Greetings, Summoner. I'm Vunjo from EUNE Servers, ranked Diamond in 3v3 maps.

In this guide, I'll be discussing my researches and studies of League of Legends. I am not famous for many well made moves (with exception of few champions), but I do take a lot of time to think about the game, it's structure, and what's the best way to play it. This of course, will include a whole lot of meta-breaking, and non standard talk. So please, if you cannot see the game from a different point of view, you may leave the page. I find calculating and predicting far more important than any other value in gaming. This is rarely seen in players nowadays, so you may find this guide very weird, and different from the others. I'll try to explain everything as detailed as possible, in order to be as clear as possible. This will be shown from the very basics of the game, to advanced tactics and ideas.

We all know that League of Legends is a PvP MOBA game. The origins come far back from Starcraft's Aeon of Strife, continued into a Warcraft 3 map named Defense of the Ancients, and now we're here. I'm not here to reveal the entire history of League of Legends, since it is not the point nor my priority in this guide. What I will discuss though, is based on the very start, the very genre of the game.

As I've mentioned it's a Player vs Player game, with minor PvE (Player vs Enemies) elements. From here, we conclude that it's very important to understand following facts:

• Know your enemy and your teammates. It's very important to understand who you're playing against, and what are their limits. This may not be effective in solo queue, but knowing your allies will help you a lot when creating a ranked team, whether it's a 5v5 or 3v3 team. This will also help you in custom 1v1 games, or so.
• Once you know your enemy, their champion, play-style, and what not, spot their weaknesses. No player is all knowing. We all tend to make a bad move sometimes, and not all of our theories or thoughts may be correct. This can be used in many different ways, from champions and builds, to very team composition.
• Predict your enemies' moves. Certain champions require excellent timing in order to be viable and to win your game (For example, Master Yi's Alpha Strike, which can be used as a spell to "flash" over the walls with your enemy, or to dodge deadly skill shots, and more). This applies in PvE games too, but it's much harder to do so in a PvP game, since certain players are completely unpredictable, and you can't know what to expect from game. This makes the specific player quite hard to counter-play.

As a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game, there's not much unknown or hidden. Not to mention that some of the following do not apply to all maps, like Howling Abyss, or Dominion. Certain facts that will increase your win ratio in Summoner's Rift for example are:

• Winning and pushing your lane. Each tower destroyed grants gold to you and the rest of your team. Destroying Inhibitors grant you Super Minions in the lane, which boost the damage and resistances of all other minions in the same lane. Since the patch 3.15, the boost equals 70%, though this may be changed in time. It's important to kill those minions first if your inhibitor is gone.
• Securing Buffs, Dragon, and Baron Nashor. These either grant gold and buff to the entire team, or just the individual who claims them. Keep in mind that timing Blue and Red buff, and warding Dragon and Baron are key to helping you win duels or team fights, or preventing your enemy from doing so.
• Warding in general, not just buffs. Wards are quite cheap compared to how much they can help you. For instance, you may buy a ward for 75 gold, and place it somewhere in their jungle. This simple ward can help you notice the enemy being low on health, and grant you an easy kill worth ~300 gold, depending on their score, killing spree, and so. On the other hand, the easiest way to make wards efficient is to place them by your or your ally's lane, to prevent enemy from killing you. Again, 75 gold spent, to prevent 300 gold for the enemy, their experience advantage, and even more gold advantage since you cannot farm while dead.

There could be a bit more facts, but these are just basics. You have probably known all of them by now, so there's nothing new or weird in here for now. However, getting reminded of these basic things is never a bad idea.

The following notes may be seen as a different point of view, though scientifically they are quite accurate.

I'll start with the general concept of the game. Usually, people start with so called "Laning Phase", where each individual selects a role, their champion, and continues to their desired lane. After some time, when players start to have enough farm for their first items, and start destroying the enemy turrets, the game changes from Early Game, to Mid Game. In this phase players tend to push their lanes as much as possible, slay Dragon or Baron Nashor for their team, and use most of their time on getting objectives done. In the Late Game, it pretty much sums up to winning the teamfights, pushing or defending the base, and securing Baron Nashor if needed.

So let's open the discussion with Early Game: the Laning Phase. The word "meta" can mean many things, but I will refer to it as standard early game, laning phase, tactic where support and ranged adc get bot lane, ap carry gets mid lane, tanks/bruisers/ad glass cannons go top and jungle. Standard Meta has been changing for a lot of time, but since season 2 it remained this one.

Now I might get trolled or raged at when I say this, but the current meta has a lot of negative and bad points. Before getting to that part, let's discuss why is this meta in here, why did professional players choose this specific meta, and why is it "working".

Starting from bot lane, we have a ranged attack damage carry (adc) and a support. Ranged adcs are generally quite similar to each other. Of course there are ones who are better at early game than others, or better at late game, and so. Ones have more mobility, or crowd control (CC)effects, defense, or damage, than others, and so on. But they all have several weaknesses in common. Their early game is below average. They're quite squishy, while dealing not much damage, since some of their main damage dealing spells, like Ashe's Volley, or Graves' Buckshot, have a long cooldown at low levels. On top of that, their CC abilities are from low to non existent. This makes ranged adcs not viable anywhere in lane where enemies have better early game. Remember that the meta, as I called it in the beginning of this chapter, is all about laning phase, and early game. Ranged adcs are only viable against each other, since they're then at their level (with minor exceptions such as Vayne top lane, or so, but this specific ranged adc has decent CC along with a short cooldown gap maker). For these reasons, they're guided by a support, someone who can help them survive the early game, and ward the lane as much as possible, so the ranged adc can spend all their gold on items.

People have tried to counter this meta, with a simple lane of 2 assassins or bruisers, also known as "killer lane". This lane did not show promise, since a tanky support, such as Leona, Thresh, or Blitzcrank could easily counter it. The killer lane should have a high amount of burst damage together, followed up with some CC to prevent the enemies from running away. However, the tanky supports could either keep them from their ranged adc, or simply survive the burst damage that the killer lane deals. I'm not saying that this lane is not viable, but people haven't been very successful with it in the past. Now I won't be explaining in details why it didn't work, but in short, a misuse of champions and summoner spells have decided their fate.

Some supports have great early game, but others don't. Even against a support with a decent early game, you can still find champions viable for the above meta that are better than supports. Worst case scenario, is that you end up with 2 great early game laners, against 1 good and 1 bad (ranged adc) early game.

On the other hand, you could pick a support along with a bruiser or assassin in lane. This makes you directly stronger than the enemy, since no matter what supports you and the enemy ranged adc have, you are stronger in early game than the adc, so overall you will win the first fight. I for one practice this meta, with few champions, but the best being Rengar as adc, while many supports are viable with him, but the best ones in my opinion are Janna, Blitzcrank, or Thresh. In my other guides (in future), I'll be further explaining how and why this specific meta works against the current standard one. When I was practicing it and playing it every day, I haven't lost my lane for a surprising amount of 6 months, while most of the other players lose the lane daily, simply because they got either outplayed, or had worse early game champion picks in the same meta and in the same lane. There are lots of possible metas, and how the players can play. The choice is what matters the most.

If you take a closer look at the other lanes, you may notice that people have done a similar thing there. Mid lane will be my next example.

Ability Power based mages usually go to mid lane. Most of them deal decent magic damage in early game, and have a ranged damage either from auto attacks or spells (There's always an exception though). What most of them also have in common, is their low defense abilities in early game. People have used this advantage to their own. And this is why now you can see assassins in mid lane. Assassins deal high amount of damage in low amount of time (also known as burst damage). Since the AP mages are (in general) squishy, assassins can easily counter them, killing them at low levels. For this reason, there are many champions viable for mid lane, such as Zed, Fizz, Talon, and so. The strength of these champions in lane does not change with meta, since it remained the same, but more with time itself, since Riot have made a lot of new patches, modifying their balance.

And now there's the last real lane, top lane. I think this specific lane in the current meta has the most options of champion picks. From AD to AP, from Tank to Glass Cannon, Ranged to Melee, and so on. For this reason you cannot predict which champion and what kind of champion will you lane against, unless you're in draft pick. In blind picks, where you can't see the enemy champions until the game has already started, you cannot have a 100% win ratio like in for example bot lane. What you can do, however, is play defensively, farm safe, and not allow anything to happen to your lane. You do not have to win the lane, as in kill your enemy all on your own, sometimes, the only thing that matters is not letting them get fed on you.

Lastly there's the jungler. This "lane" does not have many options, since a decent jungler has to have the following:

• Fast clear time. The sooner you kill the mobs, the sooner you gank, or farm more on mobs, which overall end up in more gold.
• Sustain. You have to survive in the jungle all on your own while mobs are constantly attacking you.
• Decent ganking abilities. You can do this in few ways. Either you deal a lot of damage combined with a gap closer, or you CC the enemy, and let your laner do the job.

The problem with the current meta, and the junglers, is the following. Most of them are high CC, low damage champions. These champions can gank easier, since it's always easier to cast a spell and CC your enemy than simply kill it with damage. However, their "clear time" which is the amount of time needed to clear the camp, is higher than simple damage dealers' time (most of the time have the role of carry junglers). And again, there's always an exception, champions which have both CC for easy ganks, and AoE damage for faster clear time. Now with the "jungle items", items which increase the damage dealt to mobs in jungle, the clear time is not quite the problem. However, what makes the problem is their cost efficiency. These items are strictly early and mid game items, and will not help you a lot in late game. On the other hand, despite being early and mid game items, you may want to rush better items sooner, items which will overall deal more damage or simply make you stronger. If you have to firstly get the item, and later on sell it, you may have a slight disadvantage, compared to what you could have done with other items, or champions with better clear time. This has been modified mainly for the cause of the meta. Since the new patches (3.14 if I'm not mistaken), junglers and supports gain increased gold, making them overall much more viable and easier to play in mid and late game. Support gold generating items are fine, because what they build into is a perfect support item most of the times. However, junglers just have plain stats, which may not fit with your build. This of course works only if you have a specific build for the champion, which I'll get on to later.

The Early Game meta has a few bad points, which I've explained in the above chapter. Since everyone play it, and it is the standard meta, someone must win. Even if everyone has the best meta possible, or the worst ones, as long as they are exactly the same, there must always be a winner. This is the first reason why the meta works. The second reason is that it's made for all people. Not for average, above average, but for everyone. Which means it's relatively speaking easy to play. The only factors that effect the difficulty is the skill of your opponent, and champion picks. Nothing more in general, since everything else is the same.

