Basics to Getting Out of ELO Hell

If you are any serious forum goer or blog reader, I am sure at some point or another you have come across the term ELO Hell. Loosely defined, it basically means low rating. In this blog post I will write about basic skills new and experienced players a like should work on to improve their game play and ultimately improve their rating. There’s a lot to write about so I am going to limit myself to three specific things: farming, mastering your champion, and know your match up. 

Farming – Improve your last hitting!The easiest way to improve your rating is simply by farming really well. Try bench marking yourself at the 10 and 20 minute mark to see how well you farm. For me personally, I can go anywhere from 60 to the high 90′s in minion kills at the 10 minute mark and 140 to as high as 200 at the 20 minute mark. A big part of mid and late game has to do with how well you did early game. If you can capitalize on every minion kill while your enemy can’t you will continually get stronger than them. Just think of it this way, if you can farm an Infinity Edge at 16 minutes while your enemy is still working their BF Sword, you’re probably gonna beat them in a show down. 

Mastering Your ChampionIn order to master a champion, you don’t just play them once or twice. Even 10 or 20 games is not enough. In order to really master a champion it takes many, many, many games. For me, even now, I still learn new things about my most played champion Heimerdinger (at about 200 games played). In order to master a champion, you must know how to use every spell properly in every situation. You need to be comfortable with the range, cool downs, and its damage potential. So my suggestion to raise your rating quickly, is to find a small pool of champion you are comfortable with and get really good with those champions.

Knowing Your Match UpWhat does “knowing your match up” mean? It basically means that you know to play against the champion you are laning against. This goes side by side with mastering your champion because in order to know your match up, you also have to play a lot of games, against a lot of different champions. The way you play against each individual champion will be different. Knowing your match up means that you know the capabilities of the enemy and you are able to measure yours against their’s. At any point you know when you have a kill potential if you execute your combination correctly, or if you are in threat of dying if they execute their’s correctly. 

Wrap UpAs a player trying to get better, my suggestion is to familiarize yourself with as many champions as you can. You don’t even have to play them in a game, just learn what their spells are, for your own sake when you have to go against them. When you have mastered those few champion, learn how to lane against a variety of champions, and farm better in lane you will start to see your rating soar (My opinion is that you can get to the the 1800 range purely off knowing the game mechanics).