I'd like to say that this portion will look bland because YOU ARE LEARNING!!! Learning is about the content and not the fancy flairs and icons. Sit down and get ready to digest information and critically think for yourself. With this in mind, I won't be adding any eye candy in between my chapters.

Without further ado, my name is Rege (short from Regedice) and I'm a Challenger Rengar main (no longer an OTP as of Season 13). As of 6/17/23 my peak is 1328 LP on my main acc. After recently getting Challenger without Rengar, I derusted on Rengar by otp'ing on a smurf to GM 700 lp with an 80% wr as seen in the header (90% wr to Masters, 72% wr to Chall). As a result, I figured it's about time I posted a guide. If you want to see more feel free to stop by my stream.

Anyways, it all began when I picked up Rengar in pre-season 9 upon his swim-q revert. I hit Challenger the first season I picked up Rengar. I've gotten Challenger every season since then. Before Rengar I was hard-stuck diamond 5 playing tryndamere+draven for 2 seasons straight, so don't think you're stuck forever!!

This guide isn't for just learning Rengar, but to master him. With that in mind, get comfortable with reading as studying the game is how you get better. Make sure to read all the notes for everything in the guide. The hard way is losing your mind playing 2k games to learn what you can read on the internet, so the choice is yours!

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Rengar Abilities. It's mundane, but step one is learning EXACTLY how all the gears in Rengar function... your understanding of it all serves as the oil to Rengar as a machine.

One other thing I'd like to mention in this section is Rengars passive. You should almost never prioritize your passive, ever. It should never be a driving factor in how you play the game. You should always adhere to plays that make sense for the map/game-state. In otherwords, stick to proper macro than your passive. You'll usually kill everyone at least once anyways, so it's not something you should pay a ton of attention to in-game.

Timers and tempo for plays are finite, so you definitely don't want to miss an opening for another play because you spent time thinking to play for an aspect of your kit.

The only acceptable scenario is if the game is getting towards late game, the game is even, and you're at 4 stacks. At that point, getting the increase in AD might be what secures the win. With that said, majority of the time you shouldn't even be thinking about it. Your thought on your bonetooth stacks should stop at making sure you're on people as they die so you're getting stacks at all.

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Rengar mechanics. There are only a couple of combos, but the key is mastering ferocity management. By this I mean with your purple stack, it can be easy to mis-combo and press the wrong empowered ability. Ferocity management is about keeping track of what combos you can get off with the ferocity and cooldowns optimally with the situation you're faced with. Don't button mash, there's a method to the madness that can be practiced with repetition and discipline.

For runes, I leave descriptive notes under the mouse-over bits up top. Check those notes for details on the strengths of each page. Overall, I highly recommend going through the keystones and runes on every page so you thoroughly understand how they function and provide value.

I'd like to take this portion to go over Cosmic Insight as its value isn't immediately obvious. Looking at the haste lol wiki page, the +10 item haste is a 9.09%~ cooldown reduction and the +18 summoner spell haste is a 15.3%~ cooldown reductioon. Practically speaking, that's 45.76s off your flash as well as the nudge on your smite cooldown.

For build, here are a couple notes. For "last whisper item," I'm referring to Lord Dominik's Regards (LDR), Mortal Reminder (MR), and Serylda's Grudge. The meta shifts around to prefer one of those three, so referring them to last whisper item makes interpretation easy as this item spike is what helps you shred through armor early. However, I will say to not disrespect big healers (Zac, Aatrox, Soraka, etc.) and to make sure you buy MR for the antiheal.

As for item purchase timing, lets talk about the concept of "Item tempo." Item tempo as a concept is why Rengar feels weak late game or people think he "scales off." It's not that he's weaker, but everyone else is getting stronger. For example, full-item at 7 minutes feels much different in strength than completing your item at 12 minutes. It's because you're ahead of them! Rengar played properly usually results in being an item or two ahead on others, making you considerably ahead in damage + level (600g in stats per lvl). All of this to say that many of Leagues concepts relate back to one another, so critically think how they tie together to better understand the bigger picture.

Wrapping this section with situational items. Do NOT get in the habit of building Edge of Night every game as it's absolutely true that you'll get generally useful value from it. However, mainline Rengar build does so much damage that it's better to index into those item spikes so you vaporize the enemy. For example, Serpents Fang is only worth if they have ivern, 2+ enchanters, or your priority target has too much innate shields. Otherwise, you should spec into life steal late game so you outlive everything.

