#ranked 5v5

[chordatagaming]

How to Play like a Team

If you've ever tried to play ranked 5s in LoL, chances are, you've experienced that awkward situation where no one has any idea what to do, and no one says anything. You do well in your lanes, only to find yourself in the mid game going "uh... Dragon?". Or even worse, you get into a team fight (possibly over no objective) and either no one says a word, or everyone is yelling randomly just to make noise.

Communication is the most crucial part of team play. And similarly to having different roles such as carry, jungler, and support, you should have different roles in your communication. The first and most important aspect is to set up a priority list for who gets to talk. If two people are talking at once, the person with the lower priority shuts up. For my team, it looks like this: 

1. Jungler

2. Mid

3. Support

4. Top

5. AD Carry

With positions 1 and 2 switching in the mid-late game. You should also have one person dedicated to telling everyone to shut up when they start chatting about something unimportant. For us, this is our support, but it can be anyone who has the presence of mind to notice when something isn't relevant to the game and is willing to call it out.

After sorting out your priority list, you need to decide who is going to focus on what during the game. There's so much in LoL to pay attention to: target calling, ward timers, where to pick fights, map control, enemy item choices, etc etc etc. All of this information should be covered by at least one and at most two people on your team. so that your communications can remain crisp and clear, and everyone has to focus on a smaller portion of the game while playing. Here is the way we divvied up our communication roles on my team. And while this isn't the only or even the best way to split up these roles, I will list our justification for each.

Jungle: Our jungler is our primary shotcaller in the early game, focusing on early dragons, jungle invades, and ganking/counter ganking. This one is fairly obvious, as the jungler is most involved in all aspects of the early game, across the entire map. As the game moves on, the shot calling shifts to me in the mid lane, and his focus is keeping an eye on MIA opponents and calling out engages, as well as mid-fight target calling. This works well for us, as I tend to be more decisive in closing out the game, but he can yell a lot louder than me, so it's easy to listen to him during the middle of a fight. 

Mid: I am the mid laner for our team, and my focus is on calling out my early roaming in the early game. This is pretty obvious, as I'm the only person who will notice the opportunities. Going into the mid and late game, I am much more decisive than my teammates when it comes to taking objectives and closing out games, so I become the primary strategic shot caller (as opposed to our jungler being the primary tactical shot caller).

Top: Our top laner tends to like split pushing and farming into the late game, so it's his job to call out all teleport opportunities, where he's going to split push, where he needs vision, and anything else necessary to secure his pushes safely. In addition, when he's playing initiator champions like Shyvana, he calls out engages as he sees them, along with our jungler.

Support: All responsibility for wards and timers falls through to our support. He tells people where to place their wards, where to scan, things like that. He also pays the most attention to where each team is spending their gold, calling out big enemy items as he sees them, or letting us know if we have a significant power spike that we can push. He and our jungler are also our last line for checking the minimap. Between the two of them, no enemies should ever show their face without getting called out.

Carry: We're in a very carry focused meta, so our carry needs to spend most of his focus on his mechanics, and as a result, we limit his communication responsibilities. However, he has final say on who gets what farm and where, as well as calling out when he will need peels, wards, or some other kind of support. In addition, he calls out when he's close to a power spike ahead of time, since his power spikes are the largest and easiest to make a play with.

Since setting aside these specific roles for each person on our team, the amount we've talked has gone up a lot, and our coordination has skyrocketed. We've gotten much better at taking objectives and at closing out games, and it's been a blast playing. If your 5s team is having trouble putting 2 and 2 together, try this out; it'll make a huge difference in how your games pan out.

[truthunarmed]

Ranked 5's? MORE LIKE EASY 5's! 6 wins in a row!

[leagueoftalon]

Looking For Teammates To Join My Ranked Team For Season 4

Current positions needed are; Jungle, ADC, and Support.

[supahfree]

Ranked Five Team?

would anybody be interested in playing on a ranked 5v5 team? Must be able to skype and play. I think it'd be fun. Fare warning guys i am currently bronze 2. I don't play like it, i just get really shitty teams. :( the bronze hell is strong. I usually play with my friends who are all silver 3 or above and i play better than them sometimes. Message me in game or tumblr. 

