u/MJ-Baby

I’ve coached dozens of Emerald 4 hardstuck adc students at this point, and Emerald is such a common plateau that I feel like this needs to be brought up. There is one massive common denominator between almost all of them, they don’t understand how to practically play around the 50/50s of support and jungle. People put way too much emphasis on draft analysis, I’m not saying draft doesn’t matter, but IMO it isn’t particularly important holistically until Master+. What matters much more is understanding that 50% of the time you’re going to have the better support and 50% of the time you’re going to have the worse support. You have to actually play the lane for the first few minutes and figure out how good your support is, and adjust your gameplay accordingly. The same applies to jungle, 50% of the time your jungler is going to path toward you and 50% of the time they’re going to path away from you (theoretically). If youre weak sided and your jungler isn’t coming you have to play more defensively. It doesn’t matter if you’re Lucian or Caitlyn. If your support is substantially worse AND you’re being weak-sided, you need to accept that reality and minimize the damage. This concept drags adc students down HUNDREDS of lp due to egoing and tilting. Conversely when youre on strong side with your jungler hovering, youre getting push, and you have the better support you NEED to win those games**.** Thats where a huge amount of adc agency comes from. You arent supposed to magically carry the games where your support is awful, your jungler is pathing away, and the enemy bot lane is allowed to run you over. Sometimes you’re going to get completely fucked for 10–15 minutes and then your team surrenders. That’s an unavoidable part of playing adc at ALL elos. Your job is to lose fewer of those games and win more of the good ones. Win more of your favorable games, minimize your unfavorable games, and stop trying to force the same gameplay every game regardless of what your teammates are actually doing. Every game in the first 5 minutes you should be comparing the state of your teams support/jg and the enemy support/jg. If this post sounds incredibly obvious its because IT IS, and yet there hasn’t been 1 adc student below masters that i’ve coached that has this implemented in their process. Rant over thanks for listening. Practicality over theory 10 times out of 10 for climbing AND improving.

This comes up multiple times a year for my students so I’m just going to make a post that I can refer back to:

I coach sooooooo many yasuo/yone 2 tricks that try to blend the playstyles together and honestly, it’s a blueprint to get hardstuck in plat/em/dia. Before I rant too much lets talk about transferable skills between the 2. Q spacing and auto weaving are probably the most overlapping skills besides leaning and warding, but even these can trick students into thinking they should short trade or long trade in a situation the other wind bro would when that is not the optimal trade in the current situation.

The differences:

Yasuo: Yas is an early game lane bully who uses his wind wall and passive to muscle the majority of his matchups. He absolutely excels at random fiesta river skirmishes. He is one of the champs in league with the most favorable matchup spreads IN THE GAME. Yasuo is aiming to snowball every game and end as early as possible, ideally taking over the game as soon as lane phase ends (12-16 mins usually). Micro on yas is generally much harder than yone at both the skill floor and ceiling. Yasuo has no noncommittal trading/wave clear. Requires some of the most games played of any mid laner for students to start getting results/climbing.

Yone: Yone is a 2-3 item mid game power house whos aim in most lanes is to survive and leave lane with 9+ cspm consistently. He avoids most coinflip skirmishes in favor of resources. Yone has a pretty mediocre matchup spread, with most lanes being a skill matchup, it’s also much harder for yone to gurantee prio as opposed to yas. Yone will absolutely snowball and capitalize on mistakes but farming well and avoiding deaths is the baseline gameplan to climb on him. Yone is looking to win games by utilizing item spikes 1,2 and 3 to gain objectives/towers/gold and end prior to 35 minutes. Yone has some noncommittal waveclear through E. Yone requires significantly less games than yasuo before students start getting results (usually a few hundred for yone and as many as a few thousand for yas.)

Overall: Yasuo’s win con and gameplan is much closer to something like irelia than yone. Yone can also be played in a pool of 2-3 more consistently than yas, who usually requires extended 1 tricking to climb on. Trading patterns vary but generally speaking yone is leveraging his E to extend trades and generally favors extended trades while yas will often leverage his passive for short trades and wind wall when he all ins. I could write another 20 paragraphs on the difference between the two but this is the bare minimum that should be understood. If you choose to 2 trick these champs you NEED to separate their playstyles and learning objectives or you will find yourself drastically better at 1 than the other.

EDIT: Forgot about build overlap ty for reminding me, but yes build overlap is transferable understanding.