Who is Aurelion Sol?

Aurelion Sol is a long range DPS/Control mage who excels at pumping out Tons of consistent damage and Crowd Control. He achives this through the use of his passive star rotations and positioning in team fights in order to maximize his effectiveness in battle.

Not only is he masterfully designed thematically [ He's a Star Dragon! ], but he also offers a very unique playstyle that requires the Summoner to have near perfect positioning and understanding of how to effectively maximize the champions DPS.

Be Warned!

Aurelion Sol isn't the type of champion you can just pick up one game and curb stomp your way aboard the 'Freelo Express'. He requires time and effort to be put into him in order to learn not only the positioning and timing on his abilities, but also how to play every single specific match-up you face [ Trust me you WILL fail if you don't know what you're doing ]. If you aren't at all interested into putting that much time and dedication into this god-send of a champion, than I recommend you move onto another character. Aurelion WILL NOT be for you.


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If you are still interected in picking up and learning how to become one with, 'The Star Forger' than read on, this guide will contain pretty much every single thing you will need to get yourself started!

Strengths v. Weaknesses

Aurelion Sol has several strengths that allows him to contribute to the success of him and his team such as:

+High Damage, Long Range DPS
+Tons of Wave Clear
+Almost Unmatched Roaming Potential
+Fantastic Engage
+Lots of CC
+Unique Playstyle
+High Skill Cap
+He's a Dragon. From Space!

While Aurelion Sol can pave the road to infinite 'Freelo' and your ticket out of Bronze V elo hell, you need to keep in mind that he has very defining weakness that WILL make or break the player. If you plan on playing this Giant Graceful Dragon you need to burn into your mind that Aurelion:

-Struggles against Long Range Mages
-Gets Pounded Melees w/ Gap Closers
-Very Vulnerable to CC
-Silence is brutal
-Screw Fizz, Kassadin, and Leblanc!
-Doesn't say 'Boop' enough :'(

All in all, if you keep these things in mind and learn to play around his strengths, Aurelion Sol can very EASILY carry your games!

Why Should You Listen To Me?

So at this point in the guide I would like to formally introduce myself...

Hello everyone!

I am DarkfireAm(NA) also know as DarkfireAm on Reddit.

While I can't boast about my "Super High Elo" (Silver III) I tell you with almost 100% certainty that I DO know what I'm talking about when it comes to Aurelion Sol. I not only have a pretty extensive amount of time put into this champion, but I am also a very frequent lurker on the Aurelion Sol Sub-Reddit.

[Visit the 'Aurelion Sol Mains' Sub-Reddit for constant updates on the state of the champion]

Believe me or not I do in-fact know what the hell I'm talking about. I do know however, that there are some of you skeptics who refuse to listen to someone already in the cold grips of ELO HELL [which is quite understandable], so here is my op.gg!

http://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=Darkfiream

[Also look at r2ve (Korea) who is regarded as the Best Aurelion Sol in the world -
http://www.op.gg/summoner/userName=r2ve

As you can see I have about 50 games with Aurelion in Ranked [Even more in Normals] with a solid 79% win ratio. I am honestly expecting to reach Gold V with little to no effort at all, and by the looks of it Platinum may not be that far behind!

The point I'm trying to make here is that I know some good ole' Aurelion Sol, so believe in the me that belives in me :)

So without further adue my Aurelion Sol enthusiasts, lets delve right into the guts of this champion!
...eww...

Quints

We take Greater Quintessence of Movement Speed over Greater Quintessence of Ability Power since it offers us a lot of much needed movement speed. It really just comes down to personal preference, but if you want my honest opinion I believe the Movement Speed stat is just more useful in more situations than the Bonus Ability Power.

Marks

We take Greater Mark of Magic Penetration for some useful magic penetration. Pretty much standard on every AP champion, Aurelion being no different. The penetration proves all around more useful to us than flat Ability Power making it the clear choice.

Seals

We're going to want to grab Greater Seal of Scaling Health in order to greater augment our survivability. With the scaling HP and the rest of our core items, we will be fairly 'tanky', allowing us to position a little bit farther up in team fights w/o much risk of being bursted down. Keep in mind though, if you are against a difficult AD Assassin match-up (looking at you Zed), then I highly implore you to instead take Greater Seal of Armor! This could quite possibly mean the difference between survival, and the CTRL4 Mastery Emote while you quietly await the proc from Death Mark.

