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Nidalee Build Guide by RushFrog

Middle High elo Lane Nidalee by RushFrog / RFLegendary

Middle High elo Lane Nidalee by RushFrog / RFLegendary

Updated on May 13, 2022
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League of Legends Build Guide Author RushFrog Build Guide By RushFrog 31 4 97,468 Views 3 Comments
31 4 97,468 Views 3 Comments League of Legends Build Guide Author RushFrog Nidalee Build Guide By RushFrog Updated on May 13, 2022
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Runes: Toplane

1 2
Resolve
Grasp of the Undying
Demolish
Conditioning
Overgrowth

Domination
Sudden Impact
Ingenious Hunter
Bonus:

+9 Adaptive (5.4 AD or 9 AP)
+9 Adaptive (5.4 AD or 9 AP)
+6 Armor

Spells:

1 2
Top Mid
LoL Summoner Spell: Flash

Flash

LoL Summoner Spell: Ignite

Ignite

Threats & Synergies

Threats Synergies
Extreme Major Even Minor Tiny
Show All
None Low Ok Strong Ideal
Extreme Threats
Ideal Synergies
Synergies
Ideal Strong Ok Low None

Champion Build Guide

High elo Lane Nidalee by RushFrog / RFLegendary

By RushFrog
Intro / About me
This is what you link to your jungler, playing Nidalee Mid is surprisingly more socially acceptable so you won't be needing that. If you ever have any questions feel free to ask on Stream. Playing Lane Nidalee will get you flamed and you absolutely can not underperform, it is what it is.

I used to play pro and I'm kinda famous for my Nidalee back in the day under "RFLegendary" so interpret this guide as you want.

Lane Nidalee isn't very strong by default, but can be quite effective if pushed to the limit. Don't be toxic and please purchase control wards and be good teammate <3
Toplane

    Top Nidalee is a Grasp walk in/out of bush simulator. Kinda...

    Buy Doran's Blade and make sure you take double adaptive damage, I can't stress this enough!!!


    Transforming from range to melee gives you a the melee Grasp proc, this is very important for when you have nothing better to do because opponent wont trade.

    Do not autoattack more than once, make sure you don't take much damage from minions. The whole point is that you win attrition not ALL IN KILL. Although you can do that if you took ignite. If the opponent places a ward in the bush simply use the other 2 bushes.

    You should win lane early and/or snowball the wave towards the opponent, take this wonderful opportunity to time the wave 3/4 crash into opponents tower into a recall because chances are you won't kill them early. In case you do find an opporunity to kill them with Spear/Pounce combo make sure you don't get immidiately ganked because as they say, all jungle routes lead to toplane. Jungle timers vary but there are a lot of 3 camp/fast full clear junglers right now.


    If the opponent leashed you can pull the wave into the bush at level one and zone the enemy toplaner off the entire wave. Worst comes worst, make them miss a few cs by pullng the wave to you. This is very effective but not a lot of junglers start topside, this is also good into bad matchups as a defensive strategy just make sure you don't facecheck a Darius level 1.

    Almost never leash if you don't have to, strongside Nidalee is good.

    You lose to every hard engage champion in an all in, you can't fight it don't even try. Instead look for engages on your own terms!


    A common level 4, fourth wave back is 800 gold, if youhave perfect cs which is 25 on wave 4 you can purchase Refillable, control ward and two Ruby Crystals, or a second Doran's item instead of double Ruby. Lots of math but if you have this happen you will know exactly why I wrote this here, goodjob.

    Walk down to midlane with your lead and enable your midlaner if you can't accomplish anything top. Throwing a spear from fog of war may not seem that impactful, but it sends a message especially if your next roams will not always result in you committing.
    What I like to do is walk down past vision and recall. This takes a little bit of time but if you have tempo lead (pushing prio) you can really put the enemy midlaner into an awkward spot with a Schrödinger's Nidalee existing in his topside jungle. This is jungler tech from seasons ago where they would walk into a lane and recall but yeah, go crazy have fun with it.

