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I AM NO LONGER MAINTAINING THIS GUIDE! THIS WAS WRITTEN IN JULY OF 2011 WHEN GANGPLANK WAS MUCH MORE VIABLE. FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT DIFFERENT GUIDES. ALTHOUGH BASHING MY GUIDE AND BUILD IN THE COMMENTS, I WILL STILL RECOMMEND Xeronn's GUIDE. Another VERY promising guide is Fulundry's. Both of them look like decent guides. Feel free to continue using my build, and to those who say this build is like a pile of feces, well I don't really care because this is the first time I have looked at this in half a year. Good luck summoners.

Hi! My name is Balrox. And welcome to my first ever MOBAFire guide!. This will focus on Gangplank, The Saltwater Scourge! He is a melee squishy. He can destroy if you play him right. I hope you enjoy this guide! It will be updated regularly

Announcements:
I will be adding a jungling section soon! Im currently on winter break so by the 23rd of December there will be a jungling build and section :D

These guys were also really helpful to me.

Shonabunch1 - For support with item choice and grammar checking
Deathborn Empire(Clan) - For moral support, suggestions and voting me up.
xDakotaFanningx - Just plain cool
Top Argetlam - For helping to look it over and proof reading
kkboy56 - For trolling so hard, #1 Dishonorable Mention


Morello's Buff Bat and Nerf Hammer Log:
v1.0.0.123 (09th Aug, 2011)

Grog Soaked Blade max stacks has been reduced to 3 from 4
Cannon Barrage
Fixed a bug where Cannon Barrage would not grant gold on minion kills
Fixed a bug where Cannon Barrage's slow was not always applying consistently

v1.0.0.122 (26th Jul, 2011)

Parrrley gold bonus reduced to 4/5/6/7/8 from 4/6/8/10/12
Raise Morale
Active attack damage bonus reduced to 14/22/30/38/46 from 20/28/36/44/52
Active movement speed bonus reduced to 10/14/18/22/26% from 14/18/22/26/30%

v1.0.0.121 (08th Jul, 2011)

Grog-Soaked Blade max stacks reduced to 4 from 5.

v1.0.0.120 (22nd Jun, 2011)
Grog-Soaked Blade
No longer reduces healing and regeneration, but now slows movement speed by 7%
Now stacks up to 5 times, but duration reduced to 3 seconds from 10
Damage changed to 4-21 from 5-19
Parrrley
Fixed a bug where Parrrley could sometimes restore gold to other players
Now applies Grog-Soaked Blade
Raise Morale duration increased to 7 from 6
Cannon Barrage damage increased to 75/120/165 from 65/110/155

v1.0.0.118 (10th May, 2011)
General
Armor per level increased to 3.3 from 2.8
Attack speed per level increased to 2.75 from 2.35
Attack range increased to 125 from 100
Remove Scurvy cooldown reduced to 22/21/20/19/18 from 30/27/24/21/18
Cannon Barrage
Slow increased to 25% from 15/20/25%
Cooldown reduced to 120/115/110 seconds from 120

Gangplank was born the son of the dread pirate captain Vincent the Shadow - one of the most wealthy and feared pirates in all of Blue Flame Island. One might think this would have spoiled the boy with a cushioned life of privilege, but the truth is quite the opposite. Growing up in the city of Bilgewater isn't easy; pirates are not known for their compassion, and that most certainly extends to their families. Vincent wanted his son to grow up tough and strong, so he was extremely hard on the young Gangplank. Even as a child, Gangplank was as mean as a snake and is said to have slept with his eyes open. As he grew, the young man rapidly became the most ruthless and feared pirate in all of Bilgewater, and his daddy was never more proud than on the day of his son's eighteenth birthday - when Gangplank stabbed his old man in the back and claimed the famed pirate ship, the Dead Pool, for his own.

The continent of Valoran, however, is a dangerous place for pirates; Gangplank could read the writing on the wall. The den of pirates known as Bilgewater would soon be pulled down by the undertow of Valoranian politics and the Institute of War. It was time for Bilgewater to have their own champion to represent them in the League of Legends, and who better than the fiercest pirate of them all? It is said that Gangplank has enough power and favor to claim the title of the Pirate King back home, but that he is simply biding his time and building his reputation as a champion before he returns to a life of piracy.


"Yo ho, blow the man down. Or at least shoot him when his back is turned and steal all his booty."

Huehuehue?

These are what make Gangplank good and what doesn't.

Pros
Very Good Farmer
From Mid Game onward can destroy any squishy
A free stackable slow and DoT that can slow up to21%
Can help his team no matter where he is due to Cannon Barrage.
Better than Win Nhao

Cons
Pretty Squishy
Armor counters pretty hard until you get a Last Whisper
No Natural Escape Skill.

