Nocturne Build Guide by A Nearby Shrub

Introduction

Hey everyone, my name is A Nearby Shrub, I love to play Nocturne, he's fun, he can fear people, hit them from crazy distances with his ult, and all around just be an awesome champion to have on a team. I might not be a big bad lv 30 summoner. But I've played my fair share of Nocturne games and I think I have discovered a build that will be very, very good. Against AP nasty teams So read on! leave a comment. Tell me what you think, this is after all my first guide and I've put a decent ammount of work into it. Thanks for reading, and be sure to vote and leave a comment!

Pros And Cons

Coming soon

Rune Explanation

Choose Greater Quintessence of Attack Damage to give an edge in early fights and it also helps with last hitting minions in the beginning of the game. this will help you not fall behind the others in your lane and make everything easier for you and your lane partner.

Greater Mark of Desolation

To keep damage up later in game take nine Greater Mark of Desolation. This will help you make their tanks a little less frightening, and remove the little armor other champions have.

Greater Mark of Desolation

Having nine Greater Seal of Armor gives a huge early game lead on just about everyone in armor. This means you will be taking less damage and in turn living longer and staying in the lane longer, this means more experience, and more gold for you.

Greater Glyph of Scaling Magic Resist is a cheap rune that can benefit you greatly. I choose the per level ones because by the time you are level 6 they have almost caught up with the base ones and will be better at lv 18 when that MR will really matter against things like Karthus's Requiem and Lux's Finales Funkeln.

Masteries

The thing to remember about this build is it is a damage and tanking hybrid. I dont take any defense masteries because i feel that if i did i would be doing hardly any significant damage at all late game and that is bad news for my team. I dont get 3 points in Vampirism because i already have a Wriggle's Lantern, and i dont think that it would make so much of a difference. Instead i use those points to max out Swiftness . This allows me to really use Frozen Mallet to its full potential. with swiftness I am able to hopefully catch up to someone and apply Frozen mallet's on-hit even when Duskbringer is down. It is more of a choice to help the team than just myself.

Items, What and Whys

This is where things get tricky. With the introduction of the Maw of Malmortius, I realized that that would be a great thing to use in an offtank build. and here we are.

So, i start off the game by buying a Cloth Armor and five health potions. getting the health potions really helps you stay in the lane longer and get more experience from it. Try to stay in front of your partner(if you have one of course) so that they enemy will target you and not him first. And let your partner know this so he does not fall too far from you.

after this i build the razors before getting boots. you can do either or in this situation, if you're not having trouble getting back to the lane buy the razor first, if the opposite is true, get the boots, be flexible.


I stress or. This guide is made to counter AP teams and the MR wont be necessary against AD teams.


, I then build straight into Frozen Mallet to help the team kill people who are trying to get away. Being an unstoppable killing machine is nice and all. But a team who knows how to support each other is the team who wins.

at this point health is not so much of an issue anymore, but doing damage is. that is where the Maw comes in. it gives me a Hefty boost to attack damage while providing a decent amount of MR and a shield, sweet right? This way, you can boost your MR and raise your effective health while still increasing your damage output.


Who dosent love Atma's? but seriously, Atma's is amazing and it brings out the off-tank's full potential. It will give you a major boost in attack damage from your Frozen Mallet and make you do some crits in the process


I build this last to give a final boost in damage and speed combined. further increasing the damage out can put out while also increasing the damage they take if the other team has built armor.


you can build this if you want. but against an attack damage heavy team it will not do you much good. in the case that the other team is heavy ad, i'd replace this item with Randuin's Omen. Because usually AD carries in my experience get a decent amount of attack speed. Getting randuins would be a good counter to all that jazz with its use ability

Summoner Spells

The Primary Spell setup i use in games. This lets me use Exhaust on players that are outputting heavy amounts of damage and slow down runners.


Replacing Flash with Ghost allows me to catch up to runners if the exhaust is down as well as get away if flash would not have saved me


replacing Exhaust with Clairvoyance might seem strange but hear me out. It can be very useful for helping the team know where people are, and are not. and it can also help while playing nocturne!

In a situation where someone uses Flash or Ghost to get away from your team as youre chasing them and you use Paranioa, well then youre out of luck if they get outside of your vision. so, lay down that Clairvoyance where you think they are running to and hope they pop up. The main point is. It can help nocturne land Paranoia on things that he would not have been able to with out it.