Cho'Gath Build Guide by BaLoRi

Hello everyone,

My nickname is BaLoRi, I am an Educational Content-Build Creator that is part of Fnatic and Fnatic Network, that I got 1 goal every single time. To create the MOST POWERFUL builds for each champion, that will give you the FREE ELO that you really want and rank up with your own skills in any DIVISION you want while of course having fun and enjoying the game!

I reached as the Top 1 Cho'Gath in the world for 3 different seasons and in this guide you will learn my build what made me reach to the Elo I am reaching right now easily!
With this build you will have around 80% Win ratio at Bronze-Gold Elo, 70% Win Ratio At Platinum Elo and 60-61% At Diamond-Challenger Elo!

Feel free to join me in our youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/lolbalori & https://twitch.tv/balori for more BUILDS and GUIDES and join our Discord server for real time build creation: https://discord.gg/RazhNDW and reach any ELO you want!
Chogath with this build is easy, the only thing you need to do is to FOCUS on your farm, and care for Ganks.


Nothing will stop you, nothing will win against you, the only thing they will ever feel is FEAR from your insane damage!


Hope to enjoy your Elo Boost!
Best regards.

With this build Cho'Gath become a really strong late game Assassin/Mage/Tank Champion. You will be able to deal 1200-1400 PURE Damage To any Champion with your Rupture and Around 1000 PURE Damage with your Feral Scream to Any Champion, your Basic attacks plus your Vorpal Spikes will do around 400 PURE Damage with Each hit to Any Champion plus the effect from Demonic Embrace and final your ULTI will do 1300 PURE Damage.

Magic Penetration: Magic penetration is a champion statistic which allows the magic damage done from their abilities, enhanced attacks, etc. to ignore some or all of a target's magic resistance.

Lets have an example for you to understand and compare the damage to the target WITH and WITHOUT Magic Penetration!
Lets say you have a Target with 100 Magic Resist and 3000 HP
Our Full build giving you 39 Flat and 40% Magic Penetration while having 400+AP
No Magic Pen Example:
Lets say that your skill is saying that its doing 1000 total damage, the number that you are reading on the skill is not the actual damage that you will do on the target, the 1000 damage will be reduced by 50% cause of the 100 Magic Resist of the target, so that means your actual damage from that skill will be 500!
With our Full Magic Pen build:
Your skill still doing 1000 total damage, but now cause of your Magic Penetration the target will have REDUCED RESISTANCES, lets see how you are calculating it to realize the actual damage, first you calculating the % magic pen resistances and then the flat number and they you are calculating how much "damage reduction" will do from the remaining magic resistance!
100 Mr - 40%(Percent Magic Pen) = 60 MR - 39 Flat Magic Pen = 21 Remaining Magic Resist of the target, this 21 MR means that the target will reduce only the 18% of the damage from your skills (Instead of 50% that it was with 100 MR)
that means the 1000 damage skill will now do 820 DAMAGE instead of 500 DAMAGE To understand the difference, in order for you to do 820 DAMAGE you needed without having penetration, you need to have 1340+ AP for your skill to have total damage of 1640 and do only 820 DMG to the target cause of the magic resist!

Here are some Great examples of our Full Magic Penetration Cho'Gath build in Full late Game:
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Here you can see WHY, To play with the Full Magic Penetration Build will always going to be the best way:

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So you will have Insane damage but is it just this? No, it isnt. You wont just have Damage to call yourself an Assassin. You will have 5000-6000 HP At level 18, slow effects with each skills-Hits to add up to your ALREADY insane CC! Pure Damage-Stun-Slow-Silence the combination to carry yourself to the Challenger Elo with Ease.

With this build we focus on doing PURE DAMAGE with each skill not only with our ulti.


The ultimate rune page is here,


Arcane Comet The STRONGEST Rune that you can possible play
Effect: Damaging an enemy champion with an ability hurls an Arcane Comet at their current location, dealing 30 − 100 (based on level) (+ 35% bonus AD) (+ 20% AP) magic damage after a brief delay.
Damaging enemy champions with an ability reduces the remaining cooldown.
Single target: 20%
Area of effect / Bouncing Blade Multi-hit : 10% per enemy hit
Damage over time: 5%
That means, that in late game, you will have your arcane comet in less than 3 seconds! Your Q will also have less than 4 seconds CD that will ALWAYS SECURE hitting the Arcane Comet

Nimbus Cloak Extra movement speed bonus after using your Flash or Ignite just perfect for you, cause now you can have bonus movement speed bonus to secure a KILL or your ESCAPE!

