Summoning sickness - despite the small print, even raging goblins get it.

SUMMONING SICKNESS - ˈsʌmənɪŋ ˈsɪknəs - Noun.
A disorder which disallows the proper sync between the awesome powers of a champion and that champion's summoner, typically caused by a lack of focus or tendency to become distracted, additionally manifesting as a lack of general knowledge or complacency.

[*]You win more games
[*]You enjoy playing much more
[*]You're less stressed
[*]You make dem playz
[*]Enemy players throw their keyboards
[*]You get a lot of random people adding you as a friend
[*]You have more duo partners to pick from
[*]You carry losing lanes to victory
[*]You feel good about what you brought to your team
[*]You become less of a toxic raging goblin
[*]You advance in rank
[*]You stop blaming everything but yourself
[*]You stop causing spiraling disasters in games

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Basically, your overall experience with League of Legends becomes much better. Have you noticed that when you started playing this wonderful game, it was the bees knees and you just wanted to play all day every day and get all your friends to sign up and sing the praise of Riot Games?... But then one day you joined the masses of folks who constantly go on and on about what a **** community league has, how matchmaking is broken, and scream at your teammates in all-chat?

Don't be the guy that swears up and down that they NEVER EVER do this, because you're lying to yourself. Everyone rages, even people who are 99% cured of their sickness. Nobody is ever 100% cured. But it's a goal to strive for. So lets get started on the healing process, shall we?

Deflector shields online. Support should have warded so we could have seen anivia coming. I lagged, I didn't mean to ult all you guys. Damned league servers... My little brother was dancing on my keyboard.

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Nobody likes being wrong, that's completely normal. Everyone has a deflector shield response to some degree or another, and it's pre-programmed into us as human beings. We are a social species, and anything which would bring us a loss of social standing... face it... we try and weasel our way out of it sometimes if we can. Nobody doesn't, even the boy scout neighbor kid with the integrity of wolverine's skeletal bonding has wiggled his way out of some dirt here and there. It doesn't make you a bad person, it just makes you a normal person.

What defines whether or not you're a bad person, or bad team mate in this case, is what you do with this urge to defend yourself.

You need to be the player who fesses up when he goes full ******. Make a joke about it, immediately admit it, apologize, do whatever you need to but MAKE SURE your team knows you know you messed up and knows that you're going to try and take measures to fix it. Usually people rage when someone makes a mistake and tries to deflect it or act like they were in the right place at the right time doing the right thing and BY SOME FREAK POWER OF NATURE, everything went south instead.

Nobody likes anyone who can't accept responsibility. And the rabbit hole goes deeper...

The more you shake off your mistakes like they didn't happen or they were someone else's fault, the less you learn from what could have been a wonderful opportunity to gain a valuable lesson. You need to embrace your mistakes and learn from them. If you make a royal fudgie and it really screws you and you come to the conclusion of "This game is F***ing over", a different kind of game has just begun for you my friend.

At that point, you need to spend the rest of the game working on finding a solution to NEVER making that same mistake again. If you're shut down, that just means coach just put you on the bench to think about what you did. Do players go home in competitive sports when they screw up? No. They sit on the bench and watch the rest of the game from the sidelines, analyzing what they did. Replaying it over and over and over in their head. Maybe they ask the coach what they could have done differently. Maybe they plan "I'm gonna practice hard after this game to make sure that I buff that flaw out of my A-game for good". Maybe they say positive things to other players as they pass by the bench. They certainly don't go up into the bleachers and yell at their team and bludgeon the team's morale to death, and neither should you.

So you fed Akali 4 kills in the middle lane and she snowballed and pole****ed your entire team and made you watch while wearing a tutu and calling her "daddy". You need to find a friend and tell them to play against you as Akali and go man-mode. Don't hold back. You NEED to learn what Akali can and can't do. What her weaknesses are, how to handle her. If you have a problem you ABSOLUTELY need to take measures to fix the issue. Don't just go into ranked games and hope Akali doesn't show up. That's not addressing a problem. That's you going "Well they picked Akali. Akali is OP. That's why we lost."

My friend... if that were true... Akali would be the first picked champion in every game ever played, and the team that picked her would always win. Not the case, is it? She can be beaten. Figure it out. "Not my problem. Couldn't control it." is NOT the correct attitude. Ever.

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THE BLAME GAME IS DEATH.

There's nothing that's going to lose you a game faster than pointing out someone else's flaws when someone else points out yours. Do you know what happens then? This is actual game conversation, I've removed the names.

Player 1 mid- You need to stop ****in feeding (player 2 has 6 deaths at 10 minutes into the game, all to draven)
Player 2 adc- You need to stfu
Player 2 adc- Maybe if we got ganks down here ever? Maybe? Idk. Might help. ****in idiot jungler.
Player 3 jungler- I'm not ganking a 7-2-0 draven lol
Player 2 adc- omfg this lee
Player 2 adc- yeah thats helping a ton. I guess he takes all towers then.
Player 4 support- stop ****in typing please
Player 2 adc- lol you're typing too
Player 5 Top (me)- Can we pull together and stop fighting please?
Player 4 support- This is over. Can we surrender at 20 please?
Player 2 adc- **** you lee
Player 3 jungler- lol i guess 0-6 ez thinks this is all my fault
Player 3 jungler- go play bots ez.
Player 5 Top (me)- fml...

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Kinda makes you wanna pull your hair out, right?
If someone blames you when you screwed up and you turn around and point at them for fault, EVEN IF IT IS THEIR FAULT (our Lee Sin was embarrassingly terrible), all you've done is gotten everyone in a typing war. Even I got sucked into that one. What I said was positive, but it's like saying SHHHH in a room full of loud people. You're accomplishing nothing but adding noise to the chaos. You're also focusing on typing rather than playing. If you're going to type, you should type something like this (which I did, and we won.)


Player 5 Top (me)- Mid, swing bottom with the jungler and gank that draven. I'm pushed. I'll swing down and hold your mid.


Do not provide useless additions to a useless conversation. Do not provide any input at all unless it is a DIRECT solution. Even if it's an early warning notification, such as


Player 5 Top (me)- We have kind of a weak bottom lane, we're going to need to keep an eye on it from now on until he can catch up. That worked. We need to do it again when we can.

Player 5 Top (me)-Mid push out. I will too. Then lets help bottom get freed up. Ez, stay at your tower and hang in there bro. We got you.


I don't care how fed Draven is. He can't handle 4v2 at level 10 if at least 2 of those players have some sort of frontal lobe development beyond that of an ape. Especially since mid should be outleveling him.

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PROVIDE SOLUTIONS, NOT DEFLECTIONS, NOT OBSERVATIONS, NOT OPINIONS, AND DON'T ADD FUEL TO THE FIRE.

Also, a "good job" never hurt anyone's morale ;)

^He's your BUDDY!

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Click this link and PRINT IT, and cut it out, and tape it to your monitor in a place that doesn't obstruct your vision. These are all clutch ward locations and everyone should know them before they even think about playing a ranked game, and if you don't know them, now you have a printable reference.

Your brand new ward map!

IT IS NOT "THE SUPPORT'S JOB TO WARD". It is EVERYONE'S responsibility. The moment you get out of that newbie mindset of "only the support wards" and you find your entire team warding as needed, you'll find a lot of enemy teams that have no idea why they can't set foot outside their base without getting collapsed on. It's very easy- if they can see and you can't, you lose. If you can see and they can't, they lose. Your tankiest champion should consider oracles if you're noticing that the enemy team seems to know your plays before you can execute them, or at least 2 pink wards.

Can we all agree that 250 gold isn't much of a price to pay to keep the enemy in the dark? If your entire team spends 250 gold, that's 10 pink wards on your team. If you use them sparingly and strategically... those 10 wards could possibly last you through the entire early game and into mid/late game. Its NOTHING in terms of cost in the grand scheme of things... and if you kill something, that ward just paid for itself almost 3 times over- even more if people get assists. It's a no-brainer.

If you need to be economical, just keep in mind approximate baron and dragon and buff timers, and only ward those locations when those objectives might be a target for the enemy. Nobody said you had to keep everything warded at all times. It's ideal, but not crucial. Focus more on keeping the RIGHT places warded at the RIGHT times if you're short on money. Pushing first tower in bottom lane? Ward their tri-bush and the river bush. That's only 2 wards, and now nobody can sneak up on you. Situational warding is still better than no warding at all.

Are you a money hungry glory gamer carry who cares about nothing but killing anything that moves? People like that think "I can't afford to spend money on wards"... Yeah bro, you definitely shouldn't spend money on something that, if placed correctly, will further your bank roll from collecting bounties off of caught-out champions. Good call bro. Tell me again how pro you are.


BUY. WARDS.

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Bushes are evil

Face checking a bush should always be your final option if nothing else is available. It's a simple fact- SOMEBODY on your team can light that sucker up. Don't. Do. It. Even if you think "There's no way anyone is in that bush"... that's pretty much the only thing anyone has ever thought since the history of the universe and time before they died violently in a face-checking mishap. You have to understand how careless of a move this is, and how quickly it can change the course of an entire game.

Have you ever gotten a kill in your lane and gone "HOLY HELL YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW BADLY I NEEDED THAT"... yeah. That could be what you just gave a losing opponent who would have otherwise remained harmless for another 5 minutes. You could very well have just brought someone back into the game on the enemy team by being ignorant. Almost every champion has SOME WAY to light up a bush or at least blind-check it. Skillshots wont continue through to the other side. Some abilities like Lux's Lucent Singularity will illuminate a bush for an extended period of time. Just know what your team can do, and make sure you're using it to keep people safe when you're not in combat.

