About Me and about Yi:

Hello everyone! Thank you all for noticing my guide, I really appreciate your support!

Btw. this used to be an Eclipse Yi Guide in Season 11.

To start off, you may call me Light, I am a casual League Player who has watched a lot of Pro and High Elo gameplay, as well as in game analysis and theory crafting. I am not a high elo player myself, however I am very interested in theory crafting and am alwyas trying to find new builds to make Yi more diverse. Shout out to xPetu, who not only got me into Shen, but also inspired me to do the same he does with my favorite champion!

Why do I like Master Yi? That's a great question! The biggest reason as to why I like Yi so much is that he is a champion which is easy to play, thus easy to recommend for others to try, since I really love to share my thoughts on the game and espacially my favorite champions. Even still, Master Yis Kit has a lot of potential, making him really hard to play perfectly and I find it really fastinating to see the best of the best players on Yi and how they make him seem broken even in higher elos. The only sad thing about mastering Master Yi is that the rewards for playing optimal are pretty low. The Results between someone who knows how to play Yi correctly and someone who knows how to play him perfectly are very minor, which makes it seem like the best Yi Players aren't actually doing much, when they are being as mechanial as possible on a champ with a very simple kit.

I was a huge fan of Eclipse on Master Yi and have invented the Atk Speed Eclipse Style back in Season 11. Due to the changes made in Season 12, which ended up making it worse, due to a longer passive cooldown, which means you cannot abuse it's shield and passive damage as great as back then, it is no longer viable on Yi. The Changes made in Season 12 have also had a great impact on Master Yi himself, as his mini rework has led to On-hit Builds being even greater than before and nerfing AD Yi the ground. All of these changes did not exactly help Eclipse to be viable again, which is why I can no longer recommend it. It's fun, but it's just worse in 10/10 games.

This is my Guide on how to play and build On-hit Yi,
I hope you enjoy!

Benefits of playing Master Yi

Yi is the perfect champ to start learining LOL.

- You don't have to be very mechanical to play Yi effectivly. => you can focus on learning about strategy, general game knowledge and how to jungle.

- He teaches you the basic mechanics of the game pretty well (examples):
Alpha Strike Q: Over time you will quickly learn, that abilities like Alpha Strike which make you untargatable should be used wisely, to dodge enemy skillshots, avoid lethal damage and most importantly dodge CC spells.

Meditate W: You can auto attack and then W and cancel it with another auto attack, which resets your auto attack cooldown -> teaches you about auto attack canceling.

It also teaches you to be patient and wait for you abilitys to come up again (it also gives you free passive stacks over time), to maximize your combat power in close fights, as in he is one of the best Champs to learn this, thanks to his W healing you and giving damage reduction. The later teaches you to cancel turret damage after a towerdive like Irelia! (He's generally a great diving champ, do to his untargabilty on Q and his damage reduction on W)

Wuju Style E: It's pretty simple... don't use important Abilities in the jungle, if an enemy could be close to you. You learn the keeping ablities on cooldown can be better than just pressing it at the first possible opportunity.

Highlander R: Same case, here it is about fighting on ultimate timers and don't waste your R before and Objective spawns. Also use it to get out if you mess up, it's better than dying. Also teaches you how important movement speed is, as a means of ganking and in general.

- Slow Immunity on his Ultimate

- On-hit effects work with his Q Alpha Strike since Patch 12.5

- Master Yi Slowballs really hard on top of,
- being a great scaling champion. There are only a few Champions which can face a lategame Yi on the Sidelane

- We all know the Master Yi Clips. He is great at teamfighting, as a follow up on the team engage, as he is a reset champion which likes to clean up fights, after someone else goes in.
=> Master Yi is a great montage / pentakill champion

Downsides of playing Yi:

- every resonable player will focus you in fights

- On-hit Yi has a lot of bad matchups and is easy to counter and itemize against

- Master Yi has to build some form of defensive Item, against burst champs

- You have no CC in your base kit

- If you fall behind early on, it can be rough to come back

- is very reliant on items and thus on gold.

Team Composition (Synergies and Counters)

If you want to make great use of this champ, it is highly recommended to build the team entirely around Master Yi, this however is an issue, since the team pretty much falls apart if the Yi Player falls behind and/or is bad.
He synergized really well with some enchanters, but especially with engage and every other champion which can frontline or cc for him.

About the enemy team composition:
Everyone with easy cc on you is soft or hard counter and invisibility champs will ruin your day, because you can't auto them. The worst kind of counter are champs who can burst you down in one combo. So pretty much every enemy team will have a treat opposing you.

Notice that Plated Steelcaps are a minor power spike against you
Notice Jax Nilah Teemo Shen counter you because you can't effectivly auto unless they waste their spells.

Which runes work the best?

Back in Season 10, everyone who was sane took Conqueror. Due to all the nerfs Conqueror has recieved it is not that great anymore and Lethal Tempo used to work differently, now there is no situation in which it is better than Lethal Tempo.

Since Lethal Tempo used to work differently in Season 10 and 11, it syngerized really well with my old Eclipse build, but that's for history now.

In the Preseason of Season 12 Lethal Tempo recieved some major changes, making it work like the Guinsoo's Rageblade passive, granting you stacking attack speed, which should be enough for Yi mains to know, this is fantastic.

Why is it the best Rune at this moment?
- It provides you with free attack speed, which synergizeses with On-hit effects.
- It scales better than Hail of Blades and is more useful in teamfights / long fights and it does not go to waste, if you attack someone while being blinded (it even stacks up while doing no damage)

- It has the best synergy with your passive
- It is the strongest rune in early 1v1s as well

The other Option is only really useful on Burst Builds
Hail of Blades provides you with 3 really quick auto attacks, which can help you burst enemys down, with just these autos and one Q.
This is a lot harder due to the changes made in Patches 12.5, which nerfed his AD Scaling.

