Climbing in League of Legends can be one of the most frustrating and infuriating things that can happen to any player in the game. It can be so frustrating that players will quit the game and many streamers have vented their frustration about the League of Legends ranked system.

This is largely due to the meta in the game. A meta is what is popular in that time period and what’s good to use to rank up. Sometimes, it’s good for one role and bad for another, but it’s almost never good for every role.

That being said, it can be extremely hard to navigate the game of League of Legends precisely while using the different metas that pop up to help you climb the ranking ladder. Plus, that’s not even considering how upsetting teammates can make you feel.

There have been countless times where players have gotten so mad at their teammates that they try to intentionally lose so that they can get out of the game. It’s what makes League of Legends such a competitive yet toxic game and one of the downsides of this massive MOBA giant.

I’m going to teach you how to ignore all that and make your way to becoming a League of Legends superstar because that’s what you deserve to become. After this article is finished, you’ll know all the rules, as well as tips and tricks in the book to becoming the best you can be.

How does Ranked in League of Legends Work?

Climbing in League of Legends works such that there are seven divisions to separate the players based on their skill. Bronze is the lowest and Challenger is highest. The order goes as follows: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Challenger.

Inside each of these divisions are subdivisions. The only two divisions this doesn’t apply to are Master and Challenger. The rest have this rule that applies. For instance, Bronze has Bronze 5, Bronze 4, Bronze 3, Bronze 2, and Bronze 1.

However, before you can get into a division, you have to play a series of placement matches. The placement matches are ten matches that they place you in based on previous performance. Then, based on how you do, they’ll determine your ranking.

You could get anywhere as high as Platinum 1 if you do extremely well in your placement matches, or you could get as low as Bronze 5. In the end, it depends on something called your MMR which is a number that determines who you should be placed with as well as how much LP you should gain from every match. We’ll go more into that later.

Once you’re placed into a division, you can start playing ranked matches. For every game you win, you gain LP (also called League Points). If you lose a game, you lose LP. To have a chance at going up into the next subdivision, you need to gain 100 LP minimum to qualify for promotions.

Once you qualify for promotions, you either need to win two out of three games to enter the next subdivision or you need to win three out of five. In the end, it depends on which division you’re trying to move into.

For instance, if you’re trying to move from Gold 5 to Gold 4, you’ll only need to win two out of three matches to be promoted, but if you’re trying to move from Silver 1 to Gold 5, then that’s a whole different story, and you need to win three out of five matches to do so.

You also gain and lose LP during your promotion matches so you could either look at reclimbing back up to 100 LP for another shot or you could just win one matches and be right back into your promotion matches yet again.

This is only the ranking system, and I haven’t even gotten into how meta affects everything as well. As you can see, League of Legends is like a cobweb of complicated rules and playstyles that all revolve into one messy problem.

That’s why the ill-equipped players tend to quit the game or vent out their frustrations—because they don’t know how to effectively take control of the ranking system and use it to their advantage. However, I’m going to teach you how to do so to become a better player at League of Legends.

The Rules of Climbing League of Legends

There are several rules one should follow when climbing in League of Legends. Some of them are more important than other, and a few can only be applied to specific situations. We’ll only be going over the ones that apply broadly across the spectrum and will actually affect you in the long run.

Focus in on One Role

There are currently five known roles in League of Legends to this day: top, jungler, mid, AD Carry, and support. Each of these has their own effect on the game and bring about their own results. Their playstyles drastically differ as well.

For instance, the support isn’t meant to deal damage. He’s meant to be a more utility-based player, either engaging fights or using their different abilities and items to buff and keep their teammates alive in the fights.

That being said, you should try to narrow down your pool into one main role. Become a top lane main or a jungler main or any of the other roles out there. There’s so much to learn about one role that if you wanted to effectively learn all five roles, you would take more time learning than actually climbing since there are so many micro-points that affect the game in such a goliath way.

Instead, effectively learning one role gives you a chance to play that one role as much as possible and learn the ins and outs of it. That way, you can focus more on what you’re going to do to advance your lead and help your team to win rather than how you should play as a top-laner or a mid-laner or etc.

AD Carry is much more different than top lane. AD Carries tend to be squishier and deal high amounts of damage while top-laners are tank-like and use their abilities to keep players from getting close to their teammates.

