League of Legends: 50 Tips to Help You Climb Ranked in Season 10

Don’t do this

6. Don’t call your team to group if you can’t win team fights.

There is a mating call in low elos: “group.” Every time a player gets picked off in a side lane, warding around dragon, or just walking through the jungle, inevitably they will type in chat (which you should have muted) some variation of “we need to group.”

Here’s the thing, though, just because you group doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to win. Yes, one or two enemies may stupidly waddle into your entire team, but if you don’t have a team that is equipped to team fight you shouldn’t force it.

Look at your team comp compared to theirs and see who has the team with the better area of effect (AoE) abilities and crowd control. Even if your team is massively ahead, forcing a fight against a team with Leona/Amumu/Darius/Sivir/Katarina is an easy way to throw your lead. Think about how to set up fights to play to your team’s strengths rather than just blindly thinking the solution is for all of you to group up.

7. Don’t do what isn’t working.

Let’s say you have that team fight comp, but every time your Amumu makes an engage you still end up losing the fight. While that may have been the logically correct play, after it doesn’t work a couple of times you need to stop doing it.

Yes, that might mean playing suboptimally like trusting your only fed member to split push while the rest of the team baits an objective. Unfortunately, in League of Legends, you will rarely get the chance to make a mistake three times in a row and still win. If it didn’t work twice, assume it won’t work a third time and try to adapt.

8. Don’t push into a team with heavy waveclear.

If you cannot dive the tower, you are not going to be able to push past the enemy team with Ziggs/Xerath/Xayah/Heimerdinger. Instead of just grouping to push a tower the enemy can easily defend, spread the map out and push multiple towers so their waveclear is occupied.

9. Don’t ward a bush to check if someone is there.

If you think someone is sitting in a bush, they probably are. You walking up to drop a ward into that bush just puts you close enough to them so that they can kill you. If you need to check a bush, use a long-range spell to check it or just walk away. Dying to place an “I knew it” ward is never worth it.

10. Dying with your ult still up means you screwed up.

There is no benefit to holding onto your ultimate in a fight if you have it up, especially if your opponent has used theirs. It’s always better to use your ultimate and die since at least some of the cooldown will be eaten up while you’re respawning, and worst-case maybe you’ll be able to get a kill or increase your chance for a last-second escape. The same principle applies to Summoner Spells, though to a bit of a lesser extent since summoners have longer cooldowns and you shouldn’t burn them if you’re going to die anyway.