Challenger is the highest rank in League of Legends and is one of the highest gaming achievements one can make. Every year, millions of players try to fight their way to this rank, but only a few hundred make it.
If you are someone who wants to achieve this goal, you might be discouraged and find it impossible. Luckily, it does not have to be that way. There is a roadmap that can help you get a Challenger in season 13, step by step.
I will teach you the fundamentals of the game, which can be infinitely improved upon, as well as some mindset tips. These are the things that helped me reach Masters multiple times and that would have taken me further if I were not lazy. To get to the Challenger rank there are not many shortcuts. However, I’ve found that the jungle may be the easiest way to get the Challenger ranking in LoL season 13. Keep reading to find out why…
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Drafting a Good Team Composition & Analyzing Win Conditions
Drafting a good team composition and analyzing win conditions are the next two major things that you can work on. Getting better at these tasks will significantly boost your win rate, and it will make you a better player much faster.
Drafting a Good Team Composition
The drafting part is simple. You will simply want to take the picks that’ll benefit your team the most. These will be the regular things you will learn the more you play the game. Sometimes your team will need a tank, sometimes an AP champion, and sometimes you will need something that can shred tanks.
You will also have your team to work with. You can always kindly ask them if they are down to play a pick that would benefit the team. Another thing that would also help is having a champion pool of a few champions, each with specific strengths.
Understanding Win Condition
All these aspects will tie to win conditions as well. The win condition is a term you will see thrown around a lot. It might sound like something that is next-level or “IQ 200”, but it is actually really simple. The win condition is any objective that needs to be satisfied in order to win a game.
Here are a few examples of win conditions:
A win condition can be literally anything. If you are playing vs. a team full of tanks, and you have Vayne on your team, the most reasonable thing you can attempt to do is get the Vayne fed.
A good basic win condition that can be applied to most games is to get your carries fed. If you have Vladimir on your team or someone who scales really well, helping them is oftentimes a good choice.
Since the enemy team will have their win conditions, too, you can focus on denying their advancement. If their win condition is a Yasuo, consider that as an invitation to perma-gank and roam to his lane.
Also read: Does Yasuo’s Wind Wall Block Lux’s Ultimate?
In general, there are many win conditions in League of Legends, and when you start paying attention to them, you will develop a better game sense. All of a sudden, games will feel more winnable, and you will have a new skill to work on.
Understanding Vision and Map Awareness
In the past, I would coach lower-ranked players. I would often find that the thing that kills them the most is having a bad vision score and not understanding the map at all.
If you find yourself dying too much to unexpected roams and ganks, this is the section for you. Learning the things that I will outline will help you significantly reduce your deaths and consequently improve your win rate.
When I use the term “vision”, I mainly refer to the placement of wards. Well-placed wards will increase your field of vision, and with good map awareness, it will help you save yourself from ganks, roams, and it will help you save or win an objective from time to time.
When it comes to placing wards around your lane, it is pretty straightforward. You are simply more likely to see the enemy approaching if you have a ward in a bush. This concept is not something advanced, but I would advise being mindful and placing wards often.
There are two more advanced tips I could give regarding vision. These relate to warding in enemy jungle and warding objectives. When you ward in the enemy jungle, you will find it much easier to track the enemy jungler. Plus, you will reduce their power significantly just by having vision on them.
Warding objectives is the next OP thing. Placing a few wards before an objective spawns will give you priority over it, making it easier for you to take and defend it. Vision is information, and this information will help you plan out the fight.
Developing good practices around vision and map awareness really boosted my gameplay. It is a nice complement to other skills and is definitely not something that should be taken for granted, especially if you want to become a Challenger League of Legends player.
Objectives
There are quite a few objectives in League of Legends, and understanding them in depth will be crucial for helping you get to the Challenger level in LoL season 13. For those unfamiliar, the following are known as objectives: dragons, heralds, barons, and structures like towers, inhibitors, and of course, nexus’.
