Good DAY! I'm the same crafter that gave you the now meta build for Qiyana a year or 2 ago which was Ecclipse>Manamune>SG>Boots as core, I was flamed and downvoted for that year until people finally started seeing that what they thought was optimal and what actually was optimal was my build, only took a YEAR for ppl to catch on!
Now I'm back for another Build that is Bruiser Qiyana and with the state she is in it's a solid way to put her Top or Mid depending on matchup and playstyle.

The focus here is to be safe (sorry kids) early and farm and gain xp in lane as much as possible, getting your 1st Item just adds to your survivability and from there you are going to get items that will fulfill all your dashing needs.

Qiyana is in a weird place, she is not great for the average player and she is only "good" with my now meta build only if you are extremely proficient in playing her. She has become a coinflip Queen and that's what I mean to eliminate now since Riot has such a hate ***** for her!

I think through this original Build we've found a very happy median. See most people don't want to play Q full Tank which I understand, so instead I've really looked for a happy Hybrid for the players looking to try out some new Tech as well as the older players who maybe set in their ways.
Fimbulwinter is KEY! See I'll admitt when I was close, I still think things like Radiant Virtue and Jak'sho can work, same thing with Cleaver. However the majority of players who play Qiyana just aren't willing to go down this rabbit hole. So I've just been tryin to evaluate what can work to merge these concepts as well as give her that really clutch feeling that all of us seek and since there have been meme's floating around about her being the "New Ryze (better Nerf Qiyana)" Well let's bring back some of the tech that got Ryze gutted.

Fimbulwinter 2nd, still getting your Tear 1st or 2nd back, stacking it like normal and even getting Eclipse in this Varirant as well which is something many players are use to or have dabbled with at some point.
Fimbulwinter Procs from your Ice Enchant (Water) your R as well BUT it also procs from Serylda's Grudge (3rd Item)

What this means is you probably don't need me to tell you, you are going to get a **** ton of mana (no need for PoM anymore imo, could just get corrupting pot + biscuits or some hybrid of that) CDR, Armor AND HP as well as that ****ing NASTY Shield from Fimbulwinter so you can go for big plays more often, you get more kite back utility as well as chase down utility.

So just to put in perspective your core 3 give you Damage, Pen % (**** ton of it to suppliment the loss of stacking Lethality) Armor, HP, Mana, Shield, and Slows as well as CDR.

If you do get to 4 items then you would get yourself a Cleaver as well which gives you even MORE utility, more shred, HP and you get the movement all ontop of that Serylda's Slow.
Oh and we forgot about the Elclipse shield and Movement Spd as well when you go in and proc that too!

This is the Hybrid build MOST of you have been waiting for and it took me a few days to really nail it (had to get feedback first)

I've left the other Variants up so you can see the evolution of the Build path. I could tell ppl weren't feeling the full tank or cleaver rush (even though they are good in their own ways) and with this I think we've got something really "special" on our hands (2/22/2023). I can tell there is some steam building behind folks supporting the Fimbulwinter and they have come to the Dark Side and provided we can survive that early game and get that 1st item without being completely dumpstered (that was the reason for BC first originally but I digress) then from that point on it's gonna be a Bad time for the opponents because there's so much tech here that most people won't be able to deal with it especially if you are a smart player with good mechanics you will be a ****ing NIGHTMARE, like some sort of Akali Ryze Hybrid who just ****s ppl over and doesn't even have to run anymore.

It's a very good build guys, getting to the 2-3 items is the most difficult part which is kind of what Qiyana has always semi-struggled with.

I've left every chapter the same so you can see how the process went and how things evolved and so just overall everything will be transparent. It takes a lot to come up with new builds tbh and from the outside looking in it may seem like a no-brainer like "Oh yeah DUH ofc that's good" but when there are things like the "Meta" or standard builds and all these options of combinations of things it can be really difficult for a creative person to see the answers even when they are right in your face.
I knew Fimbulwinter was good but it still took me a day or two to really figure out how to do this without pissing ppl off or just turning them off to a new build which is why the Tankier versions just haven't taken off the way I thought they would.

