Having been a casual player for a few years I understand some of the basics, but have always failed at cracking into 1400< ELO. I know that part of my trouble is I don't take the time to find a duo queue partner, but also at the same time I feel I hinder myself by trying to play more champions to accommodate what the team "needs". While I play a lethal kass (6.8/game 1.9/game 6.7/game over 30 games in S2) and a halfway decent graves, I've been struggling to find a happy fit in the jungle. Should I abandon champion hopping and try to "master" a few champions alone or what is the best approach? Is it more important to play a champion I'm comfortable with no matter what as opposed to satisfying a team role?

Also I have trouble focusing on CS. Often I start out strong, but then find myself being sucked into poor game play from others and attempting to help them win back their lanes, or avoiding bad engagements. When my teammate is too aggressive what do I do? Let him die or attempt to make a play?

PS do I need to own taric or sona to climb ranks or are those champions that see more benefit from duo queue

PSS I wont bother asking whether buying more rune pages is essential (it seems to be), but what are the most important Quints to own?

Ken,

what do you do if your support wont ward? as the carry I end up spending quite a bit of money on wards to stay safe. While their support wards all day and the carry farms.

Also how do you counter having a bad jungler and being ganked all day long?

It seems if you have a bad jungler but they have a good one then its an easy loss. I geuss I could play jungler all the time, but the next question is how do you play a good jungler if your team cant set you up to gank.

I geuss what I am saying is how do you win out when your team is bad. I generally lose when my team is bad (which makes sense) and win when my team is good (again obvious). I guess my question would be which role can i play that will affect my team so greatly I can win by being the best player?


Jungler relies on each lane knowing how to freeze and push a lane.

Support (if your carry is bad you lose)

Mid ( seems to be the most effective place to farm and carry without relying on anyone else

ADC ( depends on how bad your support and jungler is, and how good their support and jungler are)

Mr. Ken,

What are some solid picks in Mid Lane, Jungle, and Top Lane in Ranked Solo Q?

I have a pretty good question. I saw in a previous post that playing ap and jungle is the most influential on the outcome of a game in low elo. Which champions do you believe fill those roles the best currently and why. Just like maybe 3 examples of each? Pretty please?

Edit: Seems I'm not the only one that thought of this question at all... ^

What do you think of this game? Overall, it went rather well for me, but it was pretty sloppy and I made a ton of mistakes. I find that I can pull off cool moves and do almost everything right some games, but I derp hard at times and I wish I knew how to stop doing it so often.

http://www.leaguereplays.com/replays/match/2518867/

I was Janna with 3/5/38. Our MF was 27/5/15, 21.8k gold & full build. We were tied for least deaths overall.

We lost FB because of minions (enemy Lux did an awesome flash-dodge vs. Xerath, and it's clear that she understood minion aggro a lot better), Our own Olaf counter-jungled himself apparently unknowingly and nobody noticed until replay. Oddly enough, it merely kept him from feeding blue to Lux a minute later o_0. Two wrongs evened out for once.

I got some nice kills, but totally screwed up on a bunch of shields as Janna. That kill would've gone to my ADC if I had shielded MF due to the bonus AD. I did have a nice flash-tornado on Soraka, even though it was a suicide; Yi would've gotten me with alpha strike anyhow, so I figure it was worth it. A misclick caused me to buy boots twice instead of the null-magic mantle for Mercury's Threads and I wonder in retrospect if different boots would've been better in this particular matchup, given that they were a little light on CC. Our first dragon attempt was an utter disaster, with a nice teleport-gank from their Olaf that I only understood after watching the reply. Following our Olaf into the jungle was a huge mistake. Shielding myself vs. an already active ignite from Yi really confused him; he asked in chat how on earth I had healed. In general, I feel like I dropped way too few wards and rushed items, but several unusual ward spots I picked turned out to be surprisingly effective and netted us kills. I was barely able to save Olaf & Xerath a few times and failed utterly other times.

In the end, the game was won primarily due to MF getting her full build and utterly destroying the enemy and I think I didn't do too badly in helping her get there / denying their MF, though we had some trouble with how fed their Master Yi was getting. I can see where I was out of synch with my team, especially our MF and several places where I failed to shield at the right time and stuff like that, but I wonder what mistakes you see that I haven't noticed that I could improve upon?

So I play mid a lot, and sometimes I'm able to just completely dominate it without giving the enemy mid a ray of hope. When this happens, they usually just sit under their turret, even if the creeps are over by my turret.

While this is good and all, when I play certain champions, I can't actually take their tower when they're camping under it. At that point, I usually go and gank another lane. The problem is that every time I do this, the enemy mid pushes my lane and takes my tower. While I don't like sitting around in mid doing nothing because the enemy won't come fight me, I don't want to lose my tower either by going to gank another lane.

I guess one more thing I should mention is when I do go to gank another lane, I usually head back to my turret so that I get lost in the fog of war before I gank another lane, so that no one knows where I am or where I'm headed. Is that bad?

Do you have any suggestions for what I should do about this?

P.S. The main character that this happens with is Akali.

Quick question to anyone is isn't lvl 30 yet but is close.

What summoner level (I am currently 19) do you have to reach before people start following the meta.