A while back, I had a “moment” in my League of Legends career where I got overly frustrated with ranked games, and publicly announced that I was temporarily retiring from competitive League of Legends play. I specified that I would only be playing normal games with my friends for fun.

Since then, you might have noticed that season 3 started, and I already made my way back up to about 1400 elo. No, I did not already come out of temporary retirement; I just took a different approach to solo and duo queue, and no longer see it as a competitive environment anymore. That’s why I’ve decided not to even call solo queue solo queue anymore, I call it yolo queue.

If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “yolo,” it stands for “you only live once.” Most people declare this acronym prior to doing something very stupid, justifying their action by saying that you only live once, so you might as well do it.

Although I personally don’t really like the concept of “yolo,” and prefer the parodies of “yolo” instead (such as “better put on your seat belt, because yolo”), I thought League of Legends would be a great scenario when “yolo” would be very applicable.

In addition to this, I’ve come up with a short list of ways you can rethink solo queue so you get less frustrated while playing. We’ll start with,

Solo queue is no longer named solo queue, it’s named yolo queue.

Being forced to support when you main AP carry? Just support anyway, because yolo. You suck at support? It’s okay, yolo. There’s a troll on your team? Just play, because yolo. About to lose because of the troll? It’s okay, yolo. As you can see, saying “yolo” to every potential problem that arises will make you feel much less anxious and much more relaxed.

Solo/duo queue elo is not an indication of how good you are at League of Legends, it’s an indication of how good you are at solo/duo queue.

League of Legends, as a game, is about role fulfillment, teamwork, coordination, strategy, reaction, and overall group efforts. Solo/duo queue, on the contrary, is pretty much all about farming (last-hitting minions) and leadership skills in regards to leading complete strangers.

As you can see, the two are very different – this clearly means that just because you are good at League of Legends doesn’t mean you’ll be good at solo/duo queue, and vice versa. I’ve seen plenty of people with lower elos than me who are better at the game; I myself am also better at the game than many people with higher elos than me.

Nothing bad happens if you don’t get a high elo.

Sure, you might miss out on a few end-of-season rewards like a skin and a profile border, but nothing bad is going to happen because you can’t make it to a particular elo.

If your friends are young and immature, they might mock you for sucking at solo/duo queue, but once they understand that it doesn’t really matter (maybe you can speed up that process by sending them a link to this list you just read), everything will be just fine.

With that perspective, I was able to successfully come back to League of Legends solo/duo queue and lose 9 out of 22 games so far this season without ever getting annoyed or frustrated.

Is the competitive aspect of League of Legends troubling you as well? I suggest you shift your per­spective to be more similar to mine, and League of Legends will become a lot more fun.

I’ve been playing a handful of games with my buddies lately on League of Legends, and I’ve decided to go back and do a bit of analysis on the games to see what went wrong (or right).

I was going to do this anyway, so I decided I might as well do this and publish the results publicly so other people might be able to benefit from it as well.

The ordering of the champions are top laner, jungler, mid laner, attack damage carry, and support. The champion I was playing and the score I got is in bold; the [R] before some champions designates they were random people found through matchmaking, and not one of my friends.

Victory: Sion, Nocturne (12/1/8), [R] Teemo, [R] Master Yi and Soraka vs. Pantheon, Amumu, Ryze, Miss Fortune and Nidalee

• I got at least a kill or an assist every time I ganked a lane
• I got lucky with an early-game counter jungle, and took advantage of my lead to snowball for the rest of the game
• It didn’t matter how my allies were doing because I was never farming my own jungle, I was always going from lane to lane ganking and helping them that even the worst players would passively win their lane
• I was in such a dominating lead that I was building towards Trinity Force after finishing Spirit of the Ancient Golem and Ruby Sighstone

Defeat: Sion, Nocturne (3/6/3), [R] Talon, Graves and Kayle vs. Cho’Gath, Jarvan IV, Katarina, Caitlyn and Soraka

• My Internet connection randomly dropped at the beginning during initial loading, and I entered the game at 2:31
• I was about two minutes late starting my jungle route, and got no help from my allies because laning phase had already begun, which put me even more behind
• All three lanes lost, and there was nothing I could do to help because I was so far behind
• The enemy team had a quick and relatively dominating victory

Defeat: [R] Renekton, Olaf, LeBlanc (10/3/1), Ezreal and Soraka vs. Nidalee, Shaco, Ahri, Ashe and Sona

