Hey guys I'm Shok, multi Rank 1 Challenger mid laner and content creator! I played league professionally from 2017-2021 and have been rank 1 in multiple seasons, as well as rank 13 on the NA ladder in season 9.

I upload regularly on YouTube, and stream everyday on Twitch so feel free to follow me on either of those platforms :)

Season 10Season 9
Season 9 NA

In the laning phase Taliyah mostly acts as a neutralizer and will look to thin out waves early and focus on scaling. Against other ranged champs you will normally need to play defensively, although you can sometimes poke with your E and you will almost always have the waveclear advantage. Against shorter range targets you can harass them pretty heavily with your E, Q and auto poke but will have to be more careful about being all-inned.

If you're against champions with dashes or gap closers you may want to hold your E defensively as well as keep the wave closer to your side to avoid being chased down the lane as well as setup ganks of your own. Eventually, you will have enough waveclear that you can just one shot waves and look to move around the map, especially post 6.

You aren't really expecting to build up a lead in the lane phase as Taliyah, although if you play it well you probably can. A successful early game as Taliyah would just look like having high CS, low deaths, and hopefully a couple KP from impacting some skirmishes around mid or maybe ulting to a sidelane for a roam.

In the mid game as Taliyah you will want to do your best to continue to keep up your gold/xp while also being at all the major objective fights. The best way to do this is try shove the side wave as far as you can without dying. If you don't have TP up, it can be a good idea to group with your team instead and just catch sidewaves when they are going to crash on your tower until your TP comes back up. Sometimes you can go sidelane with just your ult, even if you don't have TP, but this only works if your team takes a fight around mid instead of on the other side of the map. If your sidelane matchup is really easy + your team is winning and you have vision then sidelaning should be very easy, if the opposite of these things are true then you will need to be a lot safer on side.

For objective fights, it's a good rule to try and base around 1 minute before dragon spawns, that way you can spend all your gold and get all your hp and mana back to full. This will give you the best possible chance of grouping up and winning a dragon fight.

As Taliyah it can be a good idea to try take some the AOE jungle camps like Krugs or Raptors, especially if you can take them away from the enemy team or if your jungler is too far away to farm them. Taliyah is very good at doing jungle camps so always look for opportunities to do this.

For teamfighting and skirmishing as Taliyah you will most likely just be looking to play a simple front to back teamfight. Try and position behind your tanks, and just hit whoever is in front of you. Be careful about wasting your E, the cooldown isn't super long later on in the game but in early skirmishes it can make the difference between winning and losing a fight. You can also look to save W to follow up on other people's CC to make it more guaranteed. Fights in chokes or small areas are also very valuable for Taliyah as you have a huge amount of AOE and disruption.

Finally you will want to think about various threats to you and your target priority. Normally as Taliyah you will be stuck hitting whoever is in front of you, but if an enemy squishy mispositions they should take priority and you should aim your abilities on them first. Threats are also important, think about specific abilities (for example Blitzcrank hook) that might threaten you and how you can position around them. Sometimes you may have to wait until some abilities are used before you can fully commit to the fight because it might be too dangerous to do so otherwise.

That's all for this guide, but if you want to see more of my Taliyah content there is a video guide and several gameplay videos on my YouTube channel, and if you want to ask me questions about Taliyah feel free to drop by my Twitch or send me a message on discord (shokoce)