Remember the bad points in it, and try to enhance it, picking different champions in different lanes, and you might have discovered a new way to win a lot of games. Remember that the professional players are humans, just like us, so everything is possible. As long as you keep trying you will eventually succeed in everything.

Now there's not so much to discuss on this subject. You can't really do something wrong in it in terms of champions or items. There is, however, a huge gap between diamond and bronze players, and how do they react in this point of game. In high elo games, if there are let's say 3 to 4 enemies at top lane, pushing the towers, the opposite team will usually not just try to defend it, but push other lanes, secure the dragon, or so. This is pretty much how this game phase works. You have to secure as many objective as possible, and whenever you see an enemy missing in your lane, use the chance to push it. Eventually you will get to their inhibitor, which then forces them to defend it all the time. Know that at this point it's important to have the following advantages:

• Objective advantage. This greatly affects the game, and decides which team will claim victory. By destroying their towers, you grant gold to your entire team, and allow yourself to go even further into the lane, reaching the inhibitor. Destroying the inhibitor is sometimes worth more than anything, but remember not to get too excited about it.
• Gold advantage. This is already achieved in early game, or if the enemy has gold advantage, you may want to try balancing it out. The overall gold of the team affects the amount of items each player in the team can have, which directly increases their strength. This is very important in team fights, and while defending the towers or pushing them. A great gap between the team's gold usually ends up in the wealthier's team victory. If you have strong gold advantage over the enemy team, you can recklessly gather your team in a single lane, and push the enemy's towers and inhibitors. The gold advantage allows you to dive the enemy team even under the turrets and still win the team-fight, which eventually ends up in destroying their nexus and winning the game.

The late game is quite similar to the mid game in fact. Objectives are exactly the same, but with a bit more focus on team-fights, and securing Baron Nashor, while Dragon does not become a priority to the team. Still, if there's a player capable of killing the Dragon alone, it's still worth somehow, it does grant 1000+ gold to the team, depending on the time if I'm not mistaken since the patch 3.14. Late game is highly affected by the champion builds, which I'll get on to later.

These facts are rather basics, since there's not much to talk about this game phase. I don't expect everyone to learn something from this exact chapter, but some might find it useful.

And again I'll try to be as detailed as possible when I discuss this point. There are 100+ Champions in League of Legends, most of them with unique tactics and play-style. They have some things and stats in common, but what makes them so different from others are their spells.

Every Champion has one or more roles. You should first choose a champion you like, and select his role. Let's start with Rammus for example. His spells actually scale greatly on Ability Power, but his main role and play style suits more of a Tank. This gives you many possible roles to choose, from a simple Tank, to glass cannon AP carry.

Let's compare Rammus to Fiddlesticks:

• Both of them have an AoE ultimate, which does a lot of damage and scale on AP ( Soaring Slam and Crowstorm.
• Both of them have a strong single target CC (Rammus' puncturing taunt, and Fiddle's Terrify).
• Both of them have a defensive spell (Rammus' Defensive Ball Curl and Fiddlestick's Bountiful Harvest)
• And lastly both of them have a basic ability which represent some CC but huge damage as well (Rammus' Powerball and Fiddle's Reap).
• Although these advantages come from different spells, they have a great initiating spell ( Powerball and Crowstorm.

Now when we've compared them, let's compare their game play. How do people play and build these champions. We all know that Rammus is usually built as a full tank, while Fiddlesticks most of the times as a glass cannon, rushing AP with minor exceptions of defense such as Zhonya's Hourglass. On the other hand, a perfect mix of defensive and AP Rammus is so scary, it's more terrifying than Fiddlesticks himself. He will still be tanky enough to initiate the teamfights and survive, while solo killing all the squishy champions in the enemy team. It's completely viable in jungle, or top, but I'm not here to post a Rammus guide. Some day I might post a video of how do I play him.

From the above example we've seen that champions can be built in a lot of ways, and the recommended build or path may not be the wisest one. Now when we have selected our champion, let's take a look at all the roles possible, not just for named champion, but for everyone.

These may vary by their names, but overall they serve the same cause. Riot has officially divided the roles into the following:

• Assassins
  These have a large variety of play stylee, but they do have a lot in common:
  • They all deal huge amount of damage in a short amount of time.
  • To deal the most damage, they have to build glass cannon (usually), so they are not very durable in teamfights.
  • Most of the time, they come either fast, or out of nowhere. Basically, the enemy is surprised by them, and is rarely expecting one.
• Fighters
  These champions tend to balance both offense and defense. They deal decent damage, but not the highest, and they're neither the most durable nor the squishiest in the team. Fighters are the strongest champions for dueling, since a balance of offense and defense create a great combination for it.
• Mages
  Mages have these characteristics:
  • Most of them are ranged. They scale on Ability Power, and as such deal a lot of damage in team fights. They are not famous for being durable though.
  • They have some sort of CC effects.
  • Their priority is dealing as much as AoE damage as possible while casting CC on most important targets.
• Marksmen
  Champions who rely on their auto attacks to deal the most damage:
  • They are all ranged. Their main damage source is their auto attacks, along with some of their spells.
  • They have low to 0 CC abilities. If they don't have decent CC abilities, then they either have an increased attack range, or high mobility to secure surviving in team fights.
  • As mentioned above, they are squishy in terms of stats, but make it up with spells to survive the assassins or anyone else focusing them.
• Supports
  They have a large variety of play style, and sub-roles, but they do have these in common:
  • They heal the allies, or cast defensive or supportive buffs. If they don't have any of that, then they have a decent amount of CC abilities.
  • Supports should always be near their Marksmen, and help them as much as possible everywhere they go.
• Tanks
  These champions are the ones who sacrifice for their team if needed, and always initiate the team fights:
  • They are all extremely durable. As such, they're all melee as well.
  • They deal low damage in team fights, but they make it up with a good use of CC abilities.

These are the main roles of the Champions. Some of them may have one or more roles at the same time. Everything depends on the build. The Champion is there only to choose the play style, and to have certain unique features that no item or build can grant.

All of these roles are good in theory. However, there are a lot of misuses of the roles in game. I'll comment the roles that I found to be very misused, regardless of the real reason why is it like so:

• Assassins
  The role of these champions is very simple. Kill the highest threat to your team. It's not such a hard job, but they don't do it always properly. Of course there are some cases where you get spotted by the enemy team too soon, so they kill you before you can even react, but in other cases, people had many chances, but used none to deal the satisfying amount of damage. If they cannot deal enough damage, the problem is obviously in their build, assuming that this is late game, and everyone has their builds completed. Sometimes, they fail to kill anyone because of bad positioning. Other times, because their builds are not good enough.
• Marksmen
  These deal single target damage only, have almost no CC, and can get assassinated without a problem. Even if there is no good assassin in the enemy team, Marksman will most of the times be a priority and focus to the enemy team. Sometimes, they get destroyed immediately in the fight, which means they have done or accomplished nothing, since they do not have burst damage, but continual damage, and they need time to actually be a worthy role of playing.
• Tanks
  The final role I'll be showing weaknesses in players is the Tank. Tanks are meant to initiate the team fight, and secure the rest of the team from dying. This can be done in a lot of ways, but the easiest one would be casting CC on anyone who's threatening your team. There's also another method called "peeling", which is mostly done to a Marksman. Here, Tanks stay close to Marksman, and disrupt any assassin/fighter/anyone else who comes near their Marksman, so it can stay alive and deal damage. The problem in here is, players tend to build way too much unnecessary health. They do not get enough damage, nor CC abilities. This eventually becomes into simple initiating the fight, casting the CC spells immediately, and after that becoming pretty much useless, since their CC spells are on cooldown, they do not have any other source of CC through build, nor do they deal damage at all.

How do we fix these problems? I'll get on that later, in building chapters.

For an example on how and which champions are misused, I'll start with Elise. Her spell, Skittering Frenzy combined with Spider Form make her a decent auto attacker. Something what I call, Magic damage auto attacker. The bonus damage on auto attack ratio is downright good, as most of champions have in range of 15% to 40% ap ratio. The attack speed bonus is just sick to ignore it. 140% bonus attack speed is not something that should be ignored.

Now we all know that players tend to build magic penetration on Elise. There are only 2 reasons for that:

• Her Neurotoxin and Venomous Bite deal damage based on target's current or missing health. This makes tank Elise, with minor magic penetration somewhat viable.
• Elise does not have a lot of damage dealing spells flat based on AP, and she's not popular for those ratios.

Her Volatile Spiderling scales alright with AP on the other hand, but the base damage is not high enough for it's cooldown. In other words, players mostly build Elise as a tanky, spam Q champion. Most of her job is actually to deal damage with her Q to anyone, since it scales on the % of current/missing health, while the build grants her decent (and overdoing in my opinion) magic penetration.

Now the problem is that the players have completely ignored these things when creating such build:

• Her W as already mentioned is barely used at all. By that I do not mean that they do not cast the spell, that's a mistake. They cast the spell, but with that build it's just not so strong. In Spider Form it doesn't do hardly anything, while in Human Form it doesn't do even close to other caster champions.
• Although Elise is a melee champion, and thus some people might think that she should not have any auto attack based build, she does have her Rappel to pay it off. While this spell is used to dodge incoming enemy spells, it's second advantage is a gap closer. The gap closer is not used in a perfect way. Once you're close to the enemy adc or whomever you're focusing, what will you? Just cast Q on it in spider form and "auto attack" with W? Please, that damage is truly low, and since this build is magic pene +% of health based build, you can't even kill a squishy target in time.
• While in Spider Form, she does increased amount of damage with each attack. Of course, Riot intended this to stack well with Skittering Frenzy, but the players don't seem to use it at all in that way. That's just throwing the power away of a champion. Not using it's strengths at all.

The above list shows us that actually half of the Elise's spells are not used properly at all. Mathematically speaking it's worth to build Nashor's Tooth on her, though it depends on the rest of the build, her AP, and so. I'm not saying she should have complete attack speed/auto attack build, but 1 or 2 of such items are definitely not a bad idea.