As you can see, it all differs based on the role so you’d be learning a lot more if you’re queuing up for a random role. I cannot emphasize this enough. Choose one role and make that your primary role for your climbing purposes.

However, you should also have at least one side role that you can fall back on just in case you don’t get your desired role in champion select. This does happen occasionally throughout your games. Sometimes, the League of Legends algorithm will auto-fill you into a random role or place you in a secondary role rather than your primary role.

To counteract this, have a secondary role ready—something that you can use at a comfortable pace. For me, as a top lane main, I have mid lane as my backup role since there are champions from top-lane that I can transfer to bottom lane.

I promise you that by doing this, you’ll become more knowledgeable on the game and ready for whatever the game throws at you. As I’ve said before, the meta is always changing, and by focusing in on one role, you can deal with these changes easier than once before.

Small Champion Pool

This rule is actually quite similar to the “one role” rule that I just stated beforehand. Once you choose the role you want to focus in on, choose two or three champions that you feel comfortable playing in your ranked games.

These shouldn’t be extremely hard champions, either unless you’ve been playing the champions for several seasons. For instance, if you are going to main the jungle, choosing Xin Zhao over Rengar would be a much better choice since Xin Zhao is easier to master and has as much carry potential as Rengar.

When I first started ranked, I chose three champions that had the carry potential to take me as far as I could get. Since I was a top lane main, I chose Darius, Illaoi, and Renekton. These were champions that I felt comfortable on, and I knew their kits very well, so it was easy for me to understand how to play them.

Rather than having to focus on what type of combos Renekton or Illaoi had, I could focus on map pressure and kill potential. That being said, this helped me carry games and bring myself up several divisions before the season ended.

You should be looking to do the same. Choose three champions from your role pool that you feel relatively comfortable on. I recommend choosing one pretty easy champion to play, one decently difficult champion to play and a pocket pick of your choice.

That way, if you’re having an off day, you can choose the easy champion, but if you need carry potential, you can play the difficult champion. If you’re in your promotions or everything is on the line, a pocket pick can be the difference between winning and losing.

However, like the “one role” rule, I also recommend that you choose two or three champions outside of your champion pool to use just in case something happens. For instance, if you’re counter-picked and don’t feel comfortable playing the other champions, you have two secondary roles to fall back on.

This is very rare and doesn’t occur often, but there have been times where I’ve chosen a different champion because they fit the team composition much better or I needed to counter-pick a different player.

A small champion pool helps you focus in on what’s important in the game like getting objectives, going for kills, and helping get your team ahead rather than trying to learn everything you need to know about your champion.

This all goes into account whenever climbing because every little thing matters and micro-management—something I’ll cover later into this article—goes a long way when it comes to succeeding in the ranked system.

Make the Small Things Count

I’m going to assume that you know the basics of League of Legends such as the laning phase and the other parts behind it. I’m also going to assume you know about the three stages of the game: early game, mid game, and late game. All three of these are essential components of League of Legends.

They determine who wins the match in the long run and what makes it so essential is that in the end, the little things matter more than the big things. The big things only seem important because of the scale and magnitude that they occur on.

For instance, a team fight or a big objective like Baron Nashor or Elder Dragon are obviously great things to take and signal that one team is bigger than the other.

However, what you don’t see is the preparation that goes into this. Long before a team fight or an objective pops up, people are already making small moves and adjustments to get an indirect advantage over the others.

You see this in things like clearing wards, freezing minions waves, or rotations that cause map pressure to be switched around. It’s common for professional players to do this because it’s what alleviates pressure off of the game at points throughout the match.

That’s what you should strive to do as well. It may seem hard. You probably don’t even know how to make the small things count at times because you don’t know what the small things are. They’re actually more obvious than one would think and I’ll tell you why.

You’ve been doing some of these small things, but you just haven’t been prioritizing as hard as you should so luckily for you, I can show you exactly what you should do and how you should do it. If done correctly, you should find success in your games instantly.

Minion Wave Control

The first small thing you should look to do is to control the minion wave. During the early game or laning phase, you are constantly farming minions to gain gold and experience. However, so is your opponent. If you can successfully manipulate the minion wave to be more in your favor, you can either deny them experience and gold or force them into a bad situation.

