Mental Barriers You Must Overcome in LoL to Climb
League of Legends is not only a game of mechanics and skill, but it’s also a mental game too.
Players with a good mentality and patience will generally win more in the long run compared to someone who likes to give up and flame their teammates.
In this Mobalytics guide, we will discuss four mental barriers that you must overcome in League of Legends to climb the ladder and win more games.
If you’re able to work on these and improve, you will see a significant increase in wins headed your way.
This article is brought to you in partnership with our friends from ONE Esports, check them out for more awesome LoL content!
Mental Barriers You Must Overcome in LoL to Climb
- Avoid Blaming Your Allies
- Don’t Tunnel Vision
- Avoid the Victim Mentality
- Don’t Be Greedy and Play Respectfully
1. Avoid Blaming Your Allies
It’s impossible to win every game and it’s impossible to lose every game. Things happen, and you’ll often find yourself losing the game without you doing wrong anything at all. For instance, you may be chilling farming in the top lane and scaling while your bot lane is 0-10 combined.
Now, this isn’t exactly your fault when you’re in the top lane during the laning phase, as you’re putting yourself at a severe disadvantage if you try to roam. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t look for TP plays after the 14-minute mark when your Teleport changes.
When other factors heavily influence the outcome of a victory, such as someone on your team leaving, deliberately trolling the game or refusing to play, going 0-5 by the 10-minute mark, or feeding the enemy, the bigger picture tells you that they were at fault for the outcome of the game. But that doesn’t mean you played perfectly either.
Instead of blaming your team for every loss, look at your own gameplay and see what you could’ve done instead. For instance, did you die by invading the enemy Jungler and were they able to capitalize on that? Did you die solo at level 6 because you didn’t respect the enemy to get the level up?
Picture this – you pick Yasuo when your team lacks major knock-ups. It’s going to be hard for you to get kills. You can’t blame your team for lack of knock-ups and your ability to kill the enemy when you’re limited to just your Tornado. Then again, it’s not their fault if you last pick Yasuo into a team that doesn’t empower you.
2. Don’t Tunnel Vision
Tunnel vision is something we all suffer from time to time. It’s natural to sometimes fixate on certain things. Often, you’ll find people tunnel visioning on getting kills, fighting, or farming, and they may miss out on other things happening on the map.
For instance, you may be so focused on farming minions that you don’t see that you’re mispositioned, which could allow the enemy to land a cheeky skill shot on you. Or, you’re so focused on chasing someone trying to kill them, that you don’t see the enemy’s teammates collapsing on you and trying to take you down.
Fighting and securing kills is a big one. Sometimes it’s better to let the enemy live for now and try to kill them further down the line or be happy that you blew the enemy’s Summoner Spells or forced them out of the lane. While 300 gold is lovely, it sometimes is better to let them free.
Before chasing the enemy into their jungle, look at the minimap and see where the enemy team is. Are they on the map, or are they missing? If they’re missing, think twice and be prepared to back off.
3. Avoid the Victim Mentality
Don’t get me wrong, we all complain about certain things in League, whether it be our teammates, matchmaking, or just unfortunate BS Riot throws our way. The thing is, everyone has to deal with the same things that you do in League.
We all get people trolling our games, we all get AFKs, and we all get unfair matchmaking. It’s part and parcel of typical League of Legends gameplay.
Often, you’ll find people complaining on Reddit or Twitter and even on Discord about unfair things that happened in their games. While I get it, and it’s super frustrating to deal with, it’s something that happens to everyone. You’re not being targetted, it’s just tough luck, and these things happen in a free game.
I will come across as a little harsh, but no one really cares about that unlucky games you’ve had. Suck it up and do what everyone else does. Continue playing or quit for a while, stop the tilt and prevent yourself from losing more by just taking a step back from the game before you start flaming your teammates.
4. Don’t Be Greedy and Play Respectfully
This one slightly overlaps with a previous tip we talked about. However, you need to stop being so greedy about every aspect of the game. The levels of greed depend from person to person, but generally speaking; we can all be less greedy and hot-headed.
Players greed for different things, but some of the most common forms of being greedy are overstaying your welcome or playing too aggressive when there is no need to.
One of the most common ways someone dies is by staying too long in the lane waiting for gold. For instance, the enemy may have backed, but you didn’t because you needed a certain amount of gold. Alternatively, you may have waited in the lane for too long, and the enemy Jungler was able to gank and kill you.
Another thing that is very, very common is greeding for minions and gold. In some games, we walk a little too far forward in attempts to secure minions but what happens is the enemy all-ins us when we walk up to the farm.
For example, a Malphite early may want to last hit a minion in the wave, but the enemy Darius is in a position where he can chase the Malphite down and kill him if he walks up. You need to recognize what could happen before it happens- and prevent those things from happening.
Some other things we all do that are greedy:
- Pushing one more wave. It often leaves us overextended, which allows the enemy to rotate in time to kill you. This is very common in the mid-game.
- Staying for gold after getting a kill (especially when you’re low) is a big mistake. The enemy Jungler might just come and kill you if they’re nearby. This could’ve been prevented by just recalling.
- Not recalling when you have enough gold. If you back and get your item, you could play aggressively and get kills. But if you have 2000 gold and are doing nothing with it, it’s a bit of a waste.
- Jungler such as Hecarim or Lee Sin often run around with lots of gold by accident after getting a couple of kills.
In the future, if you’ve got enough gold, or if you’re unsure if the enemy can kill you, just recall and stop overstaying your welcome in the lane otherwise, the enemy will probably kill you. Play respectfully, and don’t overstay your welcome. It’s not worth staying in lane, dying and then falling behind in gold and XP.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for reading our latest article! We hope you enjoyed and found some of these things useful. Do you think you do any of these things? Cutting them out or reducing how often you make these mistakes will make it easier to climb. Remember to check out our friends at ONE Esports for more awesome League content.