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Hesitation is sometimes key

Learn to stalk your prey. This will keep you from getting caught out in "suddenly, a team" situations. You see an ezreal caught out, standing on a ward? Looks like an easy kill? WHAT gives you any idea at all that he has no idea that ward is there? That's a fatal assumption. Stay hiddin, out of his vision range, and see what he does before you jump him. Is he orb walking a bit, seeming like he's trying to graze somebody's field of view? Is he staying relatively still as you approach, juking back and forth to make sure he seems like a really juicy target? He's probably baiting you towards his team mates whom you cannot see. Did he start blue while whistling dixie and picking his nose? Kill that dude, because he doesn't have a clue what's going on.

Assess your prey before you jump on them. That juicy kill might quickly become a juicy death. And my friend, all that gold just went the wrong way if ya feel me.

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IS IT WORTH IT?

Don't lie, don't even try and lie, you've jumped on a kill knowing you'd die before. Everyone has. It's not always a bad thing depending on the circumstances.

Akali at 6-1-2 score jumps on an Elise at 3-4-7 score, knowing she's going to get the kill but also die. This is beyond ******ed. Elise isn't worth much and Akali probably has a shutdown bonus attached to her. The person you just kamikaze'd just got more gold than you did. That's called "dat greed". Press tab if you're gonna go all suicide bomber on someone and see if they're gonna get the last laugh. Proceed accordingly. I'm not gonna try and tell you how to live, bro, but enough of those and you're gonna end up getting killed WITHOUT killing eventually. Just sayin...

A tower has almost no health at all and you know you could run up and sneeze on it but you'll probably die in the process. Do you do it? That depends...

Do you have a killstreak going?
Does the person who will kill you REALLY NEED THAT KILL? (i.e. are they behind? Do they have the pieces of a top-tier item, waiting to combine it?)
Will the loss of your presence on your team cause the enemy team to be able to push?
Are your minions pushed to your side of the river in any lane?

IF ANY OF THOSE are true, while it may be worth it in gold for your team at a glance... you may end up changing the flow of the game even though it might not show up right away. You need to be aware of the big picture. So you run in, shoot a rubber band at the tower and it crumbles, and you die to a draven who was waiting on his bloodthirster combine. Your top lane is pushed to your side and draven goes back to get his thirster. He farms it up a bit on the way down. He was going down easy before because he didn't have much sustain or damage, but now he does, so now he's a threat. Your team can't hold it off 4v5 and you lose a tower and 2 team mates.

Was it really worth it? Use your noodle, guys...

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THE NOOB TRAP

HE'S SO FLUFFY!


He's been referred to as a noob trap for a reason. Games get thrown at baron... effing... regularly. Dear god, saying it happens too much is a huge understatement. Doing baron is a nervous moment for both sides because it can literally end the game for a winning team and make for 5 less intact keyboards in the world. FFFFUUUUUUUUU...

You need to understand a few things about baron before you go in after him. Things people surprisingly don't understand most of the time, though it seems like common sense.

Baron will consume approximately 40% of your team's overall effective health.

Baron lowers your entire team's magic resist and armor, even for a bit after he's dead.

Baron can knock you up at ANY TIME... including when you're trying to channel an ultimate against the invading team.

Baron steals are surprisingly common without proper wards. WARD.

Teams often lose a tower during a baron fight. Push your lanes first.

Your carries, being the squishiest, often take HEAVY DAMAGE at baron. DO NOT use your peels to damage baron. You may need them.

It is nearly impossible to recall during a baron fight due to DOT. If the enemy team pushes hard, you're probably walking. Can you afford it?

If you're losing teamfights badly, you shouldn't be going after baron. The enemy team is just going to beat it off of you. You should be farming to get back into the game gold-wise instead. Consider dragon long before baron if this is the case.

Nobody should ever do baron with even teams. If they have 4 men up and so do you, you need to kill one more. Or at least lower someone's health to a point where engaging anything is probably a bad idea for them.

If the enemy team steals baron, running is your worst option. You're low on health, possibly on cooldown, you're debuffed, and they're going to poke you down on the way out, maybe even pick a few of you off for free while you run. Your TANKS should FIGHT and DROP THEIR CARRIES. They might wipe, but at least they're not pushing at full force and your carries may be able to get out.

Think hard about baroning. Then think hard again. Then get a second opinion. Then ask your team. Then tell them to ask their family. Now in spanish. German. Ask your professor at school. If all that checks out, do baron.

Other helpful baron stuff:

When I say push the lanes out I don't mean itty bitty "lookit the cute little minion wave" minions. I mean a siege wave should be at their front door.

If you take an inhibitor or two or three, that's not an opportune time to push just yet. Wait for your super minions to be a presence on the map before you baron.

Shield the carries, not the tanks. The tanks will be fine, trust me. I see people using shield skills on the guy in front tanking. Just because it looks like he's losing more health than a carry as far as healthbars are concerned doesn't mean he's hurt worse. A tank's health bear is worth a hell of a lot more than a carry's, and a carry is a lot more valuable if the enemy invades. SHIELD THE CARRIES.

If you don't have smite with you, don't baron.

Grab red buff before baroning if you can.

If you have cleanse, you can cleanse off baron's DOT. If the enemy team is CC heavy, use your head and don't do this.

If anyone has heal... let's just say it's group heal effect is horribly underrated in securing baron. When the enemy team invades, wait until they think they have it in the bag and heal juke them. Usually that's a free baron. It's pretty much the only time in the game that you're GUARANTEED that your entire team will probably be in heal range.

Randuin's Omen is also horribly underrated and underused in securing baron. Again, it's the only time in the game essentially where the enemy team is going to be piled up and tripping over eachother enough for Randuin's active to hit ALL OF THEM. Burn flash to get in the middle of them all if you have to. It's undeniably worth it.

If you see their jungler or a Nunu, exhaust him. It'll horribly throw off his judgement on his consume/smite damage and make his steal a LOT less guaranteed. EXHAUST LOWERS SMITE DAMAGE. EXHAUST EFFING LOWERS SMITE DAMAGE. EXHAUST LOWERS ******* SMITE DAMAGE. Exhaust is the ultimate anti-baron steal, people. USE IT.

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WIN YOUR LANE, LOSE THE GAME

THIS... IS... SPARTA!!!! GUYS?.....guys?


Just because you decimated your lane to levels unknown to mortal men doesn't mean you're gonna be able to carry. You need to watch your other lanes, no matter what role you're playing. If you're 5-0-2 and your middle lane is 0-3-0 and losing the CS war, you've sapped enough out of your lane for now and you need to be viable elsewhere for a bit. It's called roaming.

Roaming doesn't mean "I wander around the map now k", it means you did well and now you need to boost your allies. You don't wander if you're behind or pushed... just want do clarify that. That's not roaming, that's called derptastico magna. No bueno.

Anywho... Push your lane out hard to where you have some time to go do some business before the minions are at your tower again. MAKE SURE YOU CONTINUE TO WATCH WHERE THE MINIONS ARE IN YOUR LANE. If you lose your tower because you were roaming, you're wrong. Swing back and push it out again when and if you have to. Also, make sure you're picking up some CS here and there while you're roaming or your opponent will catch up... which is bad. You should only roam if you have a CS lead AND a kill lead, even if it's only one. If you don't have both, then you need to let the jungler do his thing.

But assuming you do, helping your other lanes can be the difference between "I HAD 30 KILLS AND WE STILL LOST" and "I had a good score and we won". Ranked queue is not a place for glory gamers, and you deserve every bit of stress you get from killing 80 people and losing.

ESPECIALLY make sure mid lane is doing well. I mean cmon, bottom lane and top lane are both within convenient range to help and your jungler should be relatively available if your side lanes are doing well, so there's no reason middle lane should ever fail. Hell, you can win that lane FOR HIM if you guys need to. Bottom lane gets help from mid and jungle, top lane gets help from mid and jungle, and mid lane gets help from top lane, jungle, and bottom lane's support.

Farm is too important for the ADC to leave the lane until the enemy's first tower is down. Facts of life. That being said, not a bad idea to help bottom take their tower.

It comes down to one golden rule- if one lane is feeding hard and the other 2 lanes are doing exceptionally well... your team is going full r3tard. You never go full r3tard.

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Also your buddy.

KNOW YOUR COMBAT LOGISTICS

Before you fight anyone you should know five ridiculously important things

1.) Their kills versus yours
2.) Their level versus yours
3.) Their CS versus yours
4.) Their build versus yours
5.) Their kit versus yours

Don't engage on someone 2 or more levels above you in the same condition (health, mana, cooldowns)

Don't engage on someone the same level as you with more kills in the same condition

Don't engage on someone with more CS than you in the same condition

Don't engage on someone who may have approaching backup

Don't engage on someone who can get free damage on you unless you're at a higher condition

Don't run from someone you can get free damage on if they're of the same condition

Don't run from someone if they'll take turret aggro

Don't attempt to burst someone you won't kill who may in turn kill YOU (click on them, look at their health, make an estimate on their effective health, and know your damage output)

Don't dive unless you can tank at least 3 tower shots AND withstand the enemy's damage

Don't engage while in minion aggro

Don't engage while overextended

Don't engage when outnumbered

Don't engage in a low condition

Don't engage while on cooldown

Don't engage with summoner skills down

Engage when you have CC and the enemy's summoner skills are down (unless ezreal)

Don't engage a splitting champion if you can't handle both halves (leblanc, shaco)

Don't engage a champion with % based on health damage if you're in a lower condition (riven, elise, nidalee)

Basically... know your combat situation before you're in it and it's too late. All you have to do is press tab and left-click on them and you have access to more information than you need.

The peril of a glory gamer...

You can't win a game you can't pressure.

TOWERS WIN GAMES, NOT KILLS.

Have you ever seen a team win a game in kills? As in "this team has reached 100 kills, VICTORY!"

