Let's start off with saying what this guide is about.....

This is not a guarantee of getting up in divisions. It's not about how to freelo on a particular champ. What this is about is how to enjoy playing this game even when you're stuck in the bronze life.

I'm not a pro l33t player, I'm not even a slightly good one, but when I came back to league after a break I took my time and improved my experience by realising a few things. This is my advice to people in the same situation as myself to make this game enjoyable, and you never know it might help you get a bit better as well.

This is my first guide so everything will be a bit basic. Feel free to comment but if you flame I'll just mute you ;)

So you've gotten into LoL, you've hit level 30 and you've done your provisionals and you've been placed into bronze. No matter what you do, where you play, what guides you follow, or what champ you use you just can't get out of your division.

Every game you play you experience feeders and flamers, and have an equal chance of feeding yourself and getting flamed. If you are lucky you get a decent team still and win but on average you're on a low ratio win rate.

While you love the game and the competition of ranked it's getting to the point where each game has begun to be a chore and you're wondering if it's just time to give up and play another game.......

If this sounds like your situation then you are like I was. Not able to see a way out and wondering why you bother. Well never fear, the below advice may help you turn this around.

OK so with the new dynamic queue you can pick 2 roles that you wish to play. This improves on the previous system by allowing you to focus on particular champs rather than needing some from a pool for each lane.

Each role has a basic risk vs reward ratio. The greater the risk of failing the greater the rewards for doing well.

For bronze I would personally place each role as such (1 being low, 5 being high).

Support - 1
Top - 2
Jungle - 3
ADC - 4
Mid - 5

At higher elo everything is more level. I'll explain my reasoning for all of this below in each relevant section for a role.

All I can say is that if you are unsure of yourself and your ability and want to divulge yourself of some responsibility go tanky support (Leona, Nautilus, Blitzcrank).

If you are confident of hitting skill shots, combos, and generally making good decisions take the mid (Zed, LeBlanc, Ahri, Katarina all good low elo picks).

So you've decided you want to take the easy way for the moment and pick support. Why is the risk/reward so low....

So as a support you are expected to do a few main tasks which really do not take much skill to perform, just knowledge......

The first thing which each support must do is.....ward.

A support with no wards is not a support but a wannabe mid/top laner.

The other thing is to do whatever you can to protect the ADC. Why is this important? ADCs should be getting kills, this means that they need more gold to get the items they need to make this easier, this also means that they will probably be worth more gold to the enemy to kill than the support.

Therefore you are less at risk of feeding the opposition team by making a mistake and dying as opposed to an ADC. Also as you're able to pick from a selection of champs with high defensive attributes you are able to make more mistakes without being punished.

Because of this you are likely to have less influence on the game either negatively or positively, so the risk / reward is low.

There are obviously nuances to the role which mean there is a lot more to it than the above, but if you understand and apply these you really aren't the target audience for this guide.

Good safe picks for this role is Blitzcrank or Leona. Both can be quite intimidating for the oppostion team and once you master their initiate you can become quite effective and expect to win more matches because of this.

So moving on from support we come to the top lane. No longer do you have a partner in lane with you, so more rests on your shoulders about if this lane is won or not. You still have a pick of tanky champs which means you can make mistakes and not be too punished, and unlike mid you don't have to worry about being ganked from either side of your lane.

Top does mean that you tend to be furthest from the action out of all the roles in the early game as you can't leave your lane for the other champ to push, and you should be getting ganked less than mid (unless you're being camped).

A good top player is the one who knows when they can afford to roam and when they can't. Teleport helps with this but is not always the right spell to pick. A safe bet is to roam after the first tower in your lane is lost (either theirs or yours).

Because of the early isolation this role offers I place it as a lower risk / reward than the other roles, however that being said you can carry a game from here. A fed Nasus who has lots of stacks can eat towers and turn a game where the rest of the team is feeding.

Good picks for a beginner.....Garen, Garen and Garen. He has no mana resource, is tanky, and can spin to win. Admittedly he has his counters (Teemo, Vlad, etc) but with a bit of jungle help can really have a decent influence.

Ah my current main. Jungle is the first role where you really should be having a significant influence on the game in every game. The question is will you be a positive or negative one?

The answer mainly depends on how good you are with timing when to gank and when to farm. Unlike the other lanes last hits are guaranteed in the jungle (unless you get counter jungled) so farming is relatively easy, but ganking is where we can make the biggest mistakes. Nothing worse than attempting a gank and then feeding the other team instead.

There are some easy low elo rules to follow to allow you to succeed.

1. Do not tower dive early game. Best case scenario is usually a kill for a kill which is not the point of a gank.
2. If your team initiates before you are in place and one of them dies do not just blindly jump in. Chances are you'll die to. Always take a second to evaluate.
3. If you gank and the opponent flashes, leaves lane, uses heal then just go back to farm. If they are not sensible they'll make themselves vulnerable for another gank and if not then you may find the enemy jungler coming for you. Avoid that bronze chase.
4. Try to feed your lanes, don't kill steal and once you no longer need the buffs let your team mates take them. A good jungler tries to carry their team, and not just themselves.

