Update

So, my winrate with Nami has stabilized around 50% in ranked games, which is slowly but surely giving me more of a cushion on my LP gains/losses.  I've been as high as 60 LP and only once dropped all the way back to 0, which is not bad for the 29 ranked games I've played so far.  11 of those have been wins, which apart from the 5-game losing streak at the start is beginning to approach an overall 50% winrate which is my first major tangible goal.

I keep having my game chats dominated by folks who think they're on their way up and past the rest, usually guys with lower MMR than me who have lots and lots of advice about how every lane should be played (usually phrased as "wtf just stop already" or "omg u idiot reported for bad") but don't do much better themselves.  There has been a bit of muting, including of one Graves who was my lane partner and fed three fast kills by being overly aggressive--sometimes ADCs just don't seem to consider who they're partnering with and assume it's your responsibility to keep them alive even if they move so far out of position that the minion waves aren't helping them, you're lagging behind because you need to navigate the enemy support's zoning, and they're just blindly attacking.

Last game I had a Jinx as a lane partner who spent 90% of the lane phase in the bushes tangled up around my fish-tail against Cait and Nid, both of whom had an easy time landing skillshots because ONE OF US was guaranteed to be stuck in its path due to collision.  He gave up four early kills going HAM while I was at 20% mana--and I'm talking INITIATING fights, not just harass/trade or holding ground when they attacked him.  /sigh

Anyway, I continue to try and improve on my own game, and I think the effects are showing--I plan to do more training on Mid, Jungle and Top roles (playing Support has left a bad taste in my mouth about ADC, hehe), but I'm interested to see whether I can carry myself out of Bronze V almost exclusively by playing Support and then diversify once in Bronze IV.  I feel like I'm just a few steps away from being able to do that--so we'll see.

Lolking stats: 819 ELO/LKS
9W-6L with Nami in the past week
0W-3L with Thresh
1W-1L with Ahri
0W-1L with Lux (loss prevented, thankfully--we got completely wrecked with our tankless team comp and our team banning Ahri and Fizz, my two reasonably practiced mids, while squeezing me into playing mid)

Overall Status:

Bronze V, 27 LP
11 Wins, 29 Games Played

Dodging

So I dodged my first Ranked game at champ select this morning.  Our opponents had a great team comp with KZ, Leona, Annie and Singed in the lineup (had not yet picked 5th) vs. our makeshift comp with an unresponsive Yi and the one person who called "not ADC" left to pick adc after everyone else AND with no real tanks picked on our side...

So I dodged.  I know there are plenty of opinions on dodging, but my sense is that most competitive folks consider occasional dodging an unsavory necessity.  We were walking into a trouncing and I will gladly trade 5 minutes and 3 LP for 30 minutes or so and a dozen-plus LP.

What are your thoughts about dodging?  How often do you do it?  I hope that it will become less of a necessity as I get to higher divisions, but it may be that it happens more often as folks feel more confident of their ability to assess matchups at champ select?

Overall Status:

Bronze V, 18 LP
5 wins, 14 games played

Tutorialism

Been sick the past couple of days so my League play has dropped off a bit (you'd think it would increase but...SLEEP). 

However, right before The Crud took over my body completely I had a nice conversation with someone who saw this blog and/or the GD post about it and wanted to lend a hand.  His name is TheBlackCanon (henceforth TBC) and he is currently running around in Gold 3 after a rapid rise since the opening of S4. 

He offered to spectate specific games and offer feedback on specific aspects of my play that either I identify as needing improvement or he does, which will be a great help once we can work out a time.  Additionally, he asked me a really interesting question that I hadn't considered when I told him that I main Support.

"What do you enjoy about that role?"

Man--I know I enjoy it but I hadn't thought to articulate to myself what I like about it.  Ultimately I figured out it comes down to a sense of control and engagement with the whole battlefield.  I know that this should be something that every player is focusing on, but it seems at least at low ELO that this is especially in the wheelhouse of the Support player.  Based on that feedback, TBC suggested that I look into Jungle as an additional role to develop and offered some good advice on how to start learning it based on resources that I already have.  Thus far Mid has been my fallback, but sometimes it feels like a very small role compared to Support of even Jungle from my limited experience.  I don't mean small as in unimportant, but in early game especially I feel kind of chained to my lane without much impact anywhere else.

