Getting to level 30 in League of Legends takes a whole lot of games. Bot games, normals, ARAMs, whatever your mode of choice, it's a pretty time-consuming process to go from 1-30 without the benefit of XP Boosts. You might think that when you hit level 30 after all those hours of gaming that you know the game pretty well. After all, you've probably played a wide variety of champs, looked up guides online, watched streams, tried different roles, and gotten into at least one argument on champ select about how your team needs a tank. The problem is that unless you're a really fast learner you will place, at best, around an "average" ranked LoL player in low Silver. And that wouldn't even be something to be ashamed of! There are hundreds of thousands of dedicated LoL players who never make it out of Bronze. Probably millions, honestly.
Why are millions of League players so terrible at the game, despite spending hundreds of hours playing before they even first enter ranked? How can something like SaltyTeemo, the land of the Runaan's Hurricane Sejuani, exist? Part of it is that a lot of people don't actually care about winning. They want to have fun in their own way, and maybe have accepted that they lose more often than they win when they play in that fashion. They like the idea of only buying sword items on Yi, or they think the minigame aspect of Tear of the Goddess is so much fun that they even build Muramana on Caitlyn. Other bad players just have terrible attitudes towards their fellow summoners, and are quick to give up on games, rage at their teammates, and are generally making their games harder simply by having low morale and feeding into their team's demise. But the majority of bad players are bad because they haven't spent time really thinking about the game on any meaningful level. The point of this series is to provide guidance for relatively adolescent players to think about things on their own, with a bit of a nudge in the right direction.
My IGN is Daunte Vicknabb, and I am currently Plat 4, though I think I could probably be nearing Diamond right now if I didn't take multiple 1 month breaks from playing ranked this season. I mainly play support and jungle, though I have a few midlaners that I am pretty good at and can ADC or top in a pinch.
I want to talk really quickly about runes, because they are extremely important but also extremely simple to get "basically right." You really only should need 2 rune pages to mostly get by: a page with AP, and a page with AD. What this entails is usually a set of Armor or HP Yellows and a set of Flat/Scaling MR blues (I like a mix, if I'm not going to have dedicated pages with 9 of each), plus Reds and Quints to flavor. The AD page should probably just have flat AD reds and quints at this point, and the AP page should have flat AP quints and hybrid pen reds (though MPen Reds are good enough and cost substantially less IP, if this is a big concern). When you've gotten to level 20 and are moving on towards 30, it's extremely advisable to start buying the runes as you go along so that the task doesn't seem as monumental when you're about to hit the grand stage.
Masteries are actually a much tougher thing to properly set up, because they can be changed as you learn more about the makeup of the game. While you can again "get by" with somewhat generic pages, different champions within a role will sometimes value different masteries, even in a role as generally homogeneous as ADC. A Sivir or Lucian player will probably value the "weaving" masteries more highly than a Caitlyn or Tristana would. The first thing I'd recommend doing is looking at the mastery trees for a good ten to fifteen minutes, making note of which masteries are in which parts of their respective trees. How many points does it take to pick up the "biscuit" mastery in Utility, and what are some of the things you might invest in to get there? What combinations of masteries are impossible, and which masteries require you to make big sacrifices in other parts of the tree? When you get a hang of where the masteries are, try setting up pages for yourself in under a minute. Create a situation, like "I am playing Warwick jungle" and figure out what you think works best, then try cross-checking it against a website like probuilds or a well-written higher Elo player's guide on Solomid or Lolking.
As you improve at the game and are better able to recognize certain characteristics, these situations will become more complex: "I am playing Nasus top against a team with 3 magic damage threats, including a heavy amount of slows and AoE magic damage." Now you might be more willing to invest points into the +MR masteries, and the slow reduction mastery. Maybe on Mundo you would want to invest in the Perseverance/Second Wind masteries but on Darius you'd find those points a waste and be better served maxing out on Armor and Legendary Guardian. These little differences in your mastery pages don't always make an observable difference, but the difference is definitely there, and a good mastery page can add hidden gold that a carelessly made page would miss out on. In a game where saying "I could only buy one potion on my back" often means you are about to get snowballed on in a big way, every bit of gold matters.
Item builds are similar to masteries, in that you will want to have a good idea of the types of items you should be buying on a character but will also want to be flexible as things develop. Learn the basic items first: daggers and bows, tomes and wands and rods, swords and axes and swords, etc. Once you know those, think about how they combine to make the bigger, better items that will define your power spikes throughout a game. A Dagger and a Brawler's Gloves are a pretty innocuous pairing, but a Zeal represents a fairly considerable spike in power stemming from the stat gains and the tacked on movement speed buff. Having some Long Swords floating in your inventory is pretty much always a solid option on an AD based champion, but combining those into a Brutalizer might tend towards one play style where building a Cutlass might indicate something else. After you generally know what items make what, and what items do what, you can think about why some items might be situationally superior to others even though in the abstract they are worse.
Take the big mana items for AP mid laners: Rod of Ages, Archangel's Staff, Athene's Unholy Grail, and Morellonomicon. RoA offers tankiness and incredible raw stats but needs time to grow. Archangel's offers the most raw damage and an insanely powerful active effect but takes even longer to grow than RoA and offers no defensive benefits until it is fully charged. Athene's offers resistance against your lane opponent's damaging spells, excellent cooldown reduction, and excellent sustenance in lane, but has less AP than the alternatives. Finally there is Morellonomicon, which is not great as a mana item and confers the least defensive value of the bunch, but has a cheap cost, solid AP, and an occasionally dynamite passive ability.
Which of these items you elect to build is entirely conditioned around who you're playing as and what you're going up against and experiencing as the game develops. Sometimes the Morellonomicon passive is more appealing than the slight tankiness afforded by an Athene's. Sometimes you will want to be tanky initiator Annie with a Rod of Ages, and sometimes you will want to be bursty Annie and skip a mana item entirely so that you can rush a DFG. Sometimes you will have a long game and a flow of blue buffs, and Archangels will be a completely legitimate rush on Orianna, while other Orianna games will dictate a need for Athene's to allow aggressive farming both in lane and in the jungle. If you fall into the trap of always buying Tear first on Orianna you will have a number of games where you spend ten to fifteen minutes wondering why your Q-W combo doesn't kill the caster minions. But if you decide that you will never buy Tear on Orianna you might be passing up on an extremely valuable active against a burst heavy composition featuring champions like Riven and Rengar. This also applies to choosing what tanky items to buy, or which Zeal item to buy on an ADC.
I guess the takeaway from this first post should be "think flexibly". When I watch people who are not very good at the game, I notice that they almost always play in a very restricted fashion that doesn't allow for creativity or adaptive play. I'll talk more about the adaptive elements of individual champions in the support role tomorrow (hopefully).
This owns, you own, have my babies.
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