Here are some statistics of Gangplank's Base Stats taken from LeagueCraft. To see it in full resolution, right-click the picture and press "View Image"

Your main damage spell and what makes Gangplank an OUTSTANDING harraser. What makes it amazing is that it crits and applies on-hit effects (Sheen, Phage, Frozen Mallet) This spell has an insanely low cooldown. Without CDR it has a 5 second cooldown. With Blue Buff (at level 18), Your Boots of Lucidity, and CDR at level 18 Glyphs it will be on a 3 second cooldown! Combined with your Sheen proc and a crit. Parrrley can do over 1000 damage! It also gives (at rank 5) 8 more gold every time you kill an enemy unit with it! Last hitting a caster minion with Parrrley is like killing two minions at the same time! This will be the first spell you max out.


This is a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. We max it second as it provides a very nice heal for only 65 mana. At max rank it has an 18 second cooldown. The single aspect that makes it unique is it removes ALL CC on you. Lets say Warwick ults you, Remove Scurvy and run away...or kill him. Ashe arrow out of nowhere catches you out of position. REMOVE SCURVY TO GET OUT OF THE STUN! And then later sneak up behind her and kill her with a single Parrrley for teh lulz.


It no longer lets you go DenyPlank, but it is MUCH stronger now. It passively makes you faster and gives you Attack Damage. But, once you activate it...you get almost THREE to FOUR times as much as your passive would give you and on top of that it gives all your allies ,within the range of one of Ashe's Hawkshots, Half the amount of benefits you get. This makes Gangplank an AMAZING pusher. If you kill your enemy laners and you are laning with a Nunu, Blood Boil + Raise Morale = Free tower. We max this last as it isn't as useful as his other skills


It isn't as big as it used to be, and the slow is now less that a Akali Twilight Shroud at Rank 5. But, it is now much easier for a cannon ball to hit your enemy. First of all, it is a Global Ult, so you can assist your team no matter where you are, getting an easy assist, and maybe even a kill. Your cannon balls have a small AoE so if it isn't a direct hit, it will still do the same amount of damage. It doesn't only target Champions though. If there is a huge minion wave pushing down your turret you can just ult that wave and get tons of gold and XP. If someone is going back to base and is about to die. Your ult gives you vision, so you can just send it next to a tower and hope it hits a champion. This, you will level up of course, whenever you can (Levels 6, 11, and 16)

I use a 24/6/0 Mastery Set Up. It gets me a lot of damage and I get improved exhaust. The 6 in defense stops the squishiness of Gangplank early game.

Greater Mark of Desolation

I get Greater Mark of Desolation because it gives you some great early armor penetration. 15 Armor Penetration is a lot. If you are laning against Ashe, your Parrrley will practically do True Damage in the first few levels. Ashe has a base armor of 13 (Without runes or Masteries) and you penetrate 15. Meaning until that gets a lot higher...you do true damage.

Next I get Greater Seal of Attack Speed, because early game it lets you get your poison and DoT on a lot faster, so you can stay near them and finish them off. If you feel very mana deprived, you could switch these out for Greater Seal of Scaling Mana Regeneration

After that, I take Greater Glyph of Scaling Cooldown Reduction These give 8.1% CDR at level 18. Your spell are now on a shorter cooldown. You destroy people faster.

Finally, I use Greater Quintessence of Critical Damage Because, it makes your crits do a nice bit more damage, and it can help through out the game. These could be switched with Greater Quintessence of Desolation or Greater Quintessence of Attack Damage

Starting Items

This will give you early crit with your Parrrley and the health potions will allow you to sustain your lane. You could switch Brawler's Gloves for if you prefer the early mobility

Later Into The Game
1.) I quickly turn it into an Avarice Blade: 12% Crit Chance and 5 Gold per 10. After that, we start building our Trinity Force.

2.) We start off making a Sheen. A Sheen will make Parrrley hit for so much more as it proc on-hit effects. After that, I get a Zeal, which gives us a little bit of speed, as we do not have out boots yet, and a nice amount of crit. By then, your opponents have probably already gotten Tier 2 boots. Which means we are a great deal slow than the opposition. So we will now get Ionian Boots of Lucidity. They give a good deal of CDR which will further take down the cooldown of Parrrley, making it absolutely spammable. NOW, we build our Trinity Force. That gives us a good bit of every thing and getting an EXTRA slow with the Phage component is extremely helpful.

3.) Now we start making our Infinity Edge. I like to start with a Cloak of Agility, it adds on to our crit nicely. Now I buy whichever part I can, first, Then i finish off my Infinity Edge with what ever item I had not bought.

4.) I like to buy an Elixir of Fortitude and a Elixir of Agility. The red elixir makes me slightly less squishy and provides 10 attack damage. The green elixir gives me some more crit.

5.) Now i build the Zeal portion of a Phantom Dancer, which makes me much faster and now i have a LARGE amount of Critical Strike Chance. I just build that into a Phantom Dancer now. By now, you are probably single-handedly tearing apart their team.

