Tristana Build Guide by Vapora Dark

Hi, I'm Vapora Dark, a veteran player that's been playing since season 1. During that time I've hit Master tier as a mid lane main in season 5, as an ADC main in season 7, again as a jungle main in season 8, and once more in season 9 playing a mix of all those roles including ADC. I can play every role to a very high level and have a very good understanding of the general aspects of the game on top of that.

I've been writing guides on MOBAFire since 2011, among which my achievements include winning the MOBAFire guide contest multiple times, achieving the highest score on the site multiple times with multiple guides, achieving the most comments on a single guide of all time by a very large amount which hasn't come even close to being surpassed in the 3 years that it's been archived, and having the most collective guide views on the site by a very hefty amount. I've also written some champion guides for Riot Games on the Lolesports site.

In this guide I will go very in-depth into gameplay and teaching you exactly what you need to do, so that this guide is the only resource you will ever need to go to to learn about Tristana.

They say in regards to ADC that once you learn to play one ADC, you can play them all. It's not too far off from the truth. Almost all marksmen share the same basic mechanics. Because of this, I've made this my most in-depth guide by far, as rather than just teaching you Tristana, I'll be teaching you an entire role.

VIDEOS

In this chapter I'm going to be gathering a compilation of Tristana footage ranging from full gameplays, VOD reviews of myself and more famous players, as well as short plays, to help you learn the champion even better if you're willing to put in the time to watch some extra content on top of the actual guide itself, as well as give you an idea of what the champion can achieve in the hands of a good player. Click here to sub for more educational content.

Tristana's main weakness is her weak early-game where she can get bullied and set behind when matched against stronger early-game champions such as Caitlyn, Jhin or Lucian. However, Tristana's mid-game is very strong and her late-game is definitely among the strongest of any AD carry. Rapid Fire can give her extremely high DPS for a limited duration, she gets a lot of burst with Explosive Charge and Buster Shot, and she's an extremely safe champion with her extremely high range and resettable long distance dash, Rocket Jump. I think these factors more than make up for her early-game weakness, which is in itself not too weak. She has some good matchups, especially at level 6 which is a huge power spike for her while not always such a big power spike for other ADC's. And above all, the biggest reason to play Tristana is she's so damn fun. Getting resets on her W is such a fun mechanic to have on an ADC. Whether she's average or strong, suited to the meta or not, she'll always be one of the most fun ADCs in the game, which explain why she's been so popular for so long.

Electrocute

Hail of Blades: This is the best keystone on Tristana right now. It doesn't do more damage than Press the Attack but it does help guarantee a full stack Explosive Charge and a reset on Rocket Jump, usually outweighing the overall higher damage of Press the Attack.

Sudden Impact

Sudden Impact: Since most of your Explosive Charge explosions will be executed after a Rocket Jump, this rune can greatly increase your burst. Additionally it gives magic pen as well as lethality so it'll increase the damage of Rocket Jump and Buster Shot.

Eyeball Collection

Eyeball Collection: As a bot laner you're likely to pick up a lot of takedowns, so you'll stack this rune up a lot faster than any of its counterparts.

Ravenous Hunter

Ravenous Hunter: Though you don't have any abilities that greatly benefit from the healing passive, there are no outstanding options here for Tristana. Most opt for Ravenous Hunter, but Relentless Hunter is also worth considering.

Precision Triumph Legend: Bloodline

Triumph: This can be a life saver in close fights, and the 20g per takedown actually adds up to quite a bit in bloody games. Especially good on Tristana since her playstyle encourages her to get into the thick of the action and her survival is often on very slim margins. Triumph ensures your aggressive plays aren't costing you your life any more than necessary. Legend: Bloodline: Tristana buys attack speed early and has a very powerful attack speed steroid, but she also doesn't buy lifesteal until her 5th item very often. This makes the 12% lifesteal more valuable to her throughout the game than the 18% attack speed.

Flash and Heal has been the standard ADC summoner spell combination since possibly mid-season 3. In fact, Flash has been the standard summoner spell to take on almost every single champion since forever. It's always been indisputably the best summoner spell in the game, so there's nothing you can replace it with, especially on a champion like Tristana.

Heal on the other hand, replaced Barrier when it got buffed in season 3 to give movement speed on the cast, which is the reason it's been standard over Barrier ever since, despite being affected by Ignite's Grievous Wounds. Aside from the small movement speed boost, which can be used both offensively and defensively, another reason why it's stronger than Barrier is it affects an ally, which is perfect for bot lane where you're laning with a support.

The reason you want a defensive summoner on ADC is that you have a lot of DPS, so the longer you can survive, the more damage you'll put out, usually out-damaging what you'd get from Ignite. And if it can go as far as to save your life, then that's even better, as ADC's are very important to have alive for both providing DPS and taking down towers, especially in Tristana's case given her tower shredding capabilities with Explosive Charge.

		Ability Description
	Draw a Bead	The range of Tristana's basic attacks, Explosive Charge and Buster Shot is increased by 0 - 139 (based on level) for a total of 525 - 661 (based on level) range.

This passive is possibly my favourite passive in the entire game. It's been nerfed since I first started playing Tristana in season 2, but it still gives you a huge amount of range, and the only champions that out-range you at level 18 are Kog'Maw with Bio-Arcane Barrage activated, Jinx with rank 4 or 5 Switcheroo! and Twitch with Spray and Pray activated. These spells only grant temporary range buffs (or in Jinx's case, she'll only have that range some of the time at least), so Tristana is the highest permanent range champion in the game once Draw a Bead takes her above 650 range at level 16, at which point she begins to out-range Caitlyn.

		Ability Description
	Rapid Fire	Tristana gains 50 / 65 / 80 / 95 / 110% bonus attack speed for 7 seconds.

With this spell activated, Tristana is one of the highest DPS champions in the game. Unfortunately the down-time on it is very high (11 seconds at max rank), so you need to make sure to make the most of it while it's activated. The most obvious way to do this would be to use it right after Explosive Charge to help you try and get as many stacks as possible onto your target. You don't want to waste it if you're in a position where it's not safe for you to auto-attack much.

		Ability Description
	Rocket Jump	Tristana dashes to the target location, dealing 85 / 135 / 185 / 235 / 285 (+ 50% AP) magic damage to all nearby enemies on impact and briefly slowing them by 60% for 1 / 1.5 / 2 / 2.5 / 3 seconds. Whenever Tristana takes down an enemy champion or detonates Explosive Charge at maximum stacks on an enemy champion, Rocket Jump's cooldown is reset.

Along with Draw a Bead, this is the main defining spell that separates Tristana from all the other ADC's, both pre- and post-rework. Tristana is all about being that high range ADC that dashes all over the place getting resets.

Rocket Jump is a little different from most other dashes in the sense that it's got a little bit of a cast animation before she dashes, but while the actual dash can be interrupted, the cast animation can't be. So for example, if you get knocked up during the brief cast animation, you'll be briefly knocked up but then your cast finishes, and your jump overrides the knockup. Whereas if you finish your cast animation, then jump, then get knocked up while in the air, the knockup will cancel your jump and you'll stay in place.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing, since while it means it can easily override a lot of CC's, it also makes it very easy for champions with displacements to simply hold their CC for your jump and immediately cancel it.

However, all in all I think it's one of the best mobility spells in the game, due its long range and the amazing things you can do by overriding CC with it.

Also, just a quick note, you can't auto-attack during Rocket Jump, but you can cast abilities, so Explosive Charge and Buster Shot. This means that when you Rocket Jump on top of an enemy you can place Explosive Charge mid-air and immediately get one charge as soon as you land. Or you can Buster Shot a low HP enemy mid-air to ensure they die before getting a chance to trade much damage back onto you.