No you haven't. Those aren't the rules. Think back to the All-Star game with the backdoor lich bane. Got a pretty good idea of how devastating structure loss can be in that game, didn't they? An otherwise completely hopeless team was IMMEDIATELY back in the game. They still lost, but they also gave the winning team a collective heart attack. All pressure immediately ceased while people scrambled to figure out a course of action to proceed without losing via a wide open back entrance to their base, it was phenomenal.

I read once that the transition from bronze to silver happens the moment a player realizes that towers are more important targets than champions, and I can vouch for that. That's about the time I moved to silver is when I made that transition in thought.

Most bronze losses occur when players can't come together to focus structures. They spend the game hunting for more kills and more kills and more kills while the enemy slowly pushes in their towers. You even sometimes see players let a tower fall to chase a kill. A tower that didn't have to fall. They have the mindset of "we're winning so hard, who even cares?" not thinking for a second about how much pressure they just lost.

It happens a few more times and then the obligatory "report x" all-chat festival kicks off in full swing as they lose. It's always amusing to see the "Team was too heavy" comments. Your team is never too heavy if you're actually carrying them properly. Carrying doesn't mean high kill count, carrying means "no man left behind". That's where the term came from, actually... but people seem to think that carrying simply means that you're the game's headhunter and you're good at it.

Take some towers junior, feed your mates, THEN think about calling yourself a carry.

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THE RICH CARE NOT ABOUT THE POOR

Gold advantage is the other huge winning factor in games. People lose a few team fights and think the game is completely over, not realizing all they have to do is back off for a while, get vision on objectives, farm, and avoid fights and they'll catch up and even surpass the apparently victorious enemy team.

Less-thought-about though is gold distribution. People don't consider where their gold is going, they just blindly farm and hit tab every once in a while and go "I HAVE THE MOST FARM" and think that's all that matters. You see this mistake a lot with players who play Irelia. They have the most farm in the game and they just eat minions all day in every lane. Irelia is more mobile than almost any ADC and she can clear waves like they weren't ever there to begin with. So what happens? She starves the ADC off of a bunch of farm. MOST of your damage is going to come out of your middle and bottom lanes. So if top lane has all the farm... what do you think subsequently happened to all your damage? Sure, Irelis is gonna carry hard for a while, maybe even long enough to win the game, but that's a gamble. There's also the chance that the enemy ADC and APC catch up in farm and vaporize Irelia in a fight and all your damage goes down the toilet.

Make sure you're ADC and APC are getting good farm. If you have to back off of a wave and let them get it... you probably should.

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THERE IS NO KNOWLEDGE THAT IS NOT POWER

Vision win's games. Since I covered it already, I won't go into detail, but it does round out what I call the "GRAND THREE" of game winning factors. Pressure, gold, and vision. You can play an entire game and not win a single team fight and still win the game. It's next to impossible, but the fact remains that it can be done. That alone should speak volumes about how much more important pressure is than kills. "That's not true" Oh yeah? Ever been pissed off at a backdoor Yi or Tryndamere? Why do you think you were mad?

WE CAN BEAT THESE GUYS, BUT THIS FREAKIN TRYN....

Case and point ;)

The pro guys did it once, so let's always do it always until always.

SITUATIONAL BUILDING OP.

So we're all familiar with the typical "randuin's sunfire shurelya's aegis warmogs" support item core from waaaay back in the day. How many of those fellas do you think died repeatedly to magic damage from an AP heavy team, wondering why they weren't tanky with all that armor?

That... armor...

....verus AP ಠ_ಠ

I played Katarina against a Xerath (a REALLY GOOD Xerath mind you) one-on-one on the howling abyss to try a guy out for a team, and he was dominating me until about level 10. I started changing my build pretty substantially. I noticed he wasn't building anything but straight AP with a little bit of tankiness from a rod of ages (or something. I don't remember what he built precisely and I don't play Xerath, so if ROA is a dumb item on Xerath, he probably didn't build it) but I noticed he had very little mitigation built, if any at all.

So typically Katarina goes something like Sorcerer's shoes, Liandry's, rabadon's, void staff, DFG, and zhonyas. Amiright? Or something along those lines?

WHY would I build all that penetration against someone with little or no MR? Why would I build armor against an AP champion? Why would I bring Zhonyas to a 1v1? Katarina should get exploded by xerath. He's got her beat in range, he's got some crazy CC, and he can just pile on the damage before he ever even gets close to me... or at least close ENOUGH to me for me to do anything at all. The howling abyss is unforgiving, you can't heal. So a champion like that just puts the ever-so-squishy katarina even more in harm's way. I should have lost. I didn't.

Mind you, it was "rip your hair out and curse incessently" difficult, but I won.

My end build was Rabadon's, Will of the ancients, Spirit visage, abyssal scepter, Banshee's veil, and merc treads. He kept missing the setup for his stun due to banshees and I had more sustain than he did and plenty of mitigation. He built Xerath "by the book" essentially for your typical high burst APC. I built Katarina like a moron, and would have gotten flamed hard in ANY game I tried to pull that stunt in, and it probably wouldn't have even worked in a normal game.

But that's the point, it worked where I used it. Situationally building can turn the impossible into something possible. If you build the same ol' thing every single game, I pity you when your opponents decide to switch things up on you one day. It WILL happen.

This is why the term "core items" is so substantial. Each champion has about 2-3 "core items", these are items that work really well on that champion. You still have 3-4 more item slots. use them wisely. Just because the top rated guide says that you build a certain way doesn't mean its going to be the best in every single game.

Blue build Ezreal is considered badly broken right now... yet blue build urgot eats him for dinner, and if you put diana in lane with him he'll cry and rock himself into dissociation. "But dyhannah duzzint go bottom lane lolwtfomgzorz she's teh jungle or mittle onlyz"

"situational".
Bollocks with the meta occasionally. Rebel a bit, lads. It's good for the soul.

The user "Embracing" pointed out to me that this is also true when building for your lane and then losing teamfights later. Say you're in lane against Lux and she's melting you with singularities and snares and she's like Tin-Tin "we never miss". You just don't know what the hell to do about this sniper Lux so you stack the holy hell out of some MR... Only to become a faint memory of better times when your teamfighting phase happens against a Renekton top lane, Lee sin jungler, Thresh support, and Draven adc.... which are ALL AD. I'm gonna venture to say your stacked MR won't help you when things get real, homie.

As mentioned once before... always try to look at the bigger picture! Picking Teemo to counter garen bring's almost nothing to teamfights later unless nobody grabs oracles or pink wards and not a single minion happens to set off mushrooms he may have placed in precisely the area where a teamfight was about to happen, which is SUPER unlikely, and it's even MORE unlikely that some straggler on the enemy team isn't going to set it off if a minion doesnt. Too much is left to chance, it's too much of a gamble. Other than that all you have coming out of the top lane later in the game is just another ranged DPS carry whether he's AP or AD, and you already have one. What you don't have is a tanky engage kit like Pantheon's or anything that could really pull your team out of a clutch situation like Intervention.

Try and think about what your team doesn't have when picking your champion.

Worth a lot in scrabble AND league!

IT IS POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO CHANGE THE ENTIRE COURSE OF A GAME DURING CHAMPION SELECT!

Le me in champion select: (summoners name) is on our team??!!?? I'd thought he was only a legend... A legend told around Valoran campfires. I... I don't even know what to say...

Light hearted, a little funny, amusing, and the summoner joined in saying something like "Bro... I lift all day every day." and got some chuckles himself. I play with him regularly now. I made a friend, I boosted morale before the game even started, and created a positive atmosphere with very very little effort.

Morale is EVERYTHING in this game! If you can do anything at all to improve it at any time, you should do it if you fancy winning a lot. But hey, glory isn't everyone's thing, right? Some folks like losing. Can't blame em, this is a free country and all.

All you need to do is get the ball rolling in the right direction and usually you can get everyone else to join in. Sure, there might be that toxic raging goblin that's gonna go

Hey Riftborne...
What?
Shut the **** up.

And well... that's just human nature. Not all of us should be allowed to participate in society, but yet all of us participate in society anyway. Whatcha gonna do? Nuffin, unfortunately.

---

THAT... is the question.

Know how to say what you're trying to say productively.

Despite the fact that "That" is a declarative pronoun and not a question, you do need to know what questions to ask and what statements to make within a game. This is a HUGE part of getting better and curing yourself of your sickness. All you need is to take about half a second and BREATHE, and PAUSE, and let your mind translate what you WANT to say into what you're GOING to say... and this is incredibly true in real life as well, but despite the fact that I'm a psychology major pursuing work in life coaching, that's not what I'm here to do for you today.

Everyone has a filter between what's in their head and what comes out of their mouth, despite some people having seemingly malfunctioning instances of this. It is beneficial and wise to dedicate some energy throughout your day to making sure that this filter is working, and usually all you need to do in order to ensure it's effective use is take a moment before you manifest any words into the air around you to "flip it on".

What do I want to say?
Probably something like THIS

But as covered before, all you're going to do is fire up a typing war, break your entire team's focus, your own focus, kill morale entirely, and greatly reduce your chances of winning. And when I say greatly, I mean it's substantial enough to where if you were up 30 kills, 3 towers, and higher CS across the board... you just brought the game back down to about "even".

No really. I'm dead serious, it's that bad.
There's a reason people refer to it as "toxic". I'd even call it "corrosive".

So what you want to say is something like "Bottom lane, you bunch of ****witted ****stenched pedophilic festerpile noob sacks of pantry mold, stop feeding the living holy ungoldiness of satan out of your lane, play like you have a spinal link to your brain stem, and **** your mother.

Which is... less than productive.

But what you're really getting at is "It's not boding well that you're feeding." Right? That's pretty much the jist of it?

Why not, then, ask the question "Bottom lane is there anything you'd like to see that you think might help you?" or "what can we do to help, bottom?" or "hey guys can we do anything to help bottom?"

Rather than point out the flaw, direct people towards the solution.