What bothers me the most in this part is that players want that magic penetration so much, and yet they forget what's Wit's End. This item can completely ignore 25 of enemies' magic resistance, far more than Abyssal Mask, Haunting Guise, or Sorcerer's Shoes. Along with that, it grants additional attack speed, which scales well with her spider form. On top of that, it grants 42 magic damage per auto attack, which against scales great with her Skittering Frenzy. Overall, it grants additional magic damage, and magic penetration, pretty much what LoL community would say she needs, yet it's not in the popular build.

This would be an example how you can boost continual damage (Damage dealt in a larger period of time) by a lot. You could say that Elise should have burst damage. That would be a second choice of how do we deal damage. There's no third way, you're either a burst damage dealer or continual damage dealer. You can deal either burst damage (high amount of damage in short amount of time), or continual. If you want burst damage, then's Deathfire Grasp or Lich Bane is the true answer, although Lich Bane is a continual damage item as well.

As I've explained before, Full Tank builds are only viable as long as the Tank has enough CC to peel the adc like an orange. Then again, the CC is not good enough if you cannot permanently slow your enemies ( Rylai's Crystal Scepter op). Elise only has 1 CC ability, which is single target, with 10 seconds cooldown. Far from enough to be considered a Tank in terms of CC effects. And we've already concluded that her damage with standard build is not enough. All in all, we have concluded that standard Elise build is not quite satisfying, and there are a lot stronger builds out there.

Let's move to our next misused champion: Zed.

Everyone builds him as an Assassin. Therefore, every Zed is squishy, and should deal high amount of damage (burst damage, not continual). Now why do I see some players getting solo triple kills as Zed, while others can't even burst down a single target? This is, of course, assuming that we're in late game, where nobody is fed, everyone's equal, and the only things that matter are the champion, and their builds. Since the champion is the same, the only remaining different factor is their build, and that's what makes some players execute the champion better than others as Zed.

Now I don't want to overextend this topic, so I'll make it short. Let's start with a Bruiser item, which community recommends on an Assassin. Black Cleaver is an item which grants cooldown reduction. Cooldown reduction is used only by those champions who should stay alive in fight for longer time than glass cannons (Squishy, high damage dealer champions) would. Zed is a squishy glass cannon, he can't endure in a fight (with the exception of teleporting away using your shsdows). If the enemies decide to focus you, you're as good as dead most of the times, and cooldown reduction won't help you at all. The second stat that Black Cleaver grants is stackable armor reduction. You should be able to burst the target in few shots, not to deal damage after you've done your few shots. As simple as that, but this is contradicting to the definition of an Assassin, and a glass cannon. Last Whisper is more than enough to burst down any high armor target.

There are few other build paths for Zed which mathematically work perfectly while also worked in practice. One of them is Infinity Edge + Sword of the Divine. Your ultimate requires you to deal a lot of damage in a short amount of time, it's actually a perfect ultimate for any glass cannon champion. Sword of the Divine grants just that. There's absolutely no way a glass cannon would ever survive Zed's amazing burst with these kind of items. The other item that's truly strong for Zed is Ravenous Hydra. It's available on all maps, and as such grants the highest amount of AD (since Bloodthirster is not available on all maps, and Sword of the Occult is the second exception). It's important to notice Zed's passive effect of Living Shadow when considering how important it is to have lots of AD as Zed. With all 4 items I've mentioned, I've seen players do solo triple kills, and it was really amazing. In late game, a glass cannon killing everyone all on his own, despite the enemy marksman having guardian angel, while other champions had additional armor items too. This is yet another example of how and why a proper build can do wonders.

I'd also like to name a few items that are very misused for certain champions. Let's start with the one I hate the most as someone whose one of the main champions are Master Yi: Statikk Shiv.

Before I explain why is it not a decent item for the champion, let's talk about Master Yi first. He's my very first champion, I started playing him in Season 2, always as AD of course, even then when the community would say he was not viable for it. I'm sure I'm not the only one, I've seen some Season 2 AD Master Yi videos, but it's not seen so often either. After the remake of the champion, he was truly overpowered. Everyone knew that, he had (and still has in my opinion) by far the highest damage dealing abilities, and he could get a reset after reset. Now it's much harder to play him, since you do not get full resets after scoring a kill. To some players this hasn't been a huge nerf, since his damage remained the same. However, the entire damage that he deals is entirely useless if he dies the second after an alpha strike. This is why a lot of people now think that Master Yi is not a valid pick anymore again. He's at his best now with these changes, since he cannot be targeted during the cast, and ignores any projectiles if cast correctly. It's pretty hard to play him, and rather easy to counter him, but that does not mean he's not viable anymore as most people would think. Last but not least, people create a bad build, cannot play the champion properly, and then afterwards complain that the champion's not viable? Please, unless you've tried all possible builds you should not complain about the champion, it doesn't make any sense.

Let's get back to Statikk Shiv on a Master Yi. I'll first explain why does the community buy it. As you can see in the description of the item, it generates charges through moving and attacking to unleash chained magic damage. Also, attack speed and critical strike chance are not bad choices for a Yi. The stacks also generate when casting Alpha Strike. The same could be applied to other melee AD champions, such as Tryndamere, Nocturne, or Yasuo. All of them have some sort of mobility, whether it's a dash or increased movement speed. These are the reasons why it's built. Now let me just show you a picture and the rest is up to you to decide if it's worth of buying it or not.



38 (0%) magic damage isn't really terrifying to me compared to the huge physical auto attack damage they've dealt to me. Why does this happen? Few reasons behind it:

• Statikk Shiv deals magic damage. You should be able to deal damage to anyone, and by that I mean to deal a lot of damage to Tanks too. There's no use of dealing damage only to squishy targets, unless you have so much burst damage that the target cannot even react in time to save themselves (which means less than a second to burst them down. It's possible, of course, with certain assassins). My point being, as an AD assassin or melee carry or something else, you must deal damage to everyone. To achieve that you must stack a decent amount of Armor Penetration. Statikk Shiv proc deals magic damage, therefore it's completely useless when damaging an enemy bruiser or Tank. If you want to deal AoE damage, Ravenous Hydra is by far the strongest choice for that.
• These champions generate the Statikk Shiv stacks really slowly compared to what they actually can do. Most of the times you're not moving and attacking at the same time unless you have huge movement speed and the enemy is slowed. Even if that happens you still won't generate so fast since you're melee. As melee, every auto attack generates 10 stacks. Which will lead us to the next misused (not used at all in fact) item, Runaan's Hurricane. When used on a ranged champion, it generates 30 stacks of Statikk Shiv with each hit, since you're hitting 3 targets at once. The 70% bonus attack speed stacks with this too. If a champion has maxed attack speed, and moves just a bit to generate only 10 stacks, you can effectively proc Statikk Shiv every 1.2 seconds. Incredibly fast in my opinion.

Phantom Dancer grants more attack speed and more critical strike chance, along with the unique passive, which ignores unit collision. Simply put, if you wish to have those stats, Phantom Dancer is overall a much better choice. For additional burst, try Sword of the Divine or Trinity Force or any other item of similar choice. For AoE damage, Ravenous Hydra will significantly increase your potential in farming, split pushing, and team fighting.

Which leads us to the item mentioned above. Runaan's Hurricane. If you check this item at the LoL Wiki, you'll notice that a whole lot of abilities stack with it. For example, Teemo's Toxic Shot, Twisted Fate's Stacked Deck, Graves's Quickdraw and much much more. To explain further how do they stack. Teemo's Toxic Shot will apply on all 3 targets. Runaan's Hurricane applies all on hit effects on those 3 targets, including both spells and items, such as Frozen Mallet or Wit's End. With these combinations, you can permanently slow 3 targets, or reduce their magic resistance or armor via Black Cleaver and much more. Twisted Fate's Stacked Deck will proc with every 2. auto attack as bonus single target damage. While this may not be as strong as Teemo's passive, it's still worth of mentioning. Graves' Quickdraw will reduce cooldown 3 times more with Runaan's Hurricane equipped. With this in your mind you can create a lot of different possibilities and build choices. Overall, this item has many uses, all of them can be seen at LoL Wiki. It's a great item for certain champions, but I've only seen it built on Twitch, and that was really rarely too.

Some of the features can be seen in this picture:





I wish to add an example of misusing stats in general. A game some time ago I've seen a "Tank" Malphite with 300 Armor, 50 Magic Resistance, and about 2000 Health. These stats were during mid game, so it was not a complete build. I know that Malphite's abilities scale with Armor, but that's not the only way to survive nor to deal damage. A bit of Ability Power would greatly increase your damage output, while adding more Magic Resistance is more than essential. My team and I used this weakness to win the game pretty easily. I was Master Yi jungle, and we had a Fizz in mid lane. We were both fed. The rest of the team were pretty squishy, none of them having that much Armor as Malphite. Despite Malphite being "Tank", he still got melted in a second by our Fizz. Why would Fizz do that? Simple. Malphite with that much Armor could have caused troubles to me as Master Yi and to our ADC. Moreover, his ultimate is devastating against any team composition. Fizz just used his Deathfire Grasp, along with all of his abilities and killed Malphite within 2 seconds. I wouldn't call that a "Tank". Malphite didn't do anything in that fight, while I could now get rid of the rest of the enemy team with no problems or disruptions. a simple conclussion: Always have balanced Armor and Magic Reistance as a Tank or Bruiser. By balanced I do not mean they should be exactly the same, but that's not a bad idea either. Take a look at the enemy team composition, and see what kind of damage can they deal to you. A proper build should be ready for anything, whether it's surviving loads of magic damage from the enemy AP Carry or physical damage from AD Carry. Most of the times, you receive more physical damage than magical, simply because there's always an AD carry in the team (In the current meta), while there could be an AD assassin instead of an AP Carry in mid lane. Also, all champions deal physical damage, at least with auto attacks, while not all of them can deal magic damage. And final reason are the turrets and jungle mobs or creeps. The most important factor, however, is the enemy team composition, and the amount of farm each of their champion has. It's a shame to get one shot by Fizz as a Tank Malphite.

Let's move on to our next subject. Quite often you'll see AD Assassins or Bruisers stacking Black Cleaver along with Last Whisper. To some people these items together make a great combination, which is true to an extent.



