Reign of Gaming

AD carry GP and early Glacial Sejuani

1. Look up a good guide for every champion you commonly play with or against. Pay attention to the champions abilities, maxing order, and item build in order to figure out what that champion is capable of. Unless you are familiar with every single champion on the enemy team, you are a liability to your team, as you could get caught, out played, and/or outfought simply because you don't know what the enemy can do. It's just as bad if you don't know what your allies can do. If you're serious about this game, you should actually take the time to play every champion in the current metagame 4-5 times so you really know when their power spikes, when it falls off, and how they'll behave during the laning phase and in teamfights.    

2. Learn every role until you can play 2-3 champions in all of them at 1200 elo. Firstly, being competent at multiple roles is an asset to your team, whereas unless you are in a 5 man premade, only playing 1 role forces everyone else to work around you. Secondly, you need to be roughly aware of what each person should be trying to do in game, at all times. The best way to get a handle on this is to be able to do it yourself. If you don't understand what everyone else is doing and why, you get caught, lose lanes, lose objectives, and lose teamfights. In addition, you need to be able to tell when people are being dumb and not doing what they need to, so you can punish them if they're enemies or help out if they're allies. 

3. Once you have done the above 2 things, and therefore have a good understanding of the game, you should start specializing in certain roles and champions. Have an arsenal of 3-4 champions in 2-3 roles that you are very confident in, and know exactly when to pick which and why. 

4. Find other people who play the game IRL and play with them. 


Let me add this. I don't mean to be rude, but if you had a very good understanding of the game, as you say you do, you would not be at 1200 elo. Mechanical skill only really matters at really high elo; until you get there, your understanding of the game is what will decide a fair match almost every time. In a sense, your elo IS a measurement of your game understanding. I recommend reading this guy's take on the topic: http://lolspot.net/2012/02/12/5hitcombos-take-on-elo-hell/ 

To Yaamahri

1. Kog
2. Twitch
3. Vayne
4. Trist. 

Is that list calculated for total damage output or single damage output?

I've been playing a lot of  twitch lately, he's pretty good. Expunge and passive are pretty decent in trades, and casket slow lets you get in extra hits. His q lets him escape ganks other people can't, and of course his ult makes him a terrifying enemy in team fights. The problem is that his Q is basically his only repositioning tool, which pales in comparison to the dashes on all the other ad carries, so if he gets caught he's out. Guess pro players don't want to take that risk. 

Runaans I found wasn't that good on Twitch, for multiple reasons. 
1. If you're at a safe distance to use your ult, the bolts aren't in range. When they are in range, usually you want to be backing up instead of shooting.
2. Getting max stacks on multiple targets isn't that hard, and your casket really helps. 
3. Because your ult already hits multiple people, RH is basically competing with AD and crit, instead of simply multiplying your damage output like it does for other carries.

Still, it's a LOT stronger than it used to be, and AA certainly wasn't trash before. 

A couple of questionable items, but very solid overall. If you're ever going to update this, I'd really recommend organizing it into an actual Elementz-style tier list, or at the very least, list the items in alphabetical order.

The only thing I disagree with strongly is Distortion Upgrade being tier 5. You ask, "How much benefit would a couple extra Flashes, Teleports, or Ghosts be?"

Let's just look at flash. Amumu, Alistar, and Galio use flash as a core part of their combos, and whether or not they had it available can alone decide a teamfight. These champions should ALWAYS get this upgrade, because flash gives them capabilities that an infinite amount of gold spent elsewhere could not. The fact that this upgrade is not just good, but mandatory on a few champions should already qualify this upgrade for tier 3 or 4 by your definition, and we're ignoring a bunch of it's effects. I urge you to reconsider the placement of Distortion. 
 

• Teamfights basically decide the game, so you should choose when and where you fight very carefully. You should only be looking to start fights that are in your advantage.
• Whether or not a fight is going to be in your advantage is an extremely complex question that top level players regularly get wrong in tournaments.
• Aggressively charging in just because their carry is targetable simply isn't putting enough thought into the matter. 
• Bottom line, an aggressive attitude towards initiating is going to net you more disadvantageous fights than not, which your teammates will not want to follow you into. 

There's not much advice I can give you other than play more to get a better feel for when a teamfight/fight will be in your advantage, and in the meantime play safer.

... not sure how you can look at those graphs and think, clearly nothing worthwhile about Arp...

My friend usually beats my darius with tiger udyr. He gets a crap load of AD and wriggles, which lets him win trades by activating Q then lifestealing like crazy in W stance. When I run he bear's and lands another Q. 

Could you go into more detail on why you use the most efficient items possible for your base values? I always thought (and so do the rioters, according to a post I saw somewhere) that the basic items, ei AP tome, longsword, should be used. The reason that needlessly large rod, BF sword, etc are more efficient is to reward the player for not spending money for a longer period of time, is it not?