		Ability Description
	Explosive Charge	PASSIVE: Enemies explode when slain by Tristana's basic attacks, dealing 55 / 80 / 105 / 130 / 155 (+ 25% AP) magic damage to all nearby enemies. ACTIVE: Tristana places an Explosive Charge on the target enemy or enemy turret. After 4 seconds the charge explodes, dealing 60 / 70 / 80 / 90 / 100 (+ 50 / 65 / 80 / 95 / 110% bonus AD) (+ 50% AP) physical damage to nearby enemies. The explosion radius is doubled when used on a turret. Tristana's basic attacks and abilities against the target increase Explosive Charge's damage by 30%, stacking up to 4 times for a maximum 120% increase, upon which the charge also detonates instantly.

This is Tristana's main trading spell in lane, which you'll be maxing first. It scales above-averagely with levels at max stacks, and has a huge AD ratio at level 9. As a result it deals huge burst, especially if you explode it with Buster Shot or a critical hit. With a few items, you can burst down any squishy carry if you can hit them with full stacks.

Unfortunately it scales really badly on low stacks, which is mostly what you'll be doing in lane. The cast time and time it takes you to stack it is what makes Tristana's laning phase so weak in comparison to quicker-trading champions such as Lucian and Miss Fortune. However, she's pretty decent in full-blown all-ins, as you'll easily get max stacks if you're not forced to switch targets, and the burst, especially combined with Buster Shot, means it's really risky to start a fight on a full HP Tristana post-6.

Its other use, besides damage on champions, is damage on towers. It makes Tristana the best tower killing ADC in the game besides Jinx, who's a riskier, less mobile alternative.

		Ability Description
	Buster Shot	Tristana fires a massive cannonball at the target enemy, dealing them 300 / 400 / 500 (+ 100% AP) magic damage and knocking back the target and all enemies around them by 600 / 800 / 1000 units.

A very useful ultimate with many uses. The basic ways to use it are either for burst, or using the knockback as self-peel. More offensively you could use it to shoot an enemy closer to your team or away from where they're trying to run.







Having given you a short rundown on how Tristana's abilities all work, I'll now go in-depth into explaining some of the more obscure aspects of her kit that can be used to win games.




The most obvious and useful mechanic for this spell is the ability to "cancel" displacements and outplay CC. As mentioned earlier, Rocket Jump has a small cast animation before it goes through with the jump/dash animation, but successfully completing your cast animation isn't required to proceed to the jump animation. Meaning if you get CC'd or displaced in any way while in the middle of your cast animation, you'll still jump anyway, and in the case of displacements, it'll undo the displacement. To use the example from earlier: Blitzcrank casts Rocket Grab towards you, you know it's going to hit so you use W. You enter your W animation, Blitzcrank pulls you out of it and you start flying towards him. But then you enter your jump animation, and this "cancels" the hook, AKA you stop flying towards Blitz and instead jump all the way to your target location. And thus you completely avoid Rocket Grab despite having been hit by it.

Now to use other examples where this is useful, imagine you're playing against a team composed of Malphite, Gragas, Fizz, Ashe and Leona. Here are examples of how you can use Rocket Jump to outplay some of their CC.

This one actually takes pretty good reflexes, it's one of the hardest to pull off because of how fast Unstoppable Force's animation is, but it's definitely doable and very rewarding if you succeed. The moment you see him using Unstoppable Force, you Rocket Jump backwards. He'll slam into you and knock you up, and to that you say "To hell with your knockups!", and simply Rocket Jump to safety like you didn't just get hit by one of the most deadly anti-ADC ultimates in the game. It's sometimes less than ideal since Unstoppable Force does a boatload of damage (and definitely don't do this against a full AP Malphite because you'd get 1-shot), especially if Malphite hits you with Ground Slam and/or Seismic Shard either while knocked up or while jumping away, but if there are no other troublesome threats to you on the enemy team besides Malphite, you can feel free to just bait Unstoppable Force all you want (if you have good enough reflexes) and then when he's wasted his engage, just lifesteal the damage back up. If you're confident in your ability to cancel the knockup and the damage taken won't be an issue for you, it can be very beneficial to frequently "misposition" near Malphite and bait him to engage on you to try and pick you off, as you'll slip away almost unharmed, and just like that Malphite's ultimate is down and the threat of a 2-3 man Unstoppable Force is off the table, and if your team is in position to fight, it's one of the best opportunities they'll get since the enemy initiator just wasted their engage. Though be warned, Malphite can just as easily turn this bait around on you; rather than using Unstoppable Force from far away and giving you time to react to it, if he's smart Malphite will Flash and use Unstoppable Force from almost melee range, giving you almost no time to react at all. Mind you I've only ever had this done to me I think twice in my entire time playing Tristana, and I think you're very unlikely to ever see it done below ~Diamond 3. But be aware that it's a possibility, and it can really f**k you over if you were relying on being able to react to a 0.5 second ult animation; reacting to a ~0.2 second ult animation is a whole other beast, especially if you're not expecting it.

Now this guy's pretty easy. He has 2 different displacents you can cancel, Body Slam and Explosive Cask. If he tries to Body Slam you, just cast W as soon as you see it, your jump animation will start once you've already been knocked up and stunned. However, beware that Gragas has a cool mechanic of his own in Body Slam; if he flashes mid-cast, any targets on the spot he Flashed on will be hit by Body Slam, basically allowing him to extend the spell's range by Flash's range. If he casts Body Slam towards you even though he's clearly out of range, he's going to be aiming to extend the range with Flash, so use Rocket Jump anyway. You can also outplay Explosive Cask. You may or may not find it a little hard at first since the animation can be easily confused with Barrel Roll's animation, but if you have no trouble differentiating them then it should be pretty easy to react to since it's quite a telegraphed spell. When he casts it, just use Rocket Jump just before it hits the ground and you'll cancel the knockback and jump to safety; another great engage tool blown on nothing. There is again room for Gragas to outplay you though. For example, if he's ganking you and you need to use Rocket Jump to get away even though he's not cast Body Slam yet, as soon as you finish your cast animation and enter your jump animation, he can Body Slam you (and can do it from quite far away if he extends the range with Flash) to cancel the jump. If you find yourself in this situation, needing to dash away while there's a Gragas with Body Slam available very near you, then you should not risk using Rocket Jump before his Body Slam unless you have no other options. If you have Flash, use that instead. If you don't, use Buster Shot to knock him back to a safe distance before using Rocket Jump to get away. If neither Flash nor Buster Shot are available and you really need to Rocket Jump away or you'll die, then just go through with it and pray that Gragas messes up the cancel/is too dumb to try to cancel it to begin with. Aside from that, if he manages to get in R range of you without having to use Body Slam, he can bait your Rocket Jump with Explosive Cask, then once you cancel his Explosive Cask knockback and begin your jump, he can cancel that by hitting you with Body Slam; which is not as disastrous as being knocked back by Explosive Cask, but still definitely something you'd wish to avoid if you're in a situation where Gragas will go to such lengths to land a bloody CC on you. It's also possible for him to bait your Rocket Jump with Body Slam and then cancel your jump with Explosive Cask, but this one's a lot harder for him to pull off since the timing needs to be just right. Use Explosive Cask too early and it gets cancelled along with Body Slam, use it too late and it'll only end up knocking you sideways or even backwards (the direction you were trying to dash to anyway). The two latter methods for a Gragas to outplay your Rocket Jump are pretty advanced and if you're low Elo I think you're probably unlikely to see them. Even in my Elo they're pretty rare since both Gragas and Tristana have been unpopular for a long time and not everyone is familiar with their interactions and counterplay to each other. It's more the kind of thing you'd see experienced Challenger players do, but you never know when you'll run into some random gold Gragas that saw a Challenger player do exactly that and think to emulate them.