Fimbulwinter is the Tech that must be abused here, in combination with Eclipse and Serylda's it makes for a Core 3 that makes everything just work in synergy with each other.
It's fun, it's strong, it scales and it does damage (more than the Tank Variants I have here) which at the end of the day is everything the playerbase wants. Losing Manamune as a Damage item does suck but you gain a lot in it's place, to the point where I am confident in saying I do believe this will draw the eyes of Riot after enough ppl start using it because I don't honestly think there is a lot of room for the opponents to counter play this once you get to 3 items, whereas before it was just "burst down the qiyana" well now they won't really have the option even if they DO catch the qiyana player out, there is so much more dueling potential with just Fimbulwinter giving you more ways to fight things out rather than just running for your life and waiting for CDs so you can do some Grass trick.

So at 2 items (even components) you are going to realize just how much more difficult it is for you to die. The biggest flaw in Qiyana is she is an Assassin and very Squishy but she wants to go in, she WANTS to be a Skirmisher, however, between the nerfs directly to her and the nerfs directly to her core items from last year (that I put together mind you) it is contradictor to do what she wants to do with that build.

So the new variant of Eclipse>FimbulWinter>Serylda's Grudge is setup to enable that style we have grown to love. The fact is you have to be able to live through all the things / people that want to kill you and Eclipse helps somewhat-ish but the star is going to be getting that HP in FimbulWinter, it's going to shore-up your problems through HP but also reward your CC and engages with a Shield, meaning, when you go in it's going to be much more difficult for the opposition to do what they normally do. You can't just be bursted down in 1 cc anymore and that means you are going to be able to do more in those skirmishes.

I know that people will doubt this, I know that even if it has a higher WR % that people just won't adapt until they see a lot of proof and that's where I would challenge everyone to not give up on this strat after 1 or even 3 games.

When you get those 3 items I really feel like it just unlocks and enables you so much better than going pure damage. Even if you are trading off the high damage from Muramana you are getting a **** ton of Survivability that is essentially equal to Barrier (Summoner Spell with a 180s CD) every 8seconds that you can proc EASILY with just your standard combo(s).

Ryze was nerfed for doing what I have made possible on Qiyana now. Being able to do a tremendous amount of Damage, having High Movespeed afterr eating combos and then having the Shields that you consistently have to break through to kill him. This was a balancing nightmare for Riot for what? A Decade? Until they removed / changed his Passive(s) so he couldn't do things like that anymore.

Now on Qiyana you are going to have the Dueling, the HP, the MP and CDR to support the abilities and spam; you are going to have the Movespeed, the Shred of Armor and you are going to have the Shields to back it up all while you still have your standard Kit with Invisibility, Roots, Dashes, AOE CC and with Serylda's you are going to be able to perrma Slow as WELL as procing that Fimbul passive everytime you do basically anything!

It's easier, it's more forgiving, it's less damage but it is just so much fun!

The Meta is always slow to change so remember that old ways doesn't mean that something is best! What good is building full Damage when you die just as easily as you kill? We want to control the narrative, that's what she does and means to do; you set the tempo with the Champion and the Builds of Items and Runes are there to help enable that tempo.

When I came up with the core build you know how much hate / flame I got? I even showed the numbers showing Manamune was superior to all the Lethality builds that had been running around. That build is still up here btw and you can see the massive amount of hate I got from other theorycrafters via Downvotes and Comments and now, well ALL of them run my build or some variant of it.

You cannot always just follow what worked before, especially when the champ is in a rough spot, we always must be looking for holes in the design and that's what theorycraft is, that's why this WORKS! Because the hole that Riot TRIED to create and exploit I've found a way to not just cover it but to give them on that Balance Team a HEADACHE to deal with once this starts taking off! They really want you to be ok building "optimal damage" while playing a Champ that cannot consistently use that optimal damage build, that's what they mean to do, that's why they keep gutting her and her builds; they want you to play her and just "accept" her state, just like how they did with Ryze, exact same scenario!

Are you going to do that? Are you willing to accept that Blue Pill logic that they want you to swallow?

Make sure you pick up Doran's Shield for your start and some pots, keep it simple early, nothin fancy, you don't even need to get fed early to make this build work. In fact my new build is based on you not getting fed (although if you do that's obv a +) it's all about you being able to chip away, sustain and survive while being able to chunk down others in low risk high reward scenarios.

Get Tear in First Back though, this isn't quite efficient since we won't be getting Tear until our Third item but the extra mana is needed early.

Remember this isn't about bursting/coinflipping early, it's about winning trades consistently without risk of death.
Black Cleaver currently is just a lil bit OP, it's not pre-nerf Ravenous Hydra status of busted but it's just a really good item and since we aren't going lethality anymore we want to get utility and survivability thats always our focus first.