If we were to come to a point where we can choose only 1 of this item to make it viable for the build, let's see the pros and cons of each one, compare them to each other, and conclude which one is better for a certain situation:

• Last Whisper grants overall more percentage armor penetration than The Black Cleaver's armor reduction. The Black Cleaver grants an additional 10 Flat Armor Penetration on top of it. This makes The Black Cleaver slightly stronger in early game and against lower armor, while Last Whisper shreds higher armor targets stronger.
• Since The Black Cleaver is an armor reduction effect, it affects the target itself rather than your damage. This means that overall physical damage taken by that target will be reduced after the item's effect, making your team stronger, especially if you're followed by a Marksman.
• Last Whisper is 700 gold cheaper (depending on patch), and affects immediately unlike The Black Cleaver which needs stacks. However, it grants 10 Attack Damage less, no Health, nor Cooldown Reduction. Keep in mind that as a glass cannon assassin you do not need any of those 2 stats.

Now that we've rounded things up, let's conclude the following. Assuming we're creating a late game build, the cost doesn't matter, therefore The Black Cleaver is indirectly a better choice. However, it offers great stats for a Bruiser, but not for an Assassin like Last Whisper does. In most scenarios in late game, Last Whisper overall beats The Black Cleaver in terms of total armor ignored.

Assuming we've got Offensive Masteries, which grant us 6% Armor Penetration, along with Armor Penetration Marks, let's calculate how effective is it to have either or both of these items.

For a target that has 200 Armor.
If we're buying both items:

• It's reduced to 150 due to Black Cleaver's passive effect over 5 stacks.
• Percentage Armor Penetration comes next. If we have both the 6% from masteries, and 35% from Last Whisper, it overall grants 39% due to maths. It calculates the multiplication of the difference 1 minus the percentage penetration. It sounds complicated, but simply put, it's 94% (100%-6%) x 65% (100%-35%) = 39%. Therefore, the overall armor is multiplied by 100%-39%, which is 61%. The result is 91.5 (92 rounded).
• Due to 12 Flat Armor Penetration from Runes and 10 from The Black Cleaver, it's reduced by another 22, down to overall 70.

This means we've ignored the overall 200 armor down to 70. Damage taken by the target is equal to 100/(100 + x) where X is the amount of armor after taking everything into account. Which leads us to our difference in taking damage, equaling (100/170)/(100/300), which is exactly the same as 300/170 = 1.76. Overall damage increase is 76%.

For the same target of 200 armor, but building only Last Whisper, the overall armor is as follows:

• 200 multiplied by 61% due to our Percentage Armor Penetration, which equals 122.
• The 122 is reduced by another 12 due to our flat armor penetration from runes, down to 110.

Overall damage boost is 300/210 = 1.43; 43%.

Now what we want to see is the overall quotient between these numbers, which is 1.23, or in other words, overall damage boost in buying both items, and only Last Whisper is 23% in this case. Note that this increases with the overall armor. As an Assassin, you're most likely going for a high damage squishy target. At 100 Armor, more than Marksmen or Magi usually have, the difference is 20%. This doesn't make that much of a difference if we take into account that you've used 2 items for it. The first item on its own granted 43%, the second granted 23% afterwards. There are a lot better items to increase your burst potential, especially as an AD. One of my favorite items for this is Sword of the Divine regardless of the champion being a caster or an auto attacker, because one thing remains the same. You will have extremely high attack damage, and armor penetration, both allowing your critical strikes to deal large amount of damage.

Now we've shown how and why some of the popular build paths simply do not make much sense, and why it's not always wise to follow it. This chapter may have been offensive to someone, and I'm sorry for that, there should be no more offensive talk in other chapters. This required such language clearly to show and prove a simple point: Popular builds =/= Good builds.

You have selected your champion, and the desired role that you want to play. Now you need a build to make it possible. But before we get to that, we must know the basics and advance knowledge of how to create a proper build. Here, I'll teach you how to think as a mathematician, and how to create a perfect build for any champion without any problems. This of course will be quite meta breaking, but that actually makes sense, since very few people actually calculate anything or think of it in that way, which means that the meta builds are so far from perfect.

The first thing you should do, is take a closer and detailed look at your champion at LoL Wiki. Check its stats, from health to damage, attack range to move speed. Then take a closer look at its spells. Some of the spells are very misused in a lot of champions, which either makes them not viable when asked by players, or simply not as strong as they could be.

Items

Now let's take a look at what items can grant you. The League of Legends has divided the Items into few categories:

• Tools, which have sub categories including:
  • Consumable
  • Gold Income
  • Vision & Trinkets
• Defense, which include:
  • Health
  • Armor
  • Magic Resistance
  • Health Regeneration
  • Tenacity
• Attack, which include:
  • Damage
  • Critical Strike
  • Attack Speed
  • Life Steal
• Magic, which include:
  • Ability Power
  • Cooldown Reduction
  • Spell Vamp
  • Mana
  • Mana Regeneration
• Movement, which include:
  • Boots
  • Other Movement

Along with these main attributes, Items grant a bit more, such as Healing on cast, or grants Slow on each auto attack/spell cast, or upon Item activation, etc. There are some Items with unique effects, which means only 1 instance of that effect will work at a time. This means that upon buying 2 instances of The Brutalizer, you will have 50 bonus attack damage, but only 10% CDR (Cooldown Reduction), and 10 Flat Armor Penetration. This does not mean that buying The Brutalizer along with Youmuu's Ghostblade won't stack. These stats are unique only to their exact item. However, only one Spellblade of these items Trinity Force and Lich Bane will stack.

Now when we know how Items work, let's move on with creating our build.

Champions

Next we have to understand how stats of our Champions work.

Champions have most of the stats listed in the Items section, such as Health, Health Regeneration, Mana, Mana Regeneration, Armor, Magic Resistance, Attack Damage, Attack Speed, Attack Range, Movement Speed. All of these stats increase by level, except for Movement Speed, Attack Range, and based on a champion, Armor and Magic Resistance.

In general you can simply visit the LoL Wiki to find out more information about the stats. I'll name some facts you may not have known:

• All champions start with 30 magic resistance at level 1.
• Most of melee champions gain magic resistance per level, scaling from 0 to 1.25. The exceptions that I know are Yasuo, and Maokai. Ranged champions usually do not gain magic resistance per level.
• Attack Range is the only stat which champions have by default that cannot be changed with Runes, Masteries, or Items. There are, however, some spells that increase the Attack Range of the champion.
• All Champions gain Armor per level, with an exception of Thresh, who increases his armor with his passive.

For more information on Champion Statistics, click This Link.

Runes

Runes are used in Rune Pages to improve your Champion in game. You can have multiple rune pages, but only one can be used at a time. There are 4 types of runes:

• Marks, these are the strongest as Attack Damage modifiers
• Seals, these are used as Defensive improvements
• Glyphs, these enhance Magical power
• Quintessences, these improve Utility stats

You can have up to 9 Marks, Seals, and Glyphs, but only 3 Quintessences, since they grant unique and stronger stats. For a complete list of Runes, visit this link.

Masteries

Masteries are also referred as "Talent Points" or "Talent Trees", since their appearance is quite similar to those things in other games. They increase the stats of your Champion along with Runes. The further you spend points into a specific Talent Tree, the stronger are the bonuses. You can spend up to 30 Mastery points. There are 3 types of Talent Trees:

• Offensive, which grant offensive stats, and improve both physical and magical damage of you and your allies.
• Defensive, which increase the durability, improve healing, and reduce the duration of negative effects on your champion.
• Utility, which overall increase the CDR of your Hero, Gold gained, and other supportive needs.

You can find a Mastery Calculator here: Click me!

Now I'll continue by adding few reasons why should we create builds of our own.

Before that, I'll just place few notes in here generally about building, and playing. What are the points of the build, and what's the right path of building a champion.

Points of a Good Build

As I've said while ago, this is a PvP game. Players will want to counter you, and you have to counter them back. You have to expect anything can happen, and still be able to win the fight, and eventually carry your team to victory. A perfect build would be something that has absolutely no way to counter it. If you've done everything to prevent being countered, while consistently doing damage to the enemies, you can win any fight. And that's the point of the builds in general. The main point is to win a team fight, and carry the team, and if possible, to create a decent dueling build, in case you're alone in the jungle and an enemy is attacking you.

The second purpose of any build is to be able to farm. This is very important in early game. Since we have divided the game into 3 parts, early, mid, and late game, we've also explained how and why these game phases work. Late game is mostly about building your champion right, and to get there, you have to farm in early game. That is why you should have some sort of farming item in early game, as in very first or second item in your build. For that reason I tend to build one of these items, depending on my champion, and role:

• Ravenous Hydra
• Sunfire Aegis
• Runaan's Hurricane

These items have one thing in common, and that is AoE damage. Both are useful in team fights, while some of these items are very underestimated in general (like Runaan's Hurricane. Along with team fight power, this item is excellent for split pushing, and farming. The faster you clear the jungle, whether it's your or your enemies' if you're controlling it, the faster will the minions respawn, thus directly granting you more time to do anything. Time is valuable, as in real life, in game as well. You must never afford to waste your time on anything unneeded. There's always something to do in the game, even if it's farming, and these items will just speed that process up.

The listed items work for the following roles and types of champions:

• Runaan's Hurricane for Marksmen.
• Ravenous Hydra for Fighters, or any other tanky or glass cannon AD based Champion, such as Assassins.
• Sunfire Aegis for Tanks and Fighters. It can suit both of them, depending directly on the champion, and your build.

You may have noticed that only 2 roles and types of champions cannot benefit from these Items. Those are Supports and Mages.
Let's explain how to acquire gold with these champions:

• Supports
  • Supports in the current meta do not require to farm on minions. You only have to stay close to your adc, and acquire one of the Gold Income Items. For the rest of the gold, you get by assisting your team in killing, or through Runes and Masteries.
• Mages
  • There are no items that you can get which will increase your farm rate. However, mages usually have AoE abilities, which with they can farm with no problem. You also have to note that in the current meta, you're in mid lane. As such, you can easily leave your lane to gank top or bot lane. A lot of times the enemy won't even react on time to alarm his team that you're missing in the lane, so the ganks could be successful.

Last, but not the least, the point of creating a build is to be above average, and to have a unique play style with it. Not only will it make you a stronger player overall, but the games will be more fun and interesting to watch. Also, since we've mentioned it's a PvP game, players will never know what to expect from you if you start with something completely different than the standard build. If an enemy can't expect what you will do to them, they can't react in time, and thus you have an advantage over them just by that.

That's about it, there could be more lesser reasons why having a custom build is important, and if I remember any of them I will update this guide.

Now when we understand why is a good build important in every game, let's move on to a bit more advanced tactics on how to create a proper build.