Transcendence After the new Changes of this rune, is now a very good option to have, bonus ability haste and later on 20% Skills CD refund with each Kill/Assist that you will get, that means after going all in and killing something with Q-W-E combo, you will have right away your Q-W to use it to the next target, it’s going to be a powerful tool that we will use to terrorize them all even more!!

Scorch This might be one of the MOST IMPORTANT runes together with Cheap Shot
after 1 second you will damage your enemies with 15 − 35 (based on level) bonus magic damage, that means, that you will prolong the Demonic Embrace effect by at least 2 more seconds, that means more %HP burn damage. Also, cause of Arcane Comet, Scorch and slow from your Q or E you will also activate Cheap Shot every single time!

Cheap Shot Another insanely powerful rune, after your CC (and we got many) and with only 4 seconds CD you will do 10 − 45 (based on level) bonus TRUE DAMAGE! Just insane!

Ravenous Hunter Damage to Heal, that means heal from each of your skills even your HITS and of course the true damage from your ultimate will give you a pure number for heal!
For the beginners to play with Ravenous Hunter is a MUST, cause you still dont have the experience of good position in teamfights, so you will do mistakes and you need some source of HEAL to make you sustain even longer, of course its still hard to die late game while having 6000HP, but its going to help you from early to full late game! After at least 30 games with our Cho'Gath build then swap this rune with
Ultimate Hunter after the new runes changes, together with cloud drakes you can reach CD numbers for your Feast that are as crazy as 30 seconds, so after getting used to our build and be confident enough to position right, swap to this and enjoy!


Enjoy your free Elo my friends!

Let’s start with the Items and our Items Strategy. I come up with this build after hundreds of different combinations, to create this final build that can’t lose against ANYTHING and ANYONE!

As start items you got two options.

First to start with Dark Seal and Refillable Potion the reason that with this build we are starting like that, is cause Cho’Gath as a champion got high amount of HP and even more sustain with the passive, personally I like playing with Refillable Potion cause in lane phase it will give you bonus hp-generation that together with your passive will let you remain in lane as long as you want!
Also we will keep Dark Seal till literally FULL LATE GAME, the stacks that you will have (Trust me always 10) will let you have a start item that its stats will worth more than 1500 Gold!
Second to start with Doran's Ring and of course two pots, this will give you much more mana sustain as well, cause the bonus mana regeneration together with your passive will let you spam your skills a little bit more early than before!


At your first back you will focus to have 800-1235 Gold, and you will buy 2 more Doran's Ring if we started with the Dark Seal lvl 1 and 1 Dark Seal plus 1 more Doran's Ring if we started with Doran's Ring level 1, plus either Boots or Amplifying Tome to add more Damage.

Lets talk about the 3 rings combination with NUMBERS now, and why it’s the most powerful way to play it!
The 2 Doran's Ring + 1 Dark Seal start will give you the following stats:
45 AP (Plus 3+AP per kill), 180 HP, mana regain and all that with just 800 gold (plus the Dark Seal from lvl 1) this kind of stats will totally replace the need for extra mana item and will give you DAMAGE + SUSTAIN something you can’t find NO MATTER what you buy with this amount of gold (800). This is one of the MOST IMPORTANT things you need to follow to be sure you will totally dominate your lane phase no matter who is your enemy!!
The stats from Doran's Ring is 128.23% gold efficient (Just from AP-HP without calculating the Mana regain effect), thats means that its AP-HP stats cost 512 gold and not 400 that the item cost! Also you will get 160 gold by selling it, so the actual cost of the item is 240 gold for getting 512 gold worth of stats :)
and you also got the Dark Seal that is up to 372% Gold efficient, that means you will gain stats that worth up to 1302 gold!!

By playing with the 3 rings, you got 2300+ gold worth of stats (Almost full item cost :D) and you will start selling your first of the Doran's Ring ONLY when you start buidling your 3rd core item, making you using it for at least 20mins of the game!! Also the Dark Seal can be left as last item and be built into Mejai's Soulstealer one of the cheapest legendary items!!

The next time you will go back you will buy Lost Chapter this item will give you bonus ap damage, Ability Haste and literally infinity amount of mana to spam your skills non-stop that together with your 2 Doran's Ring 1 Dark Seal you will have Damage-Unlimited Mana-Health, everything that Cho'Gath Need to dominate any lane vs any match up possible.