Stay in Lane, create pressure and get that farm while harassing the opponent while in lane.

The items are not commonly seen on her together and because the bruiser items (and even Tank items) are so OP we are gonna be abusing those with a splash of some of the higher dps items (manamune and serylda's grudge).

Radiant Virtue just is OP on anyone looking to start up a Fight with their R or Peel back with it. There's a reason why it's so common in the Jungle Bruiser meta and that's the same concept Qiyana uses as well. With this and Cleaver you are going to bring more to your Team, still good damage, it's lower than pure Lethality but it also means you can stick on people longer and go for more drawn out fights. Still can kill squishies just fine because Qiyana does have solid damage but the problem most ppl run into (if going full damage) is they must be ahead to 1 shot and get out before dying. This isn't a problem anymore, you may not 1 shot people but you can still kill but now the risk is much lower of them being able to kill you in return, meaning yea it's going to take 2 (maybe 3) rotations of spells but you aren't going to be dying as easily.

Being able to get that Muramana and SG in the next spots just ramp your damage up big time, these are very strong items on their own, some of the highest DPS items that are non-mythics so when you complete those you are going to feel a lot stronger in terms of kill potential while still being difficult to kill between Grass and Water enchants and all the other Resists, it is gonna be almost always in your favor to take a fight 1 v 1 and then kill and you won't even have to reset generally.

Sho'jin, just another item that does exactly what we want, it was close between this and Death's Dance and overall the reason why Shojin made it is because frankly we need that Damage later in the game, we started off going survivability but now after those first 2 items we need to get more damage to make sure we are actual threats. Spear gives us both Damage and Utility which adds to our Survivability.

I use Radiant Virtue OR Evenshroud, both are solid and with Evenshroud it means obv you can setup big R's to get big damage buffs for your Team while procing Radiant Virtue as well. Very nice utility to carry the scrubs of solo Q and all this while limiting as much risk as we can

If you haven't read the Item notes for Other I break down some of the optional Items. Remember this is about just being able to stay in fights longer, CC and Outplay while surviving. Fimbulwinter is an option and although it is even more off-meta it still has a place here

I really have to stress this because I already know people are gonna say "But bro I do no damage early"

Listen, Qiyana is in a really messed up spot, bad matchups, high mana costs, losing matchups SO MANY losing matchups early. Damage is the last thing you should be worried about, we don't get her to be Queen again by playing within the Box Riot is trying to put her in, we must ADAPT! We must say "OK RITO Eff You and your 200 Year Monkey Faced Clowns!"

This is slow early, this is harass, harass, farm, farm and IF the opponent gives you the opportunity to all in early then you DO but you don't have to gamble like you had to do before.

TP early back to lane after you OOM and make sure you get that Tear, use your TP's early for lane, especially if you have a good way to create pressure with that TP via pushing waves. You want to be able to stay on the map for as long as you can (Mobi Boots can be good btw, I didn't say that) getting as much farm as you can and when you trade/harass your goal is to MAKE THEM BACK! You want to stay on the map and you want THEM to be in the fountain, even if you didn't get the kill that doesn't matter because those small advantages lead to big advantages. So getting more CS/XP after you chunk someone down and force them to back, that's actually BETTER here because Tank items and Bruiser items are so strong early, it means you can fight them and they can't fight you and when they CAN fight you it'll be too late because you'll have the damage to kill them after those first 2 items.

This isn't absolutely ISN'T about One-shotting; Riot all but killed the early lv 3 Qiyana 1 Shot playstyle and now you are seeing more of a lv 6-ish all in coin flip playstyle. The risk v reward isn't there any longer and she is too weak to do a lot of the things we have gotten use to from the past. You can still run that style of build but the WR% shows that it isn't really optimal early (Looking at WR by Gamelength) she has an absolutely AWFUL early game now with a WR of around 47% in the first 20 minutes making her the 45th worst champ in the early game if we focus strictly on WR we see that people aren't doing what they were doing before and rather than pretend like we can just magically outplay it we have to accept that riot doesn't want her to do what she did.
Qiyana's WR by Gamelength at it's peak *with traditional build aka my core build* puts her at her strongest around the 30-35 minute mark, it ramps up before then but then dies down. That means that riot intends for her to go Weak Early - Strong Mid - Average Late, that puts a lot of pressure on you especially with the nature of the assassin Kit, getting high value targets and getting out alive.