Creating negativity is a sure fire way to make sure that what you want done does NOT get done. Nobody wants to listen to someone who is bossy or rude.

Good examples of productive probing:

WOULD SOMEONE WARD FOR GOD'S SAKE?
All we need to to is get some vision and we'll get a lot more plays like that one

WHY IS THE JUNGLER NOT GANKING?
We're feeling pretty pressured down here, can you swing by when you get a chance?

WHY DID YOU STEAL THAT KILL FROM ME?
KS=Kill secured. I really would like the gold next time though...

WHY THE HELL DID YOU STAY ON MY BLUE LONG ENOUGH TO STEAL IT? OMG??!
Well, there's an advantage for you. Put it to smart use because I may be delayed, ok?

WOW, WAY TO FACE CHECK A BUSH.
You never know what's in those things man. Can we agree that nobody should do that for the rest of the game?

OMFG HOW DID YOU MISS THAT KILL?
I feel like we could have had that. Let's push a little harder next time we see an opportunity, ok?

CONSTRUCTING A POSITIVE STATEMENT IS EASY:

Whenever possible, use "we" not "I" or "you"

You can use those words if you remove accusation from it. WHY WOULD YOU RUN IN 3v5 is pretty damned accusational. "I think that play may have been a bit bold. We should try and count our opponents and teammates before every engage from now on." Is less accusational, and also offers a solution. It also directs the attitude towards what the person saying it is feeling, rather than what the person who did it did wrong. The subject is also the play, not the player.

Make a joke of it if you can.

When something goes horribly wrong, a player will often immediately enter a defensive mindset even if they don't know they're doing it. The moment an accusation is made, the tripwire is triggered, and defensive becomes aggressive and hostile. That's just how psychology works and it doesn't make anyone a raging goblin. If we could raise awareness of this little quirk in human function, raging could be averted altogether. Two things need to be understood... "Everyone has bad games" and "Everyone makes bad plays". Nobody is perfect, it's that simple. So when someone makes a mistake and they're recoiled like a rattlesnake to protect themselves from scrutiny... oh what a beautiful surprise it is when someone does this:

(Sivir walks down the river just as three members of the enemy team are coming up out of the bush to engage on the players in the middle lane)

Our top laner: Sivir: O.O ERMAGERD A TEAM
Sivir: lol right?
Our top laner: We should probably ward maybe, huh? lol
Sivir: Yeah maybe a little.

BAM!!! PERFECTLY DONE! Nobody got mad. Sivir knows that bush checking was a bad idea. People know that wards would help. TEAM IS STILL FUNCTIONING WITH HIGH MORALE and NOBODY had to suffer a typing war.

DO you see how freaking easy that is?? And if you're the first to comment, and it's positive, guess what happens to the ragers?

Our jungler: Way to go sivir
Our jungler: dumbass
Our mid: lol everyone else is being cool with eachother, why do you have to be "that guy?"
Our jungler: whatever... wow

Yeah, jungler. Sit down and shut up while the adults enjoy a game. Your team is now united in being decent to eachother and NOW they'll shut out anyone who tries to drag the game down. You end up with something of a "cool kids table" effect, it becomes a misnomer to try and be negative.

While this may seem simulated or "maybe in a perfect world", this is real chat from real games and while this doesn't work in ALL games, I'd give it a solid 80%. If you can get the ball going in a good direction, it's very hard to slow that ball down. That ball is the juggernaut, *****.


Also... guess who was the fail support who didn't have that bush warded?

---

MAKE SURE YOU'RE IN A POSITION TO CALL SHOTS IF YOU'RE GOING TO.

Quiz- How many times have you met THIS guy in game?

You should never try and call shots in a game you aren't doing well in. To me, and probably others (I'm not sure), this is just another form of deflection.

Do you know what you're doing when you're trying to pull a team together and organize things while you're losing? You've probably got your camera all over the map monitoring how everyone else is doing and you're not focusing on something very very important- You aren't doing well yourself. I believe it is a fatal flaw that a lot of players make when they KNOW that they KNOW what they're talking about... Even if, in fact, you DO know what you're saying and you ARE right, no one is going to listen to someone who isn't doing well.

Take a step back, leave your team to figure things out for themselves for a little while, and focus everything you have on getting back into the game yourself. Because what usually happens is rather than correct the mistakes you must be making (or you wouldn't be doing poorly), you're focusing all your energy on making the correct calls for the benefit of your team and further spiraling into being a bit of a failure yourself. The least productive thing you can do is try so hard to assist your team that you become an anchor on it from lack of focus for your own situation.

NEVER TRY AND MAKE CALLS AND PLAYS WHEN YOU'RE NOT AHEAD.

Instead, direct your focus towards returning to being ahead.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS SECTION GLORIOUSLY SUGGESTED BY LAGGERMEISTER

Thanks dude!

No matter what excuses you want to make, or what justification you want to present... for any reason, at any time, in any game ever since the history of league, if you are a carry and you focus the tank, you are WRONG. PERIOD.

There is no counter argument. There is no circumstance where this is not true.

As a carry, for every second you're shooting at a tank, you're allowing an enemy carry to stay alive long enough to do damage to your team, or even kill them. "Well, I couldn't get close enough to the carry to do any damage to them, so I started shooting the tank" - congratulations, this is the mentality that allows a tank to do his job properly. Carries that think this way are the reason teams lose teamfights.

If you can't get to the carry, you should be jockeying for a window to get to the carry rather than FOCUSING the tanks, who are there to... you know... make you have to attack them instead of the carry. Hence being a tank. You can pop some shots off at them, but DO NOT COMMIT THEM AS YOUR TARGET. You need to still keep the carries in the corner of your eye while shooting. You need to adopt a mindset of "if it's a tank, it doesn't exist to me." Run around them, Tumble through them, become and invisible rat, do whatever you need to do to NOT FOCUS the tanks and get your damage on the CARRIES.

Shooting something doesn't mean you're focusing it. Focusing a target means "that's the target you're focusing on trying to kill". Anything can happen on this journey.

The moment you take your eyes off the carries and stop actively trying to get to them, you've started focusing a tank.

Are the tanks so consistently in your way that you simply can't get a word in edgewise? Well, then either the enemy team has REALLY good tanks or your team has REALLY bad tanks. Or both. A tank's job is to peel for the carry... let me explain this...

---

PEELING

A tank's sole purpose in life when it comes to teamfighting. You need to get the tanks off of your carry so they can duke it out with the enemy carry. You also need to keep the enemy tanks from getting any CC onto your carry. There's a difference between CC and displacement. Tanks seem to want to use displacement skills on enemy carries and CC the enemy tanks, which is completely backwards. Displacement gets the tanks out of position so your carry has a clear shot at the enemy carry, and CC keeps the enemy carry from getting as much damage onto your carry.

To calrify this...


Leona is a CC machine. She has literally no displacement skills. Her kit is gorgeous because it allows her to get RIGHT onto the enemy carry and she has TWO stuns, one of which has a radial slow around it. You can REALLY stop the enemy carry from being effective with leona, but you may have a hard time getting your carry through the enemy tanks if they know what they're doing.


Nautilus has two displacement skills, his hook and his ultimate. The beautiful thing about is ultimate is that if you cast it on a carry, the tanks usually get displaced AND the carry gets some heavy CC on them.

Displacement puts someone out of position. CC locks down the person you need to target. Know when to use each. It's perfectly acceptable to use displacement on a carry and CC on a tank, but you HAVE to know when each instance is appropriate... for the most part, it is displace the tanks, CC the carry. If you have crowd control and displacement leftover once this is done, which your team usually will... then you use it as you see fit. But when you INITIATE a teamfight, ideally the tanks will be out of position and the carry will be locked down and scared.

THAT is proper peeling. Keeping as MUCH DAMAGE as you POSSIBLY CAN off of your carry while also enabling your carry to do as MUCH DAMAGE as they POSSIBLY CAN.

---

POP QUIZ!!!!

VERSUS

These guys get into a five on five teamfight. Let's assume they all have pretty standard builds and relatively close CS and kills and gold and everything else, for the sake of argument. Caitlyn is a "mad mode cait" and just starts spam firing into the teamfight. Vi is a hungry vi and dives for whoever is closest with her ult, Leona ults the whole team spastically and happens to miss malzahar, who's in the back. Lux fires a lazor through the team and throws a snare in the general direction of the fight, hitting jayce and thresh. Elise goes balls deep into the fight and just starts beating on varus, who vaporizes her as malzahar locks her down with his ultimate. The CC from all the spamfire wears off, it's a 4v5 teamfight, and team one now has a set of custom "team 2's fur and skin and scales" coats. They sport them regularly now with some bling and hit all the hottest clubs in valoran.

What went wrong there? Well... aside from only everything, a deeper look would show the following:

A.) Leona's ultimate's center should always land on the enemy ADC. If you have to lead him with it to pull this off, and it misses other champions, who cares? Lock the ADC and try, if you can, to slow the APC as well. Whether or not you hit the REST of the team is kind of irrelevant. You should also use the opportunity of the lockdown to close distance on the carry, Zenith Blade to him, and keep him locked down with a followup stun and Exhaust him so his damage is bye-bye. Make sure you're chaining your CC properly- A stunned champion isn't throwing any damage for exhaust to mitigate, so there's no point in exhausting him until stun wears off.

B.) Elise should have noticed Malzahar was still freed up. You should always pause for a nanosecond to assess an initiation before you dive in and join it. Not every intiation is a good one which merits a full teamfight. If the initiation went south, diving into it is suicide. This initiation went south. Diving in was suicide. There was still free-and-clear damage on the table, and now a lot of the team's CC was down, so there was no stopping it either.

