What You Don't Need to Do in Solo Queue

Most, if not all, people who play ranked solo queue have at least a grasp of the basic elements needed to produce a win: farm minions, secure objectives, push towers, and use your champion’s kit to its fullest. The higher up the ranked ladder one gets, the more expansive these elements become. For instance, farming minions becomes manipulating waves and using your champion’s kit becomes playing around power spikes. These elements of winning are not found in any in-game text or tool tips, but rather picked up over time. Fortunately, however, the various professional scenes in League of Legends give the player base a basis on how they should play. While there are a million things people can learn from watching the pros, there are a few things that seen in competitive play that should not be emulated in solo queue. 

Photo courtesy of NIELSPETERDEJONG

1. Priority Picking

While metas and tier-lists are there for a reason, they need not be religiously followed in solo queue. This does not mean that breaking the meta is encouraged, but rather, one should choose a champion he is comfortable on even if that champion is not currently tier 1. This also means that first picking Thresh or Viktor or Nidalee just because “they were open” is simply not the right way to approach pick-ban phase in solo queue. Instead, a player should know which roles and champions he is comfortable on and can best help his team with, and make a judgment based on this.

Photo courtesy of Ae-rie

2. Early Game Deep Wards

Be it because one is just blindly following the pros, or being an overly zealous support, sometimes players go to great lengths just to ward in between the enemy’s second-tier and inhibitor tower. The real reason these early game wards are placed is to know whether or not the enemy team is lane swapping so that they can react accordingly. However, in solo queue, the lack of team coordination in early game can lead to easy enemy pick-offs and giving them an early game lead. Furthermore, the likeliness of lane swaps in Divisions lower than Master tier is not very high which negates the purpose of these early wards. These deep wards become a liability rather than a benefit to your team. So if you’re not in an LCS team or playing ranked 5’s, you don’t need to put anymore thought on whether or not doing this is worth your time.

3. Lane Swapping

As aforementioned, lane swaps are rare to come by, and even rarer to be pulled off effectively in any setting other than professional tournaments, higher-level play, and ranked 5’s. First and foremost, lane swapping puts both your top laner and duo in a position they may not be used to. Most players in solo queue don’t have much experience in lane swapping. While this may be to the benefit of the team since the enemy team is unaccustomed to playing 2v1 or 1v2, lane swapping is a double-edged sword if improperly done. Secondly, lane swaps may lead to the top laner and jungler to be forced into a position to double jungle. While a staple in the competitive scene of League of Legends, double jungling in solo queue more often than not leads to an awkward experience and gold distribution between the top laner and jungler, and sometimes even leave both of them massively behind. Next, it may affect the control of a team over the dragon area since the duo is at the top lane. Players who are inexperienced at lane swapping may not be able to compensate for the lack of a duo bot through deeper wards and rotations from the mid lane and may just end up in giving away free dragons. Insisting on swapping lanes forces all the members of your team to quickly try to adjust into a play style they may be unfamiliar with and be detrimental to your goal of winning. This is another unnecessary risk some players blindly take just because the pros do it. 

Photo courtesy of Riot Games

To end, League of Legends is a game for all players of all skill levels. Along with these skill levels comes varying styles of play that are learned over the course of time. With the e-sports scene of League of Legends, it becomes easy to see the new emerging and most effective tactics people play. But to see does not mean to understand. Blindly copying what one see’s in League and in Life makes one oblivious to what he/she is capable of and most suited to. We are our own players and own people, while it is good to learn from what we watch, but it is better to study further, examine deeper, and extend our knowledge to improve ourselves.. Self improvement, not successful copying, should be our end goal.

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