Your teammates suck.
They always get ganked, caught, or outplayed by their opponents forcing you into terrible
situations.
On top of that, Challenger players always tell you to just carry and climb, but it feels
like you never see their teammates int and troll the game in the same way.
In this video, we're going to show you a different way of thinking about League in a guide we
felt we HAD to make, after putting a ton of research into this topic over the last month,
where we've been creating a library for our commentary smurf page - where we constantly
send our Challengers into elo hell to show you how to climb.
Our findings were unexpected.
THIS, is why your teammates always suck.
When you load into summoner's rift, you have 4 teammates.
Now imagine those teammates to all be cows, yes cows.
Hear us out on this: all of your teammates are cows and you are the cowboy.
Your job is to get them to the river, or in this case, the enemy nexus.
To get them there, a cowboy isn't going to lift them all up with his bare hands and carry
them to the nexus, that'd be tough to do every game, unless he's a challenger cowboy.
It's FAR easier to get them to where they need to be if they were instead, wrangled
up.
To become a cowboy, we've narrowed things down to two simple questions you'll want to
ask yourself whenever your teammates start running it down.
1: Is this my fault?
2: Could I have prevented this?
Let's jump into it.
Here we have a Camille in the top lane.
She's fighting Shen and they both drop dangerously low.
As she pulls back for a recall, her Fiddlesticks come to lane to try and gank the Shen.
It doesn't quite work out, and he greeds to stop the recall, giving the enemy Sett plenty
of time to collapse onto the Fiddle.
Camille finishes her recall and teleports back, tries to bail her Fiddle out of hot
water, and they both go down.
This was a horrible play from this Fiddle and screams jungle difference.
Standard luck that Camille would get paired with this terrible jungler inting her lane,
right?
But if Camille can prevent herself from tilting off the face of the Earth and ask herself
"Is this my fault" and "Could I have prevented this?" she'll come up with two clear answers.
This is entirely Camille's fault that the play went so badly.
First, she shouldn't have went in to try and save her Fiddlesticks.
If Fiddle dies, it doesn't really matter that much.
If she goes in, she certainly dies by using her only escape tool into 2 bruisers with
CC.
After teleporting back already, she'd give away a kill and the entire wave, which is
potentially game-losing and exactly what happened.
Second, as we roll it back we'll see how all of this could've been avoided in the first
place.
Camille is trading with Shen but can clearly see that Fiddle is pathing toward top side.
If she maintains enough health to gank with, then Fiddle coming top would result in a 2v1
gank onto the shen.
However, she ends up going for one too many trades and can no longer help, having to recall.
A better player would have the awareness that Fiddle is coming top and maintain enough health
to make a gank work.
In that case, Fiddle wouldn't have been set loose to make this really terrible play by
himself, and a clean gank would've been achieved instead.
Let's now quickly take a moment to remember our motivation behind this video.
At Skill-Capped, we have a commentarys page where we send challengers into different elos
every week to see how they carry.
One filter is by carry level, to see which ones are the hardest carries by our experts.
If we had it our way, every single one would be set to 'heavy' carry, since they're more
fun to watch.
However, in reality, for every 5 games we get, only 1 or 2 of those are 'heavy', with
the majority being 'light'.
The reason for that?
Our challengers always get the better team, because they don't give their fiddlesticks
the opportunity to int their lane like that.
They'll execute the gank correctly.
Here's an example of a preventative measure from Hector.
So, Hector's ward may not have seemed like much, but as he said - it gave his bot lane
a break and they now know exactly where Karthus is.
If he hadn't done that, the enemy Thresh could've potentially looked for an engage with Karthus
and so on.
Hector controlled this potential outcome from happening by gaining lane priority and placing
a ward to track the jungler.
Onto this next example we see that Ahri's winning lane, then dies super easily to a
gank near her tower.
This is a feelsbad moment as a jungler: when your 'bad' teammates feel easier to gank than
your opponents do.
We all hate this feeling as a jungler.
Our teammate dying for no reason, giving the enemy jungler a free lead.
But once again, we have to ask ourselves, was this Fiddlestick's fault, and could he
have done something about it?
For the first question, no.
This was Ahri being dumb.
She played aggressively for no reason onto an Annie who had her stun at the ready.
Not only that, but her flash was down.
She could have very easily stood further back outside of Annie's range to finish shoving
the wave.
Okay, so it wasn't Fiddle's fault, but could he have done something about it?
Let's go back and see what he was up to.
After clearing scuttle crab, he looked to clean up a bot lane fight and only managed
to burn Janna's flash.
Whenever moving anywhere as a jungler, you should always pan your camera around to see
what's going on.
If Fiddle had done that, he could see that Ahri was trying to finish shoving out the
wave.
Fiddle likely didn't look at the map, or he didn't care about what was going on and went
to do Gromp, and so Ahri died.
We're not trying to hindsight analyze this Fiddle.
Going to Gromp here isn't terrible, but your cows won't get to the river that way.
It's not impossible to see that Ahri might get ganked soon.
She's pushing into an Annie with no flash.
Map awareness is key to being a cowboy.