So good junglers at lo elo? My personal choice used to be Amumu but I've found Volibear to be safest. I've also got a high win rate on Udyr who is probably now my main. The key to these 3 is they can all build tanky and are not mechanically hard (like a Lee Sin). Sticking to this rule has helped me a lot with Jungling and there are plenty of options (Jax, Xin Zhao, Shyvana, J4, Gragas, Mundo).

ADC, or Marksmen, is a tough role to play. They are squishy and rely on fast reactions, positional play, and the ability to accurately judge multiple variables at once to be successful.

As such they are at high risk of massively failing, and in the current meta only a few of them are capable of truly carrying a match as they used to in previous seasons.

A successful bronze life ADC however is mainly based on what they prioritise. The good ones concern themselves with last hitting and staying alive, the bad ones focus on kills and getting the opponents tower down ASAP.

ADCs need gold. Due to being in a duo lane they are at risk of getting behind on levels compared to other lanes, as such they need as much money as possible to build their big damage items. The best and safest way to gold for items is to last hit minions, and the best of the bronze ADCs focus on this.

Good ADCs for this: Caitlyn, Sivir, Lucian, Twitch, Vayne

Oh mid. How I hate thee. I'd love to be good in this role but I just suck at it.

For me in Bronze the match can swing on how well the mid lane does. A good mid laner will try and set up their opponent for a gank and then roam and snowball. If they can do this they become like an extra jungler, ganking top and bot lane.

They are always at risk however of being the one drawn into the gank, and losing that early game, and then getting flamed for it. It's a high risk lane as there are two sides to worry about ganks from and a lot of your team mates will expect you to be the star man.

So to summarise a good bronze mid will:

- play safe and try to set up an early gank opportunity
- roam as soon as they push a wave to tower
- gank the other lanes while their opponent is dead

For me the best mids at bronze are the ones who have the assasinate/escape routine down: LeBlanc, Katarina, Zed

OK so you've picked your role, started playing and things are still not going well. The enemy team are more mobile, working together and your team has begunto flame each other to try and place te blame on someone rather than themselves. What has gone wrong?

There could be 2 main reasons:

1. They are a 5 man team all on voice chat and you're not
2. They communicate with each other using pings and all place wards

The map is like the rear view mirror on a car. You should look at it every 10 seconds. Notice the opponent top laner isn't in lane? Should you wait for your top laner to ping? No.

Take responsibilty and ping it yourself. If your top laner won't do it, don't flame and blame, just do it yourself.

Same goes with wards. Everyone on your team should place a pink ward. This is not the sole respnosibilty of the support. You can all place 1 and it only cots 75 Gold. DO IT!

One of the biggest mistakes made in bronze is when it comes to objectives. Either staying too long to try and take one or ignoring them to chase down 1 more kill.

Kills do NOT win games. They help, but you can kill someone 200 times, yet if they destroy your nexus they win.

My advice is if you win a team fight take an objective near their base, then try and take one elsewhere on the map, whether it be Baron, another turret, Drake or just clearing the opposition jungle.

Do not think you need to win it in one mad push, more likely than not you'll die under tower and they'll take more than you.

Seems pretty obvious right? But ask yourself this.....have you ever played a match where the enemy team were all AD and someone builds Magic Resistance? I bet the answer is yes.

Knowing your opponent, even their basics, can really help your laning phase.

Example:

So I always used to struggle against Nasus as a Garen, which according to the internet was stupid. I couldn't figure out what was going on, and it even got to the point where I'd ban Nasus (Bronze ban, eh?).

Recently I came up against him again and thought I'd lose lane, but a simple change meant that I crushed him.

My runes were the same, my masteries were the same, my play style was the same (you have to deny farm to a Nasus). So what changed?

2 things changed. I read about his waeknesses. I always used to take teleport as top lane, and I always build Sunfire Cape as the first item on Garen, But for this match I found out that Ignite countered Nasus as did Armor Penetration. So took ignite and built Maw and guess what? Stomped.

So unavoidably you're going to get flamed. Sometimes this may be because you've made a few mistakes, sometimes it's because they have made mistakes but want to point the finger at you. So how should you deal with this?

The answer is to press tab and mute them. Do it as soon as they start to flame you. You'd be surprised how often this will help improve both your game and theirs. Ping any communication you need to and people will respond to it, whereas in chat they will just be a douche.

So some games you might come across people who will start to feed. They may get flamed and then decide to deliberately do so. What can be done?

Actually very little. Worry about your own game. Try and assist them but only in low risk situations, in fact it's probably better to try and feed a lane which is doing well and leave them alone. Unfortunately sometimes you whole team feeds, but that happens. Just don't give up and don't sweat it!

So to conclude the main points are:

1. Pick a role and sub-role and focus on them
2. Know your opponent and try to build accordingly (reading guides and building item sets will help)
3. Mute the flamers
4. Think about your decisions

Doing the above should mean that your enjoyment of the game will go up. Less flamers, maybe more wins, hopefully better performance. If you still are struggling review your past matches on op.gg. See what number is not correct (deaths are too high, CS not high enough, KDA too low) and think about how to improve that aspect.

Doing this has certainly helped me. Don't get me wrong I'll be lucky to get to Silver, but the time I have spent in Bronze is far more enjoyable than before.