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Rakan Build Guide by

Rakan Support 11.19 / Extreme Mobility!

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Rakan Build Guide By Updated on

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Really great guide man, gonna pick up Rakan right now as my first support champ, reading this guide definitely gave me good knowledge on what to know. Thank you man

I used this tank build consistently and it actually got me to my first S on my fave.

I am kinda a rakan main he is one of my top 3 played characters with 95k mastery. But this build looks great can't wait to try it good job btw.

(19) |

Ty man, have good luck with your games

(1) |

For AP Raman maybe try going Luden’s Tempest and cosmic drive as the movement speed you get is insane

(1) |

I came here to fight Rakan mentally😂😂 . Regarding your guide, I appreciate it highly. Because of the effort you put into it, it deserves 1 vote 😁

(19) |

Thank you so much! And remember if you can't beat him, join him ;)

good stuff my man

(19) |

Thank you buddy, now go smurf it! 💪

(2) |

nice guide

(19) |

Thank you for your support! Good luck on your Rakan games :D

(101) |

Hey there,

Here’s the review you asked for in the thread!

Click for review

Cheatsheet and build

It would be worthwhile to make three separate builds talking about utility, tank & AP Rakan. Now all three are listed in the same place, which increases the length of the cheatsheet by quite a bit.
I don’t think Barrier is a viable summoner on Rakan. He doesn’t need those defenses in any scenario.
Some of the notes mention Imperial Mandate, while it is not present in the cheatsheet. Make sure your notes correspond to what is listed in the cheatsheet and avoid explaining why you take X or Y, but just say when to take X or Y.
I miss some things in the cheatsheet. For example in the tanky rakan part, there are only some example builds. Same for the AP build. Tt is just not clear to me what items are absolutely necessary and what items depend on your/the enemy team.
I’ve been playing a lot with Rakan lately and your threats & synergies are a bit weird. For instance, Janna is extremely hard to play against as she can easily deny Rakan engage Thresh is also a hard-ish matchup due to this, but you have both of them listed as very easy matchups.

Pros/cons

These are alright. However I think it is quite odd that you mention that he’s weak in 1v1s, considering that he is a support. In my eyes supports are rarely able to solo other champions, with the exception of certain picks & builds. Therefore I think it is obsolete to talk about this.

Runes

I’d swap the “Why take X Keystone” and the minor runes explanations. You also talk about keystones twice. This is just a waste of space, if you want to talk about the keystones separately, then that's fine. But don't talk about them with the minor runes as well then.
Demolish could be worth it in cases where you win lane/the matchup is roam heavy. If you get the chance to hit the turret & take turret plates this could give a ton of value.
At Second Wind: what do you mean by 'poke abusers'? It might be worthwhile to explicitly mention 1 or 2 champs here. Also, when do you take Conditioning? In my experience the enemy botlane tends to be either poke or all-in.
Your argument at Gathering Storm is kinda invalid. If you have a heavy scaling team like that, you do not need scaling runes. Once your team reaches that point they will roll over the enemy team anyway. I think a better argument is that Rakan actually has very decent AP ratio’s so if the game looks like it is going late, this rune will certainly be worth it.

Summoners

I already said so before, but I think taking Barrier on Rakan is just bad.
It is a waste of space to list the Flash icon next to all the other summoner spells. I’d just remove those and merely display the summoner you are talking about.

Items

Do not add items you do not build, such as Spellthief's Edge, Horizon Focus. If you see others building them then you should figure out why & say that rather then saying you flat out don't recommend it.
My major issue with the item section is that you end up calling most, if not all items “great” or “good” or “best item”. Then you continue listing their stats, which is unnecessary as everyone can hover over the icons to see what they do. Key here is describing when you should buy X or Y item.
Some of the pros/cons of the mythics are weird. For example one of Moonstone Renewer cons is “cheap item”, however 3 out of 4 mythics have that cost. The con of “no mana source” also doesn’t make any sense as all the items where you listed it have mana regen.
What about Locket of the Iron Solari?
The legendary items are basically one huge chaos. The AP, tank & enchanter items are all thrown in a mix and it is extremely hard to get any kind of overview of what to build.
To come back to the “listing stats” part, avoid explicitly talking about numbers. Humans are not that fond of reading numbers, so avoid using them.
Some items are quite questionable, like Void Staff and Demonic Embrace. In my experience the focus on AP Rakan support lies on amassing vast amounts of AP since his ratio’s are decent. It isn’t really played purely for the damage as you might as well go something like Brand or Zyra instead. Things like Staff of Flowing Water and Rabadon's Deathcap

Abilities & Combo’s

I recommend making some distinction between talking about what abilities do and how these abilities are to be used. It can also be worthwhile to add some more gameplay related information (such as not spamming Gleaming Quill in lane).
At The Quickness Approach Velocity is mentioned. Do not mention runes or items that have synergy when they are not included in your build(s).
At combo’s you list the cooldowns and damage of the combo’s. I recommend putting this in a spoiler since it is highly specific information and it doesn’t really tell your reader that much (since it is pre-mitigation damage and people rarely combo off-cooldown). There is also something odd with the widths of your clips, keep in mind that the maximum width of MFN guides is 762px and you should give these clips a max width of 600px or so.

