Q+A Combo

Your bread and butter poke combo for lane, this will get you a stack of Absolution while also providing lots of healing from Piercing Darkness and Fleet Footwork if you're running it. You can also sustain this combo fairly well with Presence of Mind and your support item's mana regeneration.

Some match ups require care when executing this combo as champions like Alistar and Pantheon can engage on you when you get into your attack range.

Also there are Marksman like Draven, Caitlyn and Jhin that can poke you back hard. If your ADC doesn't help you with poke, it can quickly devolve into a frustrating 2-on-1 situation. Make sure you disengage and if needed, don't poke at all. Better to be behind on Absolution stacks than have the enemy lane put ahead on kills. If your ADC then complains that you're not being useful to them, mute them.

Finally, Ashe is a risky champion to poke against, especially in the above scenario where your ADC isn't going to help. She can permanently slow you and attack you until you're dead and if you're far enough away from the tower, she'll be able to do just that.

Full Combo

Senna's full damage combo is Q+A+W+A. It's pretty much just alternating abilities in between auto attacks to maximise your output. You want to use Last Embrace after Piercing Darkness to increase your chances of hitting it.

After completing this combo, just keep attacking while it's safe or disengage if it isn't.

This combo can be used both aggressively - to press for a kill, and defensively - to deliver lots fo damage while allowing yourself to completely disengage from the enemy.

If you have Black Cleaver you'll end this combo with 4 out of 6 stacks. after only about 2 seconds.

Always use E to get back into lane faster

A nice, simple one. E's cooldown is long but if you use it right out of base you get it back soon after reaching lane and the value of getting back into lane faster is significant.

If you recalled with your ADC, try to include them in your E so they get boosted too.

If someone leaves your E, they will keep the movement speed until it ends or they attack something so don't worry about getting ahead or falling behind of your ADC when doing this.

Safe Lane Sustain

If you're getting low on health in lane, fire your Q through minions to hit enemy champions. Doing so will give you the Q healing (obviously), trigger Fleet Footwork and give you a bit of mana sustain with Presence of Mind. With this, it won't take long before you're healthy enough to resume normal lane operations.

This tactic helps avoid recalling alone which is really bad in bot lane. You always prefer to recall with your ADC to avoid losing XP from them pushing the lane, them dying by over extending alone, them recalling after you get back to lane and you being alone, etc.

Don't even get me started about ADC's who think they need to recall every 2 minutes and the crash wave and repeat. If your ADC is doing that, just stay in lane and soak XP from a safe distance if you can. Maybe even take some last hits on Melee or Cannon minions.

Farming as a Support Senna

There's several deep dives on the pro's and con's of farming as a Senna support (most notably, taking cs that no one else will be able to get). The short and sweet of it is, an Absolution stack is worth about 50g worth of stats (0.75 AD, 1 Attack Range, 0.5 Crit Chance). This means that once you factor in the drop rates for souls, it is not worth taking ranged minions, barely worth taking melee minions and just barely worth getting early cannons. Later on cannons become more valueable as their gold increases.

This also means that if you go ADC and you're about to complete your 4th item (second last), it's probably worth not farming and instead doing your best to push waves without taking farm to maximise your scaling going forward.

There's also room for a duo to flip roles after the Senna ADC get's 3 full items and have the Senna pick up a support item and start exclusively scaling off of souls, takedown gold and passive gold.

Multitasking with Senna's CC

A big tool in my toolbox is the ability to focus one target in a fight and fire off my Last Embrace at a tank or other enemy to stop them from closing distance. Doing this in lane can net you a free kill if the support isn't already in position to back up their ADC and is also a useful skill when trying to secure picks or in spread-out team fights.

Use Ultimate when you're about to be CC'd

Senna's ultimate (similar to Lux) Dawning Shadow has an unstoppable cast. Only death cancels it and it doens't go on cooldown if that happens. This means that if you're about to get CC'd by someone you can effectively waste one second of their CC duration by triggering your ultimate cast time just before. This can be easily achieved against champions like Rammus, Seraphine and many others. It is especially effective against Renata Glasc's ultimate since you not only make use of that CC time, you also minimise the amount of damage you do to your team (which in Senna's case, is significant).

Obviously the above is subject to it being a good time to ult in the first place, don't just throw out your ult because Nocturne is about to get his E off on you but you're surrounded by allies and he's already going to die.

Exhause Usage

Senna works really well with Exhaust for several reasons. As a stat check tool, it gives her favourable outcomes to a lot more 1v1 fights. As a peal tool, it can be the difference between life and death. Finally, if you have a fight you're going to win but the enemy has flash or you're trying to greed for two kills in lane, you can exhaust an enemy and the chances of them getting away are significantly diminished.

