I was incredibly amazed at how surprisingly well the taric in this form is doing on top. Definitely a nice guide!

Pretty 10/10 tbh, plowed through Silver ELO just by playing Taric top, will do again.

Great guide, even though it's a little outdated as Taric is back in the support meta. Still a well structured guide with emphasis on what matters most with Taric. Great job on explaining his strengths and weaknesses as that's surely gonna help me next time i face one ;) Keep it up!

No sunfire broski?

Very nice guide! Well organized and certainly helpful.

Thank you for this guide! Been a fan of Taric, especially on top since S2!

Nice!

Great guide! Made me understand Taric more, even before he gets his upcoming rework ; -;

I understand that you're just offering criticism, and I actually appreciate it since not everyone bothers to do so. The only reason I said the whole "agree to disagree" thing is because I imagined the conversation would get kindof cyclical from there on. I'm also a long term taric player, though I initially started playing him back when the ap smashmaster build was still a big thing, since then I've played him in top, jung or supp depending on what I was into at the time. I feel like depending on the team that surrounds him he can scale either poorly or very well. If all your team needs is to keep one specific individual down then Taric is better than most at doing just that. Conversely however that also means that when you need more broadly applicable lockdown then taric suffers, just getting random E catches as you said. I think that it's a little more often then not when taric is in the top lane role and not support, where more CC is critical, that as the game goes he doesn't fall off as often.

But as stated, yup, this'll all be moot in like 3-4 weeks.

This is true, and all of Taric's items have CDR. So what's the point of even mentioning it? I'm talking about your setups for lane, which is the most important factor of success as top Taric (Doing nothing in lane provides them free farm and you don't scale). Taric has good trading power early on for about 6 levels. After that he starts to fall off *really* hard. I would suggest a rune page like this; AD or Hybrid pen marks (Preferential choice), Scaling Armor seals, Armor quints and MR blues. You don't really need CDR in runs because all of his core items stack CDR. You also neglected to include Ionian boots of Lucidity, which are broken as hell.



The overcapping thing is an issue yeah when you suggest CDR runes on a champ that doesnt need them lol. His core items should be like IBG/Frozen Heart and CDR boots+Spirit Visage in most games ( wouldnt deviate too heavily from that build) which is 40% alone. And on the second part, you just reiterated what I said about passive laners (they should scale exponentially or they are worthless) and perhaps you should clarify things like that before I assume you actually mean being passive.



Except that Taric sucks outside of lane, other than for random E catches. He does minimal damage, and is mostly ignored. As stated, he does not scale at all in terms of damage. His ult becomes negligible and his only merit beyond laning is his stun.

Now I'm not flaming you or Taric, or Top Taric, or anything. Im simply trying to help. I've played Taric since season 2 and he was my most played champion that year. I occasionally still play him top lane myself, otherwise I wouldn't have even looked at the guide.

This is all moot anyway as his rework is slated for release after Aurelion Sol.

Well the thing is that a lot of Taric's figthing power is tied to his CDR. The more CDR the more damage he outputs, the more often he can heal and the more value he gets out of individual stuns. Once capped out he can shut pretty much anyone out of a fight and pound them into the ground.

However if he normally tries to build, without runes and masteries, for CDR he doesn't end up getting the best item setup because after iceborn/frozen heart and spirit visage he run's out of great options. He could opt for getting both iceborn gauntlet and frozen heart but that leaves him with a lot of armor, but no health, makiing it inefficient defensively, and more mana then he will generally need. Having the 15% CDR from runes + masteries not only puts him into the 45% cdr cap which makes his late game rotation much more effective, but he also doesn't have to build any awkward items solely for the fact that they have CDR to do it, allowing him to build better raw stats aswell. It helps that he also scales into his normally lategame orientated high cdr state after only one item, which after getting he can then use to be very aggresive. There are other laners, like Jax or Nasus, which can be relatively passive early on, but become a bigger and bigger threat as they itemize. I'm aware that not trading at all is stupid, and when I said I played him passively I didn't mean to that extreme, I simply meant trading to keep ahead on CS as opposed to going for kills before level 6.

I know with other other toplaners that are lane orientated, that that strategy wouldn't be correct, but as you said that's with the exception of champions who scale as the game goes on. I feel that with this build Taric is one such exception.

That's not a helpful statement. It implies that both of us are stubborn. I am simply looking at these things in a tactical view; the things you have listed due not suit Taric's actual playstyle, especially not your passive laning.

No top laner should be passive unless they are designed to scale significantly to late game (Which Taric does not), and even then they need to show some teeth.