Gameplay/Extra’s

Your main advice in the early game is to just wait for level 6. However, you could be a bit more extensive about this. Do you try to go for knockups, or do you just sit around? What do you do if the opponent pressures you? For example, as Rakan you can use Grand Entrance to peel your ADC and then dash back to him (which is also a great way to avoid ganks, rather than using Grand Entrance backwards and leaving your ADC to die).
Using Grand Entrance to clear casters is something you only want to do if your ADC wants to hardshove the wave. This context is not visible here and I fear it might mislead people.
Although I like the idea of adding strengths/weaknesses in the different gameplay phases they simply do not hit the mark. Yo end up repeating the pros/cons in the earlier part of the guide + saying things that I would classify as “common sense” such as level 3, 6, 11 and 16 powerspikes, being weak 1v1 and relying on teammates. When thinking about pros/cons, try to think about what makes the champion stronger/weaker compared to other champions in that role.
In the early game part, the Macro game section and micro game section are referenced. However, neither of these sections exist.
Although supports often fall behind in levels, it should definitely not happen because you are leashing the jungler. Why? Because you don’t leash anything for the jungler after the initial buff aside from maybe drakes and nash.
In these section it is assumed that a certain build is played ( Staff of Flowing Water, Redemption and Shurelya's Battlesong)), however in the items section there are (many) other items too. It's a wise idea to give multiple examples of items you could have (or just say 'your mythic' or 'you should have about 3 items').
You talk about several item actives/abilities in the teamfights part, however I think this is mostly wasting space as you end up repeating what they do and sometimes listing very conditional things (e.g. saying that Redemption is good against tanks, which is certainly not what you bought the item for). All these things can be said in a couple of sentences and there is no need to make large paragraphs like this for them.
Roaming as a support can also be done when the wave is frozen in front of your tower. It is not necessary that the wave is pushed to the tower, like it is for all other roles.
At roaming there is again some talk about runes/items. Do not list all these specific stats. Just list the items and say that they all give extra movement speed, which helps a lot with roaming.
I don’t think it comes as a surprise when I say that splitpushing on supports is extremely questionable. You just do not have the waveclear to clear waves. If you have to use Grand Entrance you’re wasting your escape and setting yourself up to die to whoever comes for you. Buying AP items specifically to enhance splitpushing is just a waste of gold as that is simply not the support's role (unless you're Hylissang playing Pyke and your team has Nash).
The first part of the vision section consists of blatantly listing stats. Avoid doing this, tell people to look at the wiki or at least put it in a spoiler.
If you have control over the drake area you should avoid putting your Control Ward at the back of the pit regardless of the side you’re on. If you put it there then you won’t be able to disable wards that are in front of the pit, which would give the enemy team full vision.

Presentation

This is a great example of a guide where code has been used to make things look nicer. There is a lot of room for improvement though. Try viewing the guide through the eyes of a reader: does all the code you use make the guide easier to read? How can you showcase information so that it becomes easier to digest? What are you trying to tell your readers?

The first thing that jumps out to me is that you are overusing text effects. Do not bold/color entire paragraphs. It makes reading your guide extremely hard since I’m constantly getting distracted by all kinds of colors and fluff. It also doesn't look very professional.
Avoid centering entire paragraphs of text, for example in the AP vs AD & When to take what rune. Centered paragraphs are unnecessarily hard to read.
The Ability Power or Attack Damage part should be near the items, considering it is about when to build MR vs when to build Armor. I would also rename this to MR or Armor since now it seems as if you say “when to build AP vs AD”. I recommend adding something on looking at the death recap to check the damage type to itemize against, you'll find that some champions can do unexpected damage types (e.g. Warwick can do A LOT of magic damage...)