Chum the Waters has to probably be the easiest spell in the game to outplay with Rocket Jump, though the drawback is that the effectiveness of outplaying it isn't as great as some of the others. If you get hit by Chum the Waters, there'll be a delay of 1.5 seconds then the shark knocks you up and slows you. I said it's the easiest to outplay because that delay gives you a lot of time to react to it, just use Rocket Jump right before the shark attacks and boom, outplayed. But the reason I said the effectiveness of outplaying it isn't as great as some of the other examples is this: during the 1.5 second delay you're going to be slowed and this will allow Fizz or whoever's with him to walk up to you and deal damage to you. Then with Rocket Jump you'll bypass the knockup and most of the remaining slow duration, but by then you'll have probably already taken quite a bit of damage, and then you take Chum the Waters' damage on top of that; even though you can avoid the worst of the CC, you're still in for a world of hurt. Sometimes it's best to not even cancel the knockup, but rather use Rocket Jump as soon as you get hit (if you do it too late the knockup will cancel part of your jump), so you can bypass the initial 1.5 second slow by being mid-air for the duration. Then when you land you'll still get knocked up, take damage and suffer through the second half of the slow, but it at least means that you'll have immediately put some distance between you and Fizz, whereas going for the knockup cancel usually requires letting him catch up to you during the first half of the slow and bursting you some. This is especially useful if you can Rocket Jump under tower, since it would force Fizz to dive you with full HP (minus the damage you take from Chum the Waters) if he wants to kill you, which often puts him off. Even if it doesn't, he'll probably have to use Playful / Trickster to catch up and once that's on cooldown you can safely Buster Shot him away without risking him dodging it and making you waste the cooldown. IMO, this is the rule you should follow when determining whether to Rocket Jump before the knockup or whether to cancel the knockup: If Fizz/anyone else is near enough to damage you during the initial 1.5 second slow, Rocket Jump before the knockup to bypass that slow and avoid Fizz immediately closing the gap and bursting you. If Fizz or anyone else are too far away to be an immediate threat to you during the 1.5 second slow, put up with the slow then cancel the knockup, since that option is the one that overall inhibits your movement the least and immediately putting some distance between you won't be necessary.

Enchanted Crystal Arrow can sometimes be hard to react to but it's not the hardest. Now this one's a little different from the other spells I've mentioned so far in that it's not a displacement, but it's another example of how you can use Rocket Jump's mechanics to your advantage. Let's say you're laning against Ashe and Leona, and suddenly Ashe casts a perfectly on point Enchanted Crystal Arrow towards you. You don't have enough time to move out of the way so unless you Flash (which may not be up or you might not want to use), it's 100% going to hit you and stun you. So what do you do? Well as this entire segment gives away, yes, you use Rocket Jump. Backwards, unless you have a better idea. "But Vapora, your jump is so slow that it's still going to hit you". Why yes, but the jump being so slow is actually what makes it so good for that situation, because what Rocket Jump lacks in speed, it makes up for in distance, and it's a great tradeoff for this particular situation. Because Enchanted Crystal Arrow's stun duration increases the more distance it travels, for a duration between 1 and 3 seconds. I'm not sure exactly how long the stun would be for hitting someone right in front of you in the lane, but let's say it's 1.5 seconds (probably generous); a full distance Rocket Jump takes about ~1.25 seconds to complete, so by jumping backwards right before the arrow hits you, you're spending almost the entire stun duration casting Rocket Jump, which is almost like you were never stunned at all. And for when you're getting hit by longer duration Enchanted Crystal Arrows, you may not bypass the entire stun, but you'll bypass a good chunk of it, ofentimes making the arrow a waste of a cooldown despite it hitting its mark.

Fairly easy champion for you to outplay her CC again. If you get hit by Zenith Blade, or you can tell you're going to, before it snares you and begins dragging her towards you you can cast Rocket Jump to enter your cast animation. Most dashes after being hit by Zenith Blade would drag Leona to your dash's destination with you so you can't use it to get away from her if she's hit you, but with Rocket Jump, by timing it correctly (only casting it when she's already cast Zenith Blade) she'll be dragged towards you when you're in your cast animation, and then whether still snared or stunned by her Shield of Daybreak you'll Rocket Jump away to safety. Outplaying Solar Flare is pretty obvious, whenever you see it cast on you you just immediately Rocket Jump and you'll bypass almost the entire stun. The only way Leona can outplay you in regards to Rocket Jump CC cancel is if you use Rocket Jump to outplay Zenith Blade and then she immediately follows up with Solar Flare on your destination. If you have no Flash then there's not much you can do about it since you can't really dodge while you're ending/just ended your jump animation, but at the very least you're likely to be pretty far away from her ADC/team, which is a better position to be in than most ADC's would be when caught out by Leona.

Something to note is that this mechanic isn't effective against Nautilus's Dredge Line. Although you might think the same situation as with Rocket Grab should apply, Dredge Line actually works a little differently, which affects Rocket Jump in a big way. Rocket Grab interrupts your cast animation by pulling you towards Blitzcrank, but the pull itself is then interrupted by your actual jump.

But Dredge Line isn't just a pull; it pulls you towards him and him towards you, and then it does a mini knock up; this mini knockup would occur at some point during your actual jump, rather than your cast animation, and therefore the chain of events that would transpire would be something like this: Nautilus casts Dredge Line -> you begin your cast animation -> he hits you and pulls you towards him -> you cancel the pull with Rocket Jump -> he cancels Rocket Jump with his mini knockup. End result: you get hit and pulled in by his Dredge Line and your Rocket Jump gets put on cooldown, completely wasted.

That's one really specific, and very annoying interaction with Rocket Jump which I figured I'd inform you of before you found out yourself the hard way.

The following are the only other annoying interactions I know of.

Frozen Tomb: This is the one spell in the game that actually prevents your jump even if she casts it during your cast animation.

Death Sentence: Similarly to Dredge Line, Death Sentence is 2 displacements in one, as when you're hit by it Thresh pulls you back twice. You can override the first pull, but the second one would cancel your Rocket Jump. You end up slightly further away from Thresh than if you were to not use Rocket Jump, but it's not worth it when there's always the chance you could use the full distance jump to get away later.

Assault and Battery: Again, 2 displacements in one, a knockup followed by a knockdown. If she used Vault Breaker to get to you then you should just wait until after Assault and Battery hits you before Rocket Jumping away, but if her Vault Breaker is up then she could use it to cancel your Rocket Jump if she's smart, so it's safest to Flash away.





Explosive Charge's cast has 2 phases: The actual cast time, and a wind-down phase where she jumps up into the air and drops back down, which you can observe here. Lots of champions have a similar wind-down phase on some of their spells, such as Ardent Blaze, Piercing Light and Siphon Power, among others. This isn't very well known, but this wind-down phase is useless (the spell has already been cast when you enter it), and actually very easy to get rid of.

All you have to do is auto-attack as soon as your cast time ends (which can be seen through the bar that pops up for a split second when you cast it), as you'll have entered the wind-down phase. Auto-attack commands entered before the wind-down phase will be queued to go through after it ends, which is what you saw earlier when Tristana jumped up into the air before auto-attacking the turret. But auto-attack commands entered during the wind-down phase will cancel it completely, meaning it'll either interrupt her jump animation, or if you do it fast enough, cancel it before she even has time to jump.

