Learning and climbing in league are often conflated and seen as the same thing. Now this CAN be true in certain situations, but oftentimes the ‘learning’ phase is NOT the best for climbing, whereas the ‘execution’ phase is where most of the climbing actually occurs. I describe these two phases in-depth in THIS article.
The important thing to note here is that if you are aiming to stay in the ‘execution’ phase for long periods of time, you actually can stagnate and prevent further learning and lead to a plateau point.
Ultimately balancing the two, playing to ‘learn’ or ‘climb’, can be quite challenging, and even when we are told to ‘learn’ we overcompensate by ‘limit testing’ TOO much and die left right and center. Most people (understandably) interpret ‘limit testing’ as going crazy deep in every moment of the game and seeing what your champion can do. This isn’t really that accurate….
When I was on my Qiyana journey and making my guide, I went from being a COMPLETE noob to very solid at the champ, one of the tough lessons I learnt through that experience was how to NOT limit test.
I fell into the trap of ‘I must go in every time my abilities are up’ leading to me taking extremely bad trades. Same thing with my R’s. I thought this was the right way to go about things. Soon I realized that due to my ‘crazy limit testing’, every game became overly difficult and all I was testing was how to play from behind as Qiyana. I soon realized I was approaching this very wrong.
The principle I now follow is: When trying to speed up the learning process and ‘limit test’, we must get specific about WHAT AREA OF THE GAME we want to learn more about.
Once I realized this with Qiyana I began to specifically only limit test ONE specific element of my play at a time. It started out with limit testing my lvl 3 all-ins off the bounced wave, to limit testing lvl 6 all-ins, to limit testing 100-0’s in the enemy jungle to side lane dives etc. You can get even more granular and get ability specific or item spike specific e.g “I want to test my all-in damage limits ONCE I reach Rocketbelt on my Akali”
This will in turn prevent the sloppy “just send it in every aspect” approach that often turns into an immense amount of lost confidence and motivation to play the champion (which nearly happened to me if I wasn’t so obsessed about getting that guide out).
Now yes, when you first play a champion you definitely need to blindly test every part of the kit and all the key spikes, BUT this period of time should be brief and the faster you can isolate specific parts of your play the better.
How long should you limit test a specific element of your play? Well, it’s really dependent on how quick you learn. Your goal is to get it to a point where it’s muscle memory OR you have a good ‘feel’ for it. I try not to over complicate this step, if you are honest with yourself you’ll know the answer. But remember, it doesn’t need to be perfect. The number in my head when I do this is 80% competence. When I feel I’m at 80% competence, I move to the next step.
Hope this helps with the next time you enter the limit testing phase of your learning journey!
Cheers,
Curtis