The more champions you have in front alongside with you the better. Rengar isn't frontline. He can be if you build bruiser, but it's better to have someone else in front. It's worst when you have 4 ranged champions leaving you as the only one to serve as any cover. A skill you should invest into is jumping in knowing you will get one shot so you can full heal or burn ults that pack a lot of CC with your empW. DO NOT IMPULSIVELY JUMP!!! I can't tell you how many games I've lost jumping in to burn cooldowns or for whatever then I die, give 1k shutdown, lose baron (long death timer for being up levels) then immediately turning the tides or losing the game... be patient! You're a hunter.

Something you want to keep in mind is that matchup difficulty changes with comp. For example, if you're playing against Fiddlesticks and you have tons of CC then he's not as hard to handle. Some matchups become impossibly hard if you have no frontline (e.g., Poppy, Wukong). With that in mind, keep comps in mind when thinking about matchup difficulty and how you adapt your early game in loading screen (and mid/late game when the time comes).

Moving on, utilize your dodges and try to avoid first pick if possible. The last thing you want is to be in a game where they have 5 champions that do well against Rengar, your comp sucks, AND your team is underperforming. THOSE games are unwinnable. Keep in mind these lobbies are uncommon (within the scope of 100 games) and you shouldn't automatically blame external stimuli——always look inwards at yourself to improve what you CAN do in each game. Rengar is a very flexible champion, so itemize and play around what holds the most value in exploding the nexus.

Rengar does camps faster when chained together (e.g. red, krugs, raptors rather than red, blue, gromp) because he can carry his ferocity over between camps. Because of this, you should begin your clear with the framework or intention to full clear, but at the drop of a hat be able to adapt to the game and skip camps to arrive at plays on time. Understand, manage, and optimize the concept of tempo and pathing around the map.

Full clear every game isn't a good idea, but at the same time you want to set yourself up for success. Play towards the lane that will net you and your team a net lead over the other team. In matchups where it's best to invade and your teammates have lane prio, skip your next camps and look for the invade. You want to help your teammates, but if you're sacrificing way too much, then ping your team to play safe. KS kills and play to get your powerspikes as soon as possible. Lastly, make sure you secure dragons over anything else IF you can and secure heralds/grubs for plates before 14 minutes. Even if you don't secure plates with grubs, it's really strong for sieging, splitting, and staying under tower for longer for more hits. Don't forget that T2 side towers give 700g.

Other things you can do is instead of invading you can start in their jungle or plan to walk in and clear it knowing your laners will have prio. This is called splitting the map. As for splitting the map, understand how you're affecting your lanes on the other side of the map by doing this and plan ahead for your pathing after your first clear. It's not like you can always go back into their jg the second time around to clear camps, so make sure you execute whatever pressure you planned for early on and to play around the leads you generate when doing so. You are changing the game when splitting the map, so play accordingly. Sometimes you should only stay for 2 camps and not 3 because you'll get rotated on, or they don't know you split the map and if he runs into you you lose the fight. Or all of a sudden there's no play on the side you split the map so you need to reclaim control on the other side of the jungle. Or you take their camps then cross through mid (in or out of fog of war based on urgency) to catch them stealing your camps and to balance the split map's resources.

If you're not used to splitting the map, then be ready to adapt your game. You can get away with not learning how to split the map, but others will do it to you, so you have to learn when it makes sense or when junglers can go for it. The biggest disservice to yourself is mindlessly full-clearing every game. Be intentional in how you play, question yourself in the name of optimization.

Avoid dying at 20 minutes. Snowball leads are decided early but who wins the game is decided by baron. If you "die once then lose the game," it's your fault. It's hard to accept, but dying then losing meant you had all the gold/winning pieces on your team. If you're out of the picture, your team has nothing. The beauty of Rengar is you can consistently get all the winning pieces (turbo fed, 1k shutdown, etc.) so you can hard carry while being able to throw it away all at the same time. There is always something you could've done better when it comes to Rengar as opposed to say... tank junglers. Sucks being frontline for a poor performing backline lol.