Here's a clip of it in action:



Comparing it to the Tristana from earlier you can see that while the first Tristana hops up into the air after/while using E, my Tristana just stands in place. Why is this useful? Because by getting rid of that useless animation you can begin auto-attacking sooner, meaning you can more easily and quickly do Explosive Charge-AA trades, and can more easily hit 4 stacks on someone while having low attack speed, or limited time to auto-attack (stunned for some of it for example).

And here's a fun fact: Shortly after her rework in season 5, Tristana received a buff to her Explosive Charge that made the animation scale with attack speed, so it's long animation wouldn't be cutting into your DPS once you have some items. But this buff doesn't actually affect her cast time (it's already something like 0.2 seconds), all it does is speed up her wind-down phase. But, as I just explained, this animation can be cancelled outright, meaning if you animation cancel Explosive Charge quickly enough, from as early as level 1 you can basically make its animation as quick as if you were level 18 with 2.5 attack speed. Which is not broken by any means, since it basically just makes you able to auto-attack like ~0.5 seconds sooner. But at the same time it can be the difference between landing or not landing an extra auto-attack, which especially since it grants you an Explosive Charge stack, is pretty impactful during trades in the early-game.

The best way to do this animation cancel IMO is to just spam right click during Explosive Charge's cast time until your auto-attack goes through. Theoretically you could try just learn the exact timing necessary and just right click once, but you're never going to be good enough to get it precisely perfect every single time and may even sometimes auto-attack too early and end up not cancelling the animation until pretty late. Additionally, since this mechanic exists on so many different spells within the game that all have different timings, the single most effective way to universally master it on every champion is to just spam right click and get better at spamming it fast enough that you'll auto-attack at the perfect split-second to cancel the animation as soon as possible.

Also, if you enter a movement command at any point after clicking Explosive Charge, Tristana will automatically begin moving the second her cast time finishes, not even entering her wind down animation. But this is less useful since you usually don't want to be moving right after casting Explosive Charge.





This one's pretty niche. Basically you just cast Rocket Jump but Flash during the cast animation, so that just before jumping you Flash to a new position to jump from. It essentially accomplishes the same thing as Flashing then casting Rocket Jump, but wasting slightly less time since you're starting your Rocket Jump animation.

Its main use though, at least for me, is to catch out an enemy in a 1v1 situation where they're trying to keep their distance from you. Using Flash and Rocket Jump together you can close a lot of distance, and by using Flash mid-W cast it gives them a lot less time to react to it and back off in time, or even to use their own Flash to get away before your slow lands.

Bear in mind though that it has to be used during Rocket Jump's cast animation, not the actual jump, or your Flash will just cancel your jump and you'll end up looking like an idiot.





Another niche one!

Okay there actually is a reason why you might want to cancel your jump with Flash. You're still gonna look like an idiot doing it, but the enemy will be laughing from their grave, so who's the real winner?

Very rarely, you may find yourself in the complicated situation where both you and a ranged enemy are both 1 auto-attack away from death, but out of each other's range, even if you were to use Flash. And you know you out-range them so you could auto-attack them before they can auto-attack you, but they know this too, so they're smart enough to not bother trying and just run from you. You really want the kill and Rocket Jump would bring you in range of them, but if you greed for that they'll just auto-attack you mid-air and you'll die, since Rocket Jump locks you out of auto-attacking and your ultimate is down.

So both of you figure, it's a stalemate. If neither of you are going to greed for the kill and die, then there's nothing more to do there except walk away.

If you chose to walk away, then props to you for not being greedy, but there's actually a way to take the kill relatively safely. You use Rocket Jump towards them to close just part of the distance, then cancel it and cover the rest of the distance with Flash and immediately right click the enemy the second you're in range, which will be unexpectedly quick from the enemy's perspective. Therefore you get the first auto-attack off (if they even auto-attack/attack you at all), get the kill, and hopefully survive thanks to lifesteal + Triumph.

That's actually a situation I've found myself in a few times and managed to get a kill out of thanks to this mechanic. Aside from that it's also just useful in general whenever you want to use Rocket Jump to close a gap but need to be able to auto-attack as soon as possible. Maybe you want to chase down a low HP Syndra but you know she's going to stun you with Scatter the Weak and 1-shot you if you try to jump on her. That's when you jump on her anyway, bait out the E, then Flash diagonally to dodge it and cancel your jump, and auto-attack her for the kill.

You really do look like an idiot every time you Flash and cancel your own jump, but it can be worth it!





When an enemy walks up to one of your minions to last-hit it, you usually want to take this opportunity to poke them with an auto-attack. However occasionally you'll find yourself in a situation where both you and your enemy want to last-hit a minion at the same time, and he'll walk right next to the minion you want to last-hit.

In this situation it's best not to auto-attack him since your Explosive Charge passive will harass him instead, sometimes dealing even more damage than your auto-attack would depending on what level you are and how much AD you have.

However you can take this "indirect harass" technique to the next level, and even cast your actual Explosive Charge on the minion you want to last-hit and then immediately auto-attack it to kill it. If the enemy ADC is positioned next to it as they should be, the moment the minion dies they'll take splash damage from both your E's active and passive, which at level 5 for example is a guaranteed base damage of 204, though in reality it'll deal slightly more when you factor in the AD ratio and however much AD you have at that point in time.

Whenever you notice an opportunity to harass an enemy this way rather than harassing them with an auto-attack, you should take it. It usually deals more damage (varies depending on items and level), but most importantly, you don't draw minion aggro from doing it, so if they try to poke you with an auto-attack and you poke them with this, they will take some minion retaliation while you will take 0 and can just back off to end the trade before drawing any minion aggro to yourself.

However you do need to be very careful that when you do this, you're sure the explosion is actually going to hit your enemy, because Tristana has a very limited mana pool and you can't afford to constantly try and hit your enemy with long-shot minion Explosive Charges and miss a great deal of them. You just take the opportunities that look free as hell.





Buster Shot's main use in duels is just for burst, but another important aspect is that during the knockback, once you have an attack speed item you can easily weave in an extra auto-attack during Buster Shot's knockback, during which time the enemy can't retaliate as the knockback is CC'ing them. Of course usually they'll be knocked out of your range so it's only good for one free auto-attack, but one free auto-attack coupled with Buster Shot's damage frequently makes all the difference.

Using Buster Shot for CC in duels is also most effective when you can knock them back into a nearby wall. It's not Condemn so it won't actually stun them, but even after they hit the wall and therefore stop moving, they'll still be in the "knockback" CC state until the time required to cover the distance they're meant to cover, which goes up with each level in Buster Shot. Effectively, you'll be stunning them, since they'll only briefly be getting knocked back until they hit the wall right behind them and they'll spend the rest of the short duration unable to neither move nor fight.

This "stun" duration goes up with each level in Buster Shot, and while it's not a long CC by any means, depending on what level you are and what your attack speed is, you could fit as many as 3 free auto-attacks in the duration. At the very least, it's a way to get a free auto-attack off during a fight in a way that won't knock them safely out of your range afterwards, so you don't have to be 100% sure that the final auto will kill them.





I may not be a Talon main anymore, but old habits die hard! Tristana's combo can do a lot of burst, so if an enemy squishy makes the mistake of getting too close to you while you're ahead (or even/behind but stronger anyway) and you're sure you're safe, you should aim to punish them for it, or you're simply playing too passively.

The main combo for assassinating enemies on Tristana is Rocket Jump followed by mid-air Explosive Charge. Next you do 2 auto-attacks if your Rocket Jump landed on them to grant you an Explosive Charge... charge, and 3 auto-attacks if you didn't manage to land on them. Once you have 3 charges, you use Buster Shot and one final auto-attack during the knockback. This final part of the combo does massive burst as it deals damage from Buster Shot and a fully charged Explosive Charge both at once, as well as an extra auto-attack thrown in for precaution. The beauty of this is that enemies frequently have no idea of just how much damage you're going to do in these last few clicks, so someone might be fighting back and thinking they have a chance of beating you, but then be dead 0.5 seconds later while you're still at 60% HP.