C.) Lux did what Lux usually ******* does in a teamfight these days. Spamfire everything and dip out. This is precisely how you DON'T play Lux. I call this playstyle of Lux "Don't give no Fux". It's entirely too common and it needs to stop entirely. If you do this with Lux, gather round kiddies and pay attention. Firstly, initiating with Final Spark is stupid as hell considering some players of Lux will build a Morellonomicon and that item is most effective at 40% health. Then you have the Executioner mastery. You do 5% more damage once they drop below 50% health, and with Lux''s already insane damage, that's a LOT. So don't use your Final Spark to open a fight. Also, Final Spark both consumes and re-applies her passive, so why would you OPEN with it? No no no. Lux should have thrown a singularity through the team because any AOE slow in a teamfight keeps the enemy team from both positioning and recovering as quickly. It creates panic. Don't even detonate it, just keep it up. It'll blow up on it's own eventually. Now the whole team is slowed. You now have more time to position to get your snare off on or as close to the enemy carry as possible. If you can lock down the ADC and APC, you're a pro lux. If they're snared, your singularity has done it's job and you can pop it now.

next, you'll want to shield whoever is running into the fight. Watch for health bars to drop below 50% and THEN use your Final Spark. It's also wonderful for picking off flash-outs, runners, and blinkers.

D.) Vi burning her ult on whoever was closest is stupid. Just like Nautilus, if you cast it on a carry, you displace everyone else along the way. You then use your Q to get the hell back OUT of the fight, and take things as they come from there on out. You don't want to STAY in the middle of that fight because you're just going to get collapsed on and killed. Get in, get out. This will help you stay in the fight longer and be more effective because every shot you're firing at whoever is in the FRONT of the fight with your E is also damaging the people in the BACK of the fight (uhhh carries?). That's the beauty of in-line AOE damage. You're lowering the armor of the tanks and generally doing what Vi does best, which is ruin people's days.

E.) Caitlyn is being a glory gamer caitlyn and just blasting whatever her rifle is pointing at which makes for unfocused damage and a lot of aggro. Yes, believe it or not, just like with towers, there's aggro in teamfights. If you start blinking a red neon sign over your head that says "i do a bunch of damage", you're gonna get targeted quickly. keep your head below the radar until you have a target. If you don't have something to shoot that you could potentially cause some significant damage to, don't shoot.

Now, I'm not saying hang in the back and do absolutely nothing at all to anyone until you can shoot the carry, but don't commit to any target at all until you have a carry to shoot. Just provide some background damage. Don't use your abilities, don't burn your summoners, and don't get so committed to a target that you end up out of position. You should be orbiting around the team fight like a moon that's really pissed off at it's planet until you see an opportunity to blitz down and sucker punch the surface WITHOUT getting burned up in the atmosphere. Look for that hole the aerosol cans made.

Ideally, Vi would have started the teamfight with her ult onto varus, which would make the enemy team start to collapse on her and bunch up. As she uses her Q to get out, Leona catches the entire team in an ult, uses her E to get to varus, waits for the stun to wear off, and stuns him again.

She pops sunlight on the entire team. Lux throws a singularity in once the ult wears off to continue the slow on everyone. She pop's singularity before leona's sunlight wears off, consuming sunlight on everyone. There's not much displacement on this team but there's AOE slows galore. Good enough, right? Lux stuns anybody heading towards her carries and VI Q's anyone heading towards a carry and beats on them until they change their mind. Varus probably dropped pretty quickly, so now malzahar is the target and most of your CC is wearing off. Elise stuns malzahar in the middle of his ultimate and cancels it. He's not exactly threatening without it. (it's important to save some hard CC for champions like malzahar).

Caitlyn, with no background damage from varus, is able to work over malzahar pretty well as her tanks keep the enemy tanks busy... BUT SHE GETS HOOKED BY THRESH! RIGHT INTO A BOX! Elise rappels to the middle of the box and does her best to fight people off of cait because ELISE CAN DO THAT. But Jayce hammers her right into the box anyway. Like a boss. The general health pool starts to get low on both sides and it looks like team 1 might actually pull this off. BUT THEN LUX FIRES Final Spark at all the champions who are BELOW or CLOSE TO 50% health. They're all probably pretty clustered up by now on the Cait in the box. She's able to pick off one of the dangerously low champions before she goes down.

Lux is up to bat and she's off cooldown except for her ultimate and singularity. The enemy team starts to run from the 3v4 and she snares 2 of them. Vi dives in and cleans up shop. Elise sends a spider out and pops the last one.

SAVE your abilities for when you will NEED THEM.

Too many people enter fights and blow their entire kit within the first 2 seconds. 5 ultimates go off and it looks like fireworks. Now what do you do when somebody misses something and you have somebody running directly at your team? None of you have a single thing left to stop him with. Your ADC does enough damage with auto attacks to win a teamfight if everyone uses abilities correctly, so there's no reason to "maximize your damage output" with abilities unless you're a carry. Your abilities are for their utility in a teamfight more than they're for damage UNLESS you're a carry.

Ever notice that non ADC/APC characters tend to have a ton of CC attached to everything they do? Olaf's Undertow? Renekton's Ruthless Predator? Riven's Ki Burst? These champions have utility built into their kit so they can fulfill their role in a teamfight better. They aren't there to "bring the pain", they're there to ASSIST with bringing the pain by dealing damage as well as adding utility. If you have a Renekton on your team and he has the most kills of everyone, he's not doing his job correctly. He should be setting up carries for kills, and taking his own kills only if there's nobody else around to take it, or if nobody else could possibly catch up like he can with Slice and Dice.

You have to understand that unless your carries are failing hard, which happens sometimes, it's not your job to kill anything. It's your job to keep the lanes pushed out, keep objectives secured, and keep your carry safe. If you can get a kill while your carry isn't around, do it. If you're pushing a lane out and get collapsed on and you know you can take the idiot who decided to challenge you, then give them a proper beatdown. Don't wait and go "CARRY HURRY UP AND COME HERE FOR THIS!" and die in the process of waiting... But if you're in a lane with your carry, you shouldn't be taking those kills.

I LAUGH MY HEAD OFF EVERY TIME I SEE SOMEONE ACCUSE A CARRY OF KS'ING.

"It is better to keep your mouth shut and be presumed ignorant than speak and remove all doubt."

---

WHAT DO WE DO IF NOBODY IS PEELING AND I CAN'T GET TO THEIR CARRIES AT ALL?

Lose... probabaly. Hate to be realistic and everything but... :\

But what you can attempt to do in this case is realize that you're not going to win a teamfight unless you get WAY ahead of the enemy team in gold. You need to be farming the entire team's rear ends off, the importance of keeping objectives like Dragon and Baron is drastically escalated, and warding becomes even more important because you need to be able to make fights into 3v5s and 4v5s because in a 5v5 your carries are probably just going to get blown up. As ONE MAN in solo queue, you can accomplish this by doing a few things:

KNOW THAT THIS IS WHAT'S GOING ON and don't KEEP DIVING IN ON TEAMFIGHTS and try to discourage the rest of your team from just rushing into teamfight after teamfight. The worst thing you can do is give THEM a gold advantage when they already HAVE a mechanical advantage.

Don't blame your team for always losing teamfights. It's you that needs to be blamed because you haven't realized your team is stupid yet. Nobody has a gun to your head saying you need to follow them into doomed fights.

DO NOT "battle plan" with the team unless you have a good amount of downtime (like when 3 people are dead). Typing long bits of detail breaks everyone's concentration. MAKE SURE YOU'RE POSITIVE ABOUT IT AND OFFER SOLUTIONS.

DO ping the holy hell out of the person you want focused, but don't do it WHILE the fight is happening. Do it BEFORE the fight breaks out, when people are paying attention.

If you're gonna be bruiser bruisin', make sure you're built to hack through a large lifebar. Make sure you KNOW HOW TO KITE and you are KITING. Also, any support in any game ever is always looking for something useful to do. It's easy to feel useless as a support. So all you need to do is go "I need my support! C'mere bro" when you head out do hunt and ward and whatnot. What were they in the game to do? Keep you safe. So give them their job back.

DO NOT get caught out beyond the point you realize you're losing teamfights. Communicate this to your team "We're not winning teamfights, we all need to play really safe and look for people out of position. Lets ALL start warding" A 4v5 in the enemy's favor could literally be GG at any time.

Provide postive reinforcement for anyone who does what they should. Did blitzcrank just lock down the enemy leona and silence her? "HELL YEAH BLITZ, THATS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEEDED". Now blitz feels like a bossy boss. He'll probably do it again. People love being rewarded.

WARD OBJECTIVES AND TRY AND ANTICIPATE WHEN THEY MAY NEED TO BE CONTESTED. Watch where your lanes are pushed to, watch where the enemy is, watch your wards... if the enemy isn't in a position to stop you from dragoning, you need to take that dragon and note the time it will respawn and KEEP CONTROL OF IT. If you can SAFELY Baron, you NEED TO.

---

I ONLY PLAY MID.

Like hell you do. You only WANT to play mid because this game is full of selfish trolls who want the entire game to be about them and can't function on a team level if it were the only thing that could save the world.

"Why do these people exist in the game?"
That's easy. Nobody wants to play support because "nobody wants to be the hype guy for the true champion of the game". Nobody ever remembers the bassist of a band, they remember the vocalist, drummer, and guitarists. I don't know about you guys, but I listen to heavy metal. Without the bassist, heavy metal just wouldn't be heavy... but how many bassists that aren't "media stars" can you name? (i.e....not flea.) R.I.P. Chi Cheng.

But that's basically the concept for why we have "I only play middle" people in the game. They want all the glory. And I'll tell you one thing, this is exactly the person you DO NOT WANT in your middle lane. They're gonna stick to their lane like glue, they won't roam, their farm will probably be **** because they want kills so badly, and they're gonna man-dive every teamfight. When you get 2 or more people on a team who "only play x", that's when you end up with long-played games that end with a loss because nobody pushed towers. You get a bunch of glory gamers who want to show off how good they are at their role. They're not thinking at all about their team or they wouldn't have joined ranked queue while only able to play one role.