6.) So everyone is probably building some armor. Now we counter THEIR counter. Last Whisper time! You just broke through 40% of their armor. A Black Cleaver will work better than a Last Whisper if the enemies have under 112.5 armor. 113 Armor and beyond,a Last Whisper is better.

7.) End game, your have very little resistances, and you still want to hurt more. So we get an Atma's Impaler! You are probably wondering, "Gangplank has very little health, why get an item that gives AD based on how much HP you have?" Well first of all, it gives 45 armor and 18% crit. That makes your crit chance immense!
And the +45 armor cures some of your squishy-ness. Now the good part, Gangplank doesn't have much health, but that doesn't mean it is bad. With this build, Gangplank has 2203 health. That is 44.06 more AD for you, and it only costs 2355 Gold. That is 1735 Gold worth of Attack Damage and 18% Crit and on top of that it gives you 45 armor! A Zeal and and extra Brawler's Gloves is a total of 1495
gold and gives the SAME amount of crit as an Atma's. Buying an Atma's Impaler is clearly very worthwhile!

Gold Per 1 Attack Damage (This is proof of how much gold worth of AD an Atma's Gives)
I calculated how much Attack Damage is worth in gold, by taking the average of basic items from the shop, so for Attack Damage (AD):

10dmg = 415g = 41.5g per 1 AD
25dmg = 975g = 39g per 1 AD
50dmg = 1850g = 37g per 1 AD

Take the average gives you:
1 AD = 39.1666666666...g

Situational Items

Banshee's Veil This can save you from a pesky Karthus or Vladimir ult, or stopping a LeBlanc or Annie Combo in its tracks. If you are willing to sacrifice damage for survivability you can pick this up.
Cloak and Dagger If you don't have Merc Treads and you get into a lot of CC this could be slightly helpful, as it gives 20% crit and 25 Tenacity
Executioner's Calling This item, isn't really good, but it can sometimes help if there is a big healer on the other
Force of Nature If their AP carry is insanely fed and you NEED the MR i could see this helping.
Frozen Heart Same with a FoN, if there is a fed AD carry, this might work
Frozen Mallet If you can't catch up to your enemy or they keep running away, this could help you track down and kill your enemy, and give some ad (From atma's) as well
Madred's Bloodrazor This could really help you kill enemies with a large amount of hp
Mercury's Treads IF you are being heavily cced this could help you when Remove Scurvy is on CoolDown
Bloodthirster If you are a big fan of lifesteal this oculd be a very good item for you
Black Cleaver When the enemies have under 112.25 Armor this is a better choice than a Last Whisper
Thornmail AD champ is fed? Let's just make them take 30% of the damage they do to me!
Tiamat I am not a big fan of this item, but if the enemy team tends to clump up together having all of your items do AoE damage is pretty nice, and it makes farming a breeze

If you are buying any AP item on Gangplank, find another champion to play. Unless it is a Tri-Force, as pointed out in the comments :D

The route that I use to Jungle Gangplank is:
-Wolves
-Blue Buff
-Wraiths
-Golems
Time to go back, unless you have enough health for a gank.
-Red Buff
-GANK TIME!
-Wolves
-Wraiths (Unless You Gank again)
-Blue Buff

Explanation of Jungling as Gangplank:

Summoner Spells I Would Recommend You Using


You are a squishy champion without a natural blink or escape (Trynd's Spinning Slash, LeBlanc's Distortion, Akali's Shadow Dance, etc). I am not counting Remove Scurvy as it only gets rid of cc, because it doesn't take you anywhere and Raise Morale isn't a big enough speed buff to get out a tight situation. This can get you out of a bad spot or help you run to a fight where you are needed. Or...you have a Cho'Gath (6 Feast Stacks) blocking a passage and you want to get through.


Are you catching a fleeing enemy? Running as fast as you can? Or trying to disable a carry's damage in a teamfight? Exhaust does ALL of this. It is a great summoner spell that can help you for many different purposes.


Smite is very useful as one of the main summoner spells used when jungling

Summoner Spells That Are Somewhat Beneficial


Ignite can add that little extra un-avoidable damage to the champion who is running away. Ignite can make it so that you don't have to dive that enemy with 10 hp when you have 10 hp


Flash could be an alternative to Ghost. Flashing over a wall while running away from a full team is always helpful. I switch off ghost and flash purely off preference.



If you are facing a complete cc team and You get chain cced and Remove Scurvy isn't enough. Cleanse could be okay...

Uvlad Cho?

