[2019] Proficiency vs Mastery: The High Elo Mentality towards Diamond

Originally posted by LoLwolverene

I left this part out of the post for length reasons. There's no easy way to explain it, but the biggest difference is just how you think about the game, which comes out most in laning. High level players will start out the game looking at the enemy's team comp and their lane matchup, and playing differently according to it. Then, depending on the game state and their lane state, they'll continue to adjust how they're playing throughout the game. This sounds really simple, but when you get deeper into it it becomes more complex, because the amount of factors that contribute to your decision making increase the more precise your decision making is. For example, it's very easy to play safe into a counter matchup, but it's harder to know more precise things like the exact levels you lose a matchup, and what level/item wakeups change it into a winning matchup, what timings in the lane you can play aggressively relative to the jungle matchup, etc. A high level player will know how they're playing the first 7 waves of the game before minions spawn. A D1 player will typically know their matchup at a very basic level, but they don't think about their play very analytically. Most high diamond players will just auto-trade, on instinct, unless they're very far behind or in a hard counter matchup, because that's just how they learned. When you go from gold->d1 you learn to just play based on experience. You have 10s of thousands of memories of lane interactions, fights, and you use those to make your decisions. The problem is you can't create memories of concepts you don't understand. You could say the difference between proficiency and mastery is playing on instinct vs analysis, but I think that problem extends into Challenger and even pro play, albeit to a lesser degree, so I'd say it's somewhat accurate. At a higher level, the goal of laning phase shifts from just thinking about out-trading your opponent, to a wider scope of creating a lane advantage. An example would be, if you're playing Syndra and you're at 300 mana level 5, enemy laner is an even matchup, let's say Orianna, and she's at 80% hp, a D1 Syndra will continue to throw spells at Orianna, and a D1 Orianna will still try to dodge those spells. At a high level, Syndra will completely ignore using spells on Orianna, knowing her mana pool isn't enough to ever kill her, and the Orianna will completely ignore any damage taken from the Syndra, since she knows she can't die. If Syndra dropped to 100 or 50 mana, a D1 Orianna might play more aggressively, but a high level Orianna will walk into the middle of the enemy wave and not care that she's taking hundreds of damage in minion aggro, because she's not trying to out trade, she's trying to gain a lane advantage. She'll take tower shots to stop Syndras recalls, she'll take 300 hp to 0 hp trades just to make Syndra lose 80 mana. It's the same for health. If Orianna and Syndra are equal mana but hp is 400 to 1000, the higher health player will take 300 to 100 trades, because they know their health doesn't matter. Health/Corrupting pot usage is the same. 1000 to 1000 but 0 hp pots vs 3 corrupting pots. D1 player will play like lane is even, high level player will take 300/100 trades knowing they win the long term resource battle. You don't see players playing around resources in this way until past diamond, especially mana/pots. Recalls/exp are a good example of another thing that increases very sharply. From silver-diamond everyone plays around recalls in around the same way, with steady improvement, but once you get past diamond it will very sharply increase, to where in some lanes it will feel like recalls are the only things that matter. For a scenario: Player 1 pushes wave, recalls, comes back, and player 2 has just finished clearing the wave and is now running back to recall. There's a 6/7 minion wave coming into player 1's tower, and they now have no wave. In D1, player 1 lets the wave come to his tower, farms it, and tries to push the next wave into tower as fast as they can to deny minions. At a higher level, player 1 tanks the entire minion wave as they walk down the lane, walks into players 2's tower and cancels their recall, then kites back, comes back 4 seconds later to check player 2's recall location again. If player 2 stays they will constantly check their recall every time they go into fog to try to keep them in lane. In late lane phase, D1 players will not really know when to push/roam and when to stay in lane, besides obvious cases, because they don't understand the dynamics of the team compositions well enough. There's a double digit amount of factors that go into decisions like that, that take a large amount of game knowledge. Like 70% of scenarios are relatively easy decisions, and those will increase a lot from silver-diamond, but the other 30% will actually be hard decisions in which diamond players will make the wrong decision, and often won't even consider what's actual the right decision. There's certain recall timings and rotations that don't exist in diamond because the factors that go into making those decisions aren't factors that diamond, or even some challenger players consider. Mid game rotations are definitely different, but not enough that it's worth going into. It's just more along the theme that high level players think about things more analytically. Maybe I'm just tired of typing.

This isn't to say that diamond players have good mechanics and it's all knowledge. People tend to really underestimate mechanic ceiling. I've had so many gold/plat/diamond players tell me their mechanics are fine and they just need to learn mid game rotations or whatever other nonsense. Literally has never been true. Mechanics still separate pro players, they'll never not be incredibly important, no matter what level you achieve. And the higher you get the harder mechanical refinements become. There's even an argument to be made that at some point you just have to be talented to be a top top tier player, because you can't simply learn mechanics at that level, although I'm not positive I believe in that. But the effort it takes to mechanically go from diamond to Challenger is very hard, harder than diamond to silver. Things like spacing get a lot better at very high levels. Super high level matchups players will both be wiggling their champions in and out of each other's range constantly at 200+ apm, and that's not something you see even in high diamond. It's something that increases from silver to diamond, but the refinement from spacing accurate to 100 units vs spacing accurate to 20 units is much harder to achieve and more important than 300 units to 100. This is my favorite example of that concept https://streamable.com/61gtk . At a high level spacing is what determines who wins and loses lane, especially in ranged matchups, and it separates pro players and top tier pro players. The accuracy and speed of your mouse movements and clicks is by far the hardest skill in league, and it's not even humanly possible to hit the ceiling, or honestly even close. Then obviously things like skillshots, teamfight vision, prediction, split second thinking, etc, are the same.

I'd say another big difference is expanding your capacity to multitask. Honestly I'm really tired of typing so this might be scuffed but this is another one that is humanly impossible, but increases sharply at higher levels. Theoretically you want to have such a high mastery of all mechanical concepts that you don't have to put a lot of mental effort into them. In lane you have to think about 1. last hitting, 2. your minions hp 3. your movement 4. your enemys movement 5. your enemys cooldowns 6. jungle tracking 7. map awareness. A theoretical perfect player is constantly wiggling perfectly outside their opponents range, while not looking at their character and their last hits, predicting the enemys movements based on your own minions hp, while tracking the enemy jungler and watching the map. If you're running tp mid and something starts happening bot, or even if you're not running tp and the junglers are fighting in river, you have to do all this while using f keys to look at the fight every second. Literally every player in the world cheats on this. When 1 thing requires more of your attention, the others lack, because your brain can't keep up. In lower levels, a lot of the time things will completely drop. If you're in an intense 1v1 mid, a diamond player might drop all their map awareness and jungle tracking completely, and their cs will lack. Most diamond players won't track enemy lane movements while they're last hitting. They'll drop it for like 0.5 seconds. Their spacing will either not exist for .5 seconds or just be worse. And that sounds small but those refinements are what makes the difference between beating someone and smothering them in lane, where your pressure and your spacing/poking barely dip at all throughout all your last hitting because your last hitting is that good that your eyes don't ever leave the enemy champion. There's definitely more examples to be made but I think my point is clear and I don't want to type anymore.