[*The guide contains several line dividers that are shorter than the width of the guide. I recommend centering these as seeing uncentered dividers that do not span the width of the page is very unsettling.
On the topic of things not covering the full width of the guide: At “When should I take each rune” make sure the table (whatever it is), covers the full length of the guide instead of only 3/4th like it does right now.
In the items section, reconsider using those round borders. Round border + square icons doesn’t look that great. I also advise centering the icons and the headers & gold value (although you could leave the gold value out, it is kinda obsolete). The yellow divider thingies are also not really necessary.
I suspect you are using columns in the items section, for the sake of consistency, make sure that the first column has the same width everywhere. There is an obvious jump at the “First back” part of the items section.
At the abilities section there are some very large icons for the abilities. Since these are low resolution they end up looking kinda bad. It’s probably a better idea to make them smaller. You should also center the ability video’s. Overall avoid making icons overly large as it ends up looking quite bad due to their low resolution.
There are some spelling mistakes throughout the guide, so it might be worth it to do a careful reread. Besides that, be consistent with capitalizing words and such. Sometimes names are not capitalized and sometimes they are.

I'd say this guide is a good start, but definitely in need of some improvements. The main point of improvement is improving the overall readability (removing text effects & numbers, splitting up builds, removing obsolete information). Besides that it's also worth it to add more "specific" information, such as explaining when to go certain items.

I hope you are able to do something with the feedback, feel free to reply if you have any questions/remarks.

Good luck updating & upgrading your guide!

(19) |

Hey there,

I would like to thank you very much for this review, this is the jog I needed in order to complement this guide and improve it. I will be checking over and over this review as it is like gold to me. After uploading my guide several times, trying in practice tool, in-game tests, and more, I've made a lot of changes to my guide according to your review, however, there are some things I don't agree with or don't fully understand, so I am introducing them into this reply :D

Cheatsheet build

1. What do you mean by making 3 separate builds? You first talk about making 3 different builds and then you say that the 3 different builds increase the length of the cheatsheet

2. Since is a hard counter to and in the bot lane this summoner is very common, it could be a good prediction if you think the enemy bot lane will take this summoner. Remember thanks to the extra %shield power you will be getting by items like , this summoner will be even more powerful. Still, if you don't personally want to pick it, don't do it, I express in the summoner section that this is mainly good for unsure new players.

Runes

4. If your team wants to play safe, you can't play aggressively and so. So taking will be good when your team wants to scale, if you engage an early fight and your team doesn't have the early-game damage to win that, they will follow you and die, or in a best-case scenario they won't follow you and you will die alone

Main reply

In some parts of the review, you mainly say that I specify too much and that the guide should be shorter, I personally made this guide extremely in-depth, so even if it is not worth going for a splitpush build in 99 out of 100 games, I will still mention this in the guide since it will be valuable for 1 out of 100 games. As said in a note in the introduction, if you want just the main part of this guide you can just look at the cheatsheet part

I also see that you say in some part of the review that I shouldn't mention items that I don't think are worth building. In the conclusion, I specify that you should adapt your build/runes to your playstyle, so I still mention and because are items you could still build if it fits your playstyle. Honestly, you can go for a and build if you want to, but this exceeds the limits of something viable, same with

Other than that, I don't have anything much to say, I really appreciate your review, and if you are looking forward to making any other comment or improvement suggestions, I will be happy to read it and adapt my guide to it, since personally, it is hard for me to see my guides from a reader perspective. Thanks in advance

(101) |

About making 3 separate builds: Essentially I mean this. How to create this is explained here in case you want to do that.

I do not specifically say that you have to make your guide shorter or anything. My main point is that sometimes you end up listing a lot of details, but forget about the greater picture. Mentioning details is not bad in itself, but there should be a reason for doing so.

For example, numbers. What is the point of listing those? Yeah nice, this item gives 100 health, but what does that mean. The issue is, there are other items that give 100 health too. Well, the other item gives 10 ability haste as well! you can keep going like this forever. This is all insanely abstract, what is the value of such stats? How do you compare, let's say, 20 AP to 5 haste? It doesn't have a meaning. Therefore there is no point in listing these stats, only their effects matter (what does this item do for you and therefore, when do you build it?). It's easy to look at the effects & check the stats and come to the conclusion that it makes a lot of sense. On the contrary, it's very hard to look at the stats and trying to figure out their effects...

Quoted:

As said in a note in the introduction, if you want just the main part of this guide you can just look at the cheatsheet part

Quoted:

In the conclusion, I specify that you should adapt your build/runes to your playstyle

I've reread your introduction & conclusion, however neither of these are said there. It comes close, but the meaning is slightly different. Considering they are wise words you should definitely add them.

Also why do you consider to be completely unviable? :(
It's the second most picked mythic on , you gotta have an explanation for this.