Even enemies that don't try to fight back will still have an incredibly hard time trying to get away from you if you land Rocket Jump on them for the slow (brush cheese ftw), and even without the slow, if you're close enough it's usually enough to just chase them down for 3 auto-attacks before executing with Buster Shot. Additionally, in the offchance that they survive your full combo, you should have a Rocket Jump reset to finish them off with.

Champions like Ezreal are the hardest to catch out this way since they can most easily escape you in these 1v1 situations, but someone like Jhin is extremely vulnerable as he has no mobility. Additionally Jhin is by far the stronger 2v2 champion in lane so will frequently win lane and be somewhat ahead of you. This leads many Jhin's to not realize the danger of being momentarily alone in a lane with you. With his support you're limited by the enemy support's CC and Exhaust so you can't usually safely all-in him even in a 2v2 because the enemy support will reduce your burst, but in a 1v1 scenario your burst makes you far stronger than him, and so unless you're really behind, if you can manage to jump on him then there's nothing he can do short of trying to Flash and run away, since he can't out-burst you.

Just make sure you don't get too bloodthirsty and try to 1v1 everyone you find only to die when their team shows up to save them. That's when you're not playing passive enough. Go for the 1v1 assassinations when your enemy is making a mistake by being able to be killed by you, but don't try and force it so hard that you're the one making the mistake by going in.





Finally the last trick I'm going to talk about, another fairly niche one. If you place Explosive Charge on someone and auto-attack them for 3 charges, by using Rocket Jump and then Buster Shot in mid-air, you'll be able to reset your Rocket Jump while using it, and then be able to use a second Rocket Jump.

As you can imagine it's not very often that you would want to use this since it can seem quite overkill to need to use 2 dashes on top of ulting an enemy away, but sometimes when you're being chased by multiple enemies, it can be useful to dash as far away as you can, and therefore 2 dashes are better than one. You would want to use Buster Shot to knock someone back anyway, so if you can afford to use Explosive Charge and stack 3 charges before making your getaway, it should help your chances by quite a bit.








This chapter is currently under reconstruction following the Season 11 items rework, apologies for the inconvenience.

Bot Lane Matchups

Bot lane matchups are a very complex subject. On solo lanes or jungle matchups it's easy to say that one champion beats or counters another, or that a matchup is even and can be considered a skill matchup. Bot lane is unique in being a 2v2 lane and to top it off the supports are often even more impactful than the ADCs, so you have to factor the support into the matchup just as much if not more than the ADC, and also the strengths and weaknesses of each support relative to the strength and weaknesses of their partner as well as their two opponents. There's such a ridiculous amount of possible combinations you can run into (minimum 560 counting only common picks) that it's simply impossible to explain the dynamics of how every single matchup should play out, nor can I rate the difficulty of each ADC or support matchup individually because depending on the supports, your pick can either win lane against every ADC/support or lose lane against every ADC/support. So I'm going to dedicate this chapter to giving a small rundown of what you need to know about laning against each champion, both the ADCs and the supports, and a rating of what their general strength in lane is, which is not necessarily a rating of how difficult your lane will be if you're playing against them in solo queue as it varies depending on who their lane partner is and also who their opponents are, for example champions like Nami can be either big lane bullies against champions like Janna or just passive laners who are otherwise free kills for champions like Thresh; but both matchups also massively depend on their partner and the opponent's partner. Deep understanding of each champion on an individual level coupled with first-hand experience in witnessing how many different duos perform with each other will lead to a greater understanding of how any given bot lane matchup is likely to go, and with the following brief analyses of each bot lane champion I hope to give you as much of a head start in this area as I reasonably can.

			Ashe Threat: LOW
			Ashe has very easy to land long range AoE poke, but it's not particularly strong and on a very high cooldown, resulting in low waveclear, weak trades and weak all-ins. However she's one of the highest auto-attack range ADCs and can easily poke with her auto-attacks, meaning if your bot lane duo is one that can't pressure her and scare her off of trading, she can end up bullying you pretty hard in said matchups despite being an overall weak laning champion.

			Caitlyn Threat: MEDIUM
			For a long time regarded as the queen of laning phase, Caitlyn's had a lot of power taken out of her laning phase and given to her mid-late game, and playerbase perception hasn't yet to catch up with the times. She's still a massive lane bully and will win almost any lane that comes down to trading and waveclear, but she's very weak in all-ins and will get crushed in fights by any bot lane that can engage on her. Because of how extreme her strengths and weaknesses are her threat level really varies between high to low, so I chose medium as a compromise, but beware of how utterly dominant she can be in lane if you don't have a good matchup against her.

			Draven Threat: HIGH
			Draven is the absolute king of laning phase in today's League, far beyond what Caitlyn ever was at her peak. He is simultaneously the strongest ADC in short trades, long trades, and second best in all-ins. Never has a champion quote ever been more true than "Draven does it all". However, even Draven is not quite without weakness. He's short-ranged and has no escapes so he's very vulnerable to being engaged on. Unfortunately he's so strong in all-ins that if you engage on him there's a good chance he'll just turn it into a double kill, but as with all bot laners, a duo with strong enough all-ins while Draven has a support poorly suited to deal with them is all it takes to overcome the king of laning phase. Additionally, because of his short range and poor waveclear he can be easily handled by champions who can pressure him from outside his range like Caitlyn on the ADCs' side or Zyra on the supports' side, on the condition that he's not paired with a support that has the ability to easily engage on and lock down these long range champions for Draven to reach and kill, such as what Thresh or Nautilus would bring to the table.

			Ezreal Threat: LOW
			Ezreal is a champion that is primarily picked for safety, he is very hard to kill in lane and his long range low cooldown Mystic Shot allows him to easily keep up in CS from a range in situations where other ADCs wouldn't be able to farm. In exchange for being so hard to snowball against, he's also made to lack the tools to snowball himself. He has weak waveclear, unnoteworthy all-in power, and would be decent at trading if not for the fact that he can't poke through minions. He will never create a winning matchup solely on his own merits. However, bot lane being as complicated as it is, if his duo as a whole is one that is either stronger in all-ins or stronger at trading and he is able to pressure the lane rather than play defensively, Mystic Shot becomes an excellent poke tool and he can exert a lot of pressure with his range, similarly to Ashe but stronger.

			Jhin Threat: MEDIUM
			Jhin's fourth shot hits like a truck, giving him very strong zoning potential and damage when trading with it, which combined with his decent waveclear makes him a strong lane bully in most matchups. He's okay in all-ins when following up his support's engage to finish someone off, but his damage is not great in extended fights and he is himself highly vulnerable to being engaged on and burst down.

			Jinx Threat: LOW
			Jinx comes online for teamfights very early into the game but has a miserable laning phase. She's weak at trading, weak in all-ins, has inefficient waveclear, suffers from Ezreal's problem of having decent poke that's impossible to actually use unless you're already winning lane, and is also highly vulnerable to being engaged on. On the bright side, when the matchup actually does allow her to have pressure in lane Zap! allows for some very high range, very high damage poke, and she has very high auto-attack range to pressure with as well as decent CC and burst to follow up engages with, so should you find yourself on the losing end of a matchup against her don't expect her overall weak laning phase to make toughing through the matchup a breeze.