If you see the opportunity for small detours during your pathing to help your teammates,
then you should always consider them.
Fiddle could have pathed towards mid, made sure Ahri is safe, then gone to do Wolves
and Gromp.
This route takes 5 more seconds, but ensures that Ahri is safe
And in this very specific case, it would have even resulted in a likely double kill by how
much Ahri stalled out her death.
Here we have a Kayn, he's doing great, between him and Orianna they are carrying this game.
With him being nearly 3000 gold ahead of Zac.
Kayn is trying to push his lead and is way too far into enemy territory.
With Orianna stuck in mid lane and them being heavily outnumbered, she cannot help Kayn
and Kayn goes down.
So, who's fault is this?
Well, Kayn's of course, he was running it down in the enemy jungle with no teammates
to back him up.
A couple of moments later, while Kayn is dead, Orianna tries to defend the tower.
She then goes down.
Who's fault is this?
Well, if you're the Kayn and you want to climb, you should know this is on you.
You put your Orianna in the position where she had to play well to defend this tower
without dying.
But in a vacuum, it's on the Orianna for misplaying, she went for a kill instead of clearing the
wave and executed horribly.
Going down and losing the tower.
However, there's someone who is ultimately responsible for both Kayn AND Orianna dying.
Can you tell who that is?
The true culprit behind these mistakes is infact Lulu.
Why is she here?
Apparently to watch her Ezreal farm lane against a Graves, instead of playing with her team.
If she was mid, she could've saved Kayn with ultimate and he'd have gotten out and none
of this would have happened in the first place.
Depending on which lense you're looking through, everyone was at fault and could've prevented
their teammates from playing badly.
But especially Lulu who was far too attached to her Ezreal who is behind this game anyway.
Let's compare this to a 'light-carry' smurf commentary from one of challenger players:
Pocket Rhino.
He is actively aware that Zed is in danger, even after the spicy 1v1 that happened in
mid lane. "if you walk out into the lane you're gonna.....adc
is fine because bot lane has no mana" This is a perfect contrast to the previous
Lulu.
Pocket knows exactly when he can leave his ADC to make sure his other teammates don't
throw their own leads.
YEEHAW, Pocket You're A Proper Cowboy!
We do want to make sure you're aware that these live action commentarys are available
in full over at Skill-Capped.
We add more of these every week and the best way to support us is by subscribing.
We have over 800 guides, 100 courses, a refund guarantee, and a direct pro coaching service,
so there's every reason to join us over at skill-capped.com if you're serious about improving!
Jumping back into it, for top laners, one of the most frustrating things you can experience
is watching your teammates lose every objective while it feels like you're powerless on top
lane island.
For top lane, one of the most frustrating things you can experience is watching your
teammates lose objectives, while it feels like you're on an island.
Minutes after losing Dragon, this wild horse is now trying to solo the Rift Herald.
As he does, the enemy team collapses on him, pushes him away and then take the Herald for
themselves.
We clearly see that Hecarim was on a ward the whole time.
If you want to do Herald, then use your sweeper or bring a control ward at the very least.
Therefore, this is definitely Hecarim's fault and no one elses.
But was there a way Tryndamere could have made sure that these situations didn't occur?
For the initial Dragon, no.
He's running Ignite, which is fine, and was too far away to do anything about it.
But the Rift Herald is definitely something most top laners can impact.
As they did Dragon, Tryndamere knew for certain that there were 4 enemies down there.
Not only that, but he was stronger than Singed.
Instead of running down there to run around aimlessly and blow his cooldowns,
he could have very easily just done Rift Herald here and used it to crack the top lane tower
to snowball his lead.
That way, Hecarim would have never trolled here and lost *another* objective, had Tryndamere
just solo'd Herald while his teammates lost Dragon.
Let's get into every ADC's dream scenario.
You've got the wave advantage.
You hit level 2 first, and your Pyke misses everything.
You both die and you wonder why you queue for ADC at all.
Bad supports are the worst, but there's a reason Challenger players rarely get double
killed like this in low elo.
You can't make your Pyke play well, but small positioning mistakes make a huge deal in whether
you win an early engage or not.
Look how far back Kai'sa is at the moment.
As you near level 2, you generally want to move forward.
Maybe not too much to scare your opponents away, but enough to where you can appropriately
follow up.
If you notice, as Pyke went in, Twitch is just wailing on him with free auto attacks.
Had Kai'sa been positioned more aggressively, Twitch can't just blast Pyke for free and
he may be more scared to turn for damage here.
If Twitch doesn't freely auto attack, neither Pyke nor Kai'sa die, and maybe they just take
a slightly unfavorable trade at the most.
Alright guys, hopefully this guide left you with a different viewpoint that focuses more
on your own mistakes and less on your teammates mistakes.
If you are the one who is actively leaving your teammates opportunities to run it down,
instead of playing better yourselves - you'll often feel like you're left with the worse
team.
By improving your own quality of play, you'll make your teammates lives a lot easier and
leave them in less difficult situations, vastly increasing the odds that they don't run it
down and instead, get wrangled to the enemy nexus.
Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one!