If you are one of these players, you need to knock your **** off. If that offends you, you can

take a number.


The only thing you should ever be calling in a game is "fill", or you don't call anything and you wait to see what your team picks, you pick when it's your turn, and you pick based on what your team needs. There's nothing wrong with saying "I prefer mid" or something like that, but if you join a game saying "mid or feed" or "I only mid" then you're a waste of a space on a team composition and you need to stay the hell out of ranked until you can play every single role comfortably.

You're not always going to get the role you're "DA BEST" at and you need to be prepared to accept that and you need to be willing to allow someone else to play it. If you're a GOOD player, and you're worried about "he's gonna screw up at mid", then play jungle. If jungle and mid are called, play top lane. If you see mid starting to fail, then GO HELP THEM. Don't sit there and go "omg I should have played mid, noob gg, reportzorz" or "I can't believe YOU of all people overpicked me, and then you play like THIS."

Congrats! That's helping SO EFFING MUCH right now. You know what's gonna happen? They're gonna go "Oh wait man, I'm supposed to WIN MY LANE? Dear god, I had no idea" and suddenly you're gonna have doublelift's younger brother on your team. All they needed was a quick kick in the face from you, man. That's all it was. Nobody was harassing them yet, so they were playing badly. Way to save your team!

Do you see how stupid it is when you do that to people? I hope that clarifies.


The equally as detrimental kind of player you can have on a team is the player who complains about having someone on the team who can only play one role. NOW you have two people on the team contributing negativity to the team, which is twice as bad as just having the ONE idiot.

The best thing you can do to deal with this kind of person isn't to rage at them, it's to GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT and move your team around them. Play champions who may be able to recover a failing lane. In other words, if you have someone who goes "KGUYS IM MID LULZ" you wouldn't want to bring teemo to the top lane and you wouldn't want to bring Riven to the jungle. They aren't good at turning the tides in early fights. A Maokai jungler and a Renekton top lane would be ideal due to all of the extra early CC and zoning capabilities.

You're never guaranteed a lane will ever win. Just because someone picks an Akali mid doesn't ever mean you should comp around a snowballed Akali. You should still keep in mind "what are we going to do if this Akali builds to be a tank and puts all her points into her shroud? You need to always be mindful of the big picture. If you don't know the capabilities of your teammates, then assuming they're going to do well is your OWN FAULT.

FURTHERMORE

Learning every single role allows you to expand your champion roster and understand what is needed in every lane. Have you ever seen someone get forced into supporting and ward in some of the most mentally challenged locations you've ever seen? That means they've never played the role with any enthusiasm, it's always something they just sorta got forced into (and that person shouldn't be playing ranked.)

Unless you can approach a role with some sort of fervor, you're never going to learn anything about it. You mind doesn't readily retain information you don't deem important, that's just how memory encoding works.

---

STOP. Collaborate and LISTEN.

The guy is an idiot, but he's quotable in this case. A team that doesn't communicate is always going to lose to a team who is listening to each other. They're going to have poor mechanics and synergy and they'll usually be easy to "catch out". Is it such a sin to try and get some people in the champ select lobby into Skype? Or Razer Comms? Or TeamSpeak? Or Raidcall? Or Ventrilo? Or Xfire? Or anything of the sort? My Skype account has over 300 friends on it and I can confidently say most of them are from League of Legends.

I ALWAYS ask in the lobby "can anyone get on Skype?"

Firstly, people lose their balls when they're actually voice-to-voice with you. Big bad rager isn't such a big bad rager when it's realtime conversation and they have to deal with the consequences of what they say... so you minimize raging this way. Communication is much more precise, much more effective, and usually a lot more organized. It happens without anyone having to stop and type. You can SAY "let's converge here" and ping it, rather than ping it and stop to type. We're talking a 80-240% increase in effective communication time, depending on typing speed.

"but I don't want some 14 year old prepubescent annoying kid on my Skype call"
...Seriously, get the hell over it. If you want to be that intolerant, why are you playing a team-based game?

Albeit, there are some "manners" associated with Skyping.

-Don't play music
-Don't whistle
-Don't hum
-Don't talk about anything but the game at hand
-Don't talk when you don't have to
-Don't yell in the mic
-Don't eat in the mic
-Don't use Skype if you don't have a headset or at least headphones
-Don't hammer on your keyboard all game if your mic is built into the laptop... it's loud.
-Don't be annoying or obnoxious
-Don't do things specifically to be obnoxious on a call (i.e. turn your music up that people just asked you to turn down)
-Tell your dog to shut up
-Turn off anything noisy in the area (fans, air conditioners, phone ringtones...)


The power of having your team in a voice call... this is an "out of my ***" statistic, but I'd give it a solid 30% increase on your chances of winning the game.

If you CAN'T SKYPE with your team...

Simply say

"Every time someone dies, they should take a look around and give some feedback on things we could be changing or doing to win... but don't type unless you're dead, and don't be a douche."

---

IF SOMETHING SPECIFIC MAKES YOU MAD, ADAPT FOR IT.

I want to go into a story here that might clear up what I think being a good summoner in relation to your champion is. Call it "champion/summoner synchronization", and it really is important.

I used to main Nunu & Willump as a support, and he's so so so so good. But every time I got into a game where my carry was auto attacking rather than last hitting, I wanted to round up like 12 really cute puppies and just walk down the line of them and punt them all into a wood chipper.

You lose CS leads that way, it pushes the lane way too hard for nunu to be effective, and it is AGGRAVATING to meet anyone at level 30 in ranked that doesn't understand how to last-hit. And there's NOTHING I could do about it. If you yell at them about it you just start typing and they just start raging back at you and nothing get's accomplished, you just make everything worse.

So I started playing Leona purely on the grounds that I just never wanted to see this bull again. Ever. Why Leo? Because of sunlight. If this moron is just gonna spam auto attacks at everything, the lane is going to push hard anyway. She's tanky, so she can handle the added pressure, and with sunlight I can guarantee that every auto attack thrown is going to kill the minion its sailing at. I correct the CS loss from a supporting role, and I never have to see my pet peeve again.

That's what I mean by "adapt to the things that make you mad".

My friend HATES getting ganked. He can win a lane and he pushes super hard and he's an amazing player for being level 11, but he always dies in a gank and he was about ready to just uninstall the game. He still thinks "ganks are cheating". He's a young kid. He also hates spending his money on wards.

I told him "Have you ever tried Heimerdinger?" and he said no. I said Heimerdinger can put little cannony things in the bushes so you can see people coming.

HE LOVED his new heimy. Played the hell out of him and then I realized that the 'dinger is not exactly viable in season 3, so I remembered that Zyra can kinda do the same thing. He likes her too.

Which also points out another good point - "You may be playing the wrong kind of champion".

Do you have a ton of deaths in every game because you love diving in man-mode with Akali and brutally harming anything that doesn't have a blue health bar?... Have you tried Pantheon? He can do the same thing essentially but he's a lot tankier. So is Diana.

See what I'm getting at? Maybe today you should get to the "all champions" section of this mobafire page thingy and really figure out if the champion you love to play is the best fit for you.

Me? I suck at killing things. I always over-commit and wonder why the thing I committed to didn't die... even though they were 3 levels ahead of me and I was half health and they weren't. that was back when I used to play a lot of Master Yi and Miss Fortune. My buddy, who is my mentor of sorts, suggested I start playing tankier champions like Rammus and Nasus, and I did. I didn't like how little damage they did, and I hated watching them run away from me. I liked that I could eat just about anything anyone could throw at me though, and I informed my friend of all this. He said "well try Vi. And I did. I loved her and all the damage she could do and the fact that nobody could really get away from me, but I would always get baited into fights going for a kill. (Keep in mind this was a long time ago and at a much lower skill level, and if I played Nasus NOW.... one does not simply run from a Nasus.)

My friend said "well maybe you shouldn't be killing ANYTHING. And I thought this was completely asinine. How the hell do you win a game if you don't kill anything? He said "Well, killing seems to be the common problem with you. Kills frustrate you or kill you. That's no good." and I couldn't really argue. He asked if I'd ever supported and I thought "I don't play healers bro. Wimps play healers."

He said "Not all supports are healers." and suggested I try Nunu & Willump. DEAR GOD... DO I LOVE ME SOME YETI. I was happy. I was home. I was right where I should be, doing all the things I wanted to do. I could be effective, I could secure kills for people, I could make sure I made a difference in my team by feeding my carry, and I protected everyone... and in real life, I'm a definite protector. I have a massively protective persona. So this role fit me BEAUTIFULLY. On top of all that, he has a COOKIE MONSTER SKIN.

And I LOVE the cookie monster. I collect cookie monster stuff, it's all over my room. My friends always post funny cookie monster stuff on my wall on facebook. So this nunu fella... he was my champion. This was MY guy. Doublelift has his vayne, I had my Nunu.

But then I met the auto attackers, and that's what made Leona my main.

You need to find your main, and you need to find what role suits you best. You'll be so much happier when you do. I thoroughly believe riot has certain personality sets in mind every time they release a champion, and there's a champion in the pool somewhere that you're just going to *click* with, and it's possible you haven't even played that champion yet.

Once you know a lot about a lot of champions, you're going to see yourself improve drastically and become a much better teammate. Ultimately, it all comes down to "don't be that guy."

Don't be the "mid or feed" guy, ok? As you can see, it can be a lot of fun to challenge yourself to learn another role, and once you're really great at another role, you don't have to WORRY about if someone else "takes your mid" because if they fail it hard, you can just use your epic adeptness to swing down, up, or over and recover the lane.

I really hope I've demonstrated how uselessly counterproductive it is to try and hoard a lane to yourself. I know we all want to play a lane we're good at and we hate to see our "main role" failed by someone else, but it's more productive to just know how to remedy the problem if it happens.

