Aphelios Build Guide by Eneino01

⚡How do I pick items?- Learn how to pick items!

⚡Laning phase tricks- How do I play my lane?

⚡After Laning phase...- And now?

⚡Tips&Tricks- The best You can get from a guide!

⚡Thanks for reading!-Farewells

Hello! My name is Enea (Eneino01 in-game) and I'm a 18 years old main ADC that reached Master on EUW this season! This is my third guide featuring Aphelios Before starting, I would like to talk a bit of myself as a player.I started playing on season 4 with the one and the only Jinx since I was silver and she's still my main. Now, after a long time, I decided to start streaming on Twitch and now I'm writing some guides for new players. As I'm not a big streamer I'll really appreciate if anyone of you just wants to come just for once to support me and my guides. Thanks for the patience and now let's start with the guide!

Runaan's Hurricane is one of the best items on Aphelios because of how it can proc on all Aphelios weapons giving a huge spike of waveclear, utility and AoE damage while having crit and a high mov speed.

The laning phase is the most important phase for an ADC as it will determine your mid and late game so let's try to get the best out of it by explaining how a good adc doesn't get picked everytime by the enemy jungler or loses the full priority of the lane.It is always worth to mention in my guide the types of wave management that will help you improve your overall positioning in the lane.
As you may know, there are 3 type of wave management:

This is the most important wave management that an adc has to learn because it can be used as a defensive OR poking scenario. In order to do that, we just have to last hit the minions till the last second so that the wave "freezes" on the same confortable place where you can easily farm and scale.To explain you better, I'll use riftkit so that You can see a game-like situation. Defensive Freeze is used when you're against a poke lane and you don't want to get harrassed too hard. If the enemy wave has 3 minions than yours, you can stall the lane by freezing the Whole game under your tower, but You shouldn't Always do that because otherwise you're leaving every objective (dragon) to the enemy. You should also do that when you have an high scaling champion or a bully champion(I'll explain later why) and You don't want to risk at all as Aphelios. Defensive Freeze is also used as Poking freeze when you're playing Champions like Caitlyn.Let's suppose that we're winning our lane and the enemy adc is behind. By freezing our lane we can poke the enemy adc whenever he gets to attack the minions. You can see on the image below that the adc has to expose itself in order to farm while being in range of your Attacks and the support ones.
Fast push is used when you need to reset your wave so that you can start doing something else instead of farming, something like a drake. In order to do that we have to push as fast as possible (starting by the meele minions) so that we can help our jungler to secure the objective as fast as possible. If you're not able to push the lane, take in consideration to abort the call as your jungler may face your botlane and the enemy jungler while You're farming safely. That may happen because of the lack of vision that we're going to have if we're doing something like a defensive freeze or a defensive axis that I'll explain later.
This is an advanced concept, usually used by the toplaners on mid-game when they know that a fight for an objective is near.In order to do a Slow push we just have to kill the 3 caster minions of a normal wave so that yours will slowly push towards the enemy tower.By doing that, we're forcing the enemy toplaner to clear his wave first(unless he wants to lose a huge amount of gold) before doing anything else. As an adc, You won't use this too much but it's good to know how it works. Note: The power of the minions is given by the average level of the players! That means that if You and your team are behind in levels this push won't work effectivly!



Now that we know how to manage the waves let's get ahead to the axis that we can have in our games. Based on this axis, we have to play according to them to ward properly the map in every kind of situation.

