Climbing Competitive Ranked Ladders: YOU Matter Most

The ranked ladder in any competitive video game is far more than just a test of mechanical skill. Climbing requires three core pillars: knowledge, mechanics, and information combined with an ironclad competitive mindset, patience, and resolve. You must be able to take the good and the bad, and still make something out of the match. Furthermore, be aware that the player base for ranked games is often smaller, which can amplify volatility.

At the end of the season, things are always messy. Players have left or quit after hitting their desired rank, and the process of climbing can be painful. This reminds me of one painful, recurring truth: You must carry your way out of the lower ranks.

The single common factor in every game is YOU. If you sit and wait for good teammates, you are not going to climb; you are hoping to be carried up. The climbing path requires you to reduce your mistakes and pull yourself higher.

The Mindset Shift: Focus on Yourself

You simply cannot rely on your team. This requires a radical shift in mindset. You won’t always be the star of the show, but you can always make things easier for yourself. The brutal fact is this: your teammates are at your current rank for a reason, and so are you. Stop fixating on negative players, questionable builds, or missed pings. That path leads to frustration and losses. Focus on you, not them.

Core Tenets of the Carry Mindset

• Approach Every Match with Confidence: Your primary focus must be on you. You need to approach every single match with the inherent belief that, “This is not a loss; we can win.” Sometimes, strange strategies win and throw people off, but only if you are confident and disciplined in executing them.

• Own Your Mistakes: Low-level games are chaotic, objective-driven team fights. It’s easy to fall into bad habits and make minor mistakes that seem insignificant until you get punished. You need to play around the chaos and eliminate those self-sabotaging errors.

• The Balancing Act: While you must be self-reliant, you can’t be an island. It’s a fine balance: you need to be able to judge the right time to shotcall, but also know when to commit to your team’s less-than-ideal call to maintain unit cohesion.

• The Trap of Negativity: Don’t obsess over deaths. Honestly, you can die many times in the early game and still come out fine. If you’ve died ten times, you often have nothing left to lose. Yes, people will make mistakes (like not building penetration), but that is not your problem—it’s not something you can control. One mistake from the other team means you can win it. It’s that simple.

Worst to Best for Climbing

Your choice of role directly impacts your ability to influence the game and carry. This ranking reflects the role’s potential to consistently create global pressure and single-handedly swing a match in the current meta.

Here are the roles, ranked from Worst (5) to Best (1) for solo climbing:

• 5. Support (Worst): This is the most difficult role to climb with. You are entirely reliant on others; if your team does nothing, you do nothing, and it is easy to die. You absolutely need to learn your limits here.

• 4. Mid (Not Bad): This role is alright, but its carry potential is currently highly dependent on the Jungle. Any misstep in the Jungle’s pathing or the loss of neutral camps immediately puts both you and the Jungler behind. However, you have damage, farm, and the mobility to apply that damage somewhere else.

• 3. Solo (Good): A decent choice. Solo is self-sufficient—it can sustain, win its lane, and use its pressure and tankiness to influence the map, much like a secondary Carry.

• 2. Carry (Great): A good choice with high “Pop-Off” Potential. Excellent itemisation allows the Carry to snowball quickly, take objectives, and consistently lead the team to victory.

• 1. Jungle (Best): Jungle has Maximum Agency and is the best role for climbing. They dictate the tempo, possess the flexibility to path and farm, gank, and control crucial objectives. They are the single most important factor in early-to-mid-game snowballing.

Why?

The reasoning is simple: Agency. Carry and Jungle both have the potential to pop off and possess excellent items. Solo can lead its own lane and influence others. Mid, while strong, has its solo-carry potential limited by its dependence on the Jungle for farm security. All of these roles have far more damage and agency compared to Support.

Misconception and Resource Management

The most difficult challenge belongs to the Support role. Far too many players assume tanks are weak. They are not you just can’t face tank pointless damage. You have to learn to dodge. Also need to learn when to fight and when not too.

Support and Solo players live and die by this truth.

• Avoid Pointless Damage: You need to understand when and what you are doing, and crucially, you must save your escape ability. The value of a tank is not in soaking up every bit of damage, but in perfectly timing your crowd control and escape to bait the enemy and secure the follow-up kill. This requires focus on the fight, what is happening, and having a clutch exit strategy—similar to a Jungle.

• Farming Over Fighting: Another fundamental insight that separates climbers from stuck players is understanding resources. Always prioritize farming over fighting. If you are fighting, it has to be for a specific, valuable reason.

• Resource Priority: Support, in particular, prioritizes Gold over XP to quickly move about the map gathering resources and applying pressure, rushing essential items.

Climbing

Ultimately, if you want to climb, you need to commit to the ladder. That means eliminating outside distractions and fully embracing the carry mindset. It is not the game mode for you if you assume others will carry you. You need to have your mindset in the right place.

I’m currently playing ranked with a friend who mains Support and Solo—two of the most challenging roles to climb with and it only highlights how essential this self-reliant mindset is. He is trying to do things the hard way, and I am trying to do things even harder by helping carry him to higher ranks. Even if he gets into a losing mindset, I need to bring him with me.

If you commit to being the most impactful player on the map, no matter the role (though Support is the worst to do that with), you will find yourself moving up. The question becomes: Can you move past the negativity and get good enough to climb? Or will you stay stuck in low ranks, blaming others for your own mistakes?

Loads of people can’t move beyond the basics, failing to improve. Don’t be one of them.