Nautilus. One of the largest and scariest champions to face on the fields of justice and possesses an intimidation factor unlike any other. This guide is focussed on supporting your team's carry and doing all you can to pick your team up, throw them on our shoulders, and protect them from pursuing enemies at any cost, even your own life. Playing Nautilus requires selflessness, patience, and an overall awareness of the enemies team composition as well as your own. Let's continue with the guide, "FORWARD...FORWARD..."

While Nautilus does not possess a healing ability to aid the carry during the laning or beginning phases of the game, he has a lot of early game power and health to provide the edge needed to create havoc and disruption within the fields of justice. There are certain characteristics that a support or support tank needs to have and certain jobs that the support is ultimately responsible for in a game.

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• Avoid getting the last hit on minions, your carry needs all the gold
• You are in the lane to assist the carry in getting kills, not get kills yourself
• Make use of all of your abilities and focus on how they can help your team
• Warding is extremely important, make sure you set aside enough gold to cover the best areas
• Later in game, be with your team. You cannot help them if you are nowhere to be found
• Cooperate and be understanding of everyone's job. Carry, Jungler, Mage, Support, Tank.
• Be sure to build your gold producing items quickly to make extra gold for wards and items
• Get items that produce auras that help fight the enemy team's carry

All of this is being said to reveal one important point. You are the tank. Know. Your. Place.

Nautilus' true role and in my opinion his best role is that of the jungler. He possesses the durability of a tank as well as the ganks that make him stronger in the jungle than anywhere else. He will still assume his late game role of the team's tank, but Jungle Nautilus' can be one of the scariest forces to trifle with, no matter what stage of the game you are at. Jungling in League of Legends is by far the most difficult role to play as. This is because of the multiple responsibilities that a jungler is in charge of which are listed below.

• Ensure that your team has set up wards so that you can gank while still retaining the element of surprise. [See Nautilus' Warding]
• Place wards yourself if a lane is having a difficult time farming due to enemy pressure
• Clear jungle creeps quickly and carefully to set yourself up for an earlier and more powerful gank.
• Defend a lane if the controllers of the lane need to return to base for items and healing
• Rely on your gold per 10 items for funding for the items you need, do not farm a friendly lane
• When Ganking, position yourself to disrupt the lane, prevent escape, and kill the most fed of enemies in the lane.
• Call mias on enemy champions at all times to keep your team aware of the danger they are under.

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Nautilus uses the mastery shorthand build of 0-21-9. This provides the defensive masteries needed to last through team fights and the utility masteries to help your team in a very significant way.

Defense

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There are certain areas of the defensive mastery tree that help Nautilus in ways that have a much more troublesome way in game when considering the livelihood of your foes. The mastery tree for defense should focus on getting to certain points on the tree. These are as follows:

: Provides health per level which fuels one of your important abilities which will be discussed in the section titled Nautilus' Skill Sequence.

: Grants an additional 30 health at the start of a game. This is vital because obtaining all the health you can is key. Once again, this will be further discussed in the chapter labelled Nautilus' Skill Sequence.

Utility

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The main focus of this tree is the movement speed increase as well as an increase in ward sight. This will aid in overall team awareness and help prevent ganks from the enemy team.

: The movement speed will help you move about faster which will make people more cautious because, let's face it, you are playing one scary champion.

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Help your team seal a victory by following orders and supporting your team through your play style and creativity on ward placement and your ganks. Let's move on to discuss Nautilus' abilities.

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Nautilus is often described as "The Setup". I find this often times to be quite accurate. The goal is never steal a kill, so knowing what sort of damage you can deal and what your damage is based on is vital to supporting properly. Focus on using your passive as well as Nautilus' other abilities to focus your attention where it is needed the most instead of losing team fights because of a poor focus decision.

: Every few attacks you anchor someone in place. This forces the enemy to stay still and are suddenly at the mercy of your carry. While laning, you want the target of this ability to primarily be the squishier of the two enemy champions. While participating in team fights, the ideal hit should be on the enemy ad/ap carry so that your team can quickly focus down this champion and proceed to slay the remainder of their team.

: Probably the most well known ability of this champion, Dredge Line gains you an extra bit of damage as well as an excellent gap closer to secure a kill for your carry. I recommend grabbing a point in it early game, and maxing it last at level 18.

: This ability allows Nautilus to build on the tanky side like he is supposed to do, while still having a great amount of damage output in team fights during mid and/or late game. This ability stacks off of your maximum health and it is important to grab your first point in this ability and max it out as quickly as possible.

: This is quite important as well. This ability deals a certain amount of damage and reduces accordingly when passing through subsequent targets. It is still key to maximize your damage output by activating it during the heat of battle with multiple enemies around. This ability is also quite disruptive as far as animations go, it makes things difficult to see and click on. This ability is also a temporary slow for enemy champions and can help secure more kills. Plus, its just fun to watch.