• Our Renekton gave away first blood, then rage quit about three minutes into the game
• Our jungler did not instantly start covering top, which gave Nidalee a chance to get free farm and snowball in strength
• I destroyed Ahri in mid lane and literally killed her two seconds after she would return to lane
• Ahri decided after dying to me in that manner three times that she would instead roam and feed off bot lane
• Nidalee constantly split pushed and made her way into our base, attacking our Nexus turrets
• There was nothing I could do because the minions were dealing more damage to me than Nidalee, and I was passively dying trying to kill her; I couldn’t clear the minions because I’m LeBlanc
• All of our top turrets were down (including the base turret and inhibitor), but our first-tier bottom turret was still up, so it was not absolutely clear to the ADC and support that their help was needed in our base
• Nidalee pretty much single-handedly won the game for her team

Victory: Morgana, [R] Maokai, Zyra (12/2/5), Graves and Kayle vs. Shen, Malphite, Veigar, Caitlyn and Soraka

• We invaded their blue and I got first blood off their ADC
• We did a lane swap that allowed our ADC and support to kill the top turret about five minutes into the game, while Morgana was able to hold bottom
• I got an early kill on Veigar and took advantage of the lead to prevent him from farming (which is crucial for Veigar in order to get stronger by last-hitting with his Q)
• I adapted my build and went for early Rabaddon’s Deathcap and Zhonya’s Hourglass, allowing me to chunk down people’s health to half with a single Q
• We started playing hyper-aggressively and got a dominating and easy victory

Continue reading →

A few of you have been checking out my stats on LoLKing and have noticed that I haven’t been using my signature summoner spell combo of Heal and Ignite anymore. I was confronted by a few people about this, and decided it would be worth addressing.

The main issue is that Heal got nerfed too much. Before Preseason 3, Heal scaled off your level by 25; now, Heal scales off your level by only 15 (that’s a 40% nerf). The counterbalance to this is that Heal now heals surrounding allies by 100% of its strength rather than only 50%. Basically, Heal got turned into a support spell, and ended up becoming too weak for my needs.

A valid alternative for Heal is Barrier, which has a base protection value of 20 higher than Heal (95 vs. 75), and scales off each level by 20 (which is a 33% improvement from Heal). However, the effects of Barrier only last for two seconds. So, if you’re trying to bait your enemies into over-committing, you better find a solution within two seconds, or your health bar is going to go right back down to where it was before.

In summary, neither Heal nor Barrier is, in my opinion, effective enough at baiting with a high-enough projected success rate.

Of course, these are all numbers, but how do they work in practice? As most of you probably know, I play on the Public Beta Environment, which means I was able to experience Preseason 3 changes weeks before they went live on the main servers. During that time, I tested out the new Heal and Barrier extensively. Overall, without changing any other play styles or strategies, I ended up failing my baits more, and Heal and Barrier just weren’t enough to keep me alive in tight situations.

After these two spells, I concluded that the next best option is Flash. Although I hate Flash as a summoner spell and feel it should be removed, I still can’t deny the extreme utility it provides in a wide variety of situations.

It seems like it will be to my benefit to start learning how to use Flash effectively, and adapting my the way I play such that I still continue to use psychological manipulation and trickery as the fundamental core of my play style, but now use Flash to do it instead of Heal or Barrier.

One of the main reasons I haven’t ever used Flash is because I suck at using it. More often than not, when I try to Flash, I either Flash in the wrong direction, or Flash into a wall. But, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is eventually something I can get better at with practice, and I can even use fail Flashes as a strategy.

For example, in a game where I was playing Zyra, while we were pushing down one of the enemy’s inner turrets, we just couldn’t get good positioning to attack the turret or kill the enemies. So, I set up a scenario where I purposely overextended, baiting the enemies’ attention. Then, I intentionally Flashed into a wall, which made the enemies think that I thought I was in danger and was trying to get out.

Seizing the “opportunity,” all five of the enemies came forward to try and pick me off. While all of them converged towards me and began to clump up, I hit a majority of them with my roots, threw out two seeds, hit them with my thorns, spawned two plants, then caught all five of them in my knock-up ultimate. I ended up dying because I had no escape mechanism after using my Flash as bait, but I hit about three of them with my passive before fully dying.

Seconds later, my team swept forward and cleaned up the rest of the enemy team’s health bars, giving me five assists and pushing for the victory.

Of course, things like that are really difficult to pull off, but with enough practice, I’m pretty sure I can get as good with Flash as I was with Heal in Season 2.