Then we will finish our Mythic item and the ONLY One that is worth for our Full Magic Penetration Build the Luden's Tempest
This item will give you the following stats: Ability power, mana, MAGIC PENETRATION, ability haste and its active with only 10s CD bonus burst damage each time you are activating it with your Skills plus bonus movement speed bonus to reach your target easily and most importantly bonus MAGIC FLAT PEN for each LEGENDATY item that you will finish later on!!
This INSANE buff on our Core item made us even stronger, what Cho’gath always needed was MOBILITY cause we already got insane damage with our build, now you will have bonus movement speed with Luden's Tempest plus your other items that we will talk later on, making our Cho’Gath monster even STRONGER!
This item alone will let you do more than 1500 dmg without using your R at all, cause of the combination of runes-skills-items effects/stats!

The next item that we will be playing from now is Void Staff and cause we can now buy the item-part of this item that will give us bonus %Magic Pen plus AP with the lowest cost possible without the need to complete the FULL ITEM!
That new changes alone will give us more options for the next item, the first option is finish the Void Staff and that will add the full %Magic pen plus bonus Flat %Magic pen cause of the Mythic item that we got, or simply leave the part-void staff item and go for
Demonic Embrace this item will give you AP, HP and an passive effect that you will LOVE, %Max HP Dmg while damaging your enemies with your skills plus bonus %HP to AP effect, an amazing tool that made our Cho’Gath to have even more sustain than before without losing damage at all!!

**Remember you will sell your first Doran’s ring only NOW, that you started building Demonic Embrace and that to buy the part-item, the rest 2 rings will be sold later on while building our next-item choices and NEVER BEFORE THAT, even in late game, start items are so gold efficiency that are stronger than most or should I say ALL item-parts!

Then we will start building our next item, that will be the Cosmic Drive this item will give you once again AP-HP-MS and another very powerful passive effect, each time you are hitting your enemies with your skills you will have a bonus movement speed bonus buff and you will keep having this effect for as long as you keep damaging them, here is what you need to realize and why we are playing this item after Demonic Embrace, the burn effect from this item will
let you have this movement speed bonus effect activated for a far longer time, making you super mobile and fast to ENGAGE or DISANGRAGE from any fight!!! Also the movement speed bonus will stack with your Luden's Tempest MS bonus effect making you EVEN FASTER!!
As I said above, what our Cho always needed was extra mobility, this combo of items will give you that and even more than you need, cause while having damage and speed you will also have a total hp with full build of 6000+HP!!

For last item we now got a lot of options, remember that with each LEGENDARY item that we are finishing, we are gaining cause of our Mythic Item Luden’s Tempest bonus flat magic pen, till now we got 3 completed Legendary items and that means 15 bonus magic pen just cause we got our items!
What that means till now? We got 18 flat Magic pen from our boots, 6 from Luden's Tempest and another 15 from the items, making us having total of 39 FLAT MAGIC PEN with another 45% from Void Staff without finishing any more items we got 39 | 45% Magic Penetration making us already the strongest champion in the game, cause except of just damage we will also have ARMOR, MR, MOBILITY and more than 5000Hp!

As final item you can choose from the Following 3:

Warmog's Armor One of the strongest items for sustain, super useful for us! And our best choice, in all of my games I am preferring this, over the damage option, the reason behind it is cause in fights what is important is not only how fast you will kill the target, but also how healthy you will be after it, imagine having the damage to one-shot an entire team, 6000+HP and also the ability to go FULL HP simply just by walking out of the combat for few seconds… And cause we are going to grab a Blue elixir or blue buff we will also have high mana regain, making you be FULL HP and FULL MANA in all fight long, outdamaging and outsustaining any champion no matter who or how powerful they think they are!

Rabadon's Deathcap Now that you got the complete Magic pen-item effects combination you can buy an only DAMAGE item that is only worth if you get it late game, this item will increase your damage to its absolute limits, it might not be the sustain type of Warmog's Armor but its going to be the damage type to clear an entire enemy team just by hitting something with your Q-W combo, that’s what you need to kill any target, be it a FULL TANK or an ASSASSIN, nothing will be able to survive against your damage now!

Morellonomicon This item will give you AP-HP and also an important effect that your team needs, the grievous wounds effect, this will reduce any healing effects (plus regeneration effects) that your enemy team got, very powerful and worth to be consider if your teammates didn’t get an item that giving this stat!

Mejai's Soulstealer You can always finish this from Dark Seal if you got the full stacks is going to be a very powerful and cheap item! A huge amount of AP, HP, bonus movement speed and of course bonus MAGIC PEN from ludens, cause this item count as a legendary item!