The following tactics may be connected to some understandable mathematical conclusions.

I'll first start by explaining how do stats work overall, and how do we balance them perfectly, what's efficient, and what's not efficient.

Let's take a closer look at the stats again, under the Items part. These stats stack with each perfectly if used correctly. Back to basics. How do Defenses work?

• Health is a stat that every Champion has. It increases the durability of the Champion in a fight. This is the easiest way to effectively increase a champion's endurance. This specific stat will help you defend from unique sources of damage, such as True Damage, which is not reduced by any other stat, spell, or mastery (Few exceptions of spells though, such as Kayle's Intervention. Since it cannot be reduced at all, and rarely negated completely, building Health is the easiest and one of the most effective way to counter it.
• Armor and Magic Resistance are the second important defensive stats. They reduce the incoming damage from all sources of Physical or Magical Damage. Physical Damage is dealt by every auto attack, and some spells that mostly AD-based champions have. Magical Damage on the other hand is mostly done with spells cast by Mages, or auto attacks such as Teemo's Toxic Shot.
• Life Steal and Spell Vamp are another defensive stats. They do belong in Attack and Magic categories, but they serve as a defensive need. Unlike Health, Armor, or Magic Resist, these stats scale with your damage dealt to mobs, or champions. The more damage you deal, the more health you will be healed back.
• Health Regeneration is our next stat. It's rather inefficient, and usually ends up as a low healing source compared to Spell Vamp or Life Steal, but they are decent in Laning Phase. Other times, this is useful when you do not have the time to recall back to your base, and there is no enemy mob to restore your health on if you use Spell Vamp or Life Steal.
• Tenacity will not help you survive a fight directly, but it will allow you to cast more spells and to be more mobile. This reduces the duration of Crowd Control (CC) abilities on your Champion, which in my opinion is an important stat for certain roles.

Now when we know all defensive sources, let's get to how do they stack. Health directly increases the amount of damage the enemies need to deal to you to kill your champion. There is another term called "effective health". This is used to refer how much damage (without counting armor or magic resistance, along with any other penetration stats) do you have to deal to your enemy to force it down.

Before getting to numbers themselves, I'll give a final but very important note. When you want to build your champion, and increase it's stats, know that you have to increase it by the best percent amount, and not the flat amount. An example will be given here:

Warmog's Armor grants 1000 Health. If you buy it to a champion with currently 2000 Health, it will be increased to 3000. This has increased your effective health by 50% (3000 divided by 2000). Buy it another time, and you have increased your health to 4000, which means your overall effective health has been increased by 33%. Despite the fact that you have bought the exact same item on a the very same champion with same health, the bonus in a fight will not be so effective as it was last time. The percentage of your effectiveness is exactly the result which shows how efficient was it to buy an item. This falls apart with every single upgrade you do. What would happen if we'd build Armor and Magic Resistance to the champion instead of the Health? Again, it depends on the Champion's Armor and Magic Resistance, but let's say that you've had 50 of both, and you buy 50 of both. This does not mean that your durability will be doubled for the following reason:

• Although Health works in that way, Armor and Magic Resistance do not scale by flat amount. Instead, they're calculated as follows:
  
  The amount of overall damage received will be equal to the damage of the source, multiplied by 100, and then divided by a sum of 100 and your Armor or Magic Resistance. In mathematical symbols it's as this:
  For D = Damage, A/M = Your Armor or Magic Resistance
  D = 100 / (100 + A/M), depending on the type of damage. Note that this will not affect True Damage Sources, since it's not affected by neither Armor nor Magic Resistance.
  
  This means that your resistances will increase from 50 to 100 in the given example, and these mean that your damage taken has been reduced from 66% to 50%.

The more you build a certain stat to the champion, the less effective will it be compared to the last buy of the same stat.

Now we have to consider the difference of the percentage effectiveness. This may sound complicating, but it's really not much of a deal:

If your champion had 3000 Health, and you increase it by 1000 Health, it goes up to 4000. This effectively increases your health by 33%.
If your champion had 50 Armor, and you increase it by another 50, it goes up to 100. In the formula given above, it effectively increases your endurance in a fight by 66/50 which is again 33%.

These stats at this point seem to have equal boosts in defenses in terms of percentage changed. However, from the LoL Wiki we can clearly see that a 1000 Health from Warmog's Armor should cost around 2639 gold. On the other hand, 50 Armor and Magic Resistance from Warden's Mail and Odyn's Veil are both worth of a 1000 gold, which when summed up results in 2000 gold. Even though there is no difference in the durability of your champion, you have saved 639 gold only by using these mathematics.

Now we know how effective is it to build a certain stat, and we have learned that overdoing a single stat is almost never an answer to the perfect build. You can use this knowledge anywhere. For example:
Anivia at level 18 has a total of 1610 Health, while Alistar has a total of 2278 Health. From this we can see that It's more efficient to build some Health for Anivia rather than for Alistar.
There are few other things we should take account. Their Armor and Magic Resistances are different. At level 18, Anivia has a total of 82.5 (rounded up to 83) Armor, while Alistar has 77.5 (78) Armor. Remember that higher the Armor and Magic Resistance, the more effective it is to build Health. On the other hand, Alistar has 53 Magic Resistance, while Anivia has only 30. Since the difference in here is larger than in Armor, Alistar would "win this fight".
If we consider Health, it's more effective to build it for Anivia than for Alistar, but it's vice-versa when considering Armor and Magic Resistance. If we want to find the difference, it's again based on the rest of the build. If we leave the champions as they are, building 500 Health is more effective for Anivia in this case rather than for Alistar, since the HP Difference is huge at the beginning, while Armor and Magic Resistance difference are not that much in for Alistar.
Last but not the least, It's important to remember the champions' spells. Since Alistar's Unbreakable Will reduces his damage taken by 70%, overall it's much more efficient to build Health on Alistar than Anivia during the ultimate.
To avoid being too complicated. Since the Health difference of these champions is huge without building additional, at first it's more efficient to build Health for Anivia, if we do not take Alistar's ultimate into account. Till a certain point (which I don't think is needed to calculate) it remains this way, but later on, it would be more efficient to build on Alistar than Anivia clearly because of the gap in their Magic Resistances, while gap in Armor is hardly noticable.

Overrated or underrated stats

Let's start with an underrated stat. A single stat that I personally like to build plenty of, since it stacks perfectly with the rest of my build, Life Steal.

The community usually buys some of these to a ranged adc, who does some damage but does not have any armor or magic resistance. This stat is a healing source. As we've already mentioned before, Healing Sources stack greatly with Armor and Magic Resistance. It's not as effective to an adc, since that role usually supports only some Armor and Magic Resistance. This means that despite the user healing themselves, it will not be provide enough sustain in a fight. Healing is an indirect bonus to Health, which is the stat that stacks the best with Armor and Magic Resistance.

As I said this is an underrated stat. I might even say that it's misused, since the most of it can be used the best by a Fighter, and not by a Marksman. I've seen very few players building this specific stat on a Bruiser for no specific reason. There's no specific reason why not to build it, unless a champion clearly cannot gain much of it, such as Garen. Despite the fact that Garen has a huge amount of Armor and Magic Resistance, his main damage source, Judgment does not proc Life Steal, but Spell Vamp instead. This overall means that Garen can't have use it that much, since he does not do a lot of Physical Damage which proc Life Steal. However, champions like Rengar, Lee Sin, Irelia, Jax, Nocturne, Xin Zhao, and more can have a great use of this particular stat, but rarely build a lot of it.

With enough healing, and damage reduction from Armor and Magic Resistance, in theory you're able to survive the entire fight, soaking up all the damage with the healing source. This is the exact reason why some champions can use it, since this healing in particular does not fall off that much as much as the other defensive stats do. But remember to get some damage first, because it's not much of a use with low damage builds.

Next, I'll be moving on with Critical Strike Chance, an overused stat in most of cases in my opinion.

In standard builds, it's built to many champions, regardless of their role being a Fighter, Marksman, or Assassin. Let me be the first to tell you this important fact about building a champion:

Critical Strike is not a stat built by any tanks nor off tank bruisers.

As weird as it sounds, I stick to this point for a very long time. Tanks or bruisers usually have most of their Masteries in defensive points, meaning they do not have Percentage Armor Penetration nor bonus Critical Damage from it. They almost never build Infinity Edge, meaning overall that their critical damage remains at around 200%. For this reason it's directly not as efficient as it could have been on a glass cannon, rushing both Infinity Edge, and the Offensive Mastery points. Mathematically, you do not gain a huge damage boost, since you have probably lost other valuable stats, which I'll explain later on.

The second very important reason why it's not smart to build Critical Strike as a Bruiser is that the bruisers should never rely on luck. Critical Strike Chance (CSC) is luck. I'm not sure how the game calculates it, but one of the ways to calculate and proc is by generating a random number between 1 and 100, and compare it to your CSC. If that specific number is less than or equal to your CSC, the attack will critically hit. The definition of an off tank is to have balanced defensive and offensive powers. Critical hits are relied on luck, and demand a lot of stats and gold wasted on it to be effective. The off tanks should be stable fighters, not relying on any sorts of luck or so, but always dealing enough damage to anyone regardless of anything. For these reasons, Critical Strike is a stat that should be used for glass cannons only.

I can approve of few exceptions in this statement. Trinity Force is an item that grants passive called Spellblade, which increase the damage of the next attack after casting a spell. Bruisers love this item, because they live in a fight, and want to deal enough damage, while some of them have low cooldowns to rely on, so the passive can be casted a lot of times. Only 1 Spellblade can be used at a time, and Trinity Force's passive is the strongest of all in terms of AD. I would, however, sometimes recommend Iceborn Gauntlet instead, for reasons which I'll explain later.

First let's talk about the very topic above, how to use Sheen properly.

When to build Sheen?

This item has a great passive for many reasons and multiple users. I'll name some of reasons which with it does a lot more than it would for other cases:

• Champions with a gap closer. With it, the Champion can simply move to an enemy with a spell, automatically activating Spellblade, and then auto attack the enemy. As simple as that, but this has a great effect on certain champions.
• Champions with low cooldown spells. With low cooldowns, the user can cast the spell all the time, with no fear to question whether it was worth buying or not. There are a few exceptions to this however. I personally would not recommend it to champions that don't auto attack that often, or don't have an opportunity to do so.
  • This problem could partially be fixed with some attack speed. If you have low cooldown spells, and you have decent attack speed, or at least, enough to cast the animation fast enough, it's worth of buying it, since it will be much easier to proc the Spellblade despite the Champion having problems with auto attacks.
• Champions with a reset on kill spell. This is a very similar case to low cooldown spells, but probably more effective at some times. On each kill, you will deal more damage to another enemy champion, which will further fasten their death, which again grants you a reset, and this chain goes on and on until their team has been aced.