Their basic stats are the first thing you will need to learn about objectives. For example, Herald gives 300 gold upon killing it and something a little over 300 when you use it to destroy tower plates. Killing a dragon will give you a specific amount of gold along with a permanent element-specific buff for your whole team.
To avoid boring you with the details, I would simply suggest paying attention to the amount of gold and bonuses you receive when taking an objective. Soon enough, everything will become second nature.
After knowing an objective’s value, you will be able to make fast and intuitive calls and decide which objective is worth pursuing. Be careful not to fall into the trap many players fall into, where they overvalue one objective over another.
I see quite often in my games that many players ranked below D3+ will simply appreciate some objectives over others for no apparent reason. For example, they will sacrifice their entire team to try and get an Infernal Dragon when they have a free herald sitting on the top side.
In summary, understanding objectives and the value they provide, as well as when to take them and when to give them, will give you an incredible edge over your division peers. This is something that should be on your focus list if you want to get to a Challenger level in LoL season 13.
Teamfighting
Teamfighting is another core of League of Legends gameplay, and many players fail to execute this part correctly. I find that this is mostly due to in-game pressure and knee-jerk reactions–rather than thinking through a plan of action.
How you will play out the teamfight depends completely on what champion you are playing. That said, we could divide the champions into multiple broad categories to make the job easier for ourselves (Tanks, ADC, Assassins, Fighters, Mages).
As a tank, you will want to act as the frontline of your team. Your job is to soak up as much of the damage as possible and disable the enemy carries. This will give your team space to fulfill their role, and it will cripple the enemy team.
As ADC, you will mainly want to stay behind and focus on the best targets possible. The targets will be completely situational. Ideally, you will want to focus and kill enemy carries, but sometimes you will be forced to attack lower-priority targets.
As an assassin, your job is essentially bursting down enemy carries. To do this successfully, you will need to be a master of stealth and finding good angles. You will always want to find spots without vision and flank the enemy’s strongest carries.
Playing fighters is pretty straightforward and versatile. Since they are made for extended combat, you will have an easy time navigating fights. To perform well as a fighter, simply focus on the highest priority targets on the enemy team.
Mages are the most diverse class in terms of their playstyle. As a mage in teamfights, you will generally want to be playing from behind and waiting for your cooldown rotations.
All in all, these are some of the classes you will see. They can be further broken down into smaller categories, but then this guide would be more like a book. The most important thing, however, is to get you thinking about teamfights in a specific way. Soon enough, your fighting will be on a Challenger level.
Fundamentals for Laners
No matter if you are a jungle main or a laner, you will need to know laning fundamentals. These are ever-evolving aspects of the game. As the competition increases, so does the need to perfect these skill sets. They are truly necessary if you want to achieve Challenger in LoL season 13.
Priority
Priority is a concept that determines if you can fight skirmishes or not. It is based on several factors, such as your champion HP, mana, lvl, items, and lane position. If these stats are on your side, you have priority over an objective or a fight over your enemy.
Imagine a scenario like this: You are playing mid-lane, you are full HP, a level ahead, and your enemy is low HP and pushed in. A dragon is coming up, and a fight is about to break out. Who has more priority? It is obvious you can simply ping the dragon and help your jungler do it.
Sometimes it will be harder to determine priority for an objective since you will have to run many calculations. What is the state of my bot lane, what is the state of the enemy bot lane, does our top laner have teleport, and so on?
Now, these summaries might be getting repetitive, but it is for a reason. I will again have to say that to become a Challenger, you will need a ton of focus and practice. There is simply no way around it. The good thing is the rank is actually achievable.
Wave Management
Wave management refers to the strategic manipulation of wave states by killing a calculated number of minions. It helps you play out the lane on your terms. There are methods of wave management: fast push, slow push, and freezing.
Fast push consists of clearing out the whole enemy minion wave as fast as possible. This will crash your minions under the enemy tower, which will give you time to make plays around the map. It will force the enemy to either give up on the CS or miss a potential fight.