Horizon Focus Another item that finally will be as final option!! This item will give you AP, Ability Haste, HP and 10% Bonus damage every time you are slowing or immobilizing a champion, that means pretty much EVERY SINGLE SKILL that Cho'Gath got, another important thing about it is that it will "reveal them for 6 seconds" making it super useful against tricky foods!



A lot of people will ask about Shadowflame and if it is worth! You already know how much I love the MAX PEN Builds and we are still not using it. This game is not about blindly using Penetration effects, but to have the right combo of items, runes and champion skills to maximize the potential of each one of them, so Shadowflame is not worthy as item, nor his stats of the magic pen effect is powerful enough to compare to the items that we talked above, imagine even Mejai's Soulstealer is better than this!

My personal choice of last item is 90% of the times Warmog's Armor cause our max pen Cho'Gath will always one shot everything, but to have the ability to be FULL HP in full late game is an important tool that you will always need.

The max Magic Penetration that you will have with the Full build is going to be 44 | 45% and at this point no matter what you choose to be your final item, you will have the damage to INSTANT One SHOT everything in front of your eyes, no matter if they are going to have full magic resist or no magic resist they will always take from you TRUE or an insane BONUS DAMAGE instead!!

So your FULL BUILD will look like this:
Luden's Tempest Void Staff Demonic Embrace Sorcerer's Shoes Cosmic Drive Warmog's Armor plus Elixir of Sorcery

Lets talk about the strategy here. To play with Cho'Gath inst only use his PURE Strength as your weapon, like any other WARS, at league you need to use your HEAD as well to win the game.
So lets talk about what you need to focus.

Creeps: The most important thing is to focus on your farm, you need to farm fast and if you can kill all the creeps without missing even one. This way you will take the lead from your enemy champion, dont be afraid to use your skills for last hits even at the 1 level.

Learn how To improve your Farming and Wave Management by watching our League Masterclass:
Play Video
Stay Alive: To not to die at lane and not have any kills is more worth than to be 3-3 or 4-4 with your enemy Lane champion.
Your build focusing to be the strongest at the MID-Late game, doesn't matter if you cant kill now, focus on farm and you will be able to show your true Strength at the right time of the game.

Hide & Seek Strategy: You will always max your Q, even if you can't hit your enemy you will still max this skill. Rapture is the strongest skill of Cho'Gath even stronger than your ulti.
To make it Easier to hit my enemies, i come up with the Rengar style trick, its simple. just hid at the Bushes and make use of the FOG OF WAR, this way your enemy champion wont hear the Q sound or see your Animation Cast, with just this its almost certain that you will hit him and then kill him with your Combo.

Even if you wont kill your enemy, he will start losing focus from this strategy.
They wont be able to go close to cs, and lose EXP-FARM so after doing this a couple of times the game is yours.

Lots of my Subs and followers from YouTube and social asking me "Why are you not playing with teleport TOP?"
and the answer is simple and i will give it to all of you as well.

Im playing always with Flash and Ignite Top, for the following reason, Teleport is a skill for any of players don't have enough confident in theirselves that they can DESTROY the enemy TOP laner.
Its as simple as that, Teleport can be used to Come back after a fast back or go to other lane and "Help" your team.
The reason all playing with Teleport is cause they want to find the "easy" answer behind the top lane "go help others and exp there", i cant judge them really, but if you really want to say yourself that you actually won the TOP Lane then you need to do it SOLO.

Destroy your enemy not only by killing him but also by making him build TOO MUCH MR that he don't need.
All my tanky enemies building full MR Items, cant do anything else cause if they wont they will just die from me over and over again.
But by forcing them doing that the BEST WAY to counter them its to simple change lane, send your ADC TOP with your Support and go BOT 1vs2, after destroying TOP its the time to destroy BOT as well.

Doing something as simple as that you can change the ENTIRE balance of the game. The Full MR Tank top wont stand a chance vs the ADC and SUPPORT and their ADC and SUPPORT wont stand a chance vs the FULL Magic Pen You.
I did this countless of times and always winning the game at the end.

TIP: Lots of you will think "but when my team need me i can teleport there", NO. You dont need to teleport there. You can be there by foot, or if you cant be there continue with the OBJECTIVES, push your lane destroy towers take Dragons with your jungler etc.
Almost every rush TP to help BOT or MID Lane end up by being all DEAD together with you.
Cause when you TP, you suddenly change the entire MAP Phase, you going somewhere where you will be 100% seen and try to either Dodge your skills or Kill you first.
So go by foot, and go from behind them by using the FOR OF WAR.

This is the entire strategy behind what i am always doing.
If you see my videos you will see that im right at what im saying above.

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