Season 8 Jungle Aatrox is what we always wished for: a juggernaut in the jungle. While dealing out massive damage to melee enemies and generally being a menace, he is weak against ranged enemies like Graves and Kindred who can easily shut him down. In this guide, I, a Platinum 400k Mastery Points Aatrox main will teach you how to abuse your strengths and hide your weaknesses as much as possible. Let's proceed to the next chapter, lads!

For summoner spells, because you're playing jungle, there's not much choice going on.

No need to elaborate. You're playing jungle, not taking this can be considering trolling.

Flash is the standard summoner spell on most champions, because it grants mobility on immobile champions and it makes sticky champions like Yasuo or Katarina even stickier.

Aatrox has one of the biggest kill pressures in the early game. Taking Ignite is a gamble. If you manage to pull off a first blood on the enemy jungler, then you'll snowball like crazy. But you will have no escape and will have to manage with basically no mobility. You're also pressured by time. Should the game go late, you will have next to none summoner spells because Smite doesn't do much and Ignite falls off harder than any other spell.

Let's start with runes. The post-rework Aatrox doesn't synergise with Conqueror or even the Precision Tree as well as he used to. In fact, I wouldn't recommend ever taking it because all it gives is Attack Speed as bonus stats, which Aatrox barely benefits from. Instead, we have 4 options for runes: Arcane Comet, Grasp of the Undying, Electrocute, and Dark Harvest. Arcane Comet has good synergy with Aatrox's Q because it will always land, thanks to the knock-up. Taking Arcane Comet lets you bully even more in the laning phase and get an even bigger lead.

Grasp of the Undying is the second option for runes. This rune allows you to bully melee champs like Riven, Renekton, and Yasuo with your passive. What you want to do when you take Grasp of the Undying is get the proc, E forward and auto. From there on you can choose to continue farming or go ham on them. A combo with E auto as starter would look like this: Umbral Dash > auto > Infernal Chains > The Darkin Blade > The Darkin Blade > auto > The Darkin Blade > Umbral Dash > auto. If you land everything, they should be dead, and even if you don't, they're going to back because you just took more than 75% of their HP.

Thirdly, Electrocute. This is self-explanatory. It gives good burst, helps in ganks, and in skirmishes. Still, Electrocute comes with 2 downsides: the lengthy cooldown and the damage that falls off, should the game go late. So keep in mind, if you go Electrocute, end the game early.

Lastly, Dark Harvest, also known as smurf's keystone. You should get this if you're familiar to using it and maintaining the stacks, or if you're sure that the game will go late, because with 150+ stacks, you're sure to do some good damage in teamfights.

For your secondary tree, you'll almost always want to take either Sorcery or Resolve. Always take Transcendence, Chrysalis and Bone Plating as they make your life way easier both early and late game.

This is what you've been waiting for: The Build.

This one is pretty obvious. New Aatrox, unlike pre-rework Aatrox, has insane scalings on his Q, and while you could go Enchantment: Cinderhulk, if you wanted to play a tank you would just choose Sejuani or Mao'Kai, wouldn't you? Buying Enchantment: Cinderhulk would kill Aatrox's early game power for nothing.

These are the boots you'll want to buy most of the time as they offer a lot of dueling potential, be it against their jungler, top laner or ADC.

Does their team have a Nautilus, Leona or perhaps a Maokai? Do they have minimal AD in their team? Then these are your go-to boots! The 30% tenacity they offer is no joke.

The Black Cleaver is the bread and butter of any AD champ. It offers you a big chunk of health, a movement speed passive which allows you to keep up to your enemies easily, which is especially hard with post-rework Aatrox, an armor breaking passive that gets procced by your Q and both W parts, and let's not forget about the hefty 20% CDR that allows you to use Q and E more often.

Another core item of Aatrox. It offers everything he wants. Tons of AD for The Darkin Blade, CDR and some spell vamp that works wonder combined with your Umbral Dash passive and your Q, allowing you to effectively drain tank almost as well as old Aatrox.