[ginnycakes]

So, I want a LOL team.

Sadly, most of my friends don't play with me anymore. So, I'm looking for four people who are on frequently enough to play ranked fives. D":Help?

[leagueofriotpls]

Ok so we dominated our first placement match! :D If people are still interested please message because there's still 5 slots.

[summonersraft]

Tom's Notes: L2Ping

While voice communication is great and all, sometimes it takes too long to spell something out or telegraph to somebody that you want to make a play. For actions ranging from the simple to slightly irregular (but not very complex), pinging is a fast, effective and (somewhat) fun way to relay information to your team! You know what the best part about the ping system in League of Legends is? Riot gave us 5 (7) different pings to work with. HOLY CRAP THAT'S MORE OPTIONS THAN FREAKING SUN TSU, AND HE SAYS ALL BATTLE CAN BE DISTILLED INTO TWO (JUST 2) DIFFERENT FORMS OF ATTACK!!!!!! Man, those guys in LA are pretty generous. With this many pings, I believe it is feasible for a coordinated team without voice chat to convey every major movement that occurs on the map. I include "coordinated" because it is very possible for people in solo queue to misinterpret the intentions of their allies when pinging incorrectly.

While there are 5 (7) pings in league of legends, I will focus only on the three I find most important: "attack", "MIA", and "on my way".

Attack: The classic ping. This ping is very useful for telegraphing ganks on enemy laners and indicating who to focus in teamfights. I am actually surprised by how often people will ignore the obvious focus target in the scramble to fire out all of their major cooldowns or do their "job" in a teamfight. It is also painfully clear that sometimes people do not know the focus target for that specific game because either nobody indicated it in chat or nobody pinged that dude when he gets caught out of position. The attack ping makes teamfighting so much easier and requires much less yelling in all chat to get the point across.

MIA: WTF you nerds no call MIA? Well fear no more! Riot has lovingly crafted a WoW-style question mark for you all to indicate your MIA calls to your team. I'll admit, I am a firm believer that everyone is responsible for having map awareness and knowing when they are in danger of a gank. However, IT'S JUST SO EASY to ping when the enemy mid roams bot and save your duo lane from feeding a double kill. Calling MIA is a courtesy, but it is good to be polite.

On my way: This is a seriously underused ping for how much information it gives. Knowing the final destination of your ally is a BLARING SIREN for playmaking (or just, you know, warding). There are so many times where simply indicating where you're going in the next 5 seconds will save 30 minutes of grief/rage from your entire team because they got caught by your unusual map movement for a plethora of reasons.

On spamming: I know that in solo queue you must baby your allies as often as possible because there is a high probability that they are idiots, but you should avoid spamming in arranged 5s as often as possible. With most pings (6/7), aura items and wards (don't forget oracles!) showing up in the chat window, it is very easy to clutter the chat and block out major spawn timers or cooldowns the team has typed down in order to coordinate objective control. For this reason, you should really only ping twice at most. Why twice? It's simple: the first sound catches your teammate's attention, and the second guarantees that your teammate knows the location of some major event on the minimap. The only exception to this rule is when you must TELL YOUR TEAMMATE THAT THEY ARE DANGEROUSLY OUT OF POSITION AND ABOUT TO DIE, and only when YOUR INCESSANT PINGING WILL CATCH HIS ATTENTION FOR THOSE TWO-TO-THREE SECONDS THAT MAY BE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH.

I know there are pings aside from the three I mentioned above, but their use is fairly straightforward (and sometimes pretty annoying. I ALREADY KNOW YOU NEED HELP IF I COULD I WOULD HAVE BEEN THERE AN HOUR AGO). I do think that teams need to work out certain subtleties to be efficient (i.e. "danger" vs "back", "assist me" vs "is defending", what to do with the damn blue ping), but these are better dealt with on a case by case basis by the teams themselves. In fact, some of these pings are better off left unused and relegated to voice communication (if available). In the end, pinging is simply a tool to facilitate one of the most important aspects of teamplay: communication.