Glyphs

For glyphs we want to take both Greater Glyph of Scaling Cooldown Reduction and Greater Glyph of Magic Resist. With the CDR per level we get a free 10% reduction on ability cooldowns at lv.18. This can really make or break a teamfight, making it so that Falling Star comes up sooner than normal, possibly to save our life or add onto our damage. If you're against a hard AP match-up like Fizz or LeBlanc, than I recommend just going 9x Greater Glyph of Magic Resist as the MR can prevent us from getting 100-0 early on.

Ferocity

I really don't feel like I need to go too deep into the obvious choices we have here in the Mastery page, but I know a lot of people are genuinely concerned on whether or not they take a certain stat so I'll go over it anyway.

So first up we're going to want to grab Sorcery for the improved ability damage, DON'T take Fury on Aurelion Sol Mid for ANY reason. The only time you want to grab the attack speed Mastery is if you're going Aurelion Sol Junlge (which is 100% viable BTW). Next, we wanna pick up both Double Edged Sword and Natural Talent to increase our overall damage, nothing complex there. And finally we choose Oppressor over Bounty Hunter since a lot of our damage is done after we have our target stunned by Breath of Light. We can't really rely on the bounty hunter effect every single game, so it's really just best to leave it (that and the bonus damage offered by Oppressor is just too good to turn down).

Cunning

For the Cunning Tree we want Savagery for the increased damage to minions and monsters. This really helps us clear the wave early on, making the time between us staying in lane and us leaveing less than without it. We wanna get Assassin and Merciless in order to increase our overall damage output. Both Secret Stash and Runic Affinity can be useful to an extent, but overall not as much as Assassin! Dangerous Game is next, it really helps us out in 1v1s and surviving those pesky Ignite ticks making it an overall all better option for us. Precision is for the magic penetration, pretty self-explanatory there.

Now on to the popular debate, Thunderlord's Decree or Stormraider's Surge .

Now this really comes down to personal preference, but in my honest, humble opinion, I feel that Stormraider's is the superior option.

Let's look at this objectively shall we?

What does Thunderlord's do for us? What does it contribute? All it does is give us a little bit of extra damage, which is nice, but not as useful as Stormraider's. With Stormraider's Surge we get a **** ton of movement speed after damaging the enemy champion enough, which can really help increase our dps and kitting potential. In my opinion Stormraider's is just BETTER for the things we really want to accomplish as Aurelion Sol. If however you're a die-hard Thunderlord's Decree fan, then by all means go for it!

What is this Section?

For this section of the guide I'm only going over why we do or don't take certain summoner spells. I'm going to assume that already know what these spells do, so I won't cover any of their specific descriptions. Now onto the spells!

Good Spells

Flash is an all purpose summoner that 95% of champions take. It's especially helpful in Aurelion Sol since it helps us escape ganks, Flash Ult/Cancel Falling Star's cast animation. All in all you want to take Flash every single time, NO EXCEPTIONS.

Exhaust is a very multi-purpose spell. It can be used both offensively AND defensively. This can help us slow tanks who are trying to get inside our "Safe Zone" (more on our 'Safe Zone' later on :3), lower the damage of burst based champions like Zed or Fizz, and even slow our targets so we can hit them with our passive Cosmic Creator! The list really goes on and on.
This spell is just way too usful to pass up on Aurelion Mid, you'll want to take this 90% of the time.

Barrier is the only alternative that I can see working well for us. It can also help against burst champions, similar to Exhaust, but with Barrier you don't have to actually target the enemy champion you want to avoid damage from. It's 'decent', but not as useful as Exhaust so I reccomend only taking it against burst based matchups you might struggle against.

Smite is a pretty obvious choice if you're going Aurelion Sol Jungle. You can't be a jungler w/o Smite, duh...please don't take this in lane...please?

Not As Good Spells

Ignite is generally for more aggressive mid laners who want to pick up kills against their lane opponent in order to snowball. As Aurelion Sol players we aren't looking to pick up kills in our lane (you'll find it difficult if not impossible to do), I don't want to go into too much into detail with what we want to accomplish, instead I'll save that for the Gameplay Section in order to maintain clarity. Just know that Ignite won't really help us, so just simply avoid it.

Heal for us is really just a less effective version of Barrier. It can be negated with ignite, and doesn't help with surviving burst very much. If you really want that added survivability then just take Barrier, it helps way more.

Ghost is one of those controversial spells when it comes to Aurelion Sol. The stigma is that since Aurelion wants to hit his stars to do damage, Ghost must therefor be the superior option. This however is simply NOT true. We have more than enough ways to land our passive and W, we don't need to overkill with this and Stormraider's Surge . I reccomend searching for other alternatives.

Quest for Universal Domination