How an Iron 4 Shitter Hit Gold 4

What I Knew Before I Started
My account is old. Like, OG old. My first League experience was in the fall of 2010. I played a lot of norms and a little bit of Twisted Treeline (God do I miss that map).

I wasn’t good. In fact, I was terrible. Over the years, I had an on again off again relationship with the game, but never put any effort into actually learning. I was perfectly content to log in, dick around a bit, and log off.

Eventually, I found my way to ARAM, and that became my primary way of playing. Through ARAM, I finally began developing the skills of landing and dodging skill shots, kiting, attack-move, and mentally tracking enemy ult cooldowns. I still wasn’t good. I was terrible! But I was still having fun, and that is all that mattered to me. For years, this was all League was for me.

On occasions, I put some time into ranked matches, and got as high as Silver 3 circa 2013 or 2014 as a support player - though in those days, support was a much simpler role than it is now, and I was largely carried in those games. I wasn’t playing to win! I was playing to be less of a liability than my lane opponent.

In 2025, though, things were suddenly different. I had spent significant time across the late twenty-teens learning Counter Strike: Global Offensive, achieving DMG rank at my peak. I had spent about two months in 2022 learning Starcraft 2 before reaching my goal of Platinum. I wanted a new challenge.

In August 2025, I decided that I wanted to hit Gold in League of Legends, and I decided to do it as a jungler. Now, as of June 2026, I have achieved that goal. This is what I learned during that journey. I am still not good at this game. I’m terrible! Getting to Gold took nearly 400 games across nearly a full calendar year! With work and life and other commitments, I was only playing 6-10 games per week. But I did it!

What I Had to Learn Before My First Ranked Match
Before I began my journey in the Jungle, I already knew some of the things I would need to learn. These are not things that a less experienced player would necessarily think of learning, but these proved essential. By no means is this comprehensive. There is so much more you can and should learn, but this is merely what worked for me and got me to Gold.

Simplify the Game
League of Legends is, by its nature, a game that requires wiki-level knowledge to play at a high level. The Jungle role is especially prone to mental overload if you don’t structure and organize what you are learning. But how is an inexperienced player supposed to understand the role well enough to create that structure when they don’t yet know what the elements of that structure are? You have to simplify, and through my experience, I can perhaps direct a good path to start on. Reduce the role to its simplest form, and begin practice in Custom Matches.

Pick One Champion
The first step in simplifying is to reduce your mechanical learning as much as possible. That means focusing on one champion, that way you are only taking on one set of abilities and one primary rune page/buildpath. The sooner you can forget about pressing Q, W, E, R, etc and start intuitively activating abilities, the better. 

The most important thing is to pick a Champion you’ll have fun playing. Don’t be a slave to tier lists; pick the Champion with a cool skin you like, or lore you like, or whatever reason you like them. That being said, there is a massive upside to picking a champion that provides you with tools to make learning easier. The most valuable tools in my experience are:

1. Chunky (makes Jungle monsters less of a threat and increases chance of survival in fights)
2. Controlling (slows, stuns, knockups, roots, fears, anything that attacks an opponent’s agency)
3. Clear Combo (an obvious, easy to understand and consistently used combo of abilities)

 I recommend any of the following four Champions as strong options that fit this identity:

1. Amumu
   Chunky: 5/5 Naturally gets chunky as he levels up, and build often compliments this
   Controlling: 5/5 Two stun abilities, one skillshot (Q) and one huge area-of-effect (R)
   Clear Combo: 4/5 Not complicated, but does require a skillshot landing
2. Nocturne
   Chunky: 4/5 Naturally gets chunky as he levels up, but can still be fragile sometimes
   Controlling: 3/5 Fear is not the most consistent crowd-control mechanic, but is impactful
   Clear Combo: 4/5 Clear order of abilities, but does require a skillshot landing
3. Volibear
   Chunky: 4/5 Naturally gets chunky as he levels up, and build often compliments this
   Controlling: 5/5 Q stuns, E slows, and they are very intuitive to use together
   Clear Combo: 3/5 While intuitive, you’ll need to learn to auto-attack reset to get full value
4. Xin Zhao
   Chunky: 4/5 Naturally gets chunky as he levels up, and build often compliments this
   Controlling: 5/5 Every ability provides some level of crowd control
   Clear Combo: 3/5 Most complicated of these four champ, requires skillshot landing

Learn to Pilot
You’ll need to get the hang of movement, abilities, etc of your chosen Champion. There’s no better way to do this than Custom Games against AI. A 1v1 against a Beginner Bot is a fine way to start. As you get comfortable, increase the challenge by going against an Intermediate Bot. Maybe even try 1v2 or 1v3! The goal of this practice is to grow comfortable with the abilities/combos and get rid of the thinking time of “I want to use this ability” and “Which key is that again?”