A good example is if you freeze it near your tower. This happens whenever your opponent may push the wave in too close to the tower, but you manage to keep it in place, so it’s just out of tower range. Whenever this happens, it’s harder for the opponent to farm because not only is he susceptible to tower shots, he is also exposed to a possible gank by your jungler.

Whenever you want to roam or try to get kills (a big play), you need to do a small play first, and this can be pushing in the minion wave so that it’s under your opponent’s tower. That way, if they decide to follow you, they’re going to miss out on experience and gold so if the fight goes badly, they’ll not only lose kill pressure, they’ll also lose a ton of experience and gold from the minion wave.

These are two of the major ways you can control a minion wave in your favor so that you can put your opponent behind. Of course, this can usually only happen once you gain an advantage or if the two champions are evenly matched. If you are playing against someone who counters you, this can be harder to do.

Vision Control

The second thing you’ll want to do as a small play is to use vision control. You might wonder if that’s the support’s job since that’s what they’ve been doing since it was introduced as a role, but it actually isn’t just their job.

You place wards too whenever in game, and so do your teammates. Whenever you place deeper wards into your enemy’s jungle, you give your jungler insight as to where the enemy jungler is, thus giving your jungler the opportunity to either ambush them or go for a big objective.

Clearing wards, however, also has the same effect. There are pockets of vision which are always essential to any player. For instance, any brush in the river is usually always warded usually by both teams.

Whenever you clear wards, you give your teammates opportunities to make bigger plays without being known too much. Taking wards off of major objectives forces the other team to play much more careful since one slip-up could mean a free Baron Nashor for you team.

The list goes on and on for the potential of vision control and as to why it’s such a big factor. If you look at the professional gameplay, you see the major teammates always clearing out wards before they look to do something. It gives you an opportunity to make a big play, and that’s exactly what you want to strive for every time.

Rotate Like Crazy

The third thing you can do to help set up big plays are rotations. Rotating across the map gives you pockets of time where you have a numerical advantage over another lane. Successfully pulling off a play such as killing off the opponent or shoving him out of lane gives you the opportunity to possibly go for a dragon or a tower.

Have you ever been frustrated by a team taking five people to camp one lane? It seems like they’re almost trying too hard and it can be infuriating, especially when it somehow works out. That’s because they used their rotations to help them get there.

They knew when they needed to start moving and coordinated as a team to get to one place and make the moves while your team became a little too spread out and found themselves to be sitting ducks in a time when they should have been making their own moves.

I cannot stress how important rotations are. They’re what make team fights so explosive at times because rotations take time and consistency to get down. You need to know when you should start rotating and how many times you should do so.

For instance, if you’re a top-laner and you rotate down to bot lane, not only are you giving up a ton of experience and gold, you’re giving your enemy laner a chance to either come back from a deficit or gain a lead on you.

That’s why there are specific times when you should rotate. A good example is whenever you have Teleport on you, and a big bot lane fight breaks out. If your wave is pushed in and you have the opportunity, at that point, a rotation would not hurt you.

It also works with minion control. If you see that your mid lane’s wave is being pushed in towards them and the enemy mid-laner shows no signs of backing off, maybe this is a good moment to go in and try to get a possible pick for your team.

If done successfully, the successful rotations will begin to add up and eventually, you’ll see that your lead over your opponents will slowly begin to increase. Of course, you can apply these results to correctly using vision control and controlling a minion wave.

Conclusion

After reading this article, I hope that you’ve gained a whole new insight on the game of League of Legends. The ranking system actually isn’t as hard as you might think it is if you’re able to apply these rules as well as tips and tricks into your bag.

Plus, the majority tend to play with a tunnel-like vision embedded inside of their brain. They only know that they need to get kills, get items, and get towers till they eventually reach the Nexus and destroy it. Oh, and if they can get a Dragon or Baron Nashor, that would be nice too along the way.

That’s the mindset that most League of Legends players tend to have when starting from the bottom of the ranking ladder. However, as you start climbing, you begin to learn that other people know about the small things that need to be done to make the big things happen.

This is when the game really starts to take off, and your skill and game knowledge is put to the test. You’re not only applying this to climb out of “elo hell,” you have to apply this to whenever you’re trying to stay in your desired elo.

I know you don’t want to work hard and climb all the way to Platinum 5 only to be demoted all the way down to Gold 3 because of bad plays and misused judgments. Use these rules and tips and tricks correctly, and you’ll find yourself becoming a player you never knew you could be.