ADC Mastery For Higher MMR in League of Legends

In League of Legends, taking the ADC role is a huge responsibility. If you fail, your entire team will fail in most cases. But if you win your lane and deal a lot of damage during team fights, you will often be responsible for the victory. It’s a double-edged sword.

Many believe that their League of Legends MMR can most reliably be raised by playing ADC or Mid. That claim is not without merit but what many seem to forget is that the role itself does not guarantee a positive result. Just because you play it doesn’t mean you will win. To be successful, you must excel. This guide teaches you the core principles.

Understanding The ADC Role

This role requires a lot of mastery because it comes with many responsibilities. This is one of the reasons why many players like to avoid playing ranked on their main account immediately after they’ve made the decision to specialize in the ADC role and prefer to register for their sessions' new account.

Practicing new champions and tactics on such accounts is stress-free because you don’t really care about the result. All you care about is learning and getting better. But when you compete on your main, the thought of losing a lot of Elo and MMR in a matter of weeks can be demoralizing.

Here’s what the ADC role demands of you:

Champion Expertise

This is not a role that encourages versatility over specialization. Quite the opposite. You are expected to know how to play 4-7 champions really well. LoL has around 170 in total. But you only need to master half a dozen of them for this role. The rest should be played at least a few times to gain familiarity with their abilities, so that you can play your ADC role better.

When choosing your champion pool, you must pick not only champions that are strong in the current meta, but also champions that work well against some of the most common combos and strategies you will encounter.

Some teams simply love to stack up armor. Others love to have a range advantage. Others go for as much crowd-control as possible. Every strategy has a good counter, and it’s important to be versatile enough to have the option of picking a champion who can excel in any scenario. Pro Tip: Stand out in lane by personalizing your ADC champions with unique skins lol – the right visual style can boost your confidence and intimidate opponents!

The worst feeling as an ADC specialist is to see the opposite team picking a bot lane combo that has a clear counter, only to realize that you’ve never played the champion that would perfectly counter the enemy strat.

Finding a balance between versatility and expertise is not easy. But in general, having a champion pool of 4-7 solid picks should be sufficient to maximize your chances of winning.

Good Farming Skills

When you play the ADC role in LoL, one of the most important questions that you must ask is this: how do I maximize my gpm and xpm? Ultimately, these two numbers will determine your win rate more than anything else.

Your goal is to become stronger than your opponents. When the enemy ADC is level 10, you want to be level 11 or 12. When they have 4000 gold, you want to have 4500 or 5000.

This kind of experience and gold advantage generally gives you the opportunity to force favorable fights around key objectives. If you want to kill a dragon or destroy a tower, a 5v5 engagement in which you have the higher net worth and level will usually be favorable to you.

A strong opponent, understanding this fact, will try to avoid you. But that will often give you an even bigger advantage because you’ll take objectives uncontested.

Excellent Team Fighting Skills

Strong items and high levels mean nothing if you don’t know how to make good use of them in team fights. When you fight, make sure you have enough mana and all your key abilities available. Good visibility and good positioning are also important. Never fight at a disadvantage unless you have no other option.

Great Map Awareness

Dying in League of Legends as an ADC comes at a great cost. Because of this, map awareness is critical. If you don’t take a brief look at the minimap every 3 seconds or so, you are compromising your ability to make good decisions. So get into the habit of checking the minimap frequently.