Learn to Clear and Contest Scuttle
Find a youtube video of your chosen Champion’s primary clear. Ignore the world record videos and look for a coaching video. Learn the order of abilities to level up, the timing of using abilities, and practice leashing (moving away from a monster to get closer to your next camp). This will help you clear faster by cutting down your time spent walking to the next camp, but be careful not to spend so much time walking away that you aren’t attacking. It’s a difficult balance to kill a monster as fast as possible while also moving towards the next camp as much as possible.

Your goal is to be able to reliably kill all 6 level 1 jungle camps before the Scuttle monsters spawn in the river, and this serves as a benchmark at all levels for your first clear. As you rise in rank, you should be continuing to practice and get the clear even shorter. Since your first fight each game is often over which jungler gets to kill the Scuttle, arriving at the Scuttle just before or as it spawns is a huge advantage in the early game where fights are sometimes won just by being the first Champion to attack.

Learn about Uptime and Downtime
While laners must learn about wave state and the nuances of the minion waves themselves, the jungler’s job is much simpler. You need to learn the idea of uptime and downtime.

Uptime is when you have jungle camps you can clear. Downtime is when there are no camps to clear. Until you are either level 18 with a full build or your team is pushing for the win, uptime is your reserved, protected “you” time. Ignore your team and clear your camps.

When you get downtime, i.e. you have finished clearing your camps, now you go make a play/ On average, in the early game, you have about 10-20 seconds to make a play. Then, you can base, buy, and get back to the first camp on your weakside right as it spawns to begin your next clear.

As you get stronger from levels, items, etc, your clear will accelerate, leaving you with longer and longer periods of downtime between clears. In these low elos, the number 1 difference between power and weakness is gold. Farming your camps is by far the most reliable way to get that gold.

As you climb, you will begin to grow an instinct for when to break this rule and skip a camp or two to be in the right spot at the right time. I had no need to do this until mid Silver.

Learn How to Read the MiniMap
Understand the concept of your Strong Side and Weak Side. The Weak Side is the quadrant of the map where your clear begins. The Strong Side is the quadrant of the map where your clear ends. Expect to make the majority of your plays on the Strong Side of the map.

Understand Lane Priority. If your teammate is pushed forward in a lane with decent health/mana, they have “Priority”, meaning they are applying pressure to which the enemy must respond. As such, your teammate gets to act while the enemy must react, ergo the term Priority. Likewise, if your teammate is trapped under tower while the enemy lays siege at their doorstep, the enemy has Priority. The enemy can act, your teammate can only react. When you are looking at the map to decide what to do next, you need to understand that choosing to take actions when the nearby enemy has priority is inherently riskier than when your teammate has priority, because the enemy can rotate to fight you while your teammate may or may not be able to safely follow up and help you (or vice versa if your teammate has priority).

Learn Your Itemization
Entire dissertations could be written on the finer points of itemization. For me, I found a simple, practical formula that worked for me. Using the various websites that offer item builds for champions, I concocted the following universal formula to follow:

1 Main Item - What I build first, always, no exceptions. Same first item every game.
1 Boot - Have two options in mind. The first option is my preferred option, the “best” boots for my champion. The second option is the reactive option, something that I need because of the enemy team. For my low-elo climb, the second option was typically Mercury’s Treads, which I built when the enemy had 3 or more champions with strong CC abilities.
2 Core Items - Like the Main Item, these are built every game, no exception. They represent the core of my power.
2 Flex Items - This is where your build gets innovative and reacts to the enemy team. Are you dying too fast in teamfights? Build the items that work with your champion to help you survive. Need to put out more damage? Build the items that work with your champion to up the output. Etc etc. Need an easy shortcut for this step? Use the recommended items page in the shop, and choose the items that show as being good against the strongest members of the enemy team.

Don’t Die
The number 1 predictor of a loss is lots of deaths. You are almost always better off being cautious and learning through experience when to be aggressive than you are being aggressive and learning when to be cautious.

That being said, go ahead and mute your teammates. Listening to your teammates is like cheating on a test by reading off the person next to you. They’re stuck in the same class you are, do you really think they know any better than you do?