Slow push strategy revolves around thinning out the enemy wave, allowing it to outnumber your minions, and waiting for your second wave to arrive. When the second wave comes to lane, you will have a bunch of ally minions stacked up. You can now clear the enemy minions and have a horde of your minions under the enemy tower.
Freezing is a wave management technique that helps you keep the minions near your tower. This makes you safer and less prone to ganks, and it also gives you more lane space for fighting your enemy if you are ahead. To perform a freeze, you will need to have your minions take less damage than the enemy ones.
Trading
Trading is the last fundamental skill for laning. It is the easiest skill to develop, as trading is what you will be doing the most while playing a lane.
To trade well, you will need to be aware of your champion power spikes, strengths and weaknesses, and some basic things like HP and mana/energy expenditure. A good trade will make the enemy expend more resources than you.
Trading is really hard to explain, as there are so many things that play into it. But I will not leave you without giving you an extra tip. The easiest way to trade is when an enemy is going up to CS, this is where you will be most likely to catch them off-guard. You can throw out a skill shot or start attacking them while their animation on a minion is loading.
Fundamentals for Junglers
Many people will tell you that playing in the jungle feels like playing a completely different game, and I would have to agree with that. I find the jungle to be the most chill role to play, as it has the most influence over the map. This should definitely be your go-to if you want to achieve the rank of Challenger in LoL season 13.
Optimal Clearing
The optimal clearing is the easiest thing you can do to improve your rank. It obviously will not solely get you to the Challenger level, but it is a necessity. Having a good clear will save you time and allow you to have more impact on the map.
The easiest way to perfect clears is to look them up on YouTube. There is always that one main, or Phylaris, that has spent days trying to figure out the best clear. The next thing you can do is load up the practice tool and play a few rounds.
Scouting the Map
As jungler, one of your main goals is helping your allies get ahead, and how else could you do it except by scouting the map? To be efficient at scouting, you will need to look at the lanes you are pathing towards as often as you can.
The prerequisite to this is clearing well. The more of a habit clearing becomes, the less brain bandwidth you will have to allocate to looking for gank opportunities. This also ties in with knowing the lane fundamentals and tracking the enemy jungler.
Learn Lane Fundamentals
When you know the lane fundamentals, you will be more likely to predict your ally’s and enemy’s behavior. You will know to read their body language accurately and determine if they are looking for a fight, recall, or if they are baiting for their jungler in the case of enemies.
This is something that requires a lot of experience, but it is something that originally helped me push from D3 to D1. Many junglers are yet unaware of this feature, and you will definitely have an advantage in LoL season 13 if you study it.
Tracking the Enemy Jungler
Tracking the enemy jungler is a well-known strategy, and it is not something that will ever be outdated. It revolves around collecting as much information about them as possible. The more information you have, the better calls you will be able to make.
The simplest form of tracking enemy junglers revolves around predicting their starting location. Below Platinum, this is mostly bot side, as players will default to a faster leash. In higher elos, you will be able to predict where the enemy has started by looking at which laner comes to the lane late.
Sometimes, the enemies will be coordinated, and they will give fake leashes. They will hide in their jungle to give the illusion that they’re helping their jungler. The most you can do here is check their mana and HP levels. If both resources are intact, they might have faked a leash.
Another major thing that will help you track the enemy jungler is looking at their CS numbers. Each camp gives 5 CS score, and you can pretty much deduce which camps they have killed by looking at their CS number and dividing it by 5.
The final tip I would give you is to ward off the enemy jungle when you can. A 75-gold control ward can go a long way. When it reveals an enemy, it will give you plenty of valuable information you can use to change the tides of a game.
Also read: How to Jungle in League of Legends S13?
Conclusion
With millions of players competing for the limited Challenger spots, it is really hard to make your way through. If you want to get to the Challenger rank in LoL season 13, you will have to subject yourself to study!
Players must learn a decent amount of complex concepts and be willing to polish them to perfection. This is really a road with few shortcuts, but I would have to highlight that the jungle would be the easiest way to get the Challenger ranking in LoL season 13.
Also check out: How to manipulate waves
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