Summoner Spells

It should be obvious that taking Smite is required to jungle with Master Yi

I usually take Flash as my secondary Summoner Spell, as it provides me with more mobility, which Yi benefits from a lot, as well as another means to dodge enemy skillshots / CC (example: flash over a Lux Q)

I am not a big fan of Ignite, eventhough it is the best Summoner Spell, if you want to be useful in the early game and snowball. Which seems better on AD / Burst Yi, then on the classic On-hit Yi.

Cleanse Does not provide you with offensive power. Only pick this, if the enemy team has too much CC to outplay for you and you can't wait to buy Quicksilver Sash which builds into Mercurial Scimitar It is really bad in most cases because it cripples your combat abilities, but so is QSS.

Itemization on Master Yi:

All my build can be seen above, in the Item Section of this Guide.
As you may notice, the Item you should buy on you first back is in every case the good old Pickaxe, as it is the best of your Item Components. You need AD in the early game or you deal no damage compared to others. (your base AD is not enough to make use of more attack speed, trust me on this one)

As I have already mentioned, I believe On-hit builds to be supperrior to Burst builds.
This is all due to the changes made in Patches 12.5., which is why I only recommend On-hit builds.

The Reason we make use of the Guinsoo's Rageblade and Blade of the Ruined King combo is to get as much atk speed as possible with the least amount of gold and to abuse the damage of Blades on-hit passive. Same apllies to the magic damage of Wit's End which is insane, due to Rageblades passive we can procc it more often aswell as Guinsoo's Rageblade phyisical on-hit damage on top. Wit's End is really gold inefficent if the enemy team does not have a lot of magic damage, thus Blade of the Ruined King is often the better choice espacially as your first Item has to be really gold efficent. After these core items we will build either defensive items or more damage. Back when I recommended Eclipse Yi the Rageblade + Wit's end combo was my way of abusing Eclipse Passive, granting us more burst, more sustain through shield, which helped to 1v1 others making it a viable atk speed option. The reason we buy Blade first, is due to the changes made to Q, as it can procc on-hit effects since 12.5

Mythics:

Guinsoo's Rageblade is the Mythic which provides the most Damage in attack speed builds, as it provides you with a lot of attack speed and it synergizes with on-hit effects. It should be obvious why this is a great Mythic on Yi. As of currently it is the only viable option. Anything besides Guinsoo's Rageblade is off-meta.

Other Mythics are a lot worse on Yi. The only other option that could be considered is Duskblade of Draktharr, but since it has been nerfed a lot and you have worse AD scalings than in Season 11, it's by far inferior in most games. It's passive is the only good part about this Mythic, being untargetable is really insane on Yi, but you can't make much use of Lethality and Abilty Haste.

Which Champions are the worst to face as Master Yi?

I prefer to ban either Shaco, Wukong, Nidalee, Warwick, Rek'Sai, Kha'Zix, Skarner, Qiyana, Talon or Graves, as they are the most common and most frustrating to deal with jungle matchups.
My most banned Champion has to be Kha'Zix

Other champions which are frustrating to play against are: Teemo or Jax and many more which you will usually not encounter as the enemy jungler.

Your Gameplan

Auto Attack the enemy

Your game plan may be simple but hard to master.
You want to auto the enemy until they die and unlike the memes this build doesn't make you spam Q and win (reminds me of the old AD Yi...). Instead you will have to use Alpha Strike to dodge enemy spells which are a threat to you, which will be cc in most cases since your W Meditate can block a ton of damage from life threatening dangers.
Your main damage source are your auto attacks, this means you shouldn't Q for damage, since it doesn't outmatch your auto dps by a notiable amount and leaves you vulnerable afterwards.
Never engage with Alpha Strike unless you know the enemys cc spells are on cooldown. Even if it may seem tempting to Q in and kill everyone, your Alpha Strike is to valuable to dodge enemy cc. You can catch up with different things (you have the highest movementspeed base in the game)you can run them down if you are fast enough, you can flash on top of the enemy and you'll stick to the movement speed this build provides (having someone who can speed you up is really comfortable which is why some use ghost instead of flash). You can even bait some enemys into casting their cc spell just by runing at them while being in Q range and not using Alpha Strike until they use them to dodge it and you have your engage!

Makro Gameplan:
As Master Yi you will want to power farm early on and avoid ganking, unless it's free or you are on a big powerspike, you have to fight an objective, you see an gamechaning gank, your teammates matchup is unplayable without help, but is vital to you team sucess or similar cases.
You want to contest every single objective, as you are great in teamfights, but don't force it, if you lack the needed vision, or you team is too far behind to contest e.g. one drake, in that case it may be better to just give them up. Try to always farm your jungle camps effectivly, as farm is really important on a scaling champion like Master Yi

Once you are strong enough, you should be able to get every objective and you should definitly go for every single one of them, as you should win every teamfight.
You can splitpush, if your team does not have a better splitpush champion, while objetives are not up in the late game, or push on the same side the next objective will be at.
Remember not to be on the opposite side of the current objective.
If your support sets up vision in the enemy jungle, you want to follow and try to catch enemys, who stepped out of line.
You can also get every lane ahead, once you are fed, by repeatingly ganking them (avoid enemy laners, that hardcounter you if you can)
Play around your Powerspikes. (Items completions and things like Lv. 6 or Q and E maxed out)

I really hope you liked this guide and found it useful for your own gameplay of League of Legends. I hope you enjoy playing around with this atk speed monster called Master Yi.

Try to be creative and look out out for new builds, if the meta changes again. I love it, when there are many different viable builds on Yi and I will try to explore these options and share them with others.


I wish you good luck and a lot of skill in the rift.
- Light