As for macro, ensure you're prioritizing dragons, and if you can't, make plays on the other side of the map by securing grubs, towers, waves, ganks, and such. You'll reach a point of the game where you can split push quite well with tiamat waveclear, insane tower damage with last whisper item, and ult utilization to run away in worst case. HOWEVER, your ult being on cooldown means you can't fight to 100% outside of jungle. Your ult is very useful. You can use it to walk into dragon (in case they established control before your team) and pressure the enemy team into possible jump angles. Don't go for 1 for 1 unless the person you're bringing down is as valuable as you are. Be patient, don't jump on people with zhonya or champions with cooldowns up that can shut you down (unless you have edge of night). Lastly, DON'T IMPULSIVELY JUMP. Similar to lee sin-drome, it can be very tempting to take a jump just because you can, and despite you knowing it's a bad idea, you jump anyways then lose the game instantaneously (speaking from experience).

Staying in the zone at all times helps in-the-moment outplays like jumping to wards they just placed to gap close to make plays happen or jumping over walls in your ult. If you don't know what I mean, when you jump over a wall on Rengar, the enemy doesn't see you until you land on top of them, so they have much much less time to react compared to when they can see the full jump to do whatever (flash, zhonya, etc.)

During mid/late game split pushing can become a solid option. Effectively split pushing is about dragging pressure with an overall net gain (e.g., dying to 3 people but your team secures something else). More importantly, Rengar is not good at standing there and doing things like other champions can. It's not worth to spend your tempo standing in front of a tower being sieged as you can't contribute without front lining yourself and dying. That said, it's best to stay active on the map. To accommodate for Rengars lack of usefulness in some activities, you have the option to split!

Keep in mind the timing of you splitting, who you're dragging, positions on the map, etc. Use deductive reasoning to gather information on locations (e.g. if they use blue ward and they only have 1 blue ward on their team, then you know who's coming) to scope how long you can stay. The difference between you and a good splitter is staying on that thin line between overextending and splitting. Split pushing is an art. I used to main Tryndamere, so a ton of these soft skills are already built. Take the time to learn how to split properly.

A huge strength to rengar is that he has very strong 4/5-item powerspikes. As noted earlier, he doesn't get weaker it's simply that others catch up to him. With that said, you have to remain very vigilant and to rely on your team where possible.

If you have an engage comp, play with your team, otherwise play alone by securing positions in wide angles to ult at any moment or split on opposite sides of the map using ult to run away or to run to the teamfight. With blue pet, you'll be able to get to fights fairly quickly. Also, knowing how far you can traverse across the map during your entire ult is a skill in itself as ulting as soon as you can knowing you'll get there is a form of optimizing your tempo. Furthermore, the intel on positioning, their control wards, and what they're doing is all super utilizable info. Rank 3 ult lasts 20s, keep in mind no bonus movement speed gets you from base almost to krugs in that time. With late game movementspeed, 20s can let you diagonally cross 70-80% of the map.

In regards to killing people, you have to focus on their items. Because of GA, too much armor, and zhonya forces you to stress your options. Think outside of the box like forcing side lane pressure, join the fight late, etc. In other words, you want to avoid them (by killing someone else or splitting) or leverage your teammates to turn a positive into a negative. For example, you can jump on kindred, burn R, then root them (if you still have emp charge) and run away.

You need to be Tobey Maguire in Spiderman 2 during the train scene to carry on Rengar in general. Getting to late game usually is because you made a mistake along the way and because of that you're in a state of the game where you can't do everything you usually can, so figure out what you can do and execute. Your job isn't to be a jack of all trades, but to do what you can do. If you can drag their strongest player in side lane and get away alive, then do so. If you make a baron call then want to call off despite baron being 4k hp, call the play off. It's all about correctly making split second decisions.

This guide is more about giving you the philosophies, perspectives, and food for thought on how you should play Rengar rather than telling you exactly what you should do. There are many ways to win a game, so it's your call to decide which one is most optimal to win a certain game. Whether it be invading, full clearing, splitting in late game, risking a dragon play to ensure the game doesn't go late, etc. What makes a good Rengar player is not their build, because you can win with most setups/builds in the game. What makes a good Rengar player is their game IQ (ability to correctly determine the best course of action) and drive for absolutely correct play.

At the end of the day, the champion is moostly played by one tricks BECAUSE ferocity management takes a long time to "master." It's easy to learn how to lane gank, or learn how to counter gank, but it takes experience to know EXACTLY how you should execute on a particular teamfight with <1s to think. At the same time, most of the game takes place leading up to the teamfight, so study your macro as much as you do your micro.

If you have any more questions please ask me on stream. Furthermore, you can add me to dm at 'regedice' through discord. Another way is joining my discord and asking in general chat. If you'd like to book coaching you can reach out on discord or go on my metafy page to book a private session.