When playing defensive, 2 wards are NEEDED to ensure that the enemy jungler won't invade our jungle while we're farming under tower. Pink should be placed either by the adc or the supp and the normal ward by the support only. With these 2 wards we have full control of enemy jungler movements in our jungle and we can also trap him as 3!
On a stale bot lane,the four players are fighting in the center of the lane in order to get priority of the river. If we manage to get that priority we can detect the enemy jungler easily and maybe get an objective out of it while we're defending our jungle.If for any reason we lose priority, we go to the defensive axis that we explained earlier. The pink has to be placed by the adc and the normal wards by the support while he's roaming. The ward near the mid lane brush can also be placed by our midlaner so that we have less work to do.
Once we get full control of the lane, we can go ahead and ward the enemy jungle so that we can spot him in any possible situation and get value out of it by pushing other lanes or invade him aswell. All the aggressive wards should be placed by the support because as an adc you have to stay as defensive as possible. The only ward the adc can place is the one near the tribush that may be useful for all-in junglers like Zac.

Now that we know how to play our lane You'll probably think… what do I do when laning phase as ended? After laning phase the first thing we want to do with Aphelios is to survive as long as possible while farming and get our famous lategame. Now, our laning phase can evolve in two phases, the losing one and the winning one. Starting from the winning one, if we get to take down botlane it's normal to go toplane but do you really know why we're doing this or you're just assuming that's right? After we won botlane we have to decide whether to go toplane or midlane and here's how we decide.

We go midlane if...

the enemy midlaner has no waveclear or he's playing an assasin like Qiyana or Akali.If you think about it,most of the midlaners have many ways to clear the waves ,that's why midlane tower is the hardest one to destroy in the game. If the enemy is not playing Champions with high clear, and he's also an assasin we can deny his roaming abilities so that he has to defend his tower against the two of us.
Note : By doing that, we can also secure a dragon and not the herald only because we're on the center of the map.

We go toplane if...

the enemy toplaner is meele and can get bullied hard by us. Champions like Ornn and Garen will suffer so much poke! The main purpose of this swap is to take the top tower AND the Herald to destroy the midlane tower
Note: Their midlaner can't clear an Herald! That's why we want to put it mid!!
Now let's get ahead and talk about Aphelios in this strategy. The best swap we can get for Aphelios is to go toplane and take as many gold as possible. Because of the poke potential, we can keep pushing the meele on toplane under tower while He's unable to do anything. If all went perfectly, after taking down toplane you should have ended your core items and that's where you can start teamfighting because of your item peak potential!After you did these steps you just have to follow your team as much as possible without getting caught while keeping your farm high and you'll pretty much win the game.

Now that I've explained what's the game plan, we can get a bit deeper on Aphelios runes. Aphelios is one of the best hard carries to play with if you manage to learn him, so let's get deeper on the runes.

Conqueror is one of the best rune on Aphelios Because it can be stacked easily with red weapon, and skillshots in general. It gives lots of sustain and damage that's why it's the most used rune.
bloodline is a really good rune on Aphelios that can be stacked easily on early game because of your red weapon. It gives lots of sustain on mid to late-game rune compared to alacrity witch plays better only in early game.
Overheal is almost must to have on Aphelios because of how easily you can get the shield on mid to late-game. It gives lots of sustain on mid to late-game rune compared to alacrity witch plays better only in early game.
Cut Down is most of the times better than coup de grace. It just deals more damage on the average game but enemy team must have at least 2 tanks to make it work as a rune. As you don't build hp, this rune is most of the time the best one.
Nimbus Cloak is the best rune for competitive because of how easily you can avoid ganks and reposition during a fight.This rune is way better for competitive purposes, in soloq it's not that good because of the path we're taking.
Gathering Storm is also a really good rune for competitive because of the damage you get late-game. In soloq instead, it is very easy to lose games near the 20 minute mark so the potential of the rune gets wasted really easily.
Magical Footwear is good just because in soloq you need to end your build as fast as possible.
Biscuit Delivery are good because they increase your mana pool, meaning that you can spam a bunch without being forced to build Essence Reaver

You made it through! Thank you for reading this Guide and I hope this helped you to improve your Aphelios and your overall gameplay knowledge! If you're interested you can contact me on discord to have a private coaching or You can also watch me playing on Twitch! Leave a vote if You liked the guide so I can improve/make more guides!See you in the rift, summoner!