    If you're getting camped its okay to give stuff up as long as you're not feeding, this sucks because the only way you're useful is by playing aggro but you just have to trust your team to know how to capitalize on you being weaksided.

    Don't INT, every Nidalee player has low deathcount please don't ruin this metric, you're playing a hard to pilot champ means you have to live up to the standard, NO RUNNING IT DOWN!!!


    Take tower early, if you're winning summon your jungler with Shelly (Rift Herald idk why people don't know her name is Shelly...)
    And take tower to free you of this awful toplane experience, sooner midgame comes the better!


    Make sure to get early vision to prevent falling behind by jungler, if you fall behind you will lose and you will lose hard.


    Ruby crystals are op, don't be ashamed to buy two of them its basically like playing Tank Nidalee but only for early laning. The 2nd one builds into shadowflame later.

    Alternator is a good option to snowball.

    Feel free to buy a dark seal if you're snowballing but don't buy mejais please.

    Bushwhacks go around the lane or in tribush.

    Pounce isn't instant don't use it as a reaction dodge to things like Darius hook you will probably die, what I like to do is juke to one side and pounce to the other.
Midlane
    Doran's Blade carries the lane because you play the same way an ADC would play in mid. The idea is to position yourself in a way to play agressively without dying to the jungler (just hug the side the jungler isn't on). This requires some basic jungle knowledge.



    You utilize pounce to dodge common skillshots and win trades, thats why I like starting pounce (for example you can dodge Zoe's Q at level 1).



    Look for spears when the opponent autoattacks, after the animation time nerfs its the only "real" way to guarantee a spear hit unless you're playing vs a traffic cone.


    Healing yourself and autoattacking while spacegliding is very effective because people will try to dodge your spear giving you more room to auto (just dont use spear sometimes)


    You do a surprising amount of damage with Electrecute and Ignite so don't sleep on lethal, its hard to get used to but there is a tonn of matchups you can straight up kill from half HP.


    Early recall or an early roam is almost essential, don't sit in lane too long, if you're not doing something its time to try to do something proactive. First back should almost always involve HP.


    You can get really creative with bushwhacks early but its too hard to explain in text, basically you do this to threaten all in but don't go in, if you've ever played against a Nidalee you know how painful this is and you can do this through out the entire lane just make sure you don't sink your entire manabar into whacks.



    Nidalee has hybrid damage but opponent taking MR is much worse for them than taking armor (because of Doran's Blade).


    Since you're going to be playing aggressive, you will find yourself in a situation where you ether solokilled or almost soloed the enemy midlaner with a wave pushing to you. You can just recall and walk back into a frozen lane, Nidalee sucks at pushing before 6.

    Hug the side the enemy jungler isn't on and ward the same side, bushwhack the corners of ramps, most junglers will autopath and walk into it, even in high elo.

    Hunt (the passive) reveals invis and gives you damage amp, making lane Nidalee deceptively strong due to lots of "burst" from ignite electrocute, execute damage, damage amp etc. I say this because when you're new to playing Nidalee you will feel like you do 0 damage and theres a certain truth to it. It's hard to do damage but once you get comfortable with everything you will see what I'm talking about.

    Junglers with CC are your best friend because it gives you a free spear, doesn't matter if they also do magic damage, in todays day and age no-one builds resistances.

    Make sure to ask for jungler attention especially if you're winning because playing together can accomplish great things. Nidalee is fantastic at invading and being proactive on the map hence why I enjoy Midlane more right now.
"Nidalee is useless"
First things first, that sentiment has a poorly delivered yet very good point.

If you're not playing good, you're probably doing nothing. However, everfrost makes your job quite a bit easier. The creative core item choice combined with low cdr from "ingenious hunter" allows you to create picks/engage/peel for your teammates turning nidalee into a more flexible teamfighter.

The playstyle of mid or top Nidalee is that of a Leesin and you want to combine strong laning phase with a strong midgame + utility/snowball items to end the game as soon as possible.

