League of Legends: How to Get an S Every Game
League of Legends is a game that rewards performance and mastery, not just victory, and earning an "S" grade at the end of a match is the highest praise of individual skill.
However, achieving an S Rank game after game is not that easy. It requires a deep understanding of the game, your champion, and how the grading system works.
In this guide, we will cover everything you need to know about how to get S rank in League of Legends. From understanding the grading criteria to mastering the strategies that will improve your gameplay, here we go.
Understanding the Grading System in League of Legends
Getting a high rank for your performance can seem discontinuous and confusing. There are many misconceptions about the grading system and the core requirements for an S Rank.
Many players assume they need to have the best KDA and get surprised when their 25-kill game doesn't end with a huge S symbol on the post-match screen.
Before we dive into the long list of tips and tricks, it’s important to understand how the grading system in League of Legends works. The game assigns grades ranging from D- to S+ based on your performance in various aspects.
These include kill participation, farming, vision control, gold income per minute, and overall impact on the game. Other factors also play a part, such as the length of the game. With this said, let's take a closer look at the different requirements individually.
Kill Participation & KDA
The KDA ratio is a fundamental aspect of your performance in League of Legends and plays a significant role in determining your end-of-game grade.
KDA is calculated by taking the total number of kills and assists you’ve accumulated in a game and dividing it by your deaths. This ratio reflects how effectively you are contributing to your team's overall success while minimizing your mistakes.
Kills are the most straightforward aspect of KDA. Securing kills shows that you’re actively involved in skirmishes and team fights and that you’re contributing to your team’s ability to gain a numerical advantage over the enemy.
Deaths are the most detrimental part of your KDA ratio. Every death you incur not only provides gold and experience to the enemy team but also stops your contribution for a given period. Minimizing your deaths is crucial. Dying frequently can significantly lower your grade, even if you have many kills.
Assists are just as valuable as kills in the grading system. Supporting your team and contributing to kills, even if you’re not the one dealing the final blow, is highly valued by the grading system.
Balancing all three elements is vital to consistently achieving high grades. But there is much more to be said about how to get S Rank in League of Legends, so the next section will focus on Farming and consistent Gold Income.
Farming & Gold Income
Farming is one of the most critical aspects for most roles and champions, where your income is largely dependent on your ability to secure the last hits on minions. But farming effectively is about more than just accumulating a high creep score, it’s about maximizing your gold income over time.
Creep Score refers to the number of minions and monsters you kill during the game. Each minion wave presents an opportunity to earn gold and experience, so missing last hits directly impacts your ability to scale and compete in the later stages of the game.
Additionally, understanding wave management is crucial. Knowing when to freeze, push, or slow push the wave can help you control your lane and deny your opponent CS while maximizing your own.
Farming doesn’t stop with lane minions in the mid and late-game. Jungle camps and neutral objectives like Scuttle Crab also contribute to your CS and gold income. As the game progresses, you should look for opportunities to farm jungle camps when it’s safe to do so.
Getting objectives like Dragons, Barons, and even straightforward actions like turret destruction and kill participation influence your gold income.
All in all, you cannot limit your influence to lane farming if you want that S Rank. You have to be involved in every aspect of the game and influence the overall economic prowess of your team.
Vision Score
Next up on our list of tips and tricks about how to get an S Rank in League of Legends, we have Vision Score. Inexperienced players often overlook this aspect of the gameplay but it has an equally big role in the grading system.
The common misconception is that warding is a Support's job. On the contrary, effective vision control doesn’t just mean placing wards.
It involves strategic placement, vision denial, and understanding how to use vision to your team’s advantage. Most importantly, it should be done by all five players on the team.
Your vision score is a numerical representation of your contribution to the team’s overall vision. This score takes into account the number of wards you place, how many enemy wards you destroy, and the duration your wards remain active.
While the vision score is particularly important for supports, who are typically expected to lead in this category, it’s also a relevant metric for all other roles.