-Tom

[summonersraft]

Tom's Notes: Mechanical Teamplay

WTF I THOUGH MECHANICS WERE ABOUT INDIVIDUAL EXECUTION WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE "MECHANICAL" ABOUT PLAYING AS A TEAM? OH, YOU WANT US TO BE ROBOTS? I BET YOU WANT US TO BE ROBOTS DON'T YOU? WELL FUCK YOU AND YOUR SYSTEM, I WILL RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

The idea of mechanical play is a lot simpler than it sounds (also a lot less poetic and pop-culture-pun-filled). It is communicating and moving in a coordinated manner that allows a team to take or threaten to take objectives. This definition is extremely broad, and I would group different aspects of mechanical team play into three categories: observation, preparation and action.

Observation:

This is the easy one. Sometimes two eyes are better than one, and observing exemplifies this concept. If you see something significant that impacts your ability or the team's ability to take an objective, you should call it immediately. 

Things that people should tell everyone on the team:

A ward has been placed* (where and when)

The enemy is missing* (where is he going, what should be done)

A buff has been taken (timer and who got it)

A major cooldown has been blown* (summoner or ultimate)

An enemy is out of position (where is he and how do we counter)

A tower is threatened (which tower, is it savable)

Observations with * are particularly important during the early game where allies are constantly interacting with enemies on an individual level (laning) and knowing this information could tip the scale (likelihood of a successful gank, whether or not Kyle feeds jungle udyr).

While map awareness is an important individual skill (that I believe EVERYONE SHOULD GET GOOD AT IF THEY WANT TO IMPROVE), we must realize that league of legends, like most real time strategy games (no it isn'-yes it is. It is very much a strategy game at its core), is a game of limited information. Nobody can see everything, especially when there are other important things to focus on (you know, the enemy in your lane?). Every little bit of information you can contribute will increase the team's chances of victory. I do have to say that supports and junglers have a greater responsibility to take notes of these things during the laning phase, but that does not mean that the solos or the marksman is free from such responsibilities (pls tell me where wards are before I gank PLEASE).

Before we move on to our next point, a few important numbers to remember:

Explorer wards are 1 minute (you can click on a ward before it goes into stealth to check if it's an explorer)

Sight wards(green) and vision wards (pink) last 3 minutes.

Ghost wards last 3 minutes, but will disappear if enemy wards

Blue and red buff take 5 minutes to respawn. Note that the young lizards must be cleared for the timer to reset. You can use this to estimate the timer if an enemy takes their blue buff from out of vision (minus travel time of 5-10 seconds, +5 minutes from current time). 

Dragon spawns at 2:30 and takes 6 minutes to respawn upon death. You may estimate dragon timer using a similar method to the red and blue buff timer if dragon is taken from out of vision (but it should be fairly obvious, at least force them to kill a ward first).

Baron spawns at 15:00 and takes 7 minutes to respawn upon death. You may estimate the baron timer using a similar method to the red and blue buff timer if baron is taken from out of vision (IT SHOULD BE PAINFULLY OBVIOUS WHEN THE ENEMY TEAM IS DOING BARON).

Flash+ cooldown is 300 seconds base, 285 seconds with the summoner's insight mastery, 270 seconds with 3 points in the mastermind mastery, 255 seconds with both. At most, flash can have a 188 second cooldown (those two+distortion boots). This means that you have AT LEAST 3 MINUTES to make a play on a man that drops his flash.

Like flash, teleport+ has a cooldown of 300 seconds. With the mastermind mastery, teleport's cooldown becomes 270 seconds. With distortion boots and the mastery, teleport's cooldown becomes 203 seconds. If teleport is canceled, the cooldown is 180 seconds. When an enemy casts teleport, there is a 4 second window to cancel his teleport (3.5 if he takes summoner's insight). This means that THE THREAT OF TELEPORT IS GONE FOR AT LEAST 3 MINUTES after it has been casted (canceled or otherwise).

Ghost+ has a cooldown of 210 seconds. Nobody cares about this spell, but if you take all the masteries+distortion boots you hit 142 seconds. This means you have at least 2 minutes to make a play on a guy who takes ghost.