Instead we are going to modify things, see we can't change the lv 1 - 3 stuff really, we just have to sustain through the bs riot has done. However we CAN change the early game at 1-2 items; even though it's true that the Lethality mythic and Muramana are more damage it shows through the Graph of WR that those 2 items aren't actually enough like they were before; people just can't end the game and snowball quickly enough to give them those multiple item advantages. Bruiser and Tank items are way stronger early than Damage item (if you didn't know that) that's why a 1 Item Top laner with say Sunderer or even something like a Sunfire/Frostfire, can generally just walk down most squishes, if they have 2 items they are basically able to take over a game early regardless of what they are building but in this case we are breaking that power dynamic up and about to show riot what they've made us do.

See now, now Qiyana's greatest weakness (squishy) isn't even a weakness anymore, now we have just as much survivability as that loser Aatrox and more Dashes, more Dips, more Dives and all the other outplay potential that makes Queen, Queen.

Remember Tank Ekko? Remember Tank Diana and Fizz? That's what this is, this is something that will absolutely dumpster people and it just doesn't stop. See now they won't be able to outplay the outplay, now they just better hope to glob that their team is there and that they can get out safely before you just chase/walk them down.

This is imo the only viable way to play Qiyana currently and Riot really don' ****ed up imo, I wouldn't ever have to theory this if Qiyana was in a healthy state but trust me when I say this, this Build will make your opponents feel like this champ is ****ing BUSTED and then we will FORCE Riot to buff her to be what she was intended to be!

Sooo Jak was already splashable and thanks for the Qiyana Subreddit and the 1 reply who suggested it however it just wasn't enough on it's own so then we plug in Fimbulwinter which gives a small shield for 3 seconds but is only on an 8 secon CD.

This item combination on Qiyana is equally busted! This gives you Tank Stats, rewards you for CC and using your Water enchant AND lines up REALLY well with your CDS.

In all of the variants we are using Armor Pen % and Shred to essentially help us do the Damage through Abilities and Auto Attacks and using our E or even WQ with Grass to make sure we stick on ppl!

This is truly a disgustingly broken build guys. It does take a little bit of time to get use to not being able to just instantly delete but remember how Qiyana's W works with Empowered Autos, if you are a Tank (which you are sorta with this) it means you are going to be using that Cleaver and Empowered Autos to do a lot of the Work and they can't get away and if they do that's fine because you have all the tools in the World between her Kit and the Items to outplay.

They all do similar things, Jak Winter is something that I think is probably the EASIEST to execute (still think Triumph is better over POM though) and everything else is the same though.

Early - Same **** as you are use to, survive
Get that Cleaver, we are using this as a Pseudo Lethality Item basically; because it gives shred it basically is going to be you Autoing people in trades and then doing your standard QWQ or EQWQ or whatever combo you want to either A) Finish them off OR B) Escape and outplay (or dive). You want to be using Empowered Autos though and the only reason why I still chose to do Q max is because it helps with your executes with Rock weapon.
We are relying on Autos more than Abilities early, still using abilities to get on top of ppl but you have to be Autoing

Mid Game - You have 2 items? maybe 3? Now you can be bolder with positioning. No longer do you need to cower in fear of getting burst down in 1 CC. You are adding a layer of depth now, still gotta be Autoing and things but now you are able to stay doing those things longer and with less reliance on some of the things you maybe use such as lining up all your CDs. It's dramatically more forgiving, the biggest thing is make sure you are using your E to stick onto those high value targets.

Late Game - It's very similar to mid, you should have some damage and maybe you even got a little fed, you are now the person your Team is going to be looking at to make the plays and setups and you have a lot of ways to get in, stay, get out and survive.

Use those Water Enchants to make sure you can secure some Autos and Grass is still a great escape option.

Limit test a few games in Norms BEFORE you go into Ranked at least 10 games so you get the idea of how things are different; there's no point going into Ranked and trying to play this like you would the standard build. Get a feel for the difference in playstyle and how to just walk people down. It's easier even if you aren't mechanically gifted / proficient that doesn't matter! My builds always try and minimize the Risk and maximize the Reward.

The Pen % from SG and Shred from Cleaver are the Key to doing damage through Autos and Abilities here that's where the difference in style comes from.