This item is more of a cheese one. Pop it everytime right before you use ult, because your revive HP is calculated the moment you press R. Should you die, you will be revived with about 90% of your HP, and almost 100% if you have Spirit Visage.

Not just this but any tank item, really. You could go for Guardian Angel, Maw of Malmortius or Spirit Visage. Depends on the situation. You need 1-2 defensive items to not get bursted as you charge into teamfights, but more than that only negates your ult revive because they make you too tanky to revive in the given timeframe.

Max World Ender whenever you can for more bonus MS for the first second and when you're out of combat and less cooldown.

Max The Darkin Blade for more damage and cooldown reduction. The Darkin Blade is your bread and butter, as your damage isn't coming from anywhere else. Your autos barely hit for any damage, your W even less so, so The Darkin Blade and Deathbringer Stance is Aatrox's only chance to do damage.

Proceed to maxing Umbral Dash for more AD, more spell vamp and less cooldown. Maxing this skill is similar to maxing Yasuo's Sweeping Blade, as now the cooldown between dashes is shortened with every point in Umbral Dash.

Lastly, max Infernal Chains, while putting some points in while maxing E. While it is your utility skill, you should put at least 3 points in it by level 16 so you can better catch people out in skirmishes. The level 1 Infernal Chains has a puny 15% slow that allows anyone to easily escape.

This is the most important part. You might need to practice clearing the jungle in the Practice Tool before you head in a real game.

Jungle Aatrox is now a lot easier to handle for new players than pre-rework Aatrox. Why, you might ask? Well, you don't have to maintain your passive anymore, and the spell vamp comes passively. Now you don't have to choose between more damage or healing, because you have both. Also, you can oneshot small raptors, so that's neat.

Important things to keep in mind while clearing:

• You can gain a lot of HP by clearing raptors with talisman, because the AoE damage combined with the spell vamp and the talisman HP recovery will get you to full HP pretty quickly.
  
• You shouldn't use Infernal Chains on camps in case you get invaded. Infernal Chains is a weak ability in lane, but it shines the most in the jungle, because the walls are too narrow for them to escape. It also guarantees one The Darkin Blade, possibly the 3rd proc.
  
• If someone invades you, immediately start fighting. Aatrox is one of the strongest early game champs currently, and a full combo is not only easy to land in the jungle with the help of your Infernal Chains, but also lethal. It's not unheard of for new Aatrox to oneshot squishy champs early game.

With the quite recent changes to scuttle crab, the jungle path you'll follow most of the time will be blue buff > murk wolf > red buff > scuttle crab or red buff > raptors > blue buff > scuttle crab, then gank or invade.

I'll list here what Aatrox can do very well and things you could take advantage of:

• Aatrox can dive the best out of any champ, to the point where facing a fed Aatrox feels like your turret is nothing to his might.
  
• Aatrox can kill the dragon at level 5. The % max hp damage on Deathbringer Stance deals a lot of damage to the dragon, combined with the sweetspot damage on every The Darkin Blade. Watch out though, the aqua dragon slows you and the air dragon deals more damage than the others. Should the enemy jungler come, you are in big trouble.
  
• Aatrox can duel almost anyone in the jungle. Beware of tanks though, they can take more to kill than you'd think, and you cannot oneshot them with your The Darkin Blade.Moreover, they could call their laners to kill you for them while they're stalling the fight.
  
• Your Umbral Dash works similarly to Riven's Valor, in that you can cancel other abilities' animations with it. You can Umbral Dash > World Ender, Umbral Dash > The Darkin Blade, Umbral Dash > Infernal Chains. Aatrox can also change the direction of his The Darkin Blade midway through the cast time with the help of his Umbral Dash. Try The Darkin Blade > Umbral Dash.

That's the guide, folks. May your inner Jungle Jesus come to light and shine past the darkness that is the season 8 jungle. God help us all, lads.