Hmmm...You're not a support OR a tank. THEN WHY DO YOU HAVE THIS?
You are an ad melee carry. If you are running out of mana that much. Go get blue buff.
Once again i repeat YOU ARE NOT A SUPPORT OR A TANK.
Who even gets heal...Other than maybe Soraka.
First of all, if you even ABLE to HAVE this spell...you are a mad haxor. GG *Update* Now that Promote has been added to the game, I still don't feel that it is too good
Waste of a summoner spell. It doesn't do much and is killed in under a second...OH WAIT, A MINUTE. YOU STILL AREN'T A SUPPORT.
You don't want to die anyway...
You are fast enough that you don't need to teleport....

Farming isn't hard with Pirate. If you have Blue Buff last hit with your Q all day. 12 gold each last hit! Q SPAM NOW! If there is a big wave and one of your team mates wants to farm it...ult it and ninja all the gold and xp....jk...jk...jk the jk about the jk. Say what? Plus you can probably one hit them with your crit.

Videos of people playing Gangplank
*They are pretty outdated, but still show the potential of Gangplank*
Play Video This is a video of the one and only LegendCommentaries
Play Video This is a video by someone named: UnseenStalker, these videos are a year and a half old so they are quite outdated
Play Video This video is part two of UnseenStalker's video.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Sight Ward ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What They Do

Sight Ward - Click: Places an invisible ward with 1100 range sight. Lasts 3 minutes, Max: 5 Stacks. Costs 75 Gold.

- Click: Places an invisible ward with 1000 range Magical Sight (see invisible units). Lasts 3 minutes, Max: 5 Stacks. Costs 125 Gold.

- Click: Gives your Champion stealth detection until they die. Costs 400 Gold.

This chapter is about where to place and/or destroy wards to help control the map for your team. Wards will stop your team from being ganked and make it so that your team can gank their ganker, thus resulting in you winning the encounter, without them even realizing how we saw them. In the below map, the Blue Team is on the lower-left hand portion and the Purple team is on the Upper-Right hand portion. The map below shows a good place to place wards
1. This ward prevents mid lane from being ganked by enemy junglers or people coming from top lane.

2. This ward is the counter-part to number 1 except on the other side.

3. This ward is very important. It reveals Dragon and when the opposing team is taking it.

4. One of these are warded usually by the jungler so that they can see if the opposing jungler is attempting to steal Blue Buff

5. Similar to number 4, this ward is to keep your red-buff safe.

6. This was shows is any enemy is travelling from mid to top or top to mid. It also shows great vision on whether the other team is Killing Baron.

7. If your Dragon ward doesn't somehow show the opponent. This was will keep this bush safe for incoming ganks to bot lane

8. Similar to Ward number 7, this keeps safe from being ganked by a jungler, or if your Baron ward if dead it can show if someone is waiting there for you to get to low HP

If you still die...I give up on you :*(

If anyone uses this guide and gets a good score feel free to upload it on something like photobucket and i will put it into this section!

Disclaimer: I am very sorry but i have exceeded my Photobucket Bandwith and MOBAFire image limit so will not me able to add any more screenshots. I apologize.

This is a screen shot from someone named : Enozekun

This is by Raymus:

If it weren't for the people below, I wouldn't have a single vote...literally.

The People Who Voted Me To #1!

These are the ones that have a comment.

Highvoltageteddy
Weresadi
Fyrias
Gearheart
Guidedcookie
SageAdvice
Shadowsong
Xant
Awkwardnes
Krolic1987

These are the ones before i added "Require comment to vote", so they are in no particular order. These guys were my original voters! They are #1, huehuehue.

xDakotaFanningx: Now SoD BrochoLoko
AaeRohn
Saxplaya
Top Argetlam


It seems i have too many pictures, so to view the last three, just right click and press "Open Image In New Tab"
This is amazing!
Wow, I don't know what to say!
You trolling me?

Higher Than the Pros! ZOMGWTFBBQROFLCOPTERWTHROFLWAFFLE


Sweet, Second place :P

Thanks for reading! I hope you will enjoy learning how to play Gangplank. He is a very good champion. The learning curve is good for Gangplank. If you struggle a little in the beginning it is ok. I am positive that you will learn to play Gangplank well. Remember to Vote, Comment, and Favorite!

Thanks Guys!

Gl Hf,
Balrox

These guys were also really helpful to me.

Shonabunch1 - For support with item choice and grammar checking
Deathborn Empire(Clan) - For moral support, suggestions and voting me up.
xDakotaFanningx - Just plain cool
Deviji - Not very cool
Top Argetlam - For helping to look it over and proof reading
kkboy56 - For trolling so hard, #1 Dishonorable Mention
Irritated Data = Being very useful and looking at it.

MM/DD/YY format used.

6/7/11 - Made Guide
6/8/11 - Added Warding Section
6/28/11 - Added Credits and Road to Highest GP Guide
12/16/11 - After being busy on school, updated guide to latest info
12/16/11 - Remade Base Stats section and updated to new masteries
12/16/11 - Added Patch Log