Hello and welcome to my Udyr Jungle Tiger DPS and Off-Tank guide!

First of all let me say this is my first guide here on Mobafire, and I'd love to know what you think. Constructive criticism is welcome! Feel free to vote up or down, I just ask that you leave a comment explaining why, and any suggestions you have to make the guide better.

This is my guide on how to maximize both Udyr's burst and sustained damage from Tiger Stance, while maintaining the health pool and resistances necessary to fulfill the role of Off-Tank for your team. There are a few ways to play Udyr, this is just one of them.

I don't go over my actual jungling route in this guide (as of yet), however I'll be adding that section soon. In the meantime, several of the other Udyr guides have ample information on this subject and I encourage you to read them as well.

For the purposes of this guide, we're playing Udyr as a jungler, and as such Smite is required.

Your second summoner spell is largely up to you, however I find that combining Ghost with our Bear Stance allows for both better ganks, and greater chasing / escaping ability.

For runes, I go with the following:

Greater Mark of Desolation
Greater Seal of Evasion
Greater Glyph of Scaling Magic Resist
Greater Quintessence of Desolation

Armor Penetration helps with both our jungling and our dps on enemy champions. Dodge helps lower incoming damage both in the jungle and against those melee dps champions, and combines well with our passive. Magic Resist/lvl allows us to better fulfill our role of Off-Tank as the game progresses.

For masteries I go with 11/3/16. This gives us improved smite, some bonus attack speed, and more armor penetration, as well as giving us a bit more armor to help with jungling, improved ghost, higher exp gain, a bit of mana per 5, longer buff durations (essential for our jungle and ganking), and to top it off, a bit of extra move speed.

Note that Udyr's abilities are a little different from the average champion. All of his abilities are stances, leaving him with no "Ultimate", as most champions have. Also, any of his stances can be maxed to the rank of 5, leaving us with a choice to make: One of our stances must be left at 3 (for we run out of levels at 18). For the purposes of this build, we're choosing to leave Pheonix Stance at rank 3.

Also note, the mana cost of his stances decrease with skillups, allowing us to more efficiently "Stance Dance" the more points we have in the stances we're jumping between. For this reason, we leave Phoenix Stance until last, in order to reduce the mana requirements of our dancing.

Bridge Between

Entering a stance grants Udyr 10% attack speed and 3% dodge for 5 seconds. This effect can stack.

This is our passive, and gives us a great bonus for jungling and for fighting that pesky melee carry. More useful mid-late game as during early game we don't really have the mana pool to "Stance Dance" effectively (more on this later). Stacks cap at 3.

Wilding Claw

Persistent Effect: Udyr's attack speed is increased by 20/25/30/35/40%.

Active: Udyr gains an additional 15/20/25/30/35% attack speed for 5 seconds after activating Tiger stance. While active or for 5 second after Activation, Udyr's next attack deals 170% his attack damage plus 30/80/130/180/230 over 2 seconds as magic damage.

Cost
75/65/55/45/35 Mana

Udyr's Q and our main source of burst damage for this build. Grants a great bonus to our attack speed, synergizing very well with our Madreds Bloodrazor, and causes our Trinity to proc.

Iron Mantle

Persistent Effect: Udyr's attacks cannot crit, but he restores 12/14/16/18/20% of his damage as health and 9/10.5/12/13.5/15% of his damage as mana.

Active: Udyr gains a temporary shield that absorbs 60/100/140/180/220 (+0.5 AP) damage.

Cost
75/65/55/45/35 Mana

Udyr's W and a great tool both for mitigating some of the burst you will receive and for regaining some health off of creeps after a gank. Shields for a decent amount (better with higher resistances), and note that the health and mana gained in this stance is calculated before enemy resistances.

Blazing Stampede

Persistent Effect: Udyr mauls his target with such force that they are stunned for 1 second. This effect cannot occur on the same target for 6 seconds.

Active: Udyr gains 15/18/21/24/27% increased movement speed for 2/2.5/3/3.5/4 seconds.

Cost
75/65/55/45/35 Mana

Udyr's E and our best ganking tool. Combined with Ghost as a summoner spell, this can grant us quite the speed boost, allowing us to either rush in quick from the brush for the gank, or to make it away from our foes when we find ourselves in a tight spot. If you find yourself lacking damage in teamfights, this can also be a great way of assisting your teammates. By switching targets constantly, you can cause a lot of disruption for the enemy team, though this may not be your first priority. Great for interrupting channels such as Fiddlesticks' Life Drain, Maser Yi's Meditate, Katarina's Death Lotus, and Karthus' Requiem.

Wingborne Storm

Persistent Effect: Every fourth attack, Udyr engulfs enemies in front of him in flame, dealing 50/90/130/170/210(+0.25 AP) magic damage.In addition, Udyr's ability power is increased by 16/24/32/40/48 and his attack damage is increased by half of that amount.

Active: Udyr sends out pulsing waves of fire dealing 10/18/26/34/42 (+0.25 AP) magic damage each second to nearby enemies for 5 seconds.

Cost
75/65/55/45/35 Mana

Udyr's R and a great stance both for jungling and for early game, as well as creep farming. For the purposes of this guide, we're choosing Tiger Stance as our main source of damage and are leaving Phoenix until the very end. Don't get me wrong, it's a great ability, however my playstyle is more supportive of the Tiger path, and this guide is detailing how I build Udyr.

Personally I don't have a specific skill priority, but as shown above, I like to get to rank 3 in Wilding Claw by level 6 (when most champions are getting their ultimates) with at least 1 rank in Iron Mantle to assist in our stance dancing. 2 ranks in Blazing Stampede give us a moderate amount of speed boost on activation and give us our primary form of cc.

