Your walking through the jungle getting ready to gank that unsuspecting lane. Suddenly something charges you! you call your friend to help you. he reaches you and the two of you commence attempting to beat the brains out of your unknown attacker. you hit him for a short time realizing he wont stop. SLASH! your dead your enemy is still very much alive and now going after your friend. The unknown attacker slays him too. Now your whole team begins reacting. they run after the man but simply cant stop him. The man turns around and laughs. Suddenly 4 allies of his pop out of the woods and slay your remaining 3 friends. A women whispers ACED in your ears..... now you have had your first encounter with Xin-Zhao the off tank.

-a new build to show you how laning off tank xin would build. (not much diffrence)
-section about situational things
-section added Your partners in crime

Hello everyone.
I have been playing lol for awhile now and tried many guides on mobafire. I have played many different characters and tried lots of playstyles. But my favorite thing to do is jungle. I love ganking and love the advantage your team can get from having the solo lane. But this guide was not made to make you jungle with xin. (I simply am showing you how i do it). This guide was made because i think playing xin as more of a offtank may be a better idea. If you dont like jungling then dont you can follow the item sequence or just comment on the build. Basically if you like the idea but dont want to jungle, you can switch out the first item and take some attack speed. But anyway hope you like the build! :D

Hello everyone today looked at your comments and have come with a few changes! i traded out the zerkers for mercury's treads! also I removed the lantern completely from the guide! Me and my friend have done some calculating. now we have found that lantern is actually unnecessary in jungling and the damage and life steal are completely useless. So we removed it and get a later guardian angel. This gives us the 100 magic resist that we want in our off tank, and also gives us more armor.

Now people said i should remove warmogs from the guide. But warmogs gives your atma a reason to live! warmogs is the reason that the impaler is in the build! the extra health and damage is what makes everyone go after you. But with the new magic resist we will be able to surive much better. Thank you all who commented with the great suggestions!

pros
-survivability
-good damage
-good farmer
-amazing knock up
-charge
cons
-not as much dps as a glass cannon
-can get owned by cc

the skill sequence is kinda weird. i dont like the other jungling guides in skill sequence because they focus to much attack speed. i want my early damage to be more so i, after going the classic starting jungle, move into a more damaging sequence. focusing on three talon strike.

For the summoner spells i always get smite when im jungling. Also i like ghost on xin so that the enemies dont have a chance of escaping. Also ghost is great for ganking and really gives you more surprise factor when you come running out of the bush into a charge.

But for those of you who wont be jungling there are many options.

Smite

Exhaust

ignite

teleport

flash

I would say the best of these being exhaust. Just because it gives you that nice upper hand over the other ad champs in your lane. But my second best choice is ignite, simply cause i hate people getting away with 5 hp.

OK so i know lots of people are probably looking at this and thinking. "wtf xin is heavy dps champ why would you go offtank." But here's the deal xin is a great champ and has a knock-up along with great attack speed and a charge. these combine together to make him a dangerous champ. This is also sadly causes people to focus him. So offtanking allows you in this build to not only survive BUT kill the surprised enemy.

MESSAGE TO ALL XINS WHO ARE NOT JUGNLING!
remember that the guide is still easy to follow just dont get the early armor just follow the guide almost exactly after that and it still functions perfectly for the lane.

So the build starts with armor and healing pots. But this is just for the jungle. If you prefer doing laning then start with the dagger or boots, This will be moved into either ealry cc reduction or zeal thats up to you.

Next we will be getting our first pair of boots. This is because the boots will help you gank and chase the fleeing enemies.


Ok so now we have our speed now we need that attack speed that makes xin so dangerous! I KONW LETS GET ZEAL! yep you guessed it at this point we get ourselves zeal.

Now we are gonna finish our boots! we want that good early magic resist and cc reduction!

Alright this is where it gets weird. I go for phage here and try to get myself quickly to frozen mallet. the reason for this is simply i dont like people getting away, and with my mallet i make sure they dont, but the other reason is it gives us a pretty beast increase in health. at this point our items have costed about 6300 gold. this should have been aquired at about mid game with a good farming or jungling xin.

now we get atmas inpaler. this item now uses all that hp you saved up AND TURNS IT INTO DAMAGE!

now its getting crazy! here were gonna get ourselves a warmong aromr set. this will give us great amount of hp and will further increase our damage output. (remember to keep killing minions you will need to farm your warmong up)

now warmogs and guardians angel are interchangeable it depends on the enemy team. If they are mostly ap then get guardians angel first and then get warmogs.

end it all off with a phantom damage and you have your completed xin-zhao off tank!

Now while playing the off tank its important to be able to adjust to many different situations. For example maybe you feel like the enemy team has way to much crowd control and i must be a idiot for getting guardian angel instead of banshees veil... and in that situation i would be. Basically if you see the enemy is built heavy in one area, ap,ad,tanks??? then you need to adjust to these things. like a heavy ad team maybe get some thorn mail. or a heavy ap team get the force of nature and banshees veil.

Also maybe you would even want to change the skill sequence. Like lets say your with a ryze, at level 3 I get audacious charge and then commit to a kill.

When playing Xin-Zhao as a off-tank its important to remember that you are not the main damage source. you will be getting more assists and need to make sure you get those carries attention. The carries is something Xin has a easy time getting to and disabling. Use this as your method to help your team. Get more attention on you and less on ashe whos criting 500 every second. Keep your carries alive and you will have a great functioning team.

ok so for those you of you who are interested in the jungling section of the guide make sure to take a look here.

Basically jungling with xin is very simple.

I follow a easy path where i take first blue buff.
at blue buff you need to make sure your team knows how to keep an eye out for you. getting ganked killed and having your buff stolen is a very bad idea.
now while taking blue remember to pop ur heal potion and to correctly use smite and ur Q.

after blue i take wolves. (pretty basic hit and kill)

then i move on to 2 golems, then look at how my team is doing, if terrible i will go take a lane, or gank. If things are going well and no opportunity seems to be showing itself i move on to red. now before red make sure you have at least 3/4 hp. if not go back and get yourself a bit closer to the lantern. kill red and take wraiths.

NOW if the enemy team has no jungle and your feeling good, move into their jungle and reclaim your blue. this is a good boost and gives you a really long blue buff.

ok now we are around level 5. Now you can get your continuous gank on. at this level you can start pushing turrets like crazy with bottom, or just go up and take lane. this is the point where you have your lantern and you are just doing what needs to be done from the jungler.

REMEMBER TEAM FIRST JUNGLE SECOND!!!! nothing is worse than a jungler who thinks his jungle is more important than taking a lane or helping a player who wants a gank.

Now i know your thinking "ok now i know how to build but what should i look for in a laning partner cosmo?"

LOOK NO FURTHER! I have been playing a bit lane now, and think i have a few good suggestions.

Ryze
Ryze is your friend because he can stun and burst a single target, this combined with your other abilities really can get you that first blood that you love getting.
Taric
Taric has not only a great stun but also has a heal and a ok amount of damage
damge/stun
basically all i have to say in this whole section is xin wants a stun and some ok amount of damage. If you can manage to get yourself with that kind of person you will have a nice game :D

A team needs wards! In order to call yourself a real Team you need wards period. Warding up the jungle is what gives your team a advantage. So remember to always ward up and give your team what they need to survive.

this is the basic start of the guide. i still need some time to fill in all the minor xin details that many people will want.

I hope you like my idea of off tank xin. I hope to get some good comments and criticism so i can increase the quality of the guide! thank you for reading! :)