How to Improve

Improving is considered broadly under the concept of 'playing to pressure' and can be split up into four main categories:
 * 1) Mastering a Champion
 * 2) Identifying opportunities
 * 3) Reacting to opportunities
 * 4) Making opportunities

Mastering a Champion
Having mastery (or as close as possible for your skill level) of a champion is the most important factor in determining how much pressure and counter-pressure you will be able to apply in any game. The extent to which you have mastered your champion directly influences your ability to help your team and carry them to a win!

Who are you mastering at the moment?

You should have a clear goal for learning one or a few champions at a time (as you might have to play a different role if it's a matchmade game).

How will you know when you’ve mastered them?

Have you mastered the following:

How will you measure improvement? Remember to celebrate achievements!
 * Item builds / skill build paths
 * Farming techniques
 * Positioning
 * Identifying and evaluating threats constantly and accurately
 * Skillshots
 * Execution of champion’s designed purpose
 * e.g. how much damage / utility done in x circumstances
 * e.g. what pressure / counter-pressure provided in x circumstances
 * Farm goals
 * Number of deaths / type of deaths
 * Number of kills / multi-kills
 * Number of assists
 * Number of successful ganks / counterganks
 * Vision secured / denied
 * Objectives secured as a result of an action taken by you
 * Amount of damage done / received to champions
 * Gold earned

If you have a beast game, tell your friends!

“I only failed Condemn 3 times this game omg!”

What to do when you hit a wall?

Ask yourself:


 * Have I stopped getting better? How will you know?
 * Watch a replay, have a friend watch you play.
 * Observe pro / guide and compare.

Identifying opportunities
Opportunities can be characterised as either opportunities to pressure or to counter-pressure. An Akali player spends their whole game looking for opportunities to pressure and kill. A Soraka player spends almost their whole game looking for opportunities to counter-pressure, mitigating damage, healing and silencing enemies as well as debuffing them. Crowd control abilities are often used for both. In a single game Thresh can use all his abilities to either aggressively pressure enemies or deny teams from touching his teammates. Identifying opportunities such as these in the middle of a fight is crucial: Do I drop my ult here? Do I hook the running champion on low health or do I need to hook the bruiser that is on my team? Do I lantern someone in to the fight or do I need to save it to get someone out?

The first task of a good player is to know what you're getting into. More than simply identifying threats, identifying opportunities means evaluating situations in terms of risk and reward correctly and instantly. This is made easier by building a game knowledge which will provide you with a set of expectations of what to expect throughout a game with x champions at x level. In doing this, you need only expect what can happen with the champions in the game, adding new data to it as you play.

Examples:

"Their Jayce is 4/0 so I need to be ready for extra damage coming from him."

This example assumes that you know where Jayce is likely to be or where he actually is (if possible) and the ways that Jayce can usually damage you (long range poke, all in with hammer form).

"I can look to trade with the enemy Ahri as I have more sustain and she is at 60% health."

This example assumes that you know to avoid her charm or that you know you can tank the damage if you do get CC'd.

Reacting to opportunities
The speed and accuracy with which you react comes largely down to skill and experience and is largely limited by your ability to identify opportunities correctly. Some people react quickly to poor opportunities (oftentimes having been baited by the enemy into thinking it was a good opportunity). Some people react slowly or not at all to opportunities to do free damage, clean initiates or other objective based opportunities such as rotating quickly to take a tower when the enemy team cannot respond to save it.

It is often the case that players identify and react to a real opportunity but have their skillshots dodged or miss them (there is a difference). E.g. Orianna looks to ult a team but accidentally has the ball snap back to her. E.g. Malphite ults into a cluster but one or two enemies flash out of it. One is a fail by the Orianna, the other is an outplay by the enemy team.

Similarly, most people work out how to lane safely / secure farm safely but then fail to hit last hits correctly. Or they go to clear a wave and do it slowly instead of using skills optimally to clear fast (if fast is needed).

The area for improvement in reacting to opportunities (to farm, to kill, to save teammates etc) is speed of reaction, champion control accuracy and efficiency.

Making opportunities
The simplest version of making opportunities is to value staying alive and spending as little amount of time in base (shopping). If you are constantly on the map (hopefully in a good place to pressure) and not in a position to die then you are forcing the enemy to spend energy on dealing with your pressure. You are also more often in a position to react to opportunities if you do this.

Any time you play you present opportunities to the enemy to outplay you, every game. The easiest way to take advantage of this is to convince the enemy that they have an opportunity that they actually don't. This is baiting. You can bait a single enemy, two or a whole team. A simple bait is to seem to be overextending when your jungler is ready to pounce. A team bait is to seem to be going for one objective, only to turn and crush a team or rotate quickly to a different objective. You are making opportunities by presenting false opportunities to your enemy. They are not bad, you are just better (there and then).

Being ready for jungle, dragon and baron spawns as well as securing vision around these is a part of making opportunities as well. The more situations that you know to be present for / prepared for, the more opportunities you create. This therefore includes developing knowledge around jungle timers, strategically recalling and rotating efficiently.