League of Legends Gold Rank Guide

League of Legends Gold Rank Guide by Artiquinno

Hi! This is Artiquinno again with some more advice about climbing the ranked ladder, this time about Gold. The advice now is a little different to before, not about specific champions that I can recommend, but more about the Meta and how to improve as a player as well as attitude towards ranked games.

In Gold it is less about carrying your entire team because everyone is starting to get pretty good at the game but more about how you play the game, teamwork and the META. Here it is very important that you are paying close attention to your mechanics as well as who you’re playing against. You need to be comfy with who you’re playing and agaisnt. My first tip is to look up the champion you’re playing agasint if you don’t know them well; take note of their cooldowns – this will help you trade a lot better in lane.

In high Gold my friends and I have noticed it is a lot harder to DuoQ – this is because it is designed in such a way that the system expects both you and your partner to crush your lanes which is harder when the other team’s MMR has been raised. I would recommend SoloQ and maybe go back to Duo when you hit Plat.

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META:

The Meta is very important to people in Gold. They want to see the strongest people being played and are very skeptical of anything that is off Meta. It is my advice that you can completely ignore the Meta if you are 100% sure that you can pull your weight/carry with whatever pick you have. For example: I main Quinn mid/top/jungle – despite it not being a Meta pick I have maintained a 70% win rate over.

Yes people may be critical of your choices but that means that you only have to prove to them. If you have a good winrate with someone – show people your lolking and they will believe you. If not – you’ll just have to get to that point by trying – but please try stuff in normals first and see if other people have tried it before.

This doesn’t mean that following the Meta isn’t good – we are seeing champions such as Maokai top emerge which are perfectly strong, so they could be a good idea for you to pick up as they are being picked for a reason!

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TEAMWORK:

Teamwork is a large part of winning games in Gold, you have to trust your teammates! When you play mid/jungle I would recommend that you attempt to roam and get your laners fed by handing them kills for free. This will mean that Gold is spread out more over the team and people stand a better chance in teamfights. Since the Meta revolves around ADCs at the moment roaming and getting the bot lane kills is a very good idea.

Another part of teamwork is being a shotcaller. You won’t always be able to do this becasue your team isn’t as likely to trust you if you are behind – but when you can you can win that game by enforcing teamwork. If you roam and get a kill, then get an objective out of it if you can. Everytime you get a kill, have a look and see if there’s an objective you can take. This is the most important part of carrying games. In Gold lots of the games are a lot closer; so getting any Gold you can is a good idea – it will help put you ahead.

Another large part is Teamfighting, you need to know who to focus at all times, but this is rather reliant on team comps. This is a large thing to consider in champ select, but I will be writing another guide on this soon at some point.

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IMPROVING YOURSELF:

Improving yourself as a player is the most important part of being in Gold. You have to put aside that desire to climb the ladder and trust that you will get where you deserve to be in the end. To do this you have to focus on your own game and only play to get better. Other people’s games shouldn’t really affect you considering that the only common factor in every game is YOU!

Some steps I suggest to improve:

Learn to farm: Hitting 70 CS at around 10 minutes is what you should be aiming for at least very game – maybe slighlty less if you are getting zoned hard. Make sure you are concentrating becasue if you don’t you will find it rather difficult. Go into a custom game and see what CS you hit at 10 minutes, then improve it the next time you try.

Map awareness is a large part of improving in Gold, you should aim to place around 20 wards a game, even if youre not support – this will help you a lot in the long run, and is very beneficial to your team. It will prevent ganks and allow you to catch people out late game. The most important part of this is to not Tunnel Vision – get into the habit of looking at the mini map every couple of CS.

What I personally have is the HUD scale set low, and the chat on the smallest setting; with the minimap on the highest: this means that you are more inclined to look at it and have raised map awareness.

In Game Chat is either great, or completely toxic. I suggest muting someone as soon as they say anything bad – maybe unmute 10 minutes later if you are doing well and see if they are nicer; but you shouldnt be concentrating on what other people think, but how to improve yourself.

With regards to this I heavily recommend disabling [All] Chat – It can be heavily off putting. You can disable this in the Interface section in settings, maybe turn it on again for normal games, but turn it off for ranked.

Playing in a ranked team can also be beneficial, not everyone will be able to do this but if you can do this with a group of friends who will take it seriously it allows you to improve your teamplay, shot calling and your tolerence for other people’s ideas. If you want to do this but don’t have friends who are willing to try with you visit /r/teamredditteams – there are a mix of people at different skill levels willing to play the game for fun, or seriously.

Improving your mechanics is perhaps the best way to improve as an individual, this includes the ability to react to situations and outplay people 1v2 etc. This mostly comes from practice but what I heavily emphasize is to learn the limits of your champions. Try crazy things that you think have the potential of working, if they don’t you only learn more about your champion. Of course you have to be careful in ranked, make sure you don’t throw – but if you learn the limits of a champion at various stages of the game you will improve a lot.

Going into custom games to improve mechanics with things such as Lee Sin Insecs or Thresh Flays with a friend helps you practice something easily and in a stress free environment.

With regards to improving reaction times, playing OSU! is incredibly fun and has various difficulties. It is great to play in the loading screens and you will improve your control with the mouse very quickly.

Play all roles and all champions – If you play all roles and you’re last pick in a ranked game, then you won’t be uncomfortable playing a certain role. I’m not saying that you should not main a certain role, but you should be comfortable just in case you are forced into a certain position.

With regards to champions, you have to learn what everyone does, if you don’t understand how everyone works then you can easily lose lane to them. For example when I played agasint Sion I didn’t realised that his ult lasted for a good 20 seconds, this mean I lost a fight and he snowballed the lane. Had I known that, maybe the lane would have gone differently. So I suggest playing champs on free week in normals.

Watching Replays is a good way to improve – you will spot a lot more of your own mistakes when you look at replays, and then strive to ensure that you dont make the same mistakes again!

Watching replays of pros playing or watching the LCS can help you improve a lot as well – it helps you realise that you have to limit your deaths by any means possible!

Limiting your deaths is perhaps the most important thing – if you can stop dying in lane, then you stop giving the other team gold. Despite it seeming obvious lots of people seem to go back to lane and continuously feed their enemy kill after kill. Make sure that you ward and use summoners to ensure that you stay alive – take teleport if you think you’ll have a difficult lane so that you don’t miss out on too much CS.

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GOOD LUCK in ranked – You’ll get to where you deserve to be in no time!