Countering Certain Builds

Before trying to do so, you must first know what kind of build do you wish to counter. What's its primary point, what are its weaknesses, etc, for example:

• High Health Builds. Depending on your champion and your role, there are 2 items great for it:
  • Blade of the Ruined King is an item created for AD based champions. Each of its attacks deal damage based on the target's current health. Combined with additional attack speed, this can bring high health targets down easily.
  • Liandry's Torment is an AP based item. Although it's more of a damage over time effect, it can be used effectively if you have low cooldowns on your spells, or constantly deal magic damage to your enemy, such as Dr. Mundo's Heart Zapper. Keep in mind that this passive's effect is doubled when the enemy is under the effect of a CC. Buying a Rylai's Crystal Scepter is a great way to provide it.
• High Armor/Magic Resistance Builds. Again it depends on your champion's primary damage source:
  • Last Whisper along with other Armor Penetration Items such as Black Cleaver or Youmuu's Ghostblade get along great against high Armor targets. Keep in mind that The Brutalizer's armor penetration is not a unique in terms of it's name. This means that all 4 items at the same time will stack together for the highest amount of Armor Penetration and Reduction. Though this may not be the wisest choice.
  • Void Staff and Liandry's Torment grant a percentage and flat Magic Penetration. Some of the other sources are Abyssal Mask, Sorcerer's Shoes, or Wit's End, the best among these being Wit's End in terms of highest possible magic resistance reduction.
  • This is the rotation of the Armor/Magic Resistance Penetration/Reduction calculation:
    • 1. Flat Armor Reduction, stacking additively ( Rammus' puncturing taunt).
    • 2. Percentage Armor Reduction, stacking multiplicatively ( Black Cleaver).
    • 3. Percentage Armor Penetration, stacking multiplicatively ( Last Whisper).
    • 4. Flat Armor Penetration, stacking additively ( The Brutalizer).
  • Armor/Magic Penetration Runes and Masteries
• High Healing Builds. These usually heal themselves so much, you can't out-damage their healing done, thus living forever (Oh God, why?):
  • Executioner's Calling reduces the healing taken by the attacked target. This is very effective, as a lot of champions can auto attack all the time, stacking the debuff until they die.
  • Morellonomicon reduces healing taken by the target each time you deal magic damage to it. It lasts for a while, so it can last as long as the previous example if used properly.

These may have been obvious enough, but I wanted to point them out in case someone is not so sure on how to counter the builds. I do have an extra example that I'm sure people have not heard of many times.

Countering Thornmail as an AD glass cannon, or off tank.

A lot of people would simply rush Life Steal, and try to out heal the damage dealt by Thornmail. However, there are few things you have to note before doing so:

• It's based on enemies' Armor, and your Magic Resistance, along with your overall armor penetration + reduction, and enemies' overall magic penetration and reduction.
• The damage that it will reflect to the attacker is calculated before the user's Armor. For this, and many other reasons, Life Steal will rarely be enough to counter Thornmail. The user needs to have 234 Armor to reflect more damage than they would take, if we ignore the attacker's magic resistance. The calculation can be found here:Link!.
• If you deal huge auto attack damage, you're most likely a glass cannon or a bruiser with not much magic resistance. Magic Resistance counters this damage a whole lot.

One of the best items in my opinion that counters this are Maw of Malmortius, and Wit's End. Both of them grant offensive stats, and additional magic resistance, meaning you will still do enough damage while surviving the damage taken from Thornmail.

Stats which get along well

The last topic I want to talk about an advanced building tactics is the stacking of stats overall, just like I had an example before:

• Health OR Healing + Armor and Magic Resistance. It's important to have both of them for a decent build. I for one follow these ratios:
  • 20% bonus Health
  • 40% bonus Armor and Magic Resistance
  • 40% Healing (Life Steal or Spell Vamp)
  These numbers are rounded up and should not be followed precisely, but simply to show an example of how I like to build. In other words, huge focus on Healing, Armor and Magic Resistance, with just a slight focus on overall Health. In this composition, Health is just here to prevent being bursted down by the enemy team, though Armor and Magic Resistance help it as well. When in a fight, the healing and resistances might make you an immortal.
• Movement Speed + Slow Effects. These stack much greater than if they would have been separated. This happens because the ratio of your and your enemies' move speed is the highest. It's hard to do so with only 1 of these, unless you overdo one of them, like movement speed as Hecarim, which does not really end up well in high elo games. One of the combinations that I use for this is Iceborn Gauntlet along with Furor enchantment from boots.
• Flat Armor Penetration + Percentage Armor Penetration. This also works for magic penetration. Since one of the patches, the rotation of calculating these stats has switched from Percentage to Flat. This means that after you've dealt with a lot of enemies' armor, you have this slight flat amount that will help you ignore it even further. Mathematically, these 2 together stack perfectly. This does not work for Armor/Magic Resistance reduction though, since the rotation is different.

Here we can see some stats that stack really well for a maximum gold efficiency in terms of items and creating a build. Let's check some items that might perform a decent combination:

• Spirit Visage and Guardian Angel. Basically, the resurrection from Guardian Angel counts towards healing. Therefore, it's increased by 20% due to Spirit Visage for an overall of 36% of maximum health up from 30%. Spirit Visage also increases healing from Life Steal and Spell Vamp, so I like to combine it with Ravenous Hydra or Blade of the Ruined King.
• Runaan's Hurricane and any on-hit effect items, such as Wit's End, Nashor's Tooth, Statikk Shiv, and more. Runaan's Hurricane grants you additional 2 semi-attacks, dealing 10 + 50% AD (Based on patch). The key thing to this is that it applies all on-hit effects, from all items and spells. This greatly adds into your DPS in team fights.
• Sunfire Aegis and Abyssal Mask. With these items, you've got Health, Armor, and Magic Resistance, pretty much all you need for defense to some extent. The Sunfire Cape grants an additional DoT around you, increased by Abyssal Scepter since it will decrease the enemies' Magic Resistance. I use this combination mainly for Tanky AP Champions, like Rammus, Nautilus, Maokai, and so.

That's enough of Building Tactics. In the next chapter, I'll explain how and why my build works from the last chapter, and how did I come up with it, step by step.

I'll give an example of a build that works for a lot more than just 1 champion, since it's made to suit all my needs. It's a Fighter (Off tank, or bruiser, which I'll refer to as) build that I use for Rengar, Xin Zhao, Aatrox, Nocturne, Olaf, and Darius (With few minor tweaks). I will firstly list everything I use in the build, then I'll get on to the explaining part.

Items

• Boots
  • Mercury's Treads
• Offensive
  • Ravenous Hydra
  • Blade of the Ruined King
  • Black Cleaver
• Defensive
  • Spirit Visage
  • Randuin's Omen

This is an overall round up of my Item Usage, from Glass Cannon to an immortal Life Steal Bruiser. As I do not use Crit Chance on any of my Bruiser builds, and Black Cleaver is overall a better choice for bruisers than Last Whisper, the other offensive items remaining are Ravenous Hydra and Blade of the Ruined King. The defensive choices are most of the time Spirit Visage for Magic Resistance, and Randuin's Omen for Armor. Frequently I swap Randuin's Omen with Iceborn Gauntlet for extra ganking and snowballing power while getting more offensive damage in exchange for 500 Health.

Runes

• Marks: 9x Flat Armor Penetration (12 Total)
• Seals: 9x Flat Armor (13 Total)
• Glyphs: 9x Magic Resistance per Level (24 Total)
• Quintessences: 3x Lifesteal (6% Total)

I'll list few reasons why I use these Runes:

• Marks: Armor Penetration Marks offer the best late game advantage. Builds should usually be made for late game, with slight modifications so that they can be viable in early game as well. Armor Penetration offers decent stats in early game, but in the late game are far the best. They also stack greatly with % Armor Reduction or % Armor Penetration, which I have through Black Cleaver.
• Seals: As mentioned before, Seals offer great Defensive stats, such as Armor and Health. I was using Armor Per Level Seals before, early game was still good, but there was not a huge difference in late game, barely 9 armor overall. I didn't think it was worth keeping them for only 9 Armor at late game.
• Glyphs: Similar reasons as Armor. However, since each champion starts with 30 Magic Resistance, and I'm always in lane against an ADC who does Physical Damage, I do not need this extra early game advantage, so I go for Magic Resistance Per Level.
• Quintessences: This is the interesting part. As you will see in the next paragraphs you will notice that this build is heavily based on Healing as survival. This is a great way to endure in teamfights, since I deal a lot of damage, which directly affects Life Steal, and buying Health would cost me way too much damage. Instead, I get moderate Armor and Magic Resistances while getting lots of Life Steal.

Masteries



I prefer 9 21 over 21 9 mainly because of the CC reduction from last point. Defensive tree also grants me increased healing, which stacks greatly which my build. Additional Armor and Magic Resistance when enemies are nearby is incredible as well since I'll usually be near a lot of enemies to proc my Ravenous Hydra. 21 9 could be useful too, since the overall damage boost, armor penetration, and attack damage bonus are decent enough too, and grant somewhat defensive stats through life steal.

If I want a more offensive pick, I'd go for 21 9 located in the picture below. There's not much to comment here. Offensive pick is decent because of the high Life Steal in the build. This overall allows me to deal more damage and heal at the same time. With defensive masteries, I'm more durable against targets within 700 range hence the passive bonus Armor and Magic Resistance for each nearby enemy visible Champion.

Both are good choices. Pick one that would suit your play-style. My experience is telling me that Offensive choice is a better early game pick, and Defensive pick is highly dependable on the enemy team, their damage and amount of CC effects.

I always play Ignite + Ghost as summoner spells.

This is also known as "The Vunjo Build" among my friends. Hence I've mentioned that I usually play Rengar as an adc, it's guided by a support carrying Zeke's Herald, and sometimes Locket of the Iron Solari. Let's start explaining how did I get this idea, why do I need these stats, and why I should not be changing anything in it.