What I Learned in Ranked Matches

What I Learned in Iron

1. Irons don’t know how to end, so games will last for ages. Hit towers after a successful gank. If your team starts to get a strong lead and is clearly more powerful than the enemy, it’s okay to spend downtime working with a laner to destroy their tower. In Iron, taking towers will win more games than taking the neutral objectives.
2. Iron junglers don’t know how to clear. You can get an item (gold) lead just by clearing effectively and efficiently.
3. Patience. Whether ganking or teamfighting, you don’t have to just dive in and blow your load. Dance in and out, avoiding damage while buying time for your cooldown timers so you can use your abilities a second time.
4. Use your vision to control the objective pits. There’s so many great ways to use wards, but for now, just ward the objectives so you know if the enemy tries to take them.
5. Ganking requires approaching from the right angle to maximize the time you can spend between the enemy and their own tower. Try to approach the lane as far behind the enemy as you can, while of course preserving your own safety (see Don’t Die above).

What I Learned in Bronze

1. Watch for level 1-3 invades, and ward your strong side buff before heading back to start the clear on your weak side. If the enemy jungler takes your strong side, go take theirs.
2. Bronze likes gimmicks, so if you can survive or beat their gimmick, they’re often out of tools and fall behind.
3. Don’t be a Bronze. Good fundamentals beat cheese/gimmicks. If you’re losing to cheese/gimmicks, you need to give thought to the fundamental that beats it and focus on improving that aspect in future games. Faster farming, better use of vision, better jungle tracking and pinging, etc.
4. Earn the right to take an objective. To take an objective, you need either unquestioned priority on both adjacent lanes or you need to gank one of those lanes to create unquestioned priority. Then and only then do you take the objective.
5. Ganks require holding abilities for the right timing - a loaded gun and a firing gun are both dangerous, but an empty gun is not. The threat of an ability is almost as strong as the use of that ability. This is doubly true for CC and movement abilities! Hold on to these until AFTER the enemy uses their escape tools (flash, their own movement abilities, etc). There’s nothing that makes you feel more useless than wasting your hard CC on a Fizz who just leaps away unscathed.

What I Learned in Silver

1. It’s time to start building a champion pool by adding a secondary champ to use if your main gets banned. Initially, I played Volibear with some limited experimentation. Once I hit silver, I added Nocturne as my secondary pick. Once I got to mid Silver, I found I was far more consistent on Nocturne than on Volibear, and switched to using Nocturne as my main and Volibear as my secondary.
2. Vision is key, and you need to start thinking about it more dynamically. Vision in the enemy jungle is worth more than vision in the river, but vision around the next spawning objective is some of the most valuable in the entire game. Some champions like Nocturne don’t need a sweeper, because their ult lets them gank from beyond vision entirely. Sometimes, though, you still want that sweeper to get vision of an enemy Shaco or Evelynn while you take an objective. Start innovating with how and when you use your vision tools.
3. Good jungle tracking is essential to help your teammates avoid feeding. Any time the enemy jungler shows up on the mini map, ping them to alert your team to their location. After your first clear, if the enemy jungler doesn’t contest the same scuttle you’re going after, give a warning ping on the other scuttle and on both adjacent lanes to warn them of a possible gank incoming. The more experience you get, the better you know what you should be doing. Coincidentally, that also gives you knowledge of what the enemy should be doing, since they have the same job you do. Use that information to give warning pings when your teammates are doing something that you would try to punish if the enemy did that.
4. Use your first clear uptime to wait for a teammate to reveal themselves as the carry. Who’s doing well right out of the gate? If it’s all tied up 0-0, who is CSing well? 70% of your downtime should be spent camping that lane with ganks. Pitch a tent. Make the enemy rage. 30% of your downtime is used to stabilize a 50/50 lane or contest objectives. 0% is spent on a feeding lane (seriously, ignore them). Be willing to be flexible enough to change your mind as the game continues. You can’t be everywhere on the map, so if you can get someone else strong enough to roam on their own, there’s now two of you roaming instead of just you. That’s a force multiplier! That’s the real goal of ganking: a strong enough teammate that they can gank elsewhere for you.
5. Ganking requires attention. You need to know what resources the enemy has and decide the win condition and the abort condition. A win condition is the minimum result that you can call success. A kill? Burning a flash or other summoner spells? Forcing them to base right before an objective? Know when you’ve gotten the best value you can, and move on to the next thing. An abort condition is the reason to call it off, regardless of outcome. They got safely under their turret? Enemy jungler also showed up? Your CC ability didn’t land? Don’t waste time, leave and go do your next thing (basing, farming, etc).
6. Laners are greedy as hell and seem to lack object permanence. If your gank doesn’t get a kill but burns the enemy flash, ult, etc. and you still have downtime, hang around just out of vision for a few seconds. They just might walk right back out thinking you’re far away, and you can re-gank, secure the kill, and maybe take a tower plate.

