u/RemarkableConcern550

OP.GG: https://op.gg/lol/summoners/na/FluxySalv-6075

I've been playing for about a year and a half now, got to Emerald OTPing Viego, then expanded my champ pool a lot and got to Diamond. I'm now playing pretty solid hovering D3 (ignore recent loss streak) playing mostly Kha'Zix and Graves, but my champ pool includes J4, Kindred, Sylas, Diana, and Hecarim. I'm very intentional about when I pick each and playing both for my team's draft as well as what's best into the enemy comp. Also, sometimes I'm just really feeling a champ at the moment and spam it. It's been working and I feel like I've gotten the hang of the full-clear playstyle I see a lot of high-elo streamers doing, but for some reason I feel sorta capped.

For example, sometimes it's a really good Kindred angle but I haven't played them in a few days so my kiting is god awful. Or my team desperately needs frontline/engage so I pick J4, but then I don't go in and dive enough. Or I lock in Viego and nobody engages so I'm really skiddish, or Kha'Zix and teammates don't give early kills so I can't snowball, etc etc. Just in general I play way more cautious than I used to, and although I'm better at trading objectives/crossmapping, I find myself doing that more and more rather than contesting or fighting. I also am struggling with finding good times to invade, which is something I need to work on but I think comes from a lack of confidence. Even though I've gotten better since I was an OTP, I feel like I'm missing a lot of things that I need in order to climb. Also, the #1 thing that every educational content creator says is that, in order to climb, you need a small champ pool.

So, I was wondering what the best one-trick / two-trick options are Diamond+ or just any general reccomendations. I'm completely fine sinking 100+ games into a champ before picking it up properly, but I feel that I'm over-investing my brain into draft and theorizing and I just need to play the game. It can include junglers in my pool, but honestly not Viego. I know I have a shit ton of Viego mastery, but something about him just feels awful to play in the wrong comps and weirdly much harder to carry on than any of the other champs in my pool (maybe it's just that I play way too respectfully). I always have a streak of doing really well on champs when I first pick them up, so hoping to continue that.

Also open to any other suggestions if you notice something!

dpm.lol: https://dpm.lol/FluxySalv-6075

I started playing league last season and have over 1.6m mastery on Viego at the moment. I one-tricked all the way to Emerald, hit a hard plateau, then started really trying to climb and currently am D3 and still climbing very consistently. One of the biggest changes was expanding my champion pool/picking situationally (or if I’m just really in the mood to pick a champ), and have found great success with Jarvan, Kha’Zix, Kindred, Graves, and Sylas (thinking about picking up Locke). However, the more I climb the less I find myself playing Viego, and maybe I’m just washed but he feels way worse to play. Here’s my thought process in draft:

I hate blinding but if forced I typically pick Jarvan or Graves. Into melee-heavy enemy comps or if my team has great peel + frontline I pick Kindred, if the enemy comps is squishy I go Kha’Zix or Graves if they lack range/dive, if our team needs frontline/engage/cc or the enemy is very immobile I pick Jarvan (I play both lethality and bruiser), and if we need AP or I have rlly good ults I go Sylas. Sometimes I slot in a Hecarim or Shyvana if I get the sense we are just playing to scale and 5v5 teamfight, but I think it’s a pretty solid pool and I’ve gotten very good at adapting to their strengths and weaknesses. I’m climbing and honestly believe I can hit Masters in a few weeks time

However, I don’t really know when to play Viego. For each situation, the other champs seem to have so much more damage output while also having better ganks/tools to stay alive. When I’ve played Viego recently it’s essentially only been if I’m in the vibe or my team has hard engage + damage output at the start of a fight. Think Nautilus + Brand or Singed + Sivir, basically guaranteed reset potential. However, if the enemy has lockdown @ burst, I find it hard to pick him because even if I get reset I’ll just die immediately after. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it also feels like if you die even once on Viego, your game is just completely over. Although his snowball can be oppressive, he feels unplayable from behind and very weak if the game goes past 30 minutes. Why not just pick Kindred or Graves and have more/safe DPS with good scaling?

I love this champion and those complete 1v9 games feel amazing, but the more people respect his resets and games become closer I just can’t find myself picking him at all. Maybe it’s just mental block but I need some help with it.

Started a new account to learn toplane, been playing mostly Darius or whatever looks good matchup-wise. Enemy blind picked Quinn so I thought I'd have a little fun.

Just got this absolute creature in my game who died once early, then immediately bought tear and items for Diadem. He's done this multiple games, is Gold 3 60% wr, and somehow is in full Diamond lobbies. He didn't run it, he just afk farmed and got dove perpetually because he did no damage, but still seeing that he's done this multiple times and hasn't been banned is quite disheartening. I don't know why this isn't an automatic flag, especially considering there is literally no world in which this build is viable.