Here's a video of how it usually works In-game:
Play Video

Making of the Build

Now we look back at the points of the build. One of them is based on the PvP game aspects. Since I'm the carry, I want to be able to kill anything, from glass cannons, to tanks. The build itself is made of boots, 3 offensive items, and 2 defensive items. The 3 offensive items, along with the burst of the champion ( Rengar in this case)) give just enough to burst down the enemy carry. Then the rest is up to consistent damage.

The Burst Damage come from Ravenous Hydra active part, and Blade of the Ruined King active as well, along with other characteristics that make Rengar an assassin. I usually save the active of BoTRK if I have enough damage for mobility in team fights. Since the early game meta allows me to get fed early on in game, in 90% of the games I have a huge advantage over the enemy bot lane, which grants me even greater burst power against them, since they will be under leveled, and have less defensive stats just by that.

That is how I start a fight, buy bursting down anyone I need to, most of the times their adc. If enemy mid lane or top lane is fed I can burst them down too, but not just with double Q. The rest of the bruiser build allows me to stay still in the fight and continue the damage.

Once their squishiest and strongest champion is down, I start clearing the others. As you may remember from chapter earlier, I wrote how to counter champions with high health, or high armor. This build allows me to penetrate through both of them, since I have Blade of the Ruined King, which deals a lot of damage based on target's health, and Black Cleaver to reduce their armor by 25%. Along with the flat armor penetration from the same item, and my runes, I do not have any problems with Tanks. To conclude. With these 2 item I deal damage to everyone, no matter are they tank or glass cannon they will fall down soon enough.

And now we have the essential item for team fights, which also grants additional burst damage, the Ravenous Hydra. Why is this essential in team fights? Because most of the champions I've mentioned deal primarily single target damage based on auto attacks. As such, with Ravenous Hydra I will deal a lot of AoE damage. People will always want me dead, since the meta allows me to get fed early on in game. The ultimate allows me to pass unseen by the enemy team right into the heart of their damage. Being ranged or not, it will not cause problems anymore. Then most of the champions will remain melee, and will want me dead. Even if the enemy support is ranged, they will try to save the rest of the team. Overall, most of them end up grouped up only to kill me, which suits me just fine. Not to mention that if the entire enemy team is inside a bush, I can have no problems bursting them for an easy double kill+ while the rest would probably try to run away. Yes, it is that strong indeed.

These were the most important reasons to choose the stated items. Now we're back to defensive items and boots. I've chosen Mercury's Treads for an obvious reason. Since I'll be the primary target of the enemy team, they will try to CC me as much as possible. Mercury Treads along with the Mastery point in the Defense tree grant me maximum possible CC Reduction without any champion abilities.

Now I have to get Armor, Health, and Magic Resistance with 2 items. First I went for Spirit Visage. This item is a perfection for the build. It grants 20% CDR, which is great for me since I do not have much from the rest of the items (The Black Cleaver grants 10%, and the potion in late game another 10%, along with Spirit Visage it's maxed to 40%). It grants me all the Magic Resistance I need combined with Mercury Treads. The extra health is useful, but what I personally love the most is the increased Healing. As you can see from the build, Ravenous Hydra and BoTRK grant me 27% Life Steal, along with Quintessences of Life Steal this number becomes 33%. However, Spirit Visage increases it by another 20% into exactly 40%. Since the support is carrying Zeke's Herald, this life steal becomes 52%. But wait, there's more. The Mastery Point will also increase this healing by 10% when I'm below a quarter of the health. Healing done is simply huge. Never forget that I do enough damage to everyone, and this damage is AoE, which all stack with Life Steal. In other words, the more the enemies are next to me, the stronger I am, hence I will heal for more through Life Steal, and there're Mastery Points for that as well. Not to mention that Dueling with this build is the easiest thing ever, since you cannot die anyway with such healing done and decent Armor and Magic Resistance. Which lead us to our next item, Randuin's Omen, granting 500 Health and 70 Armor. The addition to it is the slow on auto attack, which is perfect for my role, since everyone is focusing me anyway. As simple as this is, but there is a second option that I've tried recently in fact. Iceborn Gauntlet would then replace Randuin's Omen. It would then grant me more damage on each spell cast, along with a very strong slow. With this, I end up not just dealing damage, and tanking the entire enemy team, but slowing the enemies too! Following up with Furor boots, Rengar's Bolas, Blade of the Ruined King, and Ghost, it's nearly impossible to run away from the fight against this.

There's another option that I sometimes use on champions which deal True Damage. Since they deal True Damage, I could remove an armor penetration Item, but that might not always be the best choice. For example I'll add Olaf and Darius, since both of them are bruisers, they fit the off-tank role the best, and deal a lot of single target True Damage. By replacing Black Cleaver with a Maw of Malmortius, I get more Magic Resistance, and slightly more Attack Damage. After that, I have more Magic Resistance than Armor, so I can feel free to replace Mercury's Treads with Ninja Tabi. This, however, leaves me without the needed Tenacity, other than 15% from Masteries. Remember that Maw of Malmortius' passive grants more attack damage based on missing health. This goes extremely well with the Life Steal from the rest of the build, and one of the mastery points that grant 10% increased healing when below 25% health. Another point that stacks greatly is the second Maw's passive, which grants Magic Damage Shield again when low on health. This way, if you're fighting an AP or a hybrid champion, you can survive, deal more damage, and heal more when low on health, making it even better duel material. I use this change rarely. It's only viable if the enemies do not have too much Armor, and if they do not have a lot of CC effects. Overall Armor and Magic Resistances are increased with this change, but I lose tenacity, and armor penetration.

Now Let's revise this all into Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Dealing damage to anyone, regardless of their endurance. The damage dealt is also AoE.
• Casting CC on the enemy team, and boosting my move speed make me a high mobility fighter. This is also enhanced with the maximum CDR which I have.
• Durable enough to be focused by everyone, since Life Steal is here to guide me through everywhere.

Cons:

• Grievous Wounds, a debuff which decreases the healing gained by 50%, counters me quite a lot. I still end up with 26% life steal even then, decent enough, but it's still a great counter to this build. Then again, I'm rarely affected by the debuff, since nobody builds Executioner's Calling, and I can easily burst down mages who carry Morellonomicon. Also, the Life Steal coming from the build is not obvious enough, since the only real Life Steal items I have are BoTRK and Hydra, granting only 27%. The rest is up to them to see.
• Burst damage against you. The only reason why this could be a problem is because you do not have a lot of health (From ~2800 to 3400 depending on Randuin's Omen or Iceborn Gauntlet). I still have loads of Armor and Magic Resistance, more than 210 while my Battle Roar is up. And yet again, if there is an assassin in their team, you can choose him as your primary target, and burst him down instead.
• CC abilities that are not affected by tenacity, such as knock ups, could possibly shut down my sustain.

The second Con can actually be applied for nearly any build, and yet, this build has a solution for that too. The healing reduction on the other hand is the only true thing that can counter me. However, I can, again, burst down someone with the healing reduction items. I have Ravenous Hydra, there's no issue choosing whom to burst. The third con is a weakness to all builds, since there's no way to reduce its duration.

There's another interesting thing about this build. My favorite support for this meta is Janna, because of her shield, which grants lots of AD. This build has a bit less than 300 ad, which is rather low compared to how much damage it actually does. This mean that the Janna Shield, and Zeke's Herald passive are both extremely effective on me, which we conclude back in the Stats topic. Imagine what happens if we have Vladimir's Hemoplague and Maokai's Vengeful Maelstrom. These 2 will increase my defense, and boost my damage. Since my damage is boosted, so is healing from Life Steal, so even more do I receive in defenses.

Lastly, I never have to rely on luck, or Critical Strike Chance. I deal continual damage as a true fighter, while very few things counter me.

Indeed there's no divine build or so. The best build you can create is the one with the most pros, and the least cons once we've included everything in it. Still, the only way you can die is alone, and far outnumbered. Stay with your team. The strength is in numbers, not just individuals (Unless you're 8 0 2 in 11 minutes, then you can go alone if you wish).

Overall, this build has all the pros that I need, and very few cons. It has a designed early game (meta) only to counter the adc's weaknesses, which we've mentioned while ago. This means that in all the games I will have a great advantage, and in late game, when I create the build, I'll be nearly unstoppable. And that overall rounds up this guide, and brings up the point. By using knowledge of the game, and researching further deeper in it, I've guaranteed victories in my lane, and used the knowledge to create a build, which I use to carry the team in last phase, and win the game.

The Animations, cast times of spells, and time required for an auto attack are all important factors when it comes to general playing and mastering a certain champion. There are several champions that highly scale with Attack Speed, but rarely acquire the stat. Some of those are Taric, Maokai, Shen, and Skarner. It's fairly obvious why they can use a bit of extra attack speed. Before getting into details for each one, let's round up what's common in all of the named champions:

• Primarily they're all Tanks. They either initiate the fight first or follow as an off-tank. All of them are dependable on auto attacks through spells, some more than the others.
• Mostly deal magic damage but tend to auto attack when they're able to. This makes them a stronger hybrid damage dealer. Dealing both physical and magical (hybrid) damage is harder to counter, since it requires both Armor and Magic Resistance, directly affecting the opponent's build choices.

Now let's get to each champion in a bit more details.

Maokai's Sap Magic allows him to heal on every 5. spell cast nearby. This includes enemies outside of vision range. In teamfights, where we can find 10 players constantly spamming their spells, as a Maokai player you may notice that your passive is up all the time, and you can't use it. Getting some attack speed will allow you to proc your passive much more often, directly making you more durable. As such, Wit's End offers both defensive and offensive stats all decent for Maokai. The more attack speed you have, the less time you'll have to spend waiting for it, which means you'll acquire more stacks that won't go to overflow with your passive.

Shen's Ki Strike is an essential Energy gatherer. The other way of gathering Energy is through his Taunt Shadow Dash, though it varies from 40 to full Energy based on the amount of targets Taunted. Most of the Energy Champions with high cooldown reduction will find some problems refilling the bar. The more attack speed Shen has, the more energy he will acquire, thus the more spells he will be able to cast.

Skarner's Energize directly affects his kit. With each attack, all cooldowns are reduced by 0.5 seconds, doubled when attacking an enemy Champion. The more attack speed you have, the less cooldowns will his spells have, so Attack Speed acts like a sort of Cooldown Reduction. Having both of them will also make you a decent damage dealer while supporting your team with your CC effects and spells alike.