Regularly warding key areas and helping to clear enemy wards can positively impact your vision score and, by extension, your chances of getting an S Rank.
Not to mention that vision control can be the difference between winning and losing a game, especially in prolonged matches.
Match Duration
Surprising or not, match duration plays a significant role in determining your chances of achieving a high grade. Even if you fully understand how to get S Rank in League of Legends, sometimes it is impossible.
The grading system is designed to assess your performance relative to the average performance of players on that specific champion in matches of a similar length. Therefore, the duration of the match can impact various aspects of your gameplay.
In shorter matches, the grading system is generally more lenient towards metrics like KDA and CS. This is because there is less time to accumulate high scores in these categories.
However, this also means that your performance needs to be efficient and impactful within the limited time frame. You need to capitalize on early leads, make decisive plays, and avoid making mistakes that could hinder your overall impact.
The grading system will also account for the vision you provided in the time available, so make sure your contributions are meaningful.
Medium-length matches are often seen as the sweet spot for earning an S rank. In these games, you have enough time to demonstrate a full range of skills and have an all-rounded impact on the outcome. But you will need to be consistent from start to finish.
Finally, long games are the most challenging for securing an S rank, primarily because the expectations for performance increase as the game progresses. The grading system assumes that with more time, players will naturally accumulate higher KDA, CS, and vision scores, so the benchmarks for an S rank become stricter.
How to Get an S Rank in League of Legends: 5 Key Tips
Having discussed the grading system and all focus points, we can turn our attention to specific aspects of your gameplay that you can improve to get consistently high grades.
Master your favorite champions
Playing a wide range of champions decreases your chances of getting high grades consistently. Even the best pro players have a limited champion pool as it is much more important to be exceptional with several than just good with everything.
Find your best champions and go beyond understanding their abilities. You need to know their strengths, weaknesses, matchups, and optimal builds in various situations. Spend time in the practice tool refining your mechanics, such as last-hitting, skill-shot accuracy, and combo execution.
Watching high-level gameplay, reading guides, and analyzing your own matches can help you better understand your champion's role within different team compositions.
Improve your laning phase
The laning phase sets the tone for the rest of the game and heavily influences your chances of securing an S rank. A strong laning phase gives you a gold and experience advantage, setting you up for a successful mid and late-game.
You should focus on accumulating a high creep score while maintaining a solid KDA ratio. Effective trading with your opponent, harassing them without sacrificing CS, and knowing when to push or freeze the wave are among the key skills to develop.
Also, placing wards in strategic locations and keeping track of enemy jungler movements will help you avoid unnecessary deaths, allowing you to stay in lane longer and farm more effectively.
Improve your efficiency in team fights
Your performance in team fights can make or break your chances of earning an S rank. As a start, you need to understand your champion's role. You have to know if your goal is to be dealing damage, peeling for carries, or initiating fights.
Positioning is critical. Timing your abilities to maximize their impact can also win you fights. And you should always communicate with your team to ensure coordinated efforts.
Don't be toxic
League of Legends is a team game but frustration or negativity can quickly spiral into poor decision-making and unnecessary mistakes. You should try to stay calm even when the game isn't going well.
Encourage your teammates rather than criticize them and focus on what you can control - your own performance. Moreover, take breaks between games if you find yourself tilting.
Learn the role-specific requirements
Learning how to get S Rank in League of Legends also requires you to understand the mechanics behind the different roles. The grading system takes what champion you play into account and there are different expectations for the different roles.
For instance, supports are evaluated more on vision and assists, while ADCs and mid-laners are graded more heavily on damage and CS. Understanding what’s expected of your role will help you focus on the right areas to achieve a high grade.
Conclusion
Earning an S every game is not only challenging but more so impossible. Even if you know every requirement in the 'How to get S Rank in League of Legends' rulebook, winning games also depends on your teammates and other uncontrollable factors. However, by improving your KDA, farming, vision control, and overall game impact, you can consistently achieve higher grades than before.
