This build is a continuation of my previous Ardent-Tank Zilean build from last season with Bond Of Stone. However thankfully for this season Zilean now has a way of reliably proccing his Ardent with aery and so doesn't have to build full tank.

The central idea around this build is to proc Ardent (and your ult) as much as humanly possible. To do so, you MUST take Bond of Stone as one of your runes, and it's pretty essential to take aery too. Bond of Stone allows your team to proc the healing (and aery and ardent) whenever attacking someone you've either stunned with your double bomb, or even just E'd. You also need to be maxing that cdr as fast as possible, which is very helpful with the Transcendence rune, which also happens to give you a fair amount of AP if you go over the cap (which you will with this build).

For me, I try to make every item in my build have some amount of cdr to maximise the utility of the transcendence rune. Ultimately, this usually ends up giving around 300 AP and a **** tonne of utility/tankiness for your team to boot.

The first thing to note about this build is that it's incredibly team fight oriented. Until you have your ult, you're pretty damn weak, so you need to play around this. If you can make it out of laning unscathed, you're home free unless someone on your team decided to feed their ***es off.

Remember- In teamfights you don't always have to buff the adc. It may be more useful for you and your team to speed up and/or revive someone else on your team who may be doing more leg work. Divers and assassins are particularly useful for this so think Yasuo, Xin, Shyvana,Irelia, Riven. Just speed up whoever is most fed, but be aware your adc will likely outscale all of them in the end unless they're just bad.