Right?

---

AID IN MAP AWARENESS

That'd be greeaaaattt...

For god's sake there's a ping for it now. WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE WE HAD TO TELEGRAPH MIA CALLS TO THE OTHER LANES, AND WE LIKED IT.

Quick rule of thumb. If you can look at your thumb, wave it 3 times, and look back at the screen and the enemy hasn't shown up yet, THAT'S A MIA. CALL IT. I don't care if they recalled, I don't care if they went into a bush and took a really long time to ward it, THEY'RE MISSING. If you don't know where they are they're MISSING. Never assume. Assuming makes a corpse out of you and me.

At higher level of play, sometimes the enemy will even make SURE you see them recall, buy items, and go STRAIGHT to another lane because they know you're probably not going to call their approach. You see this a lot out of Akali, Talon, Katarina, Diana, Zed, Kassadin, and Fizz. All the people that can come from behind a tower and still gank effectively due to mobility. ESPECIALLY call MIA if you know your opponent is capable of something like this. Unless you LIKE a fed assassin...

Do you know what happens when you shut down an assassin in your lane? They go elsewhere for kills. Not because they're douchebags, but because that's what you do as an assassin. Getting shut down early is your mortal enemy, so you do whatever you can to rectify it. That USUALLY means roaming... and they aren't roaming "to help the other lanes" they're roaming to EFFING KILL YOUR TEAM. They need kills to get big and they're going to try and get them one way or another

MIA is a courtesy, not a requirement. Watch the minimap yourself.

WRONG.

That's a copout. If you have ever said this or ever plan to say this again, you are scum. Anyone who supports you is scum. Any article which agrees with you or backs you up is scum.

Calling a MIA is your responsibility not because "my team can't watch a map" but because it's LOGICAL. Your teammates have other things to worry about without having to stare at YOUR lane on the minimap. Yes, they should be- that's entirely true. But that doesn't give you any reason not to CALL IT ANYWAY. It's called being part of a team, you do what you can to lighten the load on those around you and be effective as a SINGLE UNIT. If you're the guy going "It's not my fault you don't watch the minimap or ward" then you're going "Not my problem".

It's certainly going to be your problem when they come back to your lane after you shut them down so well with several kills and more gold then you, so who's laughing now?

Likewise, this brings me to step 9...

---

AWARENESS 101

Something is wrong with this picture...


What's the first thing they tell you when you learn to drive? Or at least one of the first things? To scan. Look at your mirrors, the road ahead of you, your rearview, your spedometer... always keep your eyes busy, basically. Always be taking in information.

You have SO MUCH information available to you and what do we do anyway? We've got our eyes in one of two places. If you're new, your eyes are always on your champion and a small radius around it. If you're a little more experienced, your eyes are always on the ENEMY champion, and the area around the general region the two of you are fighting in. Creeps, enemy support, approaching jungler, that sort of thing.

But if you REALLY want to be good at the game, you need to develop a further awareness. Both of the views discussed above are FATALLY flawed.

What did you see when you looked at that picture above?

-Why does a level 8 Kog'Maw have pots and a faerie charm?
-How is a Kog level 8 at 2:15?
-Why are minions already meeting eachother in lane at 2:15?

From this information I can gather that this photo is either fake or staged for advertisement purposes in a beta or open-code environment probably a direct hookup to an offline server judging by the zero latency, no other players, and 60 fps. All that from a picture that looks like "Meh... just an uninteresting screenshot." Took me about 15 seconds to see all that.

You have so much information available to you... that's my point.

THE GAME TIMER

Is the enemy thinking about dragon at about this time?
Is it too late to effectively buy GP10?
Is it too late to effectively buy a Rod of Ages?
Is it too early to be checking for Baron?
Is red or blue up?
Where might their jungler be?
Can I steal an enemy buff?
Should we be rallying to gank the enemy jungler?
Should we be rallying for dragon control?
Should we should ward baron/dragon/red/blue/river?

THE COMBAT HUD

Am I running the wrong runes and masteries, and should I be playing more carefully?
Are my summoners up?
Is my escape on cooldown?
Am I low on armor, running up to fight an AD champion?
Am I low on MR, running up to fight an AP champion?
When they engage on me, am I going to suddenly hit level 6 off of a dying creep and be able to capitalize on their engage with an ult they weren't expecting?
What buffs do I have?
Is my regenerative/shield passive ready to use?

MINIMAP

Is my team in trouble?
Is my team ready to push a tower?
How many enemy players are visible right now?
Which one is missing?
(look at game timer) where might they be?
What was that ping noise, who's pinging and why?
Is one of our lanes pushed too far to our side/Is farm available?
Is anyone caught out by our wards?
If I engage here, will anyone be close enough to help me?
If my team mate engages, am I close enough to help him?
If I go to help my team mate engage, will I die myself?
What escape route is going to be my best bet?
Where is my jungler?
Where is my support?
What lane is going to be the most effective to push now that we won this teamfight?
Do we have a minion wave on the way? Or should we go to another lane?

THE TEAM DISPLAY

Who has their ultimate right now?
How is my team's health and mana looking?
If I gank for this person, will they be able to help me?
How is my carry doing on mana?
Should I engage on the enemy, or is my carry dead in the water (oom)?
Do I have an opportunity to save someone? ( Shen, Soraka)
How much of my team is up?
Should I not be this far extended because my team is down?
If I die here, could that lose the game for us?
Are we going to lose this teamfight because our carry isn't up?
How much longer until they ARE up?

With so much available information to gather, if you're not scanning your HUD every few SECONDS, you are substantially harming your effectiveness in game.

If you press Tab...

Equipment

There are some things you can't know by looking at a champion.

Do they have life steal/spell vamp and I don't? Might they out-sustain me?
Do they have armor penetration? Can I tank them?
Are their boots faster than mine? Can I escape?
Do they have a hexdrinker they're waiting to juke me with?
If we engage here, is that Ravenous Hydra going to hack us all down slowly?
Can he get an extra attack in with that Ravenous Hydra?
Is he going to juke me with Youmuu's Ghostblade?
Has that caster completed Seraph's Embrace yet? Will she have a shield?
Are we going to get Randuin's/Shurelya's blitzed?
Do they have a locket?
What aura items do they have in general?
Am I going to kill myself attacking that thornmail?
Am I going to slow myself attacking that warden's mail/randuins?
Do they have a frozen heart?
Does someone have an Abyssal Scepter? Are they going to hurt more when that scepter is around?
Does someone have pink wards?
They bought no wards, feel free to gank this lane.
They bought wards, but they don't have wards anymore. This lane must be warded.

TIMER

When are their champions going to come back up from being dead?
Is this "free push" not going to be free in a few seconds?
Is this champion I presumed missing actually dead?
Do we have time to take an inhibitor if we don't have time to push and win?
Will we have time to escape this push?

SUMMONERS

Who is their jungler?
That's a lot of teleports... watch for teleganks.
That's a lot of AD, build armor
That's a lot of AP, build MR
That's a lot of CC, build tenacity
That's a lot of sustain, build anti-sustain like Executioner's Calling
That's a lot of poke, build Banshee's Veil
That's a lot of damage, build Aegis of the Legion or Guardian Angel
That's a lot of tankiness, build Liandry's Torment, Deathfire Grasp or Blade of the Ruined King
Their jungler is 0/0/0... must be disconnected. Don't worry about ganks.
We're up a man- 4v5, we should split-push.
X APC/ADC is doing all their damage. That's who we focus.
That ambiguous champion is building this particular way. (i.e. Yi is going AP)

---

WOULD YOU DRIVE A CAR YOU BOUGHT YOURSELF BLINDFOLDED?

I knew I had to word that specifically because some of you would go "if someone else bought it? 2 more beers."

Don't play with your volume down. Don't play with a TV going in the background or a movie on your other monitor. Don't play when you know people are going to distract you. Don't play when you have to pee. Don't play drunk. Don't play high. Don't play tweaked. Don't play strung out. Don't play with a broken hand. Don't play with your cat on your keyboard. Don't play while you're sick. Don't play if you lost your foot in a bizarre gardening accident.

basically, unless you're ready and in tip-top condition to play, don't play. Or at least stay out of ranked.

Did your girlfriend break up with you today?

Was she a cheating witch and you just didn't have the heart to get rid of her? Play, because you're probably in a great mood.

Was she Jessica Alba? Don't play, because that sucks bro. You're gonna drag everybody down with your negative attitude.

I don't need to keep going, I'm sure you get it. Make sure you can hear what's going on and you can dedicate some real time to playing the game without interruptions with NOTHING else to think about but League of Legends. If you're distracted, you play worse and make bad decisions.

Sit up straight in a nice, comfortable, supportive chair, make sure everything you need to reach is in a good ergonomic location. Make sure you have some water on hand if you get thirsty or maybe a little bag of crackers or something so you can munch a little bit while you're dead if you're feeling kind of hungry... or maybe just eat a meal before you get in game. Make sure you can see your keyboard and your mouse, make sure if you have some music on in your room that it isn't louder than league of legends and it's something you like, not something you're going to want to change. Also, make sure it's chill and upbeat and happy and feel-good music. If you listen to heavy metal or rap or that sort of thing when you play, you just get more hostile a lot easier.

You'd be surprised exactly HOW much music can affect not only your mood, but how quickly you can CHANGE moods. You may go into the game all pumped up because you're listening to something like this... (I dig this track)

But then people screw up and you're in adrenaline mode and you say wretched things about their family and things go south.

But if you listen to stuff like this... Then everything is just cool B)

ROBERT DOWNY JR. SAYS

Play Video
This has been a public service announcement.

---

THE ADC

---

-> Stops farming

-> Tower dives alone (wait for a tank)

-> Rages at the support

-> Burns barrier in panic when there is no reason to, throws keyboard later when they actually need barrier and it's burned.