Beyond level 6, it's up to you. I prefer to maintain a balance between Tiger and Bear stances, while remembering to put more ranks in Turtle as we approach mid-end game.

We start off with the jungling norm; Cloth Armor and 5 Health Potion. Ideally, we should be able to purchase both Madred's Razors and Boots on our first blue pill. Razors will massivley increase our jungle speed, as will the boots, which also help speed us up during our ganks and travel time between lanes.

After these, I like to get a Recurve Bow. Personally, I skip Wriggle's Lantern and go for Madred's Bloodrazor instead, and the bow gives us some much needed attack speed on our way.

After the bow, I like to finish our Mercury Treads. The longer we are in CC the longer we aren't stunning the other team, or bursting down their carries. CC is a killer, and these help reduce that killer to a more manageable level.

After Merc Treads, I build a Trinity Force, starting with Sheen. Sheen alone will add a nice bit of burst to our damage, and by upgrading it directly to Trinity, we gain a plethora of stats, all of which are useful to us.

Once Trinity Force is complete (most likely nearing the end of mid-game), we want to complete our Bloodrazor. Trinity gave us our burst, and Madred's gives us our sustained damage in Tiger Stance, against both squishies and tanks alike.

Once these core damage items are complete, we want to start to beef ourselves up. We are the Off-Tank, after all. We gained enough health with Trinity to get by during mid-game, but now we need some more. Banshee's Veil answers the call. Even with the nerf to it's amazing passive, it is still a great item. It provides both health and mana, a good amount of magic resist (combined with our glyphs makes us quite tanky), and, of course, it blocks ANY ABILITY every 45 seconds. It could be Teemo's Blinding Dart, or Karthus' Requiem. Regardless, any blocked ability is a good thing. Get this!

Now that we have a good amount of magic resist and health, we should improve our armor a bit. Guardian's Angel is the perfect compliment to our defenses. Granting a large amount of armor, a bit more magic resist, and the ability to cheat death once every 5 minutes. With Ghost, Blazing Stampede and Iron Mantle, Udyr is great at escaping, even near death. Now, even when you go down, you get a second chance!

With just one item slot left, we're left with a choice. We can choose to further increase our damage output, or we can become even more tanky.

As for me, I like to go for a Hexdrinker. I've found playing Udyr that by this late in the game, enemy casters are the largest source of damage to us. Melee aren't really an issue at this point, as they have to put themselves in range of our 6 second cooldown stun and our burst. Casters, on the other hand, can throw nasty spells at us from range, while we close with them. Because of this, I like to go for the extra magic resist and the amazing passive on Hexdrinker. This can save your life when Banshee's isn't up, and combined with our Iron Mantle, allows us to block a significant amount of magic damage even as low as 30%.

If you're not having any problems with near death experiences and are generally stomping the opposing team, feel free to add more to the hurt. You can do this with any number of items. My favorite candidates would probably be the following:

Infinity's Edge: Combined with the crit on our Trinity, this item grants us a high amount of damage and a respectable crit chance.

Bloodthirster - Granting us a possible max of 100 damage and 25% lifesteal, this item is great. With our attack speed in Tiger Stance you'd be suprised how much health you can regain with this.

Zeke's Harbinger - Granting us even more attack speed, and giving our team the attack speed / lifesteal aura, this item adds a bit more survivability and is a great asset to your team's AD carry. It even reduces nearby enemies armor a bit more. Personally not my first choice, but someone on your team should have it, and you have a slot to spare. Teamwork!

I mentioned the term "Stance Dancing" a few times throughout this guide, and I realize many players new to Udyr may not know what I'm referring to. Let's take a look at Udyr's passive once more:

Bridge Between

Entering a stance grants Udyr 10% attack speed and 3% dodge for 5 seconds. This effect can stack.

As stated above, this is our passive, and it stacks up to 3 times. The duration is only 5 seconds, meaning that in order to maintain 3 stacks, we must change stances at least once every 5 seconds. This is called "Stance Dancing", and this can be used in many different ways.

The first thing to realize is that each of Udyr's stance's active effects is separate from it's persistent effect, with it's own short duration. This means that you can activate Wilding Claw to get the attack speed bonus and on-hit effect, and then immediately switch to Bear stance in order to stun on next hit as well. Changing stances does not remove the previous stance's active effect, it will continue until it's duration ends, as normal.

Early game we don't really have the mana pool to do this for very long without Golem Buff, but as we rank up our stances and the mana costs go down, we can start to Stance Dance for more prolonged periods of time.

There are many different benefits to Stance Dancing, and one of them is the ability to "Pre-Load" with Wilding Claw.

For instance, we could pop into Wilding Claw to ready the on-hit active and attack speed boost, switch over to Blazing Stampede to stun on our next hit, and then immediately jump back to Wilding Claw right after our first hit. This allows us to increase our initial burst. If we just Bear to our target to stun, and then Tiger for the on-hit, we only get one of those on-hit effects during our first few hits, since we have to wait for the cooldown to come up on Tiger. If we Tiger before Bear and then Tiger again after the first hit, we've increased our damage by causing two on-hit effects over 2 melee hits, as opposed to the previous 1 over perhaps 3 melee hits.

This is just one trick we're able to pull off using stance dancing effectively. I'm not the king of Udyr by any stretch but I hope this gives you some ideas. If you know of any others feel free to post them in a comment, and I'll try to incorporate them into the guide!

One last thing of note is that because our Recurve Bow and Wilding Claw give us a nice attack speed, Udyr is a great tower pusher. Just pop into Tiger Stance and whack away!

That's about all I've got for you right now. I'm sure I missed a few things, I'm pretty tired at the moment, but there it is. As I said before, feel free to vote up or down, all I ask is that you explain your reasons for doing so. Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are very welcome!