However, that feeling is also probably the result of my limited skill, so I often feel pressured to keep toe-to-toe with my lane opponent especially because I'm still very much a novice at last-hitting (mainly due to spending most of my time learning Support skills).

Anyway, I'm hopeful about this new opportunity and my horizons already feel broadened!

Overall Status:

Bronze V, 27 LP
3 Wins, 10 Games Played

Win #2 - on Coordination, Skillshots, Sweeping and Honoring

Woohoo!  Two in a row!  This time I finished 3/3/20 with Nami, which are the kinds of stats I like to see, and managed close to a full build (I've been moving toward maxing the Frost Queen's Claim and pairing it with Liandry's Torment for a strong late-game softener).

Although my individual stats were strong (and I did land a few very well-timed CC skillshots that turned teamfights for us), I can't really claim any credit for the win because without those skillshots I think we still would have won.  Final score was something like 42 kills for us and 21 for the enemy, mainly because of a couple of things:

1. Coordination
We were able to routinely initiate with great effect on the enemy because they were just all over the place.  Their bot lane duo stuck together most of the way through the game which is nice and chummy but they often were pursuing objectives that the rest of the team didn't seem to have any clue about.  They were easily located and isolated, and thus eliminated, and that left the rest of the team vulnerable once we had superior numbers.  There wasn't a LOT of map pinging on our side, or team chat--we just all were on the same page with needing to attack where we had strength, take objectives, and retreat/regroup before we overextended so we could catch them out when they either overextended on their counterattack or got complacent burning off minion waves.

This was hands down the NUMBER ONE factor that led to our win, I have no doubt.

2. Skillshot Placement
WOW.  Now, in previous posts I've noted that I really need to work on my skillshot placement, and you will probably think (based on my light gloating above) that this point is about self-congratulations, but you will be wrong!  Instead, the enemy bot lane (Leona and Jinx) really drove home the importance of consistently good placement and timing of skillshots that limit your opponent's options or ability to dodge them.

Both of these players had a very hard time landing skillshots.  I think the only time Leona landed her initiate it was on me and because I didn't mind her landing it because my goal was to force a fight (we had two hidden backup making it a 4v2 right under their tower).  In that instance I still managed to escape alive.  The fact that I didn't have to work as hard to avoid their skillshots gave me LOTS more opportunities in lane than I am used to having and also gave me more resources to work with (more health from less damage taken, which meant more mana from less healing, which meant more harrass which meant more lane control and so on and so forth). 

This really, REALLY made some things click for me in a way they hadn't quite before.  Seeing my own specific incompetence mirrored back at me made me aware of how much easier I was making my opponent's game.  Anyway, enough on that topic.  Suffice to say I will continue to focus on skillshot placement as a core skill to develop.

Other Stuff:

Sweeping: I did a ton more sweeping than usual this game and noticed that my instincts for it have gotten better.  I've begun thinking more strategically about where it would hurt my team to be seen moving around by the enemy.  There's still a lot of work to be done, but the whole map-awareness picture is starting to come together for me bit by bit.

Honoring: Despite a well-coordinated game with reasonable communication and a very solid win, I didn't receive any honors from anyone.  This surprised me, and reminded me that in my other win there were no honors from either side, though in a couple of my losses I've received a couple of honorable opponent honors.

Now, this might not seem like such a big deal, and honors don't DO anything, but I feel like especially in Bronze V where the mind-meta is that you constantly have to contend with toxic players, you want to reward players who are being constructive and working well with their team, as well as those who play honorably and don't talk rude smack, etc.  Granted that my sample size is small, but I'm a bit surprised.  Maybe I just put people off!

Before you think that this post is too self-congratulatory, I fully expect a devastating loss to come next, fueled at least in part by my raging incompetence and inability to really internalize a lesson until I've learned it at least a dozen times.  I just want to make sure to note what's working and what's not--and in this game, at least, things worked more than they didn't.  I still need to work on my skillshots, my early game mana efficiency, my map awareness, my communication, my...well, basically everything.