-> Commits to a tank or bruiser as their primary target while another carry beats them down

-> Purchases attack speed before damage or damage before attack speed on the wrong kind of champion

-> Focuses more on harass than on CS while the enemy ADC focuses more on CS than harass

-> Gives up a CS lead by roaming early

-> Gives up a CS lead by ceasing pressure on the enemy ADC

-> Harasses the enemy support

-> Extends past river with no wards

-> Travels alone

-> Stays in lane too long without recalling when they gain a lead, allowing the enemy carry to gain an item advantage and cancel your lead by killing you

-> Tanks dragon or baron and then goes into a fight at half health

-> Travels in front of their team (ALWAYS BAD. NEVER DO THIS.)

-> Farms with abilities and dies once they run out of mana

-> DOESN'T LAST HIT. If you can't last hit, play bots until you can. Go here.

-> Doesn't keep what their support may be thinking in mind. Blames their support when they go H.A.M. and the support hesitates because they had no idea what was happening

-> Blames support for their deaths rather than adjusting to a passive support or communicating that they want to be aggressive.

-> Tries to hold a tower by themselves

-> Stays in lane when low, thinking they might be able to make a play; Doesn't pay attention to the fact that even though the enemy carry is almost dead, the support is at full health, off cooldown, and within range to make sure your day is ruined when you engage. (BTW that support is probably watching you like a hawk and praying that you go for it.)

---

THE JUNGLER

---

-> Plays lane favorites, forgets one lane completely

-> Doesn't realize that "top lane is doing well" doesn't mean "I don't have to gank there" it means "help him take his tower so you have TWO roamers".

-> Lane taxes a lane that's behind in CS

-> Lane taxes a lane they've fed previously

-> Lane taxes a lane and leaves

-> Contributes to the feed in a losing lane rather than attempting to help elsewhere

-> Doesn't hand off buffs

-> Doesn't hand off kills to carries

-> Steals kills from carries

-> Thinks it's their job to carry the game... this is the CARRY's job.

-> Complains to the rest of the team when they're counter-jungled rather than warding themselves

-> Spends too much time in lanes and falls behind in experience

-> Can't tell the team "no, I have to farm"

-> Farms too long in the jungle and lets the enemy jungler demolish every lane

-> Doesn't answer a gank with a gank of his own

-> Doesn't counter-jungle AT ALL

-> Uses smite on siege minions as he passes through lane, doesn't have smite for dragon steal later

-> Ganks a lane pushed to a tower, dives, and feeds.

-> Waits forever at a lane pushed to a tower for a gank, loses valuable experience in the process, and doesn't ultimately do anything but hurt his own game. If you're not going to take a tower, stay out of pushed lanes.

-> Doesn't realize that a pushed lane often means the buff closest to it is free to take if it's up

-> Ganks while low on health or mana

-> focuses so hard on one lane that another one falls (when there was really nothing he could have done in the lane he was in ANYWAY and he SHOULD have been at the sieged lane instead)

-> Prioritizes kills over pressure relief/providing pressure

-> Doesn't buy GP10 when he's not getting any successful ganks. If the game is past 9 minutes but hasn't gone to 15 minutes yet and you have very little or no ganks... you need GP10.

-> Continues to snowball when he's fed hard rather than handing off most of his kills to a carry to get someone ELSE nice and fed as well.

-> Continuously hunts for kills rather than pushing lanes

-> Doesn't TELL stubborn lanes to go back to base while he holds their lane. Some people just don't want to leave lane ever, and sometimes someone needs to tell them to GTFO. Others simply don't want to be a bother and ask you. Watch for low laners.

-> Doesn't ever do dragon because he's too busy trying to superstar the lanes

-> Does baron without smite being up ("wait for smite, team. X seconds.")

-> Continually ganks a lane that's doing incredibly well so he can get fed kills (all you're doing is starving them of kills they would have gotten anyway without you, and letting the other lanes suffer).

-> Doesn't help ward (WHAT better candidate is there than the guy that's gonna be in the jungle anyway?)

---

THE TOP LANE

---

-> Afk farms for days even while the other lanes are destroyed all the way to the inhibs (usually nasus.)

-> Continues standing at the enemy tower and making funny faces at the enemy, unable to farm under the enemy tower, walking in circles scratching his nuts waiting for farm to push back out (ROAM.)

-> Doesn't ward his river bush

-> Doesn't ward his tri bush

-> Plays Teemo, Akali, or Riven (they have massive potential to get a lot of kills, but bring nothing to a team overall.)

-> Builds a ton of armor against their AD lane against what is actually a mostly AP team

-> Uses a global ult to steal farm in other lanes/steal kills (GANGPLANK.)

-> Doesn't do golems/wolves/red/blue when their lane is pushed out too far to safely farm

-> Refuses to drop their tower because "I'm getting great farm up here"... so basically "screw my team, me me me."

-> Doesn't keep track of whether their opponent has warded or not (all you have to do is see if they started with wards, and see if those wards go missing.)

-> Leaves their lane to roam when they're against a Tryndamere Fiora Singed Master Yi or Volibear who isn't going to do anything when they leave except plow the hell out of their lane while they roam and SUCCESSFULLY backdoor. Stay in your lane when you're against a backdoor champion.

-> Is so focused on farming up their skills ( Nasus, Sion) that they're welded to their lane and never leave ever for any reason and leave their team to 4v5 all game. Usually subsequently complains that everyone is fed and wonders why and "omg my team is nub". Nah. You done screwed up son.

-> Feeds Irelia

---

THE MID LANE

---

-> Burns all their mana farming

-> Doesn't trade with top lane if they're hard-countered

-> Plays Akali, Riven, or Teemo (see above)

-> Thinks Lux counters Akali

-> Stops farming to roam too early (do you have a CS AND KILL lead?)

-> Doesn't ever resume farming

-> Lets their tower fall while roaming

-> Doesn't call MIA

-> Doesn't ward, gets ganked, blames jungler

-> Doesn't ask for blue ever, gets mad at jungler when they don't get blue (ASK.)

-> Doesn't follow their lane if their lane starts roaming (push your minions first.)

-> Doesn't keep track of whether their opponent has warded or not (all you have to do is see if they started with wards, and see if those wards go missing.)

-> Doesn't take their tower as soon as they possibly can (waits, likes the farm, likes repeatedly eating their opponent)

-> Doesn't help with dragon

-> Doesn't defend buffs (jungler should have them warded, you should help him kill the counter-jungler.)

-> Keeps taking kills after he has more than 10 rather than feeding the rest of his team

-> Steals kills from ADC (you can run out of mana. They can't run out of ammo.)

-> Feeds hard rather than allowing themselves to be shut down. (If you die more than 3 times before 8 minutes, you need to accept that you are your opponent's betch and just passively farm under tower. Wait for backup.)

-> Refuses to build situationally (what good is all that damage if you're always focused and dead?)

-> THE SINGLE MOST GUILTY LANE OF NOT EVER WARDING.

---

THE SUPPORT

---

-> Doesn't communicate extraordinarily well with carry (pings, text, skype... SOMETHING.)

-> Plays aggressively with a passive carry or passive with an aggressive carry

-> "I don't have room for wards" - Then you're spending your money wrong.

-> Doesn't buy sightstone/ruby sightstone

-> Argues that you don't need to buy sightstone.

-> Doesn't buy aura items (AP/CDR Lux "support")

-> Doesn't seal a kill for which a carry failed/died if they can (they'll get an assist.)

-> Favors offensive/harass skills to defensive/buff skills (i.e. Leona leveling her Shield of Daybreak rather than Eclipse, or Nunu & Willump leveling Ice Blast rather than Blood Boil).

-> Rages at the carry

-> Doesn't roam when the carry is doing well to support other lanes

-> Has no idea what proper warding is

-> Doesn't counter-ward

-> Never buys Oracle's Elixir

-> Builds Sorcerer's Shoes or Berserker's Greaves

-> Builds damage or AP over supporty items... if you have Rabadon's Deathcap on a support, you need to never support again until you figure out how to be a cognitively functioning addition to your team.

---

THE TEAM

---

-> Doesn't bring tanks

-> Has TOO tanky of a comp (not enough damage)

-> Doesn't know there's a META WITHIN THE META. You need an initiator, a peeler, a tower pusher, a wave clearer, and a support.

Dr. Mundo, Riven, LeBlanc, Varus, and Lux doesn't work. You'll never take a tower and you don't have much initiation besides a tank that won't die.

Tryndamere, Hecarim, Brand, Draven, and Leona does. You can clear waves, initiate when you want to, backdoor all day, take towers like mad, and peel like a boss.

-> Counter-comps itself. If you pick a poke comp against a dive comp, you're going to lose. If you pick a dive comp against a lockdown comp you're going to lose. Pay attention to this.

-> Doesn't pay attention to lanes lost at champion select. Did someone just pick Ashe against Caitlyn? You may want to pay more attention to that lane, then.

-> Gives up more deaths than a tower is worth

-> Refuses to let a tower fall which is granting the enemy team a lead

-> WILL NOT STAY GROUPED - Shopping doesn't win games. Buffs lose teamfights. Doing dragon while there is an opportunity to take towers is stupid. The gold difference is a measly 40 gold and towers win games. Too many summoners on their own effing program.

-> DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO FOCUS - if your team can't focus, you can't win. Drop carries before tanks. If the tanks do no damage (often the case), then IGNORE THEM. Run right past them. If they ARE a threat, then read my section on how to DEAL WITH THIS.

Very simply, the more people who know these things, the better off we'll all be and the more enjoyable this wonderful game will become.

Share this with your friends, share it in champion select, share it on forums, share it in instant messages in-game "hey man, I just read this. If you get a chance, you should too."

Consider it "raising awareness". I'm not trying to simply advertise my own guide entirely, so much as get good information to as many people as I can.

So won't you please share this guide?