Kernels of Wisdom

1. Laners will want to blame you. It’s not your job to win their lane.
2. Bad players won’t understand why you never gank for them while the rich just get richer. See point 1.
3. Bad players will be confused when you prefer taking an objective over securing a kill on an enemy already backing under their tower. See point 1.
4. A retreating enemy is almost as good as a dead one. Don’t chase for more than a few seconds. The objective you can take during their absence (a tower/plate, a dragon, etc) is worth far more than securing the kill.
5. Watching replays feels pretty useless when you don't know what your mistake was and don’t know what the solution was. Instead, while playing, pay attention for the moment you know in your gut the game is won or lost. Watch your replays to try to identify if that was truly the moment the game tipped, or if it was actually something earlier that set the wheels in motion for the moment you felt it.
6. Watch every death in replays and figure out what choice you made that led to your death. If this gets tedious, it’s because you are probably dying too much and likely being too aggressive as a whole.
7. Aggression has two phases: the aggression that says start fighting and the aggression that says keep fighting. Pay attention to both. Sometimes starting a fight was the right choice, but continuing too long and not disengaging was the mistake.

My First 100 Games
I played 97 games as Volibear, 2 as Nocturne, and 1 as Amumu.
I banned Briar through Iron and Bronze, but I banned Kayn in Silver. Now, I just ban Briar. My teams seem to tilt less when they never have to play against her.

Common Opponents in First 100 Games

Champion	Games Played	Winrate	Expected Winrate	Lessons Learned
Kayn	10	80%		Kayn takes more finesse than a lot of online coaches give credit for. In Iron and Bronze, opponents had trouble piloting and understanding the power spikes.
Master Yi	7	57%		Jungle tracking is essential to keep your team safe. Even if you play perfectly, you cannot count on your team to not feed him, so you need to make sure your team has as much info as possible.Master Yi players like to cheese with a level 1 smite steal of your buff, so hold your highest damage ability and be ready to smite fast on your first camp.
Warwick	7	71.4%		Warwick is often taken by players who ignore fundamentals, since his passives compensate for many shortcomings.Hold your CC to interrupt his ultimate and try to keep his attention on you instead of your team.
Nocturne	5	80%		Nocturne will get his ganks. You can’t stop it, and you can’t effectively match.But if you farm efficiently, you can beat him in lots of 1v1 situations, so invading is a strong counterplay, especially pre level 6.
Lillia	5	60%		Another case of a seemingly simple champion that low elo players don’t understand how to pilot efficiently. While her kit is oppressive, hold to the fundamentals and you should be able to stay ahead.

Hardest Opponents in First 100 Games

Champion	Games Played	Winrate	Expected Winrate	Lessons Learned
Evelynn	3	33.3%		Loves to invade. Level 1, level 3, level 6, doesn’t matter. Evelynn will try to cheese you at your camps.Use vision wards and sweeper to keep an eye on her. If you’re playing Nocturne, you can skip sweeper and use yellow trinket to keep the objectives and jungle entrances warded, and drop your vision wards as needed when you expect a fight or take an objective.
Kindred	3	0%		The kiting queen, this champ was a nightmare for my Volibear every time I played against it.I honestly didn’t learn much except how to clear my mental after a loss
Karthus	3	0%		Karthus will collect kills without ganking thanks to his ultimate. His clear is also unbearably quick.On the plus side, he starts and remains highly fragile throughout the game, so look to invade frequently if a nearby lane has priority.
Pantheon	2	0%		His E ability shuts down so much damage, and he can chunk teammates out of the fight very quickly.Don’t commit to a fight. Disengage and re-engage after cooldowns expire.
Teemo	2	0%		Cheese personified in a champion choice. Typically favored by off-role players who got filled to jungle, Teemo will be content to fill both his jungle and yours with shrooms, ganking only occasionally before an objective spawn.Use your vision wards and sweeper to keep your jungle clear, and try to have at least one of the two available for invades/ganks