Hello bros. It's your boy Strike - Best Graves EUW here. BACK WITH SOME BUFFS (Yay)

If you want a quick run-down just look at the item builds and scroll down to the Lethality Build section. The guide is still in the works for S14 with a lot of recent changes.

I have been playing Graves for many years now hitting Challenger in S10/S11/S12 peaking rank 4 and holding best graves on several websites. So far hitting Grandmaster in s13. I am back on the grind in S14 (a little late I know) I have realised Graves is quite weak currently sitting at around 46.5% winrate and we are lacking a good graves content creator. I am currently sitting at a 60% w/r in 100+ games (master 300LP) and just got back, however I feel I have the best read on Graves currently.

Graves is a shotgun short-range marksman that can be played as an assassin/bruiser/crit marksman. Currently, the meta style you can play him is lethality and will be the ones I go through in this guide. As you know lethality now
grants the full amount and is no longer scaling, with the lethality items also being
cheap it is the build I recommend.

Although Graves has fairly basic abilities their is a big gap between an OK graves and a good Graves. These stem from understanding his limits/animation cancels and executing his playstle correctly with good builds.

The guide will have a few chapters and go quite indepth. For more things Graves visit my twitch https://www.twitch.tv/strikegraves I stream daily and be willing
to answer any questions you may have.

Lets get into it.

Graves can start blue and full clear or start red and full clear. Both are fine. It depends on the side of the map you want to be. Is your botlane ezreal yuumi and you know they won't have priority + you can't gank...while top is Riven vs GP? Start on the side your botlane is and path to the top laner who has the volatile snowball matchup.

In other words, you path clearing all the camps in the way towards the lane you want to end up at.

However, your path can be changed. Vs champs that can invade you, start red. Red is the premium combat buff early and not having your red vs someone who does feels really bad. It also helps you gank. In addition, you can start red specifically to invade enemy jungler - More on this later.

Make sure to go 2 points Q skipping your W level three if you are full clearing. This will allow you to finish your full clear before 3:30. Only go W lvl 3 for invades/early ganks.

That is about as deep as early game pathing gets I'll highlight some invades you can do on graves though.

Pathing has become quite one dimensional with full clear being the most optimal (most of the time) However, with the removal of 20% damage debuff on enemies camps, counterjungling is more meta than it was. Below I highlight an example.

E.G You see hecarim start blue lvl 1. And you start red getting a strong leash from your shen. Whilst the hecarim seems to have started solo (You see him on the early ward you placed). Due to the leash discrepancy, you are up tempo + hp. Since graves has an E, he can dash over the wall and invade hecarim on gromp (He knows hecarim loves to full clear). At the gromp Graves can kill the hecarim particularly if you have ignite.

The objective of invades in S14 particularly early on is to setback a jungler (full clear ones mostly) from getting a safe start for them to execute their full clear into gank strategy. Or if its a gank jungler, to prevent him from ganking.

Invades early on are not really about developimg massive farm leads particularly on graves who clears really slow until he has levels and items. In other words we wanna delay our invades until we have some items preferably.

In other words. Invading is niche but under right circumstances where you have a vulnerability you can exploit (due to superior leash/matchup/summoner spell advantage/lane priority) it is highly effective.

With the recent Crit Buffs that Graves has received could crit be good on him? How does it work? Well Graves previously had a multiplier of 20% bonus damage per pellet on crit (Formula I am not entirely sure on) which NOW scales upto 30% bonus damage per pellet on crit at level 18. So from 20-30 from level 1-18.
Graves also fires 6 pellets on a crit as opposed to 4, vastly increasing his damage although each subsequent pellet after the first one hits does between 23%-33%

With Buffs to Lord dominiks, Mortal Reminder and Infinity Edge..could crit be back?
I don't believe so and here is why.

Crit costs WAY too much relative to lethality. For example a Youmuu ghostblade gives 60 AD 18 lethality for 2700 whilst an Infinity Edge for 3300 gives 65 AD 250 crit strike and 50% crit damage. Now these are not bad stats, however unless you're critting you will not be doing more damage than the youmuu. Not to mention youmuu provides more movement. This also further stems from S14 changes to lethality transitioning from scaling flat pen to total flat penetration (18 lethality is now 18 flat pen)

In other words, full crit builds are still dead. However, as mentioned above Graves is a good crit user, so we can opt for 20-40% crit strike even 60% sometimes with items like lord dominiks being VERY strong on graves currently.

Also a sundered sky build could be meta but that item is still giga bugged lol (thanks riot)

So what is the lethality build now? I see people running collector or opportunity? What do I think is the build. I build neither, I opt straight for a youmuu. As a jungler such as graves with an incredibly slow clear and low mobility I need to take a youmuu to play the map. With its out of combat movement speed and active movement speed, I can gank easier, farm easier and fight better for only 2700 gold I get a good chunk of AD and lethality too.

Second item? I experimented a bit here...with the likes of hubris, profane and opportunity. These items are by no means bad. They do a lot of damage, however I was running into the same issue over and over. My champ is too squishy for the current meta, loss of resistances to Graves over many years, coupled with his E barely enough to negate lethality users and no magic resis rune option I realised that unless im snowballing a second lethality item makes me a sitting duck.
However. I will say, opportunity second when you are ahead is a great item it gives you that bit of movement and burst for 2700 that allows you to keep the pressure on the game and get some oneshots. I highly recommend it if you are very ahead to close out a game.

Queue Eclipse. Eclipse provides a substantial shield, and along with your fleet allows you to stay alive and acts as the extra armour and mr your E is missing allowing you to play in front of the enemies face a bit more. Sure the damage and shield is far lower than that for melees but proc is still 6 seconds for both
(reduced by cosmic too) for 2800 it provides 70 AD and 15 haste (we need the haste) and hence is really cost effective

Third item? Vs super tanky opponents take LDR/Mortal Reminder. If not I just take edge of night. Edge of night is also another strong defensive lethality item that is relatively cheap. 15 lethality is nothing to laugh at and with 50AD 250HP and a low CD shield that negates one spell it allows Graves to very easily go for oneshots or play upfront. With eclipse/edge of night/fleet/youmuu you do respectable damage, have some haste, have some HP, have 2 shields 33 lethality 180AD have some movement.
At this point your only real weakness is A) Tanks and B) Magic damage. Magic damage you can use your edge of night to deal with and tanks..you just build a mortal reminder/ldr 4th.

Along with your boots (mostly plated steelcaps and merc treads) you have 5 items now.
What do we build last? Plenty of options here really..need some MR? Maw. Want some lifesteal and crit? Bloodthirster...Want more lethality? Opportunity, Hubris, Profane and Axiom.
I personally think that this is his best build right now
Some people suggesting black cleaver third instead of edge, I don't like having only 25% penetration that I need to proc myself, S14 has a lot of armour and lethality + 25% isn't enough to deal with tanks, however 35% is.

That is all for this guide. I will be updating it and improving it as time goes on especially now that I am back. I will update it for upcoming patches as I know he will change a little. I will also add some more chapters and format it better so stay tuned for it. (Mechanics and late game section coming soon)

Other than that have fun, I love Graves and play it every season...and stay safe junglers we get a lot of slack XD

Like and comment! drop stuff you'd like me to add and make sure to tune into my stream, I will attempt to get Challenger as Graves OTP even if he is a D tier champ