Introduction
This is your Ultimate Guide to Getting an S+ LOL.
What does it mean to be a good player in League of Legends, and is your rank all that reflects your skill? Well, ever since Riot released the Champion Mastery System to show off your Mastery Points for your favourite Champions, Riot has incentivized trying your best by rewarding players who they deem performed exceptionally well! The reward being a Hextech Chest for the chance at free skins! So, with such a rewarding system being in place, many players want to get the best rank they can in every game.Â
Despite the Champion Mastery System being around for years now, players still don’t understand what they need to do to get those S ranks for unlocking Mastery 6 and Mastery 7 and for getting a chance at free skins!
We will be breaking this down on three main sections:
- What is S+ and why you need to be aware of it
- How to reach to get into S+ effortlessly
- How this affects your MMR
- How getting S+ can help you climb elo
What Is an S+?
Similar to most grading scales, or at least tier lists in games, the grading from worst to best is D, C, B, A, and S. For each letter there are also the degrees of minus and plus depending on how much you deserved the ranking. Therefore, the worst rank is a D-, and the best rank is an S+.Â
What actually determines your ranking at the end of the match depends on many factors that we will get into later, but it’s important to know that it’s not as simple as having the most kills or a lot of CS.
The ranking is specifically designed to try and make all positions have the same chances of getting the rank to not favour some playstyles over others. Nevertheless, it’s easy to see how playing a carry Champion can put more control in your hands to get you to the point of dominating the game in a way that will get you that desired rank of S+ and a shot at a free skin!
Why Should You Be Aiming for an S+?
Of course, there is enough reason to aim for an S+ to get a chance at a free skin, because free stuff is always nice! Another fair reason for aiming for the S+ is to show off your new Mastery rank in games and with your friends. But, none of these are actually the reason Riot developed and released this system in the first place! The goal was to ultimately incentivize players to always try their hardest!
The idea is that if players want free skins or a high mastery, they will of course, need to play well! But, by quantifying it like this, players are more incentivized to think about each of the components that has an impact on that game’s rank, and in turn, think more about the game and how to get into a better position than they are!
Whether it’s with noticing that your CS is low, or that you are dying too much, knowing how impactful these things can be when striving for them is a great way to promote a better mentality towards the game and a future-focused perspective. Often the most toxic and tilting scenarios a player can encounter occur because a teammate is flaming them for a mistake they made.
When considering the stats needed for the mastery ranks, players understand that the damage is already done and instead think about what they can say to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Dwelling on the past will not help the future outcomes in the game and by incentivizing players to think in this manner through the Champion Mastery System is a fantastic win-win scenario!
What Impacts Your Champion Mastery Score?
First and foremost, your KDA. The KDA is not the stat that is a make or break for your Champion Mastery Ranking, but it’s one of the easiest to see when things are going well, or not quite on track. On the topic of KDA, it’s important to know that it depends on your role. Supports obviously are not expected to get as many kills as the bot laner. For good reason.
However, they are expected to get a lot more assists! So, for example, an Ezreal will have a better ranking at the end of the match than a Nautilus if they both have a KDA of 8/3/5 assuming all else is negated. However, an Ezreal with the same KDA, but the Nautilus having a KDA of 3/3/10 might be a different story.Â
In the same light, the role matters a lot for a stat like CSing. A general rule of thumb is that Supports are only expected to get around 1 CS/min whereas the Marksman is expected to get closer to 7 CS/min! In the same way the Marksman might have a Mastery Score hindered by having a CS/min lower than that threshold, the Support could have theirs hindered if it’s significantly higher than their threshold!Â
Another big part of the Mastery Score is your percentage of your team’s damage dealt and taken. This is one of the stats most underrated even though it is clear when a Champion is doing their job based on these stats. Likewise, the kill participation matters as well. A high impact role like Jungle will be expected to have a high kill participation!
Alternatively, a split push top laner will not be expected to get more than a handful of kills and assists in a given game. It does in fact, even get influenced by the specific Champion played, too! For example, Soraka will have an easy time getting assists because of her global heal on her ultimate ability!
Jarvan IV is also expected to get a high kill participation score because he is a jungler with good ganks AND just by using his Demacian Standard near an ally before they get a kill will result in an assist because it provides them with an attack speed buff!
Of course, this means that the specific Champion played matters! It’s important to understand that if the Champion played is insanely overpowered at the moment, they are expected on average to do better than others, inherently making the S rank more challenging to reach than others! On the flip side, if the player is playing something with a very poor win rate like mid lane Ezreal, it will actually be easier to get a high ranking score for doing the same work!Â
The next part of the Champion Mastery Ranking that people underestimate the value of is their participation in the team effort! Essentially, if you are taking part in getting Dragons, that is good! If you are not, that is bad! Of course though, it’s even more intricate than that because a top laner that is on the opposite side of the map is not expected to help with the early Dragons in the same way the Jungler is!Â
Despite it being more important for Supports, warding and specifically destroying wards! It is very easy to spam wards on cooldown with the trinkets, so it’s not as valuable to just place wards. On the other hand, removing enemy wards off the map is incredibly valuable for denying vision and therefore heavily incentivized in the Mastery Score System!
The factor that plays a more significant role than people realize is the length of the game! All of the previous stats are influenced greatly by how long the game goes, and what is expected to happen during that time! For example, while a top lane Nasus might not be expected to have high kill participation or Dragon killing participation, he will be expected to have destroyed several turrets! If the game is longer, the easier it will be to have an accurate picture of how well Nasus did compared to what was expected of him.
The shorter the game however, the more variability there is in actually determining how well you played statistically and therefore, you’re not likely to get such a premium rank like an S+! Essentially, the longer the game progresses, the less your base stats like KDA will matter and the more your Champions specific win condition and expected progression throughout the game will matter!
Finally, the most important reason and factor to consider about the Champion Mastery Score is how it catalyzes your MMR. Essentially, despite losing, if you manage to get a high ranking, your MMR will go up, even if you are losing LP! So, even if you believe the game is absolutely lost, it’s still worth trying your best because you can still be rewarded for your efforts!
Conclusion
Overall, there are clearly many pieces to the overall pie that is an S+ Champion Mastery Score in any given game. In fact, too many to truly make any guarantees of what strategy will get you the best results. The best piece of advice is to simply consider what it is your role and specific Champion is expected to do at every point of the game and do that exceptionally well!Â
Of course, it’s easier said than done, but as long as you follow the general trajectory of what is expected of your position, and do your best to stay even slightly ahead of that trend-line, you’re well on your way to hauling in those S+ ranks!
There’s also a fun thread going on reddit which you can find here about the general ranking in lol.
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