: In my opinion, one of the most terrifying ultimate abilities in the game. Use this to shut down the enemy carry with ease. This will knock up enemy units on the way to the targeted unit and upon impact will massively knock up the enemy champion and slow them and everyone who was hit for a short duration. Deals a good bit of damage upon impact, but more importantly causes chaos among enemy ranks and scatters champions quickly. Use to initiate normally and also works as a great execute if you find yourself 1v1 with a low health champion.

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The set of runes I chose is focussed on being present in the lane, instead of being the force that kills everyone. I believe armor is important, but I also am aware there are better armor runes I could use. Please, allow me to explain my decision. I think It will make a little more sense.

: As a support this will be very important in providing you with the proper gold count to purchase wards without it interfering with your item purchases.

: As a jungler, you will require mobility through the jungle as well as the lane for stronger more reliable ganking.

: After 9 of these bad boys, Nautilus will have an additional 12 armor give or take, plus the additional armor from masteries. Considering your first item, covered in the next section, will be Doran's Shield, Your additional health will be increased as well as your armor. This level of armor should make it to where you can take on most as style champions early game.

: Provides some additional magic resist to maintain longer lane presence, even if put against a mage or two. Very important as a tank to obtain both armor and magic resist.

: Extra armor provided so that you can handle having any champion in your lane, compensated for also by the set up of the quintessence.

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The cheat sheet explains the order in which to build certain items. The game changes and will never be just like another game. Here are the items I tend to build, followed thereafter by other items for certain troublesome situations.

: Grants a tenacity buff which decreases the length of slows, snares, stuns, and suppresses as well as a hint of magic resist. great boots for any tank really.

: This is your main health giving item and can really add to the damage output of your Titan's Wrath.

: provides you with a ton of armor, a ton of mana, and a ton of cool down reduction. as well as a passive that beats the pants off of DPS(damage per second) champions.

: Ability power, additional slow, and an extra 500 health fed into your Titan's Wrath. This is a great item for you in all ways.

: Some magic resist for the big bad tank as well as an impressive ability power buff and an aura that can really help your team's mages.

: Health Regeneration as well as an additional 15% cool down reduction to give you the full 40% cool down reduction. allows you to keep Philosopher's stone for your entire build.

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Ok I know that some games are going to be different so here are some other items that tanks tend to enjoy.





These are just a few helpful items with similar themes to the rest of my guide. Some more explanation I believe is required for the early build for this champion.

Philosopher's Stone AND

The purpose of these two important items is to give you extra gold that you are missing out on because of choosing to let your carry farm all of the minions from your lane. These two items later build into amazing, team work focused items that make you the team favorite pretty fast. Make sure you grab these items very quickly and keep them in the build as long as you can to help produce enough gold for the items you desire as well as for the wards you are gonna need to plant throughout the map.

Warding is one of the most important aspects of League of Legends and also one of the most scorned. Often times, one team gains such an advantage on the other that warding almost will not matter, so no one does.

Sight Ward: Your normal everyday ward to use in bushes and various other places and will eliminate the Fog of War in an area.

: This ward is for revealing other wards as well as stealthed enemy champions. These wards are to be used for Baron Nashor as well as Dragon. This is so that the enemy team's wards can be eliminated as well as the area being warded.

Here is a video that explains several excellent areas to ward and why they are great areas to ward.
Play Video
Do not forget this is part of your job as the support tank and no one else will be doing it. Keep up with your responsibility.

Summoner spells are really flexible when playing as a support because really it is all about who your are going to support. The two that I have selected are just ones that are pretty common in my lineup when using Nautilus.

: This spell can really hose down an ad/ap carry when they try to make some great escape. Can also help you escape in a sticky situation.

: This is helpful right after a kill in early game. Allows you to go heal and make it back fairly quickly so that your carry is not left alone in a lane for too long. Late game this spell can put you in the right place at the right time and allow you to save a life across the map.

9/28/12: Fixed minor adjustments to continue the tweaking necessary to obtain a higher rating

9/28/12: This guide rockets to the top and earns the #3 Best Nautilus guide on the site.

9/29/12: Official blog inspired by this guide forged in the heart of a dwarf star, url provided

9/29/12: GUIDE BREAKS 10,000 VIEWS!!!!! THANKS EVERYBODY!!!!!

10/8/12: GUIDE BREAKS 20,000 VIEWS!!!!! THANKS AGAIN EVERYONE!!!!!

The way of the support tank is not the path that belongs to all summoners and it is my personal opinion that not everyone can do it. Be it selfish pride, stupidity, arrogance, or whatever else you can think of, playing a support the right way is not easy to do. If this concept of a support tank is foreign to you, please do not down vote my guide, I promise I do know what I am talking about to some degree.
This Guide also has discussed using Nautilus' best overall role as a jungler. Jungling is not an easy task either and will take some getting used to, but with the strong ganks Nautilus provides as well as a cooperative team, there isn't a force that can topple the mighty Nautilus. I look forward to hearing from the readers of this guide and I love helpful suggestions and up votes so hit me up.