I started this account around a month ago now to take climbing extremely seriously and hit Diamond. I had been pretty hardstuck Emerald just spamming games for over half a year, and after getting a 1 month vacation on my main I decided to lock the fuck in. The name of the account is very telling, as I have over 1.5m Viego mastery on my main. Feel free to ask anything, but I felt like sharing my progress:

For the first 100 or so games (until I was finished with school) I

• Played exclusively in the computer lab and limited myself to 5 games a day/session.
• I played early before class, made sure to get good sleep, played music, and tried my hardest to enter flow state during games.
• I found myself getting less tilted, but if I had a tilting game I'd take a quick break or call it a day if I noticed it was negatively impacting my game.
• I recorded every single game in a google doc (attatched image for reference), and VOD reviewed games I was confused by or just every loss when I had the free time. Even if nothing else, it just forced me to think about every game and not just blame people
• Initially, I locked myself to Viego and played Twitch ADC secondary and nothing else no matter what
• I muted all until mid Emerald and rarely typed unless constructive.

Towards the end as I had more time, I played reflexively depending on how I was feeling/tilt, hence the longer sessions.

The first part of my climb was mostly just getting my mental in check and picking up some focusing on some simple fundementals I mostly overlooked (a friend of mine in my computer lab helped a lot with this). I started learning how to hover lanes in the mid-late game, focused a LOT on maintaining tempo and thinking about where I "spend" it as I started treating it like a currency, and I solved one of my biggest issues which was throwing early leads/dying too much. A lot of the concepts I learned, like playing teamfights 2nd, specific interactions, etc. were very Viego specific at this point. Then, I hit E2 and started hitting a wall hard.

I was "carrying," but not winning. You know, the phenomena of getting unlucky/MVP on OP.GG every game. I started watching higher elo Viego gameplay and it helped a lot with early skirmish timers, but I still couldn't overcome this idea of having to hard carry every game. I had this mental block of "losing in draft" because of teamcomp or just writing off a game as lost if I was behind a lot, and it was really hard to overcome.

There are 3 things I attribute to breaking past this barrier:

1. Champion pool expansion. This may not apply to all junglers, but Viego is not a champion that you can play in every comp. He is also not a very "fundemental" champ due to how squishy he is and how much gold he requires to be useful. The other junglers I played were J4, Nocturne, Diana, and Kindred (which I will retire). Ignore the Kayn games, there weren't mine. I'll be honest, a large part of my switch is due to watching a LOT of Agurin's gameplay, which taught me an unimaginable amount about how to play the game. WATCH HIGH ELO GAMEPLAY it makes a world of difference.

I started ganking more, playing engage around other people's leads, and jungle overall felt much more like JUNGLE. I could dedicate a lot of the mental energy I spent playing Viego on teamfighting/positioning towards macro and setting up those teamfights. When I locked Viego, it was amazing because I was able to play with much more agency because I had setup. It solved a lot of my OTP burnout issues I had where Viego was just feeling too tiring.

2. Hit towers. No, like seriously hit them. I made a post a bit back sharing some of my frustration, and one comment stood out. "Not a joke: are you hitting turrets?" Turns out, no. I could have a 700g shutdown and be 2 items up with all objectives, but we would be 2-3+ turrets down and baron would barely make a dent. I lost multiple games on Viego because my lead would just get outscaled and my ability to carry would decline significantly when DD/GA/Zhonya's were factored into the equation. I started playing towards whichever lane had more turrets up and playing for the turret. Just finished a gank/dive? Hit the turret. Just won a teamfight and no objectives up? Hit the turret. Obviously don't force, but playing for triple inhib instead of elder/baron and ARAMing it mid is SO much better.

3. The game is always winnable, but also always losable. There were two distinct instances in which I unintentionally traded the game for a penta, or a quadra that almost was a penta. Playing fights with numbers disadvantage, playing to stack kills instead of push your lead, taking objectives off tempo, etc. are all mistakes that will lose even the most unlosable of games. Unless it's a comeback/you got carried, you should honestly have less than 3 deaths when you win, even if it means forgoing your 1v9 super hard carry. Your kills mean nothing until you press B and spend the gold, and you should be playing to slowly choke out the enemy jungler. Take tier 1 turrets, full clear their jungle even if yours is up, and don't take random fights. Play on your ability timers on objective timers with numbers advantage and you will win. Getting caught is YOUR fault, and if your teammate die out of position ask yourself 1) could I have turned that fight, and 2) did I sufficiently communicate not to play that fight. Depending on those answers, it also might be your fault.

Honorable mention, have an account you play on for fun. I treated my main like an alt, just playing a lot of random shit (mostly Kassadin atm), but just logging into that whenever I had a league itch to scratch but knew I wouldn't play well saved me so much elo.

There's honestly so much more I could talk about in this post, like how nice jungle tracking or pinging your teammates off is, but it's kind of long. I know it's a lot of yap, but when I was scouring reddit and youtube for advice and only getting "full clear, gank, tempo, look at map, blah blah," I would've loved a long incoherent rant. Either way, I plan on keeping up my climb and maybe hitting masters? We'll see. I definitely missed some stuff so feel free to ask questions.