The previous 3 examples have been fairly obvious to guess how do they stack with Attack Speed. Now let's get to my personal favorite: Taric.

Taric's Gemcraft allows him to reduce cooldowns of all abilities by 2 seconds on each attack after casting a spell, while dealing bonus damage. They key part of this is the reduction of abilities' cooldowns. This new Taric changes in a recent patch makes his play-style much like Riven's Runic Blade. Which means, after casting a single spell, try auto attacking. This will allow you to cast your spells at maximum speed and deal the most damage. With a decent attack speed and cooldown reduction, Taric can create a great rotation in spell + auto attacks, allowing him to constantly cast his spells, and deal decent amount of damage while still being extremely durable and supportive for the team.

I've tested a build in normal queue for Twisted Treeline. This is what ended up:
Play Video
I'll also share the build here so you can test it for yourselves.


Runes



I'm using Attack Speed Marks and Quintessences, followed by Armor Seals and Magic Resistance Glyphs. The Seals and Glyphs are for maxing out the durability through runes. Attack speed Marks and Quintessences help your rotation with your passive. The other choices that are still viable would be Magic or Hybird Penetration Marks or Quintessences, or Quintessences of Percentage Maximum Health, as they increase the healing through Imbue. Simple AP Quintessences are still viable but in my opinion less effective. Spell vamp is also somewhat viable.

Masteries



I'm using the same Masteries as I do for Volibear. Maxing out Armor and Magic Resistance, getting increased healing while low on health, and taking reduced damage from enemies that have impaired movement make me directly more durable through the passive of Iceborn Gauntlet. The Offensive part grants me bonus damage and attack speed, both useful for Taric.

Build and Item Usage

The key to building a durable champion is to utilize and combine Resistances (Armor and Magic Resistance) with Healing as sustain. Taric is an expert in that without using any Life Steal or Spellvamp.

I'd prefer Mercury's Treads over Ninja Tabi because of the tenacity, but if the enemy team has loads of Physical damage dealers or simply put Auto Attackers, then you may switch the boots. At the very last, Zephyr can serve perfectly as a Move Speed item instead of boots.

The rest of the build is very simple. I'm mainly focused on Magic Damage with slight boosts to Physical Damage.

Since Taric doesn't have any CC effect other than the single target stun Dazzle, without any gap closers you're not able to reach the enemies. Therefore you must acquire some way to slow the move speed of enemy champions, not just once, but frequently. That is why Iceborn Gauntlet is one of the best choices, since it grants all the stats that Taric needs. The other somewhat viable choice is Frozen Mallet.

Since I'm healing a lot, Spirit Visage will scale greatly, since it increases the healing amount in %, meaning the more heal you have, the more cost efficient this item will be. The other stats are all greatly used by Taric as well.

The next 2 items that perform a combination are Sunfire Aegis along with Abyssal Mask. The 2 items together grant overall resistances, Health, Armor, and Magic Resistance. The other 3 parts are direct boosts to damage. Bonus Ability Power, the periodic damage over time from Sunfire Cape, and the reduction of enemies' magic resistances from Abyssal Scepter make it a great combination for longer fights.

The last item is again a hybrid of defensive and offensive stats. The key part to this item is the Attack Speed and Magic Resistance, it's Wit's End. This, along with Abyssal Scepter grants me just enough Magic Resistance Reduction to deal just enough damage.

Since Taric already has loads of Armor through the passive boosts of Shatter, we'll need to build much more Magic Resistance to make it closer to Armor. Because of this, we've got 2 high Armor items, Iceborn Gauntlet and Sunfire Aegis, but 4 Magic Resistance items as well, Mercury's Treads, Spirit Visage, Wit's End and Abyssal Mask. Overall, you'll have around 300 Armor while Shatter is off cooldown, which rounds up to about 260+ while on cooldown. You'll also end up with around 250 Magic Resistance. Both of these are incredibly high for any champion, especially with this much healing.

This part is probably not for the beginners, it's an advance tactic. You can't use this unless you already know a lot about the game. This can include lots of tactics, I'll name few of them, but there are a whole lot more.

Firstly you should know the community. 98% of the players have exact same thoughts on champions and cannot think of them in another way. For example, Amumu is considered as a tank, and very few people would ever think of him as an assassin. Of course, it's mostly based on the build, even Amumu can deal a lot magic burst damage with Deathfire Grasp and Lich Bane, along with 750 AP or so. He can deal a lot of physical burst damage with Sword of the Divine and Infinity Edge with some armor penetration. Overall, he can be anything, but the easiest and most common way (not always the strongest or the best way) is a tank. Basically, it's up to you to decide what kind of a champion are you playing.

You can use the following in the exactly given way, amumu assassin for example. You can jungle with him, but rush only high AP items to deal lots of damage. Usually when players see enemy amumu approaching they are only afraid of his Bandage Toss and Curse of the Sad Mummy, which are both CC effect spells. They do not expect high damage coming from you. Even if you have full damage items, players might still ignore you and consider you a tank, sad but true fact. Not everyone checks the players' builds nowadays, since most of them are either the same, or serve the exact same role for the desired champion. You can just sneak up on them, and surprise them with your burst damage, which will more likely lead to a successful gank. I'm not advising players to do this, I've never really tried it to be honest, but this is just another random example of how you can surprise your enemies using simple tricks.

The second trick that I've noticed is the meta changing tricks. If you select a champion whose role does not fit the current meta (My example, Rengar adc on bottom lane), players usually react in the following way, depending if they are your allies or your enemies:

• If they are your allies, in the very champion select screen they curse you or simply dislike your choice of champion for the lane. This should never bother you though, as long as you know what you're doing there's nothing wrong with it. If you're in a duo lane with a random player, you may want to explain your tactics to them.
• Like most of the players, enemies will probably think it's a bad tactic, and will simply ignore it, or try to stomp it. Either way, it suits you. My example fits this the best. They see a Rengar on botlane, followed by a support, so they know that I'm doing the role of an adc. Sometimes they are scared, other times they're confident that I'll fail the lane. Whatever the case is, they will not know what to do, and how to counter it. Think about it, you don't see that very often, and you have no idea what kind of a player are you facing. If you know you're playing against a high elo player, this makes it even worse, since you may expect the player to be actually good with their champion, and in the end win the lane. This is pretty funny when it comes to my tactic. At first, the enemies act like normal. Supports in their bushes or outside, either way trying to harass me or my support while their adc is trying to farm. At level 2 I get Ferocity as Rengar, and along with Janna's attack damage buff, I can deal huge early game burst damage, and probably get a kill, since the marksman is always squishy, no matter the champion, especially in the beginning of the game. Once I get few kills on them, instead of farming the creeps, they just start hugging the turret, getting no creeps whatsoever, while I get all the gold I want. Simply put, they're scared. They did not know how much burst damage I can pull at early levels, so I used this advantage to "bait" them, and get few kills on them. Later on they become completely useless, with no farm, and more deaths than kills and assists combined.

Here's a video of how exactly does this meta work. This was taken from a single game, there were much better games before and a few worse. I'd rate this to be a below average to average Rengar bot lane game.
Play Video /league-of-legends/champion/master-yi-3 Play Video /league-of-legends/champion/zed-107 Play Video

Before creating the builds for all champions, let's think of what we should look at, what do we wish to accomplish with the given champions, and how are we going to do that.

Earlier we've mentioned the mistakes in roles that players tend to make. Some of them are general picks in roles. For example we've got Tanks who build a lot of Armor and Health, even without much Magic Resistance, and rare opportunity for damage. The most common pick like that is the Season 4 top lane meta: Shyvana, Dr. Mundo, Renekton, and Trundle. Usually players buy a single or no damage item at all on these champions, something like Ravenous Hydra or Blade of the Ruined King. Their excuse is "These champions have high base damage". That is partly true, but that doesn't make them deal a lot of damage to everyone, which is what they should do. The current meta is to rush these champions, and pretty much go #yolo at the enemy Marksmen/APC. Most of the outcomes depend on the overall gold advantage of the players, though they cannot kill the back line alone since they're either alone against 2 or more, or they simply don't deal enough damage because of the overused tanky stats. Overall, they do not accomplish much in team fights. You might be wondering why am I repeating myself in this, and the answer is simple. In the following chapters, where I'll show some of my builds for the champions you'll never see a role described as "Tank", rather as Fighter or Tanky Mage. In the end, the role is similar, you can still initiate and stay in their back line as a tank, but you're more supportive for the team, or you're dealing much higher damage than a Tank.

Which brings me to my next point. I personally see no way that glass cannon builds would work 100% of the time in almost any PvP game. Why does this happen? Depending on the game, you're either so squishy that you can't even react in time to defend from multiple enemies, or you don't have enough mobility to kite them as a range glass cannon, or for many other possible reasons. In League of Legends, as a glass cannon you most often get one shotted by an enemy assassin, or you simply get stomped by the enemy bruisers/fighters going for you. There'll always be certain champions viable and the best as glass cannons, who have certain ways of defensive or survival potential, but in the end, it's all just a bunch of gamble. Sometimes they'll carry the teamfights, they'll deal the most damage and maybe get the dream penta kill which people love to get, but other times, they'll just get focused and won't do anything in team fight. All in all, it's not always appropriate nor viable, and has a lot of ways to counter. Another bad point in them is the following: They're meant to be exclusively late game champions, they're usually very weak in early game (Known fact about Marksmen). In the end, they're not even that strong in late game, since they're easily countered. Therefore, in certain games, or champion picks, they won't be strong in any game phase, which simply concludes that in those games they're just weak and useless (Sorry Marksman mains!).

Similar facts about glass cannon Marksmen can be applied to Mages as well. As defensive item, they use Zhonya's Hourglass instead of Guardian Angel like Marksmen do. That will keep them safe for a couple of seconds, but after that, they're defenseless, with only thing to save them is their most likely CC ability set, which of course don't work against a lot of champions and their heavy Tenacity builds. To keep it simple again: As a glass cannon, you'll always have to focus more on survivability rather than on damage and skill shots as such. For the same reason you're going to see durable possible builds for all the champions, along with the common ones.

In the next chapters I'll show the builds for all champions. Some of them will take more time to be finished. If a build is made for certain 1 champion, then most of the commentary will be set in the Summary. Otherwise, since I'll use some of the builds for more champions, I'll add few ideas or minor modifications below the images.