It takes time to understand exactly when Exhaust is best utilized and if your allies ping it becasue you didn't use it and didn't want to, mute them. I have a zero tolerance policy for people telling me how to play when they are the ones that screwed up.

Healing Allies with Q

Some ADC's get it. Some don't. Your Q is instrumental to your safe, reliable and effective lane poking. Do not use it on allies outside of the following exceptions:

* You can't step up to poke or there's no one to poke
* Your ADC is below 30% and doesn't want to recall
* You can fire it through your ally to hit an enemy that's outside your range
* When taking epic monsters or hitting towers you can and should line yourself up with your ADC so your Q will hit them and the monster/tower.

In all other cases, use your Q exclusively to poke and set up engages. If your ADC complains, use the mute button.

That's for laning. Outside of laning, especially with a lethality build, you're heal is much stronger and when out of combat you can and should use it to heal allies so they don't have to recall and give up map pressure. At this point you also have more attack speed from levels and runes so you'll be able to reset your Q faster.

Use Presence of Mind if you're out of mana

This one is kinda obvious but if you're running low on mana and it is safe to do so, just step up and auto enemies to get that bonus mana regen coming. You don't need to recall for mana unless you do!

Ward Q

Another popular trick with Senna players is to use a ward to attack an enemy outside of your normal Q range. Since your Q can fire through wards, you have a portable range extender in your inventory most of the time.

This technique can be hard to execute on and costs a ward and your Q CD if you miss. I would recommend not expending too much brain power on this if you haven't mastered Senna's other tools.

More to follow...

As I remember more tricks I use in my games, I'll update this section to include them so watch this area! :)

One of the new Lethality items we received in 14.1, this item is one of the undisputed top items for Senna. Mostly due to the 5% Move Speed but also the bonus lethality you get to charge up when out of champion combat. This is a must buy, especially for lethality Senna builds. If you have an Ornn on your team, get excited, because this item evolves into Certainty which builds on this amazing item to make it down right insane.

This is a decent item but isn't particularly good on Senna. Most of the time you're using your ultimate in team fights in which case the ultimate reset passive isn't very useful. This might be a good item in ARAM but I wouldn't take it in rift games.

This item is too weak to justify an item slot and it's too easy to lose the shield on one ability and be ended by the next one.

Another new Lethality item, this one has decent stats but the passive won't be particularly helpful unless you're the ADC. If you are an ADC and want to build lethality, this is probably going to be your first or second item.

Too weak. Especially on ranged.

Core. This item not only has excellent armor penetration but now that it has lethality, you also get to boost your Q healing more. The slow effect passive is pretty useless on Senna but the power of this item makes up for the lack of passive use.

Good stats and the best passive for a support Senna. You get your damage and some nice utility to help the team and yourself establish vision dominance.

Fairly weak on Senna compared to other lethality items and the passive means you end up with more kills at the cost of your team.

This is a solid item and the movement speed effects are helpful when moving around to assist different lanes or quickly apply vision. I'm not yet sure where this fits in Senna's build or if it fits at all but for now I've put it in the 4th slot. The other item vying for that slot would probably be Voltaic Cyclosword.

With Senna being quite slow and also very fragile, these boots are very helpful to keep you at a safe distance, to dodge enemy abilities and to just keep up with the flow of the game.

Defence boots against armor. Very helpful in countering heavy armor compositions or a fed enemy Master Yi and similar.

Defence boots against magic. Might need to make this the default until mage meta is patched a bit. Magic damage sources are currently extremely overtuned. A 4-item Ekko can one shot you with his E these days.

Not an ideal item for Senna but if no one else is buying it and you have major armor threats like Rammus or an unstoppable split pusher with lots of armor, this is instrumental in helping take them down and Senna stacks this up fairly quickly.

If you aren't looking to go max lethality, this item should be high on your list. It is the highest power spike out of any item in the game as of the end of Season 13 and this as a 4th item instead of Youmuu's Ghostblade is completely viable - maybe even preferable against any high HP enemies.

Garbo. Has been for a while but now it's definitely garbo.

Ultimate Ability Haste is very nice but the stats on this item aren't enough to make it worth picking up.

Good against burst magic damage. We have a lot of that now. You do lose a bunch of damage going for this though sadly.

With item costs being down across the board, I'm currently on the hunt for a boots replacement that'll eke out a bit more damage and not completely sacrifice movement speed. This is one condender for that covetted boots slot. 10% movement speed is about 33 movement speed but you also lose some movespeed since % move speed applies on top of fixed movement bonuses (like boots) so in reality you lose around 40 movement speed by switching to this item. It's a pretty bad trade but warrants some investigation anyway.

After 12 on-hits (attacks + Q's) you will accumilate a total of 30% armor penetration, 25 armor and 25 magic penetration (at level 18). It's not a good item for Senna. It takes too long to stack and the effects aren't enough to give her any meaningful durability.