Until next time.

Overall Status:

Bronze V, 39 LP
2 Wins, 7 Games Played

Lunar Revel Event

So I'm going for path of truth because the icon just "popped" for me in a way the other two didn't.  Generally I don't care too much about summoner icons, since so many people at a given time are getting each new one--but I realize that it's kind of a collector-impulse trigger.  Folks want to get as many of them as they can, and I guess I feel that too, since a year from now you can rock a limited icon and new players will be all "omg whar u get tht icon dude?"  Or something more coherent.

Aaaaanyway, took the evening off and back to the grind a bit today.  Here's hoping for a second win soon!

A First Win!

Well, I feel like I'm more excited than I have a right to be given that it came in my 6th ranked game in Bronze V, but it was a pretty good win.  I ended 1/3/10 which is a bit lower than I would like given that we had over 30 kills (I feel like I'm not doing my job unless I've got K+A of more than half of our team's kill total, preferably above 2/3), but I had the lowest number of deaths on my team and was often well positioned to get our team kills while still extricating myself from trouble.

Once again, skill shots were a problem for me.  My Nami Q (bubble toss) only hit about half the time, which annoyed me because I was even trying to lead my targets.  I just still need more practice to calibrate things.  Yi threw me off too, of course--I would often toss a bubble just late enough that he'd be able to initiate his Alpha Strike before it hit, even when I was anticipating him. 

A big difference in this game as well was that I made more of a conscious effort to establish map control and map awareness.  I did a lot more pinging than usual (though not spam pinging), called more MIAs even in other lanes sometimes when I could see enemies moving away and our guy was out of lane for one reason or another and wouldn't see it in person, and set a few objectives for us as a team.  It didn't always work out, and the team was generally uncoordinated, but that was all good practice for me and I feel like getting in these habits will be good for me in the long run and build good instincts.

Oh, and I got 21 LP for this win.  I'm not sure whether that's a big number, a small one or an average, with this being my first win of the season, but it feels big--four more wins of that caliber and I'll be out of Bronze V...potentially.

Current Status:
Bronze V, 21 LP
1 Win, 6 games played.

First "Toxic" Player Experience

Just ran into my first legitimately problem-causing player, attitude-wise.  He was playing Udyr jungle which looked like a good plan except that he died 3 times during early laning, whether from mistimed ganks (not on my lane) or just bad encounters with the enemy jungler (Warwick).

My lane (I was Nami alongside Jinx) was at least holding its own--neither of us had any deaths and we were keeping the pressure on the opponents and trading well, but not really in a position to take any kills just yet though it seemed inevitable that we would if things continued the way they were going.

Then top lane completely collapsed with three quick deaths in a row, mid went down at the same time and we have a full-blown invasion on bot lane.  We were driven back to tower and the game snowballed against us from there.  We lost (of course) after three failed surrender votes, all of which I voted "yes" on since I could see that the 14-kill enemy Darius could wreck our team solo even if the other four on his team threw hard.

As the third surrender vote came out failed and the enemy dropped our nexus turrets, I made the point immediately above, and Udyr immediately responded, "Well, I know who to report!"

Apparently he thought I was stating that we needed to fight to the end and he was offended, and threatened several times to report me in the post-game chat.  When I realized he was clueless and angry, I wished him good luck being needlessly belligerent and exited, upon which he sent me a friend request (???).

It's absolutely amazing to me that more mental capacity isn't required to play this game at reasonably close to the level I currently play it.  It makes me feel bad about myself, a bit.

However, actual lessons learned: some of the trouble in that match could have been prevented if I had more map awareness and had communicated more to my allies about what was happening where.  At least the snowball from dropped top to mid to bot could have been slowed or prevented.  I realize it's because I'm still 90% focused on my mechanics and positioning in-lane.  Once I get more comfortable with that I hope that I can focus more attention on the broader game--but baby steps.

Current status: Bronze V, 0 wins, 4 games.