT it will be a bad trade for you. Example? The enemy is at their tower, the wave is at my tower. I shouldn't go harass them at their tower because I'll get hit by the their tower and miss CS. It may be a dumb thing to say, but knowing these things however obvious make you aware of things like the creep wave dictating whether you can harass or not.

I won't be able to tell you all the instances where its good for you to harass and I won't even try. Its something you have to learn on your own, playing games while harassing as much as you can will eventually make you better at it. You'll harass when its a good time to sometimes, and you'll continue at it and get better. You'll harass at times when its bad(doesn't matter if its due to match-up, if the jungler is there, or creeps, a bad time to harass is a bad time to harass) to do so, you'll learn not to do it and get better. Soon you'll be putting you in your enemies shoes, thoughts like "They could harass me so easily right now, why aren't they? I'm just going to farm it up for free." will come up more and more frequently and before you know it you'll be in Gold wondering why it was so hard to climb out of bronze.

[4]Teamfights

At this point in the game, your team and you are sizing up the enemy team and are about to fight. Because of your role, there are a few things you are unable to do. You cannot capitalize on the poor positioning of their tank (say he is in the back) and initiate the fight because thats not what you do unless you're Ashe. You have to sit behind your team and wait for them to initate. Its also good practice to use your tank to pressure the enemy assassin, ap carry, bruiser, etc. Say I'm Graves and the enemy Lux wants to throw a binding on me and 100 to 0 me. If I stay behind my team's Jarvan, I'm creating an imaginary line Lux can't cross if she wants to get to me which is effectively Jarvan's initiation range. Practice using your teammates in this way is a great way to hone your positioning to be as effective as possible.


Anyways, thats all I wanted to touch on. I think that pretty much sums it up when it comes to the AD carry role. If people like this post I'll make some more about more roles, but I'm only a gold player myself. I can't really make posts about what's what when it comes to high elo decision making, you'll have to look at high elo players for that. I can only tell you how to get better, or at least how I got better. A tip worth mentioning is that watching stream generally don't make you a better player. They're better for learning the ins and outs of champions. The reason I say this is you're more likely to learn a trick with a champion then an opportunity you can seize in your games because said opportunities rarely show up in high elo games(unless you are high elo trying to better your play), you'd do much better watching vods of say WildTurtle's smurf account when he was just climbing up, you'd learn a lot more than watching his stream now.