Playing passively

One of the hardest things for me to do when I'm playing League is to play passively. But sometimes that's just what you have to do. I was playing Sona with Caitlyn against a Volibear / Miss Fortune tandem. It was brutal. If I got in front of my ADC (which is what I typically do), the Volibear would just charge me and flip me back to his ADC who would promptly pound me. Part of the problem was that Sona is really squishy early levels (the lowest lvl 1 hit points of any champion in League. Part of the problem was i was playing aggressively. I was used to having a significant poke advantage over my opponent. Volibear started with a Doran's shield and I was never able to get anywhere near Miss Fortune. What I should have done was stayed back and helped Caitlyn farm. We should have stayed near our tower and I should have used my Q to keep the creep wave pushed just outside tower range (a trick that is somewhat easier with Sona then other support champs). It would have resulted in fewer deaths (I finished laning 0/4/1) and also gotten me a small amount of CS from keeping the minion wave level. Even then, it would have been difficult as MF is really good at pushing a creep wave with her AoE so we would have had to attack the creeps fairly aggressively. But it would have been a better game plan then just getting pounded and feeding their MF.

In our second game, my ADC went Cait again but I did two things different. First, I picked Nunu. His blood boil and snowball are much better to pair with Caitlyn then the poke of Sona. The reason is that Caitlyn doesn't have a gap closer. So where Vayne/Ezreal/Graves can finish off an opponent that I get weak, Caitlyn can't really do that. But Blood Boil + Ice Ball gives Caitlyn 1-2 extra auto-attacks against an enemy champ that she wouldn't otherwise have gotten. That's a powerful advantage for the champ with the longest base auto-attack range in the game. The other thing I did (as we were again playing a non-standard bot lane of Corki + Xin) was that I played more passively. Waited in the bush and poked them when they came near me. Nunu is inherently more tanky with more personal sustain than Sona (through his Consume) and can afford to play a bit passively while beefing up the ADC's ability to farm, farm, farm.

Every game is a learning experience. One of the really neat things about League of Legends.