hello im shadowshyguy and im here to bring you a Skarner guide. this is my first time making a guide so please feel free to tell me how i can improve my guides. anything from phrasing, item recommendations, to finding spelling errors is appreciated.

effective health: high
damage: hybrid (medium)
utility: high (suppression ult)
mobility: high ( powerful built in movement speed buff)
dueling: is a decent 1vs1 fighter but nothing extrodinary

Pro's
- spammable aoe damage
- fast clear speed
- very good supress ultimate that has tons of potential if used right
- can be quite tanky mid to late game.
- a great mix of a steroid and a shield
- attack speed = cooldown reduction

Cons
- pre 6 ganks are decent but nothing special
- easy to kill early on
- low natural sustain (before you bring up his e i will mention it later)




What is skarners job?
Skarners role:
offtank- skarner is meant to be semi tanky late game but not a full tank and building some damage instead
jungler- skarner's role in the jungle is to provide support to the lanes via ganks and pressure.
semi-carry- skarner is not a full carry. he cannot snowball very well but he can make use of gold from kills when they come by and can be somewhat scary if fed.
disabler- skarner has at least 1 reliable stun or suppresion

1. as a bit of a tank (not a full tank though)
2. to provide constant aoe damage
3. to focus and supress enemy carries.

One mistake i made in my old build and that a lot of people make is to build Skarner like a carry. Skarner is not a carry he is a semi-carry meaning that he cannot snowball hard enough to carry his entire team but he can make use of gold and kills and can cause problems for the enemy team if fed. play style wise Skarner plays similarly to hero's like Irelia and Nasus wherein he can build a Trinity Force and then build almost all tank items and still do large amounts of damage. this is because crytal slash works extremely well with the spell blade passive meaning that coupled with attack speed makes it so that almost every attack is a spell blade attack. to its core skarners damage scales better with attack speed and spell blade then it does with flat damage and thus i don't recommend building large amounts of flat damage. the example build i use has upwards of 80% bonus attack speed which gives enough attack speed to give 1.5 attacks per second meaning in 2 seconds you can output 3 attacks combined with skills and spell blade. i mostly recommend after Trinity Force building tankiness, attack speed, and utility.

tips-
recommend attacking between crystal slash casts to maximize damage output

if you initiating one thing i recommend is
Shurelya's Battlesong -> Flash into their team --> Impale their carry --> Randuin's Omen--> pull carry into your team --> profit??? (depends on your teams reaction)

i run 9/21/0 masteries on skarner

Offense Tree
in the offense tree i focus on attack speed, damage per level, and armor penetration for a boost in early game damage.

Defense Tree
i focus on early survivability in the jungle, tankiness, and take safeguard for easier tower diving.

Utility Tree
i dont build utility tree on skarner due to personal prefrence but if i were too i would recomend mana regen, movement speed, buff duration, and Artificer if your using alot of activatable items.

Marks


i take these marks due to the fact that they synergize well with skarners passive energize and because they give better early game clearspeed.

Seal's

standard runes for most meele or adc champs. gives you additonal survivability and tankiness early on.

Glyphs

again fairly standard runes on... well most champs honestly. even ap mids take these runes simply cause its nice early spell resistance.

Quints

fairly standard runes for most tanky dps, adc's, and ad offtanks. gives a small boost to early game damage... but even small boosts are appreciated. :)

energize
Energize (passive)

skarners famous passive. this decreases your cool downs simply by auto attacking. this the reason why it is emphasized that you build attack speed on skarner cause with his passive
attack speed = cdr.


Crystal Slash
this spell is your main form of damage. due to his passive it is a spammable aoe attack that can slow. synergizes well with Trinity Force


crystalline exoskeleton
skarners shield. it empowers him with bonus attack speed and movement speed while active makeing him an effective chaser and runner. its also quite nice for tanking due to the shield part. all around a great steroid.


Fracture
shadow? you said skarner had no natural sustain? what the hell is this then. okay skarner has one sustain move the problem is it's not that good. this is undeniably skarners most lackluster skill. the heal is fairly weak early on and is only effective when laneing skarner which most people don't do. its so useless on jungle skarner that i don't even put a point in it till lv13. it just doesn't give enough health to sustain him in jungle i am sorry :C


Impale
skarners bread and butter ability. unlike other single target suppress ults skarner is unique in the fact that his ult doesn't root him to the spot as well. in fact skarner can not only move while suppressing his opponent but he can drag the opponent around. in the hand of a skilled skarner player this ability could have a huge amount of potential. it also makes his ganks more effective.

Mercury's treads
a super meta pick because it is arguably the best pair of boots in the game. also its a nice source of early magic resist.

Trinity force
a very powerful item on Skarner due to the fact that he benefits from almost all of the stats (except 10% crit chance) and the sheen effect works amazingly with you q. this item is a majority of skanrer's damage. another item you could take is Iceborn Gauntlet but personally i still prefer this item due to the wider variety of stats it provides.

Randuin's omen
a very nice anti-carry/offtank item. the attack speed slow passive makes you very effective against right click carry's plus it give lots of health and Armour and a good active if you need to initiate.

shurelya's reverie
an item taken on skarner for additional health and the active which synergies amazingly with skarners ult

i will be continously updating my guides. i will procced to attempt to add things like a laneing guide. explanation of situationals, and some tips and tricks. i am just posting what i have so far.
( i apologize for how bad the guide used to be, i will focus on playing Skarner and ranked over the next couple of days to improve the guide)

- update 06/04/2013
spell check
mass makeover of build
added play style section
bit more in depth on Skarner role

- update 22/02/2013
spell check.
changed item order around.
made a separate section for testing items instead of mixing them with situation.

-update 21/04/2013
changed item order again. will update core item section later to compensate for the change