After my last post, I immediately dropped right back out of Bronze IV and hard, hard, down to 0 LP in Bronze V again. That was a very, very humbling experience. Actually more humbling than being placed into Bronze V initially was.
At any rate, that caused me to do some thinking about my strategy and about my capabilities as a player, and I decided to take some time to really focus on a couple of things:
1. Diversifying Roles. I needed to become more comfortable outside of the Support Zone. A couple of the games I lost during my quick slide into oblivion were the result of being pushed into roles I wasn't 100% comfortable with, and performing adequately to my own standards but not having the bandwidth left over to really affect the outcome of the game overall beyond that individual performance. It was harder for me to practice good map awareness and leadership when I was devoting all of my attention to mechanically keeping pace with my opponents in lane or in the current fight.
2. Diversifying Champion Selection. A few of my losses were also the result of just not being all that comfortable with tanky supports--and here I'm talking primarily about Thresh and Leona. When my team goes tankless with jungle and top and I'm 5th pick support, I have no choice but to pick one of these two (or potentially Volibear or Malphite, which I would LOVE to develop as part of my pool but that's a mission for the future). Because of not really playing those champs, my performance as a support really suffered. Whether a champ is "easy" or not, playing competitively requires reflexes and instincts around the capabilities of your champion's kit that I just did not possess for either of them. That was a major liability.
This time-out (or vacation) was part of a realization that I've come to adopt as a guiding philosophy for Ranked--when I stop advancing because my current capabilities are not up to the challenge at my new MMR, that is the time to step away, identify things I can focus on actively improving in Normal, and do it so that I can go back to improving my standing in Ranked.
The reasoning behind this is that, as long as I'm continuing to advance, working on attributes that I can only safely improve in Normals (like learning new champions for a given role, or learning new roles) are actually inefficient overall. Staying in competitive Ranked form while accruing LP and MMR helps me to continue to become more comfortable and to hone instincts and reflexes--and once I begin to level out I can take some time to examine why I'm not moving upward any longer and really refocus myself on those areas at that time, returning to Ranked to employ newly-developed skills and to test whether my training has been effective.
This will keep me from burning out on training for training's sake--Normals played to master a new role or champ or technique but without any correlation to a Ranked payoff--and also keep me moving up as quickly as possible to test myself against more difficult opponents.
I spent some time in this break learning more about top lane and about Renekton specifically, practicing with Leona and also honing some more Mid skills with Ahri. This has served me well and I've risen steadily since then, approaching a promotional to Bronze 3!
More to come, soon:
Current Status:
Bronze IV, 97 LP
85 games after placement, 45 wins
Support win % this week: 90
