User blog comment:Texas Snyper/Elo Hell and You: Part 2 - Skills That Pay the Bills/@comment-199.126.208.195-20110910215828/@comment-98.248.60.254-20110911225042

Play safer roles.

These players that have unreasonable standards or openly attack you are silly. You're either dealing with an airhead with 50 wins or a pissed off veteran with 1400 total games stuck at a low ELO.

Although I am very capable of playing any character in a classic game, ranked is unfortunately very different. It's hard enough to deal with the enemy team but you must deal with your own team at all times.

Jungler and Support are some of the safest roles with some of the high potential and high risk. Top Solo Tank can usually set you up nicely as well. AP Carry and Ranged AD demand extreme confidence and knowledge of the game if you do not want players to qq about you. No matter how hard you try though, there will always be a handful of players that pester you in game about decisions "they" would have never made. Learn to filter out the meaningless statements while taking the meaningful ones into consideration. Control your emotion and maintain composure when necessary.

For playstyle, the safest supports are Taric, Sona, Morgana, and Alistar. On the other hand, Soraka is a little different now since she can sustain players less easily but deals more damage. Taric is a great laner that can setup kills with plenty of champions, especially Caitlyn. Sona, if played right, can have a huge effect on team fights while dominating enemies in lane to let your ally last hit and then come in for kills. Alistar deals a bit of burst, he's tanky, and heals while setting up favorable engagements that can yield kills. Morgana works well with a lot of champions that would prefer to farm or need to close distance, Caitlyn and Ezzy are both great partners. Some other ideas I've always dreamed of are support Orianna and Maokai but the latter excels at carrying with mid solo.

Jungling Gangplank has always been safe for me in ranked and normal games while Jungle Amumu has always been a hassle. From this, I have learned that you should never listen to the demands of your allies in draft ALL THE TIME. Choose champions you are comfortable with and simulate possible scenarios in which one character will be superior to the other. I have always felt that junglers like GP have much more potential to do everything while Amumu is an overrated champion, in the sense that, the people that deem him OP do not know how to play him or fully exploit his abilities and initiation [It's why I play Galio over the poor mummy].

Top Solo is great for Nasus, Mordekaiser, Singed, Irelia, Akali, Jax, and many others. However, I do believe that smart players can easily counter even the best of Mordes. The key to top solo is taking advantage of ganks, farming, and dominating the lane overall.

Additionally, learning the nuances of ranked games is essential. Top is for a tanky character, jungle is for tanks unless your top is a tanky character[Or that dastardly Fiddledick!], mid is for ap carries, and bot is for ad ranged and support. At lower ELO, this does not apply and more skilled players freely deviate from this formula to throw people off with more unique and niche team compositions.

Optimize your playstyle so you are the best XXXX they've seen and pick up on ranked concepts immediately. It took me two games to master it and I played support up to gold rank before playing a more diverse set of roles. Ultimately, always just adjust to your own team.