Elo hell has a different meaning to every player, and even starts at a different rank, but there’s one consensus throughout the community about it—it sucks. When you feel like you’ve hit a wall in your play, your teammates are working against you, and you just aren’t climbing, that’s when you’ve hit elo hell.
The best tip for getting out of elo hell, though, is realizing you’re in it in the first place. Many people don’t realize that they’ve hit that wall and try to shift the blame to feel better about themselves. Getting to this realization and then working to change how you play the game can seriously help you climb out of elo hell.
Below is a guide for every rank, from Iron to Diamond, and what you’ll need to do to get the next rank and climb out of the infamous elo hell. A lot of these traits apply to all ranks, so be sure to learn all of them to drastically improve your gameplay.
Iron: Play for early and punish mistakes
Iron players usually have poor mechanics and lackluster knowledge of the game, making for a lethal combo to slide down the ladder. But it’s easy to get from Iron to Bronze and above because the skill gap isn’t massive from one rank to the next.
The easiest way to win in Iron is to win early. If you play for lane and win, a lot of the enemy team will tilt or give up. Play champions who are strong early, like Caitlyn, Pantheon or Talon, and focus on farming to the best of your ability while staying out of danger.
When people are tilted, they’re more likely to make mistakes, and you can capitalize on them if you realize them. As long as you make less mistakes than the enemy and you’re aware of the mistakes being made, you can easily get out of Iron.
Bronze: Work on farming, optimize runes and items
Bronze players still have below-average mechanics and poor game knowledge, but they’re able to edge out their Iron counterparts. Working on these mechanics is the easiest way to climb into Silver, as well as giving yourself the best chance of winning by optimizing your runes.
Farming is arguably the most crucial mechanic in the game. If you can’t farm, you won’t have the gold to skirmish later on and you’ll fall too far behind to be relevant late game. You can go into the practice tool and work on farming—try it without items to make it as difficult as possible.
Fixing up your runes and items is also key to getting out of Bronze. Make the most of the gold you have by buying things that allow you to keep ahead. Make your rune page as optimal as possible to give yourself an easier time in lane.
There’s plenty of sites that give you stats for the best item builds and runes, like u.gg or probuilds.net—so if you aren’t sure where to start, check those sites out.
Silver: Develop a gameplan and play around it
Silver players usually have pretty average mechanics and game knowledge all around—after all, most of the player base is in Silver. One thing that most Silver players don’t do is develop a gameplan and playing around it.
There’s three questions you should be asking yourself when you get into any lane:
- Are the champions ranged or melee?
- Are the champions AP or AD?
- How good are the champions at pushing?
Using this knowledge, create your gameplan. Melee champions will look for more all-ins than ranged champions, while ranged champions can poke more. AD champions win extended trades while AP champions have higher burst. How well you can push will determine how you can trade against your opponent, as well as how the junglers will interact with your lane.
Playing around gameplans like these, while still farming as well as you can, will give you the edge to climb out of Silver and get those ranked rewards.
Gold: Understand game macro and team comps
When you’re in Gold, this is the first time you can consider yourself above-average. Hitting this rank is a major achievement, so feel good about it. But remember, there’s always more to learn. By the time you’re in Gold, your mechanics are pretty good, but your game knowledge is lacking.
Learning how to play the macro game and the importance of team compositions and counter picks is the next step to up your game to Platinum. Getting towers is sometimes better than getting kills or dragons because it opens up the map to get vision control. Once you have the vision control, you can make macro decisions based on where the enemy team is.
This is also where games start to become won and lost in champ select. Knowing favorable matchups, playing meta champions, and understanding champion synergies will help you get out of Gold. Learning a couple of new champions is a must so you can adapt to all situations.
Platinum: Die less
Platinum is the rank people get stuck in the most. You have good mechanics and passable game knowledge, but the attitude of players in Platinum is a major issue. It’s the halfway house between Gold and Diamond that no one really wants to be in, so toxicity and egos are rife.
Among all of this, the one thing that can get you from Platinum to Diamond is relatively simple—just die less. You can make great plays mechanically, but your life is more crucial than any gold you can get. If you make a play and you’re going to die for it, reconsider it and think about whether you’d lose waves or towers for it.
The same thing goes for your teammates and their plays. If your teammate makes a poor play, don’t go in one-by-one to salvage it—use your pings to tell your teammates to fully commit or back off to make sure that one death doesn’t turn into a wipe.
Diamond: Learn recall timings and wave control
Diamond is usually the goal for all League players. Master and above usually seems unachievable, while it doesn’t feel good to be in Platinum. Once you hit Diamond, you should feel proud of your efforts, but as always, you can learn that extra bit to hit Master.
The intricacies of the lane start getting abused heavily by high-Platinum and low-Diamond players, so learning how to control your lane is crucial. A poor recall can set you behind hundreds in gold and up to a level in experience, while putting your wave in a poor place in the lane, leaving you open to ganks or being frozen.
This is a more advanced version of making a gameplan in Silver. In Silver, it’s mostly for lane. In Diamond, you need to be managing your lanes all game. Knowing when to push for grouping or splitpushing and what your strengths are is important. Saving your teleport when you back can be the difference between making a game-winning play or the enemy laner doing so. These small changes can help you climb fast.
The road doesn’t end once you hit Master, though. But by this point, you would have made great progress from where you started. There’s some things that go through all ranks, like having a decent champion pool of around three to five strong champions you’re comfortable on for your main role and one or two champions for off role. Nail these down and you’ll be climbing in no time.
