So I started reading about which champions have the overall highest win ratios in lol. And along comes taric who was.. well.. way up there. So I start getting interested in this guy. From the very moment I wiki'd his stats I'm like... this guy is gonna be fun packing some at least some ad carry gear. So I started experimenting, then experimented more, and started winning... alot. Then felt confident enough to write a guide. So here it is.

So mastery wise you can definitely go more into the offense tree with something on the order of 24/6/0. I like the tank tree a bit better. His high starting health combined with the inherent toughness of the tanking tree encouraged me to then build more offensively. I now think the strong cooldown reduction of the tanking tree build also comes out ahead as well. You don't normally think of taric as a cooldown guy since everything except heal is gonna be in the 10 second range. But, taric typically lasts a long time in team fights. He is typically not targeted and has strong defenses in terms of armor and stun. So I found I was often getting the opportunity for a full second round of ability shots.

The hextech gives solid sustain with a much needed slow. This allows a long e,r,w,hextech, ignite combo that delivers solid single target killing power. The sustain allows you to lane strongly even with some unexpected laning partners. I haven't tried soloing much. It might go ok but I kinda doubt it. Sustain requires you to melee creeps and you really can't do it under heavy harassment. Yer fine against a non-ranged, but then you might not get that lucky. Taric does have solid farming and is in very many ways the blue version of sion. He is definitely a better team fighter than sion and one should actively seek to participate in every teamfight.

With the strong ad component of this build he does remarkably well paired with an ap nuker. By the end of the match this build typically delivers 60 percent physical and 40 percent magic damage. Really a pretty even split.

You might also say that going AD nerfs taric's support abilities. The answer is not really. I frankly think this is the way he was intended to be built. His ultimate's damage scales with attack power, but its damage/ap buff does not. Most importantly, his passive only regens mana based on auto-attack damage. So a traditionally mana starved taric now can repeatedly heal his teammates. Note too that I haven't completely neglected AP items and am still delivering 100 ap, plus a potential for 70 more with the ultimate.

The later build is really totally situational. Taric will have a lot of armor but little magic resistance late. If a caster is fed, getting a negatron cloak is probably a good idea. My basic tendency would be to build atmogs last in most situations tho. Likewise you can also build more tanky early as needed.

I haven't bothered, but this guide can pretty readily be adapted into a jungling build too given the obvious modifications. I rather strongly feel that taric is an absolutely excellent jungler in much the same way jarvan is. Lots of armor, good aoe, and strong survivability. He also has an absolutely superb ganking move in the 1.5 second stun which drops people absolutely dead if properly coordinated with your teammates.

I like the ignite flash combo for all the usual reason. Flash gives ridiculous utility for quick attacks and is your only escape. Ignite combines well with your hextech as a strong kill move plus offers an outstanding 5 damage and ap on cooldown. Just what you need.

I think he's moderately difficult to learn. With the cooldown reduction of heal based on auto-attacks its somewhat hard to get into an ability use rhythm. Plus you'll have to make some relatively quick decisions about where to click since both allies and enemies and movement is on the table. Your killshots also require you to use an activateable item. So enough about that, smartcasting is just critical.

I did spend some time pondering the usefulness of a rylai's to add some cc and make him more tanklike. I'm just not that sufficiently impressed with it. The radius of his aoe's really isn't that big and it just doesn't pack enough pop. The 500 health is certainly nice, but... the defensive tree balances that out quite a bit. That said, this taric build has enormous push factor. He very readily steps into the offtank role and can be a prime contributor to tower takedowns.

He does require good teamwork. I've built him with a lot of good solo powers but we all know this is a team game. And taric is the ultimate team player. You could certainly build him with aegis, but I think its better for the main tank to build it. That 1.5 second stun is really powerful, and really long. I've seen level 1 kills happen almost within the space of it with three auto-attacks and three ignites hitting. DONE. I guess you could also say that you're trying to do too much with this build by satisfying every possible weakness, but frankly the stats speak for themselves. Taric = wins.

ps. allright i just added in the complete build. frankly i've never built the whole thing since most games don't get past the trinity. but thats what i'd build for an epic. one thing i like about the hextech/trinity combo is that they are extremely expensive, allowing you to stack a bunch of doran's items if you are falling back. doran's are just superb for taric and frankly you can mix and match as you please. its probably not good to buy more than two of them since you end up selling the third one pretty quickly. but there it is.