Kha'Zix Build Guide : Tinjus' Ultimate Kha'Zix Jungle Guide for Season 16

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simple cool guide!

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Still good for 11.13?

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Deep guide and very clear, nice

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Just getting back into League and picked up Kha when my other main got banned. Your guide was amazingly helpful and I may have found a new main.

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So useful!

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Hey Tinjus, I was wondering what you think of items like Collector, DD, or GA? Also I'm just getting into Kha'Zix again after playing him a few time when he was free and your guide has helped me get more insight to items and runes for Kha, thank you!

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Death's dance is good, GA and Collector are very average and IMO shouldn't be built

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hey Tinjus.
you were the reason I started Playing Kha'zix.
Thank you for all the guides and streams.

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Awesome and most complete guide.

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Thank you!

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Hey Tinus, when are you going to be adding your HOB rune page to your guide? it looks like a lot of fun to use.

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got some bonus tips from your youtube, tyty

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Nice job!

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amazing guide from an amazing khazix player!

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Thank you!

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It's very useful how the guide now matches items with evolutions, that's a very nice way to think about things while playing a game.

But the guide currently seems in two minds about whether is a good or bad item!

I suggest Youmuu's is an excellent first item for three reasons. It's the highest damage item against squishy opponents (which includes most mid-game opponents, as almost nobody except the top laner and will be building armor in their first two items). It's the cheapest big item, at only 2900 gold, and cost is important because a jungler's gold is capped (unless lucky with early kills). And it has a great build path, both components and are strong already and are things Kha'Zix would be building anyhow. The guide knocks the lethality, but the +20 lethality on Youmuu's gives around +13 or +14 armor penetration already by the time you complete the item, because as a jungler you are not going to be completing your second item until level 9 at earliest.

is more of a team-fighting item, in my opinion, and also does not give very much benefit until the opponents have higher armor, either from natural scaling or from items. The armor shredding (5% per ability / attack) is great if you have a mostly AD team, but is not - on average - as strong as the +20 lethality on Youmuu's unless you will require 7 or 8 hits to take that opponent down. Therefore I think is generally better taken as a second or third item.

I think:
matches a Q-first evolution
matches a W-first evolution (strong in team fights)
matches an E-first evolution
matches an R-first evolution

(but I'm not sure about the E-first evolution, I don't use that one so much...).

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Youmuu's is, has and always will be a strong first item because of its cost efficiency, theres no doubt about that. I never said Youmuu's was bad in my guide, I only mentioned that it isn't as strong as before the assassin update. Many builds involve taking it as a first item, but that doesn't mean its core by any means.

Right now Red smite + Black Cleaver as a first item is the superior item build because of the emphasis on dueling, and this is further enhanced by Evolved Q which synergises incredibly well with the armor shred and 20% CDR. Even with Youmuus, it WILL take at least more than 1 Q to kill your enemy unless you are miles ahead of them. Its inevitable, meaning that you cannot judge an item's power based on their stats alone. If you fail to take into account the utility that an item brings to the table then you will miss out on a lot of power. Black Cleaver possesses much more utility compared to Youmuus' 10% CDR and movespeed active. I would much rather have the 20% CDR of black cleaver which puts me at 40% with runes/masteries compared to youmuu's 10% cdr, and be able to cast Qs much faster. The fact that Kha'Zix's damage is more consistent overall now rather than always relying on isolation means that getting CDR as fast as possible is much more efficient than prioritising lethality.

I don't even look at lethality anymore, I buy items based on their passives and actives and determine what those items can actually enable me to do. It isn't like last season where armor penetration was a MUST HAVE. Since black cleaver is such a well rounded item, it works wonders for almost every situation, with it only being 200 gold more expensive and enabling you to do much more simply because of the 20% CDR. I would say Youmuu's is still the superior item for assassinating, but it is very easy for supports to peel off assassins in this meta, so I rarely find myself building youmuu's anymore unless they have a bunch of squishies that I can assassinate with ease.

Thinking of Black Cleaver as a teamfighting item makes no sense to me. It has always been for champions who can dish out multiple hits of physical damage quickly in a few seconds. It doesn't really have anything to do with teamfighting. If you're thinking that it works well with Evolved W (which I used to think), assuming you cast evo W on an entire team, you will only be shredding 5% of their armor, meaning that you have to wait another 5 seconds for your W to come back up where you can shred it again. Its a very gimmicky concept, and it has never worked for me in any of my games. Youmuu's movespeed active is flexible so it can work for all the evolutions, I'd much rather have that instead of black cleaver for evolved W.

Still, when it comes down to it, for squishies, and against bruisers/tanks is the way to go, regardless of your evolutions. The information is slightly outdated so I may update it soon. I did my best to explain everything but its very difficult to justify with there being so many variables.

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Thank you very much for the detailed response, this all makes sense!

I ran some careful computer simulations against various different opponents to look at the effects of lethality and to test which is the hardest hitting 1, 2, 3 and 4 item set for a full Kha'Zix combo (E-Q-AA with passive-W) - also taking a look at the DPS for a longer combo assuming evolved Q (E-Q-AA with passive-W-Q-AA-AA). (And yes, I appreciate that the passive could be refreshed for the second or third auto-attack using R or a nearby brush, but let's just assume R is on cooldown and there is no brush...)

The answer, as you might guess, is that it depends slightly on the opponent's armor and level, and also on what runes and masteries Kha'Zix has. But in all scenarios these items regularly feature: . The only thing which really changes is the order of taking those items, and the changes are subtle. The Black Cleaver is the best in DPS terms, because - as you rightly say - Kha'Zix DPS is mainly affected by the timing between Qs. (One tricky thing which I'm not sure about is whether it's better to fit in a second auto-attack when Q is just coming off cooldown, and so delay your Q because of the auto-attack animation, or whether it's better to use Q immediately?)