			Kai'Sa Threat: MEDIUM
			Kai'Sa has a lot of winning matchups while only having a few losing ones, but she doesn't excell at any particular area. She's decent in trades, has decent waveclear and decent all-ins which makes her a versatile champion fitting well into most matchups and supports, but she generally won't crush you in any individual aspect and can be beaten by duos that strongly outshine her any areas, and is especially vulnerable to ADCs that can best all-in her. Her mobility is decent enough though that she's not overly vulnerable to engages compared to the more immobile ADCs.

			Kalista Threat: MEDIUM
			A Challenger level Kalista wins almost all lanes, but the average Kalistas you'll encounter in your games won't be quite so impressive, generally winning against low threat ADCs, going even against medium threat ADCs and losing to high threat ADCs. She's a lane bully that can pressure opponents quite well with her high mobility, low CD trading and strong poke to develop healthy CS leads, but she lacks upfront damage in fights, loses DPS when slowed and is generally quite easy to kill once locked down. However, when in a winning matchup she can be very oppressive due to her high mobility and ability to help her support engage.

			Kog'Maw Threat: LOW
			Kog'Maw is best known for being a mid-late game hypercarry and respectively his laning phase is appropriately weak to compensate. He can't push very well early on, has very weak trading in lane, very weak poke until level 6 when it becomes okay, very poor followup to engages, and is himself highly vulnerable to them. When actually in a winning matchup he won't have a hard time exerting pressure between his massive auto-attack range during Bio-Arcane Barrage and his long range poke with Living Artillery, but he doesn't bring much kill potential to the lane. When in a bad matchup he won't have a problem farming safely while avoiding trades but can be easily divable by a strong enough all-in duo.

			Lucian Threat: HIGH
			A traditional lane bully, Lucian sacrifices mid-lategame power in exchange for putting it all into his laning phase. Lucian has great waveclear, decent poke, great trades, is great in all-ins, has great followup to engages, and has great mobility to keep him safe from engages. He's a little worse than draven at most aspects besides waveclear but his extra mobility makes him safer and also better at abusing his leads when he has them, especially as he typically rushes Blade of the Ruined King which also gives him a solid slow to force kills with. Lucian will typically lose lane into matchups that outrange him when his lane can't easily force engages, or can lose to duos with stronger all-ins.

			Miss Fortune Threat: MEDIUM
			Miss Fortune is a champion who can be a massive lane bully into many matchups given the huge range and damage of her Double Up, but she suffers from being too easy to kill when engaged on. Against matchups that can't all-in her though, whether in a poke-focused lane or paired with an engage support she can pack a massive punch through Double Up poke and Bullet Time damage in fights.

			Sivir Threat: HIGH
			Sivir is probably the most underrated laning phase ADC there is. She has the best waveclear of any ADC at later levels and still really good waveclear earlier on, great poke, decent trades, is okay in all-ins, is relatively safe from being engaged upon by basically any support that isn't Alistar, and is really good at helping her support engage with On The Hunt. Her short range however means that she's easy to poke and is vulnerable to engages that don't rely on CC that she can spell shield.

			Tristana Threat: HIGH
			Tristana has bad early waveclear, really bad poke and really bad trades, but her strength in all-ins in matchups where she can fully stack her Explosive Charge is absolutely unmatched, and her massive dash range with Rocket Jump makes it easy for her to force all-ins at the drop of a dime. With all her power focused onto this one single strength, it makes for a highly explosive and action packed laning phase, where at any moment she can jump on you and one-shot you. She has a hard time into matchups where she can't win all-ins, usually either as a result of CC leaving her unable to stack her Explosive Charge in time, or Exhaust nullifying her burst when she does. Since all-ins are her one strength, in matchups where she can't force them she ends up being really useless and falls pretty far behind. However, her amazing mobility also makes her really safe and hard to kill even against bot lanes with great engage.

			Twitch Threat: LOW
			Twitch may be marked as a low threat, but that doesn't mean you can let your guard down against him. Twitch has bad waveclear, bad poke, is bad at short trades and is highly vulnerable to engage, making him an extremely weak champion in lane overall. However he's okay in extended trades where he has time to stack up Contaminate, and Ambush makes him the best ADC at forcing fights on his own terms when it favours him. Despite being extremely weak in all-ins and trades and on average being down in CS into every single matchup as a result of it, he still averages being up on kills into every ADC except Tristana. It isn't enough to make his laning phase good given that on average he still falls behind in gold to every ADC except Vayne and Kog'Maw, but it goes to show that while his laning phase in a vacuum may be terrible, you still need to be very careful and aware to make sure that you don't end up giving him free kills in situations where he can sneakily engage on you when it favours him.

			Varus Threat: MEDIUM
			Varus has decent waveclear, poke and trading, and his ult is an amazing engage tool which coupled with his bursty kit makes him decent in all-ins too. However as a jack of all trades that makes him easy to beat in a matchup that's much better than him at any given aspect.

			Vayne Threat: LOW
			Being a late-game hypercarry, Vayne has bad waveclear, bad poke, bad trades and poor all-ins. On the other hand she's relatively safe, and she's great at following up engages or engaging herself when she's in a winning matchup. But she pretty much loses any lane so long as the support difference isn't enough to compensate for it.

			Xayah Threat: MEDIUM
			Xayah has great waveclear, decent poke, good trades and great all-ins especially when paired with a CC support while also being safe from engages and having great followup to engages by bringing CC of her own. All around a very solid laner, but is quite short ranged and can be easily handled by matchups that can keep her at a distance or beat her in all-ins.

			Alistar Threat: LOW
			Alistar is a rather weak laning support overall given his vulnerability to being poked, the ease with which his WQ combo can be interrupted by many supports with displacements, and the fact that any CC or mobility spell can prevent him from stunning his target with Trample. However, after level 6 with Unbreakable Will active he's also the tankiest support in the game, and with all 3 of his non-ultimate spells being CCs and mostly displacements it makes him very hard to ignore in skirmishes. It also makes him great at setting up plays, so if he is in a winning matchup it makes it very easy for him to dive 2v2 or with the jungler's help, given that he can tank up the tower for long periods of time while CCing the targets to allow his team mates to safely finish them off.

			Bard Threat: MEDIUM
			With Cosmic Binding and Traveler's Call, Bard has probably the strongest level 1 of any support which is something you always have to watch out for when playing against him, but in further levels he gains very lackluster abilities and falls off to rather middle of the pack in terms of laning strength, able to beat up the weaker laning supports but also getting beat up by the stronger ones. He's very good at low-range trading and has a reasonable amount of healing to sustain his ADC and himself despite not quite falling into the healer category of supports, and can set up good engages with Tempered Fate to allow his team to catch up to the caught enemies and kill them, and also allow himself to get into position to stun them either against a wall or each other with Cosmic Binding. He himself though is quite vulnerable to engages especially when not near a wall he can Magical Journey to for an escape, and since he only has one damage spell and auto-attacks/passive to trade with can also be quite vulnerable to poke from stronger trading supports.

			Blitzcrank Threat: MEDIUM
			Blitzcrank is probably the most hit or miss champion in League of legends, both literally and figuratively. If he hits his Rocket Grab it will likely turn into a kill, but if it misses he proceeds to have absolutely no lane presence over the next ~18 seconds until it comes back off cooldown and his ADC may as well be laning 1v2. So obviously it goes without saying that his all-ins have the potential to be great if he's the one forcing them by landing a good hook, but when missed or if used on a melee range target he's rather weak since he doesn't bring much to the table other than forcing a target to become horribly mispositioned and briefly CC'ing them in that spot. He's generally weak into strong laning supports that can control the lane and make him scared to walk up to hook for fear of taking too much damage or getting caught himself, but can be quite successful into some of the weaker laning supports, especially into enchanters. Though the opponent's general strength in lane is still the overall biggest factor, Blitzcrank is more so happy to face enchanters than other supports, and likewise shines into immobile ADCs who have no easy way of dodging the hook and have to play defensively and far back to avoid putting themselves into a position where they can get hooked.

