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What are the different ways to boost your Elo rating in LoL?

It seems like when you lose 5~7 games in a row there is no way to get a decent team to play with, thus leading you to lose more and more.

  1. How do you get in to winning streak in solo queue?
  2. Are there specific champions I should watch out for and queue dodge?
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Technically it should be Elo not ELO as it's a dudes name Arpad Elo –  Alex J. Roberts Apr 12 '11 at 15:45
just play more games there is no such thing as elo hell –  Gigala Jul 31 '12 at 0:07
@Gigala agreed: na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1978488 –  tzenes Jul 31 '12 at 1:29

4 Answers 4

up vote 10 down vote accepted

1) As far as I can remember, "Solo" queue actually lets you queue up to a team of two. This may have changed. Unfortunately, Solo Queue is just that - you and some strangers - and if you want an easy strategy to climb the solo queue ladder, there isn't one. You're largely at the whim of the matchmaker, so the best you can hope for is to carry a team, perhaps by playing a ganking jungler such as Rammus, Shaco, or Nocturne.

The current metagame theory is that teams with a jungler > teams without, so by playing a strong jungler (assuming you aren't overestimating your skill) will give you the best odds, as an early game lead can be hard to overcome.

2) Queue dodging in a ranked game no longer reduces your ELO, but it does prevent you from queuing for ranked games for a substantial amount of time. If you want to raise your ELO, you need to play games, and you can't do that if you constantly queue dodge.

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"The current metagame theory is that teams with a jungler > teams" - at low elos, you can easily exploit this by going 2 carries bottom and fake a (say lee sin) and go 2 bruisers top. The best games I have played recently were by forcing my team to play with no jungler and pushing turrets super fast. –  Merritt May 17 '12 at 20:57
@ravendreamer The penalty for leaving a ranked game in the champion selection screen is now 30 minutes instead of an Elo loss –  troll Jul 26 '12 at 4:41
you should edit your post cause of the new patch you no longer lose elo for dodging a ranked queue and also add that the first 15 games (or more or less i cant exactly remember) make you lose much more elo or you gain much more elo –  Gigala Jul 31 '12 at 0:08

It is still possible join "solo queues" with a partner and this can increase a bit your chance to win.

Try then to find a good friend to play with and try to find heroes combinations that work well together (synergies). Optionally use TeamSpeak on any other voice program to communicate in-game.

Usually in low ELO games lot of people do not understand how important is having a balanced team. Having no stun/crowd control or not enough tough guys (tanks/offtanks), no jungler, could probably lead to a bad loss.

Try to "fill" the holes in your team by selecting an appropriate champion (jungler, tank, offtank, support, ap/ad carry, etc.). From my experience what usually misses more in low ELO are tank/offtanks and solid junglers. Of course, before being able to apply this effectively you need to buy and learn to play decently different typology of champions.

Regarding the other three members (four if you play alone) you will have in your team the only thing I can say is to try having e a positive attitude towards them (do not start calling them "noob" at first dead). Communicate in game when needed and try to propose tactics.

Applying all these suggestions could help a bit, but for sure is not easy to climb the ladder and exit from ELO hell. I went down under 1000 in ELO and now I am finally reaching again 1300, after months of attempts.

Good luck!

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Unfortunately I had recently the same issue as you did, lost like 6 Ranked games consecutively, and you know what I found, that as your ELO drops down and as Drake has well mentioned, the teams start to lack solid composition, and most importantly many of these teams lack a carry (most likely an AD/DPS one).

So after this little frustration, I decided to start trying out AD carries, or sort of Beefy DPS which can actually carry a game and raise up my ELO again, I am talking about champions like Master Yi, Olaf, Xin Zhao, Nocturne etc..

I would recommend you to get specialized on playing AD/AP carries, even without a good team composition at a low ELO such as 1000- you can win that type of games for your team if you play smart.

Good luck

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ELO hell doesn't exist. If you're losing ELO you're being matched against people with similarly low ELO, so unless you're really bad at the game, or really unfortunate, you'll win sometime.

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How would you address the issue of being "really unfortunate". Elo is a statistical measure, so losing 10 games in a row has a low probability, but it's not a zero probability. Are there any ways to mitigate that from happening? –  Atav32 Aug 14 '12 at 18:13

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