the Most Important Thing for Improvement - League of Legends by TopTierTopLane

I've Coached Hundreds of Players for Thousands of Hours. This Is the Most Important Thing for Improvement.

Hi, I'm Patrick, or TopTierTopLane. I've coached hundreds of players over 4 years, with thousands of in-session hours. Despite my poorly chosen tag, this experience encompasses all roles fairly evenly. I thought I'd share some of the problems I see over and over, and potentially give you, the reader, some direction in this endless sea of information that is trying to get better at League. Obviously this isn't definitive or necessarily relevant to you, as everyone is different and this is a general post. With that being said, this information has a very high chance of being relevant to you. One of the biggest problems people have with learning league, especially the type to go on /r/summonerschool or seek coaching, is missing the forest for the trees. Many teachers are happy to indulge them, as there are a lot more trees to sell than forests. This is the first and probably only post of this style I'll make, because while there are thousands of little things that differentiates players of different skill, there are really only a handful of important things. Each skill in this handful I'll define as a "fundamental", a term I try not to use as it is used nebulously and more often than not, incorrectly. So yes, this is a post telling you fundamentals are important.

Wait! Don't click away quite yet. Fundamentals aren't usually what you think. Almost every student I coach agrees fundamentals are the most important thing, if phrased like this. A smaller but significant percentage actually reflect this in how they conduct themselves within the session. This smaller percentage tends to focus on things that they percieve as fundamental to the game, likely due to prior consumption of content attempting to educate them on the game.

Most agree fundamentals are the most important thing. Most believe they understand what the fundamentals are. Why then, do people pay me to coach them? If they already understand what they need to do to improve, surely they're wasting their money. Except one of the biggest problems players who are hardstuck have is that they don't know what they're doing wrong.

Can you see the cognitive dissonance emerging here? If I ask someone to identify their mistakes in a game, it usually looks like "I didn't need to die here, I misplayed". "I should've lasthit these creeps better". They only see microscopic mistakes, when in that exact game they're making countless macroscopic ones.

To understand this, let's do a bit of an experiment. Open up a wordpad, and write down what you consider to be the fundamentals of League. If you find these to be role specific, just do whatever role is relevant to you.

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Okay, so you probably said something like:

-CSing

-Wave control

-Jungle tracking

-Warding/vision control

-Orbwalking

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>! Maybe you said some less directly trainable, more vague skills, for example:!<

-Mechanics

-Teamfighting

-Damage foresight

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So how do we improve these? Well the top set can be trained to 90% efficacy in soloqueue in less than 100 games, assuming the player is reasonably comfortable piloting their champions already and not change resistant. These are 2 pretty big assumptions, but honestly I have plenty of students who can get these basics down real quick, typically those who have been playing less total time and have prior experience working with teachers (sports background etc). They'll climb, maybe a league, but they're still not going pro anytime soon. So what gives? This list contains important skills, but fundamentals are really just skillsets that don't change much over time. This means you can forget about what items are best on your niche build. This DOESN'T mean you can forget about setting up your base timers to get the correct items. This DOESN'T mean you can just build the same thing every game without considering gamestate. Here are a few examples of what I would prefer to define as fundamentals:

-Power spikes- one of the most important parts of understanding the game is knowing how all 10 champions operate at their respective item/level spikes, and best approximating how they will interact together. Hugely underfocused.

-Camera control- another woefully underrated skill. Take a lesson from SC2, camera control is a MECHANIC. Nice lee sin montage, now let's see you click on your lanes and see HP bars/minions so you actually have some semblance of where to path.

-Presence- understand WHAT you're needed for. In soloqueue/premades below semi-pro level, this is usually defined as "be there when they arbritarily decide to butt heads". You need to understand WHAT you're needed for to actually understand WHEN you're needed.

-Tempo- how to create, understanding in advance when you're going to be behind or ahead, understanding when to maintain vs trade tempo.

-Back timing- effectively 3 different skills in early, mid, and late game. Ties in with wave control and itemization the whole game, but becomes significantly more vision oriented as the game goes on.

-Mental resource management- thinking about the game when there is downtime. Focusing on what is important. This ties in heavily with the missing for the forest for the trees thing, and why I believe that type of overlearning is more often harmful than helpful.

-Flexibility- playing the game differently based on gamestate. Some games you need to group, some you need to split. Some you need to be the bus driver, othertimes a passenger. Some games you need to hard shove when enemy leaves lane, other times you need to follow. This might all sound obvious, but in game often players will react instinctively to a situation the same way no matter the details.

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All of these things and more work together and effect each other, and create a skillset that we can call "league of legends player". You already do most of these things, to varying degrees of effectiveness. These things change, but not drastically enough that it matters. This is why a player that took 3 years to hit d4 can take a year off and get back d4 in a month. These are the fundamentals.

So no, you're not going to hit challenger just by hitting 10cs/m every game and spamming an easy champion to learn their damage. This probably was sufficient in past seasons where players were worse and the meta was slower, but it's more complicated now. If it was really so easy, a lot more people would be there, so be happy it's complicated and enjoy the process of learning. This game is pretty complex, and it's OK not to understand it all. I don't, I still talk to players, other coaches, and watch VODs to keep learning.

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tl;dr fundamentals aren't as simple as you may think, but they are almost certainly the only thing you should actively focus on if your goal is to improve. Alternatively I made a video you can use like an audiobook: https://youtu.be/QWdLmFB9tzg

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