I would suggest looking up the cooldowns of REAL ultimates (ignore transforms, ammo-gated spells, mana-gated low cooldown spells) and "combat" summoner spells (ignite, barrier,heal,cleanse). For all intents and purposes, if these spells are down, you can probably expect them to be down for at least 1 minute, but no guarantees beyond 100 seconds (rune and mastery setups are not always predictable). 

+Displacement summoner spells are a real threat to both you and your team and are probably the most underrated abilities to the uneducated masses of league players. An enemy's flash is one less guy escaping with 10 hp, one less initiator diving your squishies, one less baron steal after the blood, sweat and tears it took to break down that monstrosity. Ghost and teleport are slightly less threatening that flash (jumping walls op), but can be equally or even more potent in most situations.

PS. You can take your own cooldowns as well if you feel that it is necessary (mostly summoner spells, everyone knows when your ultimate is up :3).

  Preparation:

This is a throwback to our discussion of objectives and how to take objectives. Using the information you learn from "observing" the enemy as well as your own cooldowns and positioning, you may be able to lightly snowball this knowledge into a tangible advantage. In the early-mid game where time is of the essence, simply communicating 30 seconds beforehand that you are going to gank a lane will give the laner an appropriate amount of time to evaluate the enemy's positioning, ward positions and lane state in order to make appropriate movements to optimize the gank (kill slightly more minions while allowing the lane to push up, standing further forward to appear vulnerable,etc.). While this is commonly used to set up kills, preparation is very important when coordinating tower pushes and dragons (a fight with 5 level 2 ultimates is very different from a fight with 2 level 2 ultimates). We have been practicing this the most, using a solid framework to band-aid our communication issues, so I will not go too deeply into this (see coordinated buff steals).

Action:

Very simple in theory. Very difficult in practice. Often this job lies on one person, but so long as everyone is on the same page, anyone can do it. Mechanically, action is essentially calling what objective to take, what battles to initiate and what threats to focus. In the heat of the moment, everyone has a different view of the game state. Consider this scenario:

At the 30 minute mark, game is 15-20, your team has taken the past 4 dragons, but your entire outer turret layer is gone. A lucky pick by your team forces the enemy support and jungler to base, nearly dead. You have just taken the enemy's outer middle turret, your first of the game but barely have any minions to siege the inner for another 30 seconds. The dragon is currently down, your top inner turret is at half health and is under threat from a large minion wave, and the bottom lane is pushing slightly in your favor on the enemy's full hp outer turret. Baron is warded and ripe for the taking, but you know there might be an enemy ward around there somewhere so they might know if you attempt it. For all intents and purposes, your team is both equal power and equal skill with your enemy. After you take the turret, do you:

Go bottom and take the easy outer turret. With the minion wave you could easily crash down and get the easy 750 global gold to pad the mid outer turret money. You do not know if the enemy jungle is warded and they may quickly threaten a counter baron or counter turret afterwards.

Continue to press middle lane and attempt to take an inner turret. This would give you the most map control, but with the enemy jungle and support returning soon, you may face strong opposition.

Take baron. This risky baron will give you the power spike you need to gain the upper hand and push for the victory. You can take it fairly fast and with the enemy jungler in base, there is little chance of a smite steal. Unfortunately their solos and marksman are all near full health/mana and can definitely put up a fight with the additional damage from baron.

Send a couple people top to save the turret while the rest of the team clears wolves/wraiths and goes quickly to buy. This is the safest of the four options. It guarantees that the enemy won't get more global gold from killing your top tower (so you come out marginally ahead) and allows you to power up for the next objective. Unfortunately this will allow the enemy team to regroup as 5 again and resume the game normally. 

How often do you get scenario 5? "One ally goes top lane to try to save the turret. He does not have enough damage to kill all the minions and save the turret but gets some farm. One ally goes bottom and gets the tower down to half health before the minions expire. The remaining three attempt to take mid and die in the 5v3 that follows". I can tell you that this scenario must be treated on a deeper case by case basis. I can also tell you that in every single game, there is a single optimal answer, but several "correct" alternative answers. The most important thing I can tell you is that the call you make must be executed as a team. That is the essence of decisive action.

-Tom