Six interesting results from my simulations:

1) From level 6 and a completed Warrior enchantment, give higher damage than , for the rest of the game. As Kha'Zix builds AD items, the benefit of Lethality marks becomes stronger and stronger, roughly speaking it's a 2-3% additional improvement for each additional damage item, depending on opponent armor levels - so Lethality becomes stronger as overall physical damage goes up, and in contrast the benefit of having +8 AD from runes becomes fairly trivial once you have over 200 AD. (But at early levels with no items, Attack Damage marks give fractionally higher damage against jungle camps, around 0.5% higher depending on camp. This difference at low level is so small that I suggest it can't be worth taking Attack Damage marks just for that, it probably makes zero difference to actual clear times, because of overkill. I'll try to reproduce the nice tests in this video to be sure!)

2) is the highest damage first item, because of its true damage bonus. It's especially strong if combined with because its true damage scales off Lethality. However, offers higher DPS, and health and other benefits, for less gold, so is overall a much more gold efficient choice.

3) , or other alternatives, are not worthwhile in the first three items unless the opponent has extreme bonus armor, like two or more full armor items. However, for a fourth damage item these overtake other items against any opponent with bonus armor of 60 or higher. At full build it's probably best to build to take down those armored opponents, because you can 1-shot squishy opponents with any build.

4) never features in the hardest hitting item sets for Kha'Zix. Its damage including the effect is pitiful compared with any of the items offering +50 AD and armor penetration.

5) is fairly high on the list - around the 5th strongest item - thanks to its raw +75 AD. It would place higher if Q is not evolved and if the target is not isolated, so that auto-attacks are a more important part of the damage mix.

6) For gold efficiency and DPS in the early game, it looks possibly better to rush instead of . This seems counter-intuitive, but makes a noticeable difference to jungle clear times because cooldowns are important and all large jungle camps carry some armor and need multiple hits to kill them. It only costs 825 more gold to have the stronger item, and the build path is also stronger - for example + gives you better combat stats than + . Obviously if rushing first, you delay the ability to smite champions when duelling, and you won't have the mana regen from Talisman.

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Thanks very much for this, it was really informative!

Theres no denying CDR is crucial for Kha'Zix in this meta, I'm just surprised at the results from your lethality test. I guess I jumped on the lethality hating bandwagon too soon and jumped to conclusions. Lethality runes were the original setup that I ran at the start of preseason, but I stopped due to the strong opinion of other Kha mains saying that they're bad. To me it felt okay, and it didn't really seem to impact my early game too much, but I stopped just to be safe. I'll definitely give them another try.

As for theres no denying that it possesses the highest amount of damage because that passive is just insane. This is also another reason as to why I've stopped running , because duskblade simply beats it it in terms of damage and I can still hit 40% CDR easily with .

is another item that I don't seem to pick up too frequently. Its usually bought for tanks but paired with evolved Q is so effective against tanks that it really doesn't matter if you don't take it anymore.

is universally known for being a niche item on KhaZix, but a lot of people misunderstand why it is so strong. Its clear that it won't provide as much damage compared to other items because 30 AD and a sheen passive just doesn't compared to something such as a duskblade. However, It does scale very well with levels, which further supports buying it when you're ahead. You don't buy trinity force for damage, you buy it for the 2 passives, the attack speed and CDR (the utility), which synergises well with a mobility based playstyle. I made a discussion thread that talks about it Here if you want to check it out (its outdated but still has good info).

I'm not sure about a Black Cleaver rush. 825 is still a big gold difference between the two items, and if you're behind it takes a very long time to finish. There are obvious benefits to Warrior which we don't need to go over and the extra 10% CDR from black cleaver isn't that noticeable anyway until you have 40% CDR which you need to have warrior to get. Also the armor shred doesn't work on jungle camps so the only benefit of black cleaver in the jungle is that extra 10% which as I said doesn't really have much of an impact or noticeable difference until you hit 40% CDR. There is also the matter of not having which actually makes a huge difference in clear times, that on hit damage is extremely powerful for any jungler trying to clear. I'd still say to rush warrior simply because of its cheap cost and the fact that you can do a lot with an early 60 AD, while with black cleaver you need 825 gold more in order to powerspike, which is a pretty big deal if you ask me.

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You're welcome. And yes, you're right about rushing being bad for farm, I was forgetting that its passive has no effect on jungle camps! (In addition, I actually tried this in a normal game last night and mana was a big problem in the 2nd and 3rd clears, without the mana benefits of .)

Basically the simulations I ran confirm that the build you are already taking is optimal. For the first big item, gives highest DPS for duelling, gives highest burst damage for assassinating.

and are the other most gold efficient items in pure damage/gold terms - I mean even before placing gold value on their additional passives and actives.

The only things in your build which are possibly inefficient are the early and the marks.

From level 6, with and your masteries and other runes, Kha'Zix will definitely do greater damage with . When it comes to marks, it's a pure question of numbers (the marks make no difference to combos, ability timing or movement). I therefore don't see that there is any way to know which marks are stronger, other than running the numbers. All the simulations I have run - against many different opponents - show that lethality marks are superior on Kha'Zix from level 6 onwards. But note that lethality marks are fractionally weaker than AD marks - around 1-2% less total damage - when Kha'Zix and opponents only have level 4 and Kha'Zix only has , which is maybe the case for your first gank. The lethality marks stay fractionally weaker until you have that sweet +60 AD from the completed and from then on they become the stronger choice.

Tinjus' Ultimate Kha'Zix Jungle Guide for Season 16

Tinjus' Ultimate Kha'Zix Jungle Guide for Season 16

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