			Brand Threat: HIGH
			Brand's combination of strong long range poke, one hard CC and immense burst make him one of the strongest laning supports in the game, alongside most mage supports. Given the range of his poke along with its strength it's very hard to beat Brand through trades and therefore makes strong all-in lanes with good engage the best chance at beating him in lane, but pre-6 he has the proper tools to keep his opponents too low to be able to risk engaging and after 6 with Pyroclasm he can potentially blow up two targets at once in fights, so all in all there's just no getting around the fact that Brand is just not a champion that ever expects to lose lane, except against other mage supports for whom you can also say the same thing.

			Braum Threat: LOW
			Braum has great peeling and defensive properties for keeping his ADC safe in teamfights, but this translates very poorly into laning phase strength where he's just a low-CC melee support with no damage, no way to fight back against poke, and not particularly safe from getting engaged on, so rather abusable in pretty much any matchup. Fortunately he's very tanky to make up for it so not particularly easy to kill, and Unbreakable can often save his ADC's life in fights too, but overall he's the weakest laning support in the game.

			Fiddlesticks Threat: HIGH
			Fiddlesticks has two equally viable spells he can max based on his needs or desires, either Reap to focus on poke or Terrify to weaken enemy trades/all-ins, either way though he has a good time in most trade/poke focused matchups. Engage is the best way to deal with him but he has the option of taking Aftershock to instantly proc with Terrify if he ever gets engaged on so he gets very high resistances on top of CCing one of his attackers for a high duration, so unless he can be CC chained or caught off guard with cooldowns he's not particularly vulnerable. Additionally at level 6 he becomes very strong in all-ins where he has the opportunity to jump in with Crowstorm and can find creative ways to force a fight by surprise and catch people out, making him a threat you always have to be particularly cautious of.

			Janna Threat: LOW
			Janna can either max Zephyr to prioritise trading and controlling the lane, or Eye Of The Storm to prioritize keeping herself and her ADC safe while still offering some extra damage through the AD and having reasonable poke in her unmaxed Zephyr. She's weak in all-ins but is also great at protecting herself and her ADC from all-ins in many matchups, making her an overall decent support while still being slightly on the weaker side, though vulnerable to supports with longer range poke and supports who can engage without being affected by her Howling Gale.

			Karma Threat: MEDIUM
			Mantra-empowered Inner Flame is probably the strongest poke spell you'll find on bot lane which does massive damage and is very easy to hit, but Mantra has a long cooldown and Inner Flame on its own is rather short ranged while still doing decent damage and making it easy to shove and control waves. Being a sort of enchanter/mage hybrid she doesn't really shine at either aspect, but her magelike qualities make her a rather good laning champion despite not being quite on the same level as other pure mage supports, and her enchanter qualities make her decent at protecting and buffing her allies, despite not being quite as good at it as pure enchanters.

			Leona Threat: MEDIUM
			The greatest thing that Leona offers is easy engage onto vulnerable short range targets, since her Zenith Blade travels through minions which is a feature most engage champions lack on their engage tools. However it's also quite short ranged which is a big disadvantage over them and her all-ins are not as strong as other engage champions, so while she has an easy time forcing fights to extend her lead in good matchups, she doesn't necessarily have a great deal of good matchups, so is best paired with a strong laning ADC and works best when picked against weak laners.

			Lulu Threat: LOW
			Lulu has the ability to massively buff her ADC's damage mid-late game as well as offering great anti-burst protection and works best paired with hypercarries, so given her scaling it's not surprising that her laning phase isn't that great. She does pack a lot of damage however, so she can definitely act as a bit of a lane bully in winning matchups, but she needs to get in close range to use it and can easily get blown up in many matchups.

			Lux Threat: HIGH
			Whether maxing Lucent Singularity to focus on poke or Prismatic Barrier to shield massive amounts of damage for her ADC, Lux brings a lot of damage to the lane either way, and brings both pressure and kill potential, using her long range poke to wear enemies down coupled with her long range snare enabling her to burst down low enemy laners. However to get the most damage out of her kit she has to get in auto-attack range to proc Illumination, without which she misses out on a lot of damage especially if she maxes Prismatic Barrier, which opens up room for enemy laners to try and punish her either by trading back or engaging on her.

			Morgana Threat: HIGH
			Black Shield makes Morgana a hard counter to most of the CC reliant supports, but the rest of her kit is also strong enough that she generally performs quite well into enchanters too. With Dark Binding and Tormented Shadow she can inflict a great deal of poke damage, and with Dark Binding scaling up to 3 seconds of CC she has very high pick potential, especially after level 6 when she can follow it up with Soul Shackles for a longer lock-down. In general Soul Shackles can make her a large threat in all-ins since she can Black Shield herself to make sure she can't be CC'd so she can complete the channel, and if she uses it before Dark Binding she can guarantee a very high lockdown period onto a target she stuns. The only supports that can reliably beat her are lane dominant mage supports, but she isn't an awful pick into these either since her Black Shield at worst can act as a regular shield and can also be used to counter any CC these champions commonly have.

			Nami Threat: LOW
			Nami brings a perfect balance of poke and healing as she improves both when ranking up her Ebb and Flow, and can frequently both poke and heal her or her ADC with one cast, making it easy to keep her and her ADC topped up and healthy while also applying pressure in the matchup. Her all-ins however are generally not all that great, hinging massively on her ability to land her slow moving Aqua Prison. When she does hit it she's rewarded greatly with a decent CC duration which can turn around many fights. But when she doesn't her contribution to fights isn't great and even with her heal she's still quite squishy and vulnerable. She scales decently into mid-game though and is a wonderful asset for helping her ADC minimize their losses in lane while also doing a great job of bullying weaker matchups. Additionally the fact that she does have options to force and win all-ins through her CC is something that gives her an edge in many matchups that other enchanters don't have.

			Nautilus Threat: HIGH
			Nautilus has gone through long periods of weakness in the support role, but currently at the time of writing this he is probably the strongest all-in support, bringing a heavy mix of high tankiness, decent damage and long range, very easy to land engage. However he has no poke and can't engage through minions, so in matchups where he has no prio and can be punished for walking up to fish for hooks he won't be able to contribute much and is vulnerable to poke. When in winning matchups though his ease at engaging makes him very scary to face and can generate very large gold leads.

			Pyke Threat: HIGH
			Pyke is currently the strongest support in lane, bringing the same playmaking utility you'd get from other engage/hook supports while also being highly mobile, rather tanky overall in extended scenarios where he can make ample use of Gift of the Drowned Ones, and also bringing a lot of damage into the matchup given his position as the only AD assassin support in the game. He doesn't quite have the damage to one-shot a carry unless extremely fed, but coupled with his ADC's damage it makes it rather easy to bring a target below the execution threshold for Death from Below, making him great at snowballing especially given the fact that any targets executed by Death from Below give full kill gold to both Pyke and the ADC, causing winning matchups to generate more gold for the duo as a whole than they would for any other duo. His high mobility and sustain also make it extremely hard to punish him except if he can be CC locked and burst down, making it hard to generate leads from him when he fails at making a play, while not being as forgiving for the enemy bot lane when he succeeds.

