I’ve recently received quite an influx of people asking me during my League of Legends stream or games if I’m trying to copy SilSol.

At first, I had no idea what that even meant, and initially didn’t even realize that SilSol was a person. However, after a few minutes of Googling for information, I discovered that SilSol is a Korean League of Legends player who has an extremely high solo/duo queue Summoner’s Rift elo, but is known for feeding a majority of his games. One particular characteristic of his is that he always takes the summoner spells Ignite and Heal.

Seeing as I just found out about this player, it’s obvious that I’m not trying to copy him, and I’m not implementing any of his strategies into my game play intentionally. However, I did a bit of research on him to see if we had any unintended resemblances with each other.

I conveniently found a thread on Reddit explaining what kind of player SilSol is. (I’m assuming this is also the reason why people suddenly knew about SilSol and suddenly started asking me if I was trying to copy him.) SilSol generally plays in a stupidly aggressive manner. The adjective of “stupidly” is not being added in there myself as my own opinion – any neutral third party would look at his play and think that he is stupidly aggressive. He apparently doesn’t care if he does, and takes huge risks and gambles to get kills, even if it means turret diving at level 3. This usually ends up getting him killed, which is why it seems like he feeds every game. However, he still manages to get up to a really high elo.

This is because his stupidly aggressive play helps out his teammates. If he constantly puts extreme pressure on his laning opponents, this either forces the enemy jungler to camp SilSol’s lane, or makes SilSol’s laning opponent frightened (especially if they’re American, because Americans tend not to be able to deal with excessive aggression) and force them to play more defensively, decreasing their opportunities of snowballing.

The primary reason this works in high-elo play is that SilSol’s allies are able to take advantage of this situation to the fullest and coordinate well-enough to win the game off of it. It doesn’t work in lower-elo play because nobody is intelligent enough to organize around someone like SilSol.

Taking Ignite and Heal helps SilSol in his purpose because he is able to Ignite his opponent to get the extra damage on them to help achieve the kill, and Heal himself so he’s able to increase his chances of survival after executing the aggression.

Coming back to me, I’ve taken Heal and Ignite in almost every game of League of Legends I’ve played since I was summoner level 7 and Ignite was made available to me. I’ve tried out Flash for a handful of games, but it never seemed to be as useful for me as Heal was. I understand that Flash can have much greater utility, but I’ve always felt that Flash was far too situational, and way too many things could go wrong with Flash.

Heal is a very straightforward spell. If you’re about to die, you use Heal. If you’re Ignited, you either wait until it runs out, or you use it while you’re Ignited if it’s going to kill you and mitigate a good chunk of damage from Ignite.

Flash, on the other hand, will never guarantee you anything. Sure, you might be able to Flash over a wall once in a while to save your life, but what if you have damage over time applied to you? Are you going to try to Flash away from Ignite? What if the enemy just Flashes right after you? What if the enemy has a wall-jump or gap-closing ability built into their regular skill set?

People could argue that Flash has offensive uses as well, but so does Heal. I cannot even begin to imagine how many times I have used Heal offensively to make someone overcommit to a kill, then suddenly get a burst of health and turn the fight around to get a kill, or even first blood (because Heal is more effective during lower levels).

But that’s enough about Heal as a spell, how does it fit into my play style?

First, although I’m not stupidly aggressive like SilSol is, I’m still pretty hyper aggressive. If I see a situation that I think will result in over a 60% chance of victory for me, and I have both my summoner spells up, I will usually go for it. Of course, the 40% chance that I will fail is still pretty big, so that’s where my summoner spells come in.

There are two main things that could go wrong when I go for something – I either die too quickly, or the enemy ends up getting away with a sliver of health. Both my summoner spells help me out in this situation because they give me a surge of health and an extra ticking damage over time on my opponents.

Another reason Heal and Ignite works well with me is because I like to have a strong presence when I play. I want to establish and give off the impression that I am someone to be feared, and if the enemy sees me somewhere, they have to be cautious. One way to establish this status is to be extremely difficult to kill, and even pull off successful kills in tight situations. Again, Heal and Ignite help me with this. For example, if I am low of health and the enemy laner and jungler decide to turret dive me, if I get a surge of health with Heal, throw down Ignite on someone, get a kill with the help of my turret, force them to disengage, and walk away alive, that shows that their efforts are not enough to kill me. Even though they might rationalize the situation by saying they got Heal baited, it still stays in their mind that they tried to kill me and miserably failed.

So, bringing this issue back to full circle, am I copying SilSol? No. Am I taking Heal and Ignite for similar reasons as SilSol? Yes. Did I get the idea from SilSol? Absolutely not.

It sort of makes me laugh when people think that strange strategies only arise as a result of people copying professional players. It makes sense that people believe that, though, because a lot of lower-leveled players tend to do that – they see something successful in a tournament (such as the recent success of Orianna in the world championships), and they start copying it.

If anything, I’m on the opposite end of the scale. I’m the one coming up with these strange strategies, and I’m the one making them work – for example, using Heal and Ignite on bruisers on the old Twisted Treeline and managing to get up to upper platinum and lower diamond elo, which is about the top 0.3% in the world.