If you can't land a spear you can always land Everfrost then land the spear. This is why I go this item is because it transforms you into an opportunity based champion and has lots of practical creative uses, combined with a low cooldown from domination tree its a good adaptation to the new age of champs.

Itemizing Shadowflame 2nd spikes your damage very very hard and I'm sure you understand why, also it helps with
survivability in combination with Everfrost.
Sorc shoes are essential because if you don't have pen you can't be a threat!

But doesn't Nidalee fall off? Yeah and the only way you can stop that is by staying ahead, she scales similar to how old Jayce would scale where the idea is to stay 1 item ahead of the competition so technically you're always ahead thus you don't fall off (you can't make mistakes).

Midgame you can one shot most carries due to a heavy magic pen build and if you don't oneshot someone you can always peel until you find an opportunity to do so. Basically you want to look for opportunities but don't force anything, this is a difficult craft to master, patience.

Nidalee's hitbox is actually massive, theres literally a block attached to the tail so keep that in mind.

Different skins have different animations, so use whatever you like but I like Bewitching because Riot put a hat on the cat thats really awesome.

Nidalee is very good at farming enemy Gromp and Krugs, please do this as often as you can without hurting your lane, you can do Chickens if you're Midlane!

Mid to late you will likely be using the blue trinket so make sure to utilize its cooldown to check areas, get nice cheeky wards in enemy jungle or check objectives. This combined with bushwhacks allows you to effectively never get caught off guard by someone sitting in a bush further adding onto the idea that Nidalee is supposed to have good "KDA". Don't play for KDA i'm just saying you should have the tools to not get caught so use them :3

You can actually play Nidalee support too if you like but I'm not a big fan and I have no idea how it works but fyi its not that bad, like if Xerath was Yuumi...
Weird / Cool Mechanics
These two are pounceable, its impossible to explain just go into practice and try a bunch of times, pretty useless but a cool way to show off.

Map isn't perfectly symmetrical so these are exclusive to the side you're on, first is blue 2nd is purple.


I actually didn't know about these until recently, but yeah, pretty cool.

Cougar Q + W. You just click the minion thats low with bite and pounce away at the same time, takes some getting used to but pretty self explainatory. Gives you a pounce reset and keeps the hands warm but most importantly its fun to do and intimidates the opponent because its "hard" to do.


Attacking with grasp/ attacking a tower with plating in range then transforming to cat makes you do "melee" damage. Meaning you do more damage to tower plates in melee, demolish does more, grasp procs as melee etc.

Using an overhead emote and transforming leaves the emote in the spot you transformed in, very useless but pretty cool.

Standard all in combo is -> pounce -> bite -> swipe because you can't flash/dash dodge swipe, you can only do max damage E > W > Q if you know the opponent has no mobility or its the only way you kill them. Just do fast combo until you are used to it because its by far a better default than the "max damage" combo.

You can transform back to human after pouncing mid animation, keep that in mind because you can instacast after landing as opposed to transforming at the end then having the delay till cast!

Passive movement speed from bushes stays on you for 2 seconds after exiting a bush, you can effectively tap bushes for movement speed and although its only 10% it can make a big difference.

Cougar Q is an autoreset.

Range form auto to lasthit -> transform -> pounce for the reset, pretty fun to do not very practical aside from lasthitting but you will be doing a lot of auto pouncing when poking an all in champ so get used to this too.

You can cougar Q through stuns, yep its exactly what it sounds like.

Hunt stays on for longer than you can see so you can actually extended pounce much later than you think, its weird to explain but don't be pressued to go in before it runs out especially if target is in lethal without the hunt damage bonus.


Alright, this about wraps it up, if I have any updates I'll be sure to add but I'd like to mention that I'm not responsible for any lost LP and you getting reported, thank you for reading do at your own risk. Also check me out on youtube and twitch, I'm better with words than I am with text.

You can bushwhack on top of everfrost snare for hunt proc if you don't have spear up or if theres minions in the way.
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RushFrog Nidalee Guide
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High elo Lane Nidalee by RushFrog / RFLegendary

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