			Rakan Threat: LOW
			Being a scaling support, Rakan's laning phase is rather weak. His engage is hard to land, doesn't do much damage and he isn't particularly tanky to actually win the fights he engages. He has some poke but it doesn't do much damage, and some sustain but it's not on demand and isn't that strong. Sort of a jack of all trades that's weak enough in all aspects that he'll be outshined by most supports in lane. At level 6 his engages become a little stronger as he can more consistently land Grand Entrance and also gets to charm one other target on top of that, but still isn't great engage compared to other engage supports. He does have special synergy with Xayah's Deadly Plumage in lane that makes his all-ins a lot stronger than they are with any other ADC, but still overall on the weaker side of engage supports.

			Sona Threat: LOW
			Sona eventually ramps up to being one of the strongest lategame champions in the game even compared to non-supports, so naturally her laning phase suffers to compensate. First and foremost she's the second squishiest champion in the game besides Yuumi but doesn't get to go untargetable to make up for it, making her the most easily killable support to play in laning phase. However she does bring decent poke and some healing and shielding for both herself and her ADC, causing her to have an easy time into enchanters and other weak laners who can't punish her in all-ins and allow her to scale and keep herself and her ADC topped up with sustain. However her aforementioned squishiness makes her very weak into stronger laners with either high damage or good engage who can punish her lack of defensive stats.

			Soraka Threat: LOW
			Soraka is the queen of healing in League of Legends, providing unparalleled levels of healing through Astral Infusion alone while also having a large global AoE heal in Wish to boot. Unfortunately this healing comes at the cost of her own HP and her own self-sustain is quite low and dependant on harassing enemies with Starcall, leaving a lot of room to punish her. When in winnable matchups she has the option of maxing or putting some early points into Starcall in order to have higher poke in lane, but it's still quite short ranged and doesn't do all that much damage, leaving her still quite an underwhelming laner.

			Tahm Kench Threat: LOW
			Kench doesn't have a great time into the majority of the support roster, but he actually does quite well into most melee supports. As these supports are mostly engage focused Devour is an invaluable tool for keeping his ADC safe, but additionally Tahm Kench has a ton of damage when he can Devour an enemy champion, but has a hard time stacking it against ranged champions. Against melees on the other hand, this isn't a problem and he's much more capable of utilizing the full extent of his kit, and Thick Skin makes him incredibly tanky to the point where he isn't scared of letting himself be engaged on. So with this in mind he can certainly be quite strong in lane, but when looking at his performance on bot lane as a whole and not just against the champions he counters, his laning phase suffers quite a bit from his incapability of dealing with champions that outrange him.

			Taric Threat: LOW
			Taric is the only melee pure enchanter in the game, every one of his spells except Dazzle being defensive to protect his allies, which makes him great at protecting, but very bad at fighting enemy champions considering he lacks the range that other already weak laning enchanters would have to their advantage. He doesn't fair as badly into melee matchups since, similarly to Tahm Kench, he gets a lot of damage from his passive which he can't easily apply to ranged champions but can easily use on melees. However while this makes many melee matchups more bearable than ranged matchups, he still tends to not do very well into most of them.

			Thresh Threat: HIGH
			Thresh combines the engage and pick potential of a melee champion with the trading pressure of a ranged champion. With Flay's passive combined with its active, Thresh packs a lot of damage in just one spell rank, and will often put a few early points into it to maximize his early damage. In winning matchups he can easily walk up to Flay an enemy towards him even through minions knowing he can win the trade. Flay is also great defensively and can block many champions' engage tools. Additionally, the aptly named Death Sentence often spells disaster for targets caught by it as it stuns and pulls the victim closer to Thresh and his ally over 1.5 seconds, and allows Thresh to dash in and chain it with the rest of his CC. Its range makes it hard to cope with Thresh in losing matchups and exerts a lot of pressure over the opponents in lane knowing they can't get too close to farm while Death Sentence is up. But while he shares many characteristics with melee supports and is a great deal tankier than enchanters and mages, he's still notably squishier than the average melee support and has a harder time surviving all-ins and being caught by CC in even or bad matchups.

			Vel'Koz Threat: HIGH
			Vel'Koz provides some of the longer range poke of all the mage supports, with experienced Vel'Koz players also being able to easily land poke on targets hiding behind minions due to the way Plasma Fission works, making it hard to avoid the pressure Vel'Koz exerts over a lane. He also brings long range massive AoE damage in Life Form Disintegration Ray after level 6 which makes it hard to ignore him in fights, while his range also makes him a hard target to get to. He also has a displacement CC in Tectonic Disruption to keep himself safe with, covering all his bases and making sure there's no easy way to deal with him in lane.

			Xerath Threat: HIGH
			Xerath is the most oppressive mage support in lane despite not being too popular in the role. Neither of his two poke spells are hindered by minions meaning there's no way to avoid his poke except by dodging it, and since in the support role he doesn't have to move into a vulnerable position to last-hit there's not much room to fight back unless he's comfortable enough to step up because he thinks he'd win the fight. As far as mage supports go though he's probably the most vulnerable. He does have CC in Shocking Orb but it's not a displacement, is single-target, has a short duration at short distances such as when the engage has already happened, and while his poke is the most oppressive of any other mage support he also has the least immediate burst of any mage support so there's generally very little risk in engaging on him in even or close to even circumstances as he won't blow up one or two people at a time like Zyra or Brand could. This makes long range engage supports a lot more effective at dealing with him than they are against other mages. Which is not to say that they beat him, since in a vacuum Xerath should basically win lane against any support except for maybe Pyke, just that they fare better against him than they do against other mage supports despite Xerath being the strongest laner of them as a whole.

			Yuumi Threat: LOW
			Yuumi is extremely squishy and as such has to spend the vast majority of her time attached to her ADC in order to not get constantly caught out. She provides a lot of healing and poke while attached but while it gives her an amazing late-game, for laning phase it doesn't quite make up for the lane being a 1v2 most of the time as she lacks lane presence, both literally and figuratively. She fares worst against engage supports who can both force her to detach less for fear of getting CC'd and blown up in an instant and also abuse the fact that her lane partner is sort of 1v2 and easy to engage on most of the time, but tends to perform quite well into other enchanters or weak laning supports who can't abuse her lack of lane presence, and also can't abuse her as hard when she's detached which allows her to detach more often and have more lane presence than she would in tougher matchups.

			Zilean Threat: LOW
			Zilean is similar to Karma in that he acts as a sort of mix between an enchanter and a mage, though I would personally say he leans far more onto the enchanter side, and it shows in his laning strength, or lack thereof. Like Karma he has rather high damage poke in the form of Time Bomb which also provides an AoE stun as well as doubling its damage if he resets its cooldown with Rewind and lands it twice. The issue is that it's very hard to lane compared to Inner Flame or other poke supports' abilities, and to obtain its full benefits he needs to manage to land it not just once but twice within a 3 second period. When successful he's very highly rewarded, but otherwise he's rather underwhelming. He can make it much easier for himself to land a double Time Bomb by casting Time Warp on his intended target, but this has a rather short range which leaves him open to retaliation. This means that when facing weak lanes he's more likely to be able to walk up to cast Time Warp for easy double Time Bombs, but in harder matchups where he can't walk up to cast Time Warp without being punished he won't have anywhere near the same level of poke and overall lane presence, leaving a rather large gap between his highs and his lows in laning phase.

			Zyra Threat: HIGH
			Following and finishing the mildly amusing trend of most mage supports being located towards the very end of the alphabet, Zyra is just as lane dominant as the other mage supports, providing very high lane presence with her poke and burst, though compared to other mage supports she sacrifices a little bit of poke to make up for her high CC in her AoE knockup on Stranglethorns, and her high DPS in Rampant Growth and Garden of Thorns . Her poke is also significantly on the shorter range which leaves her slightly more vulnerable to low range engage supports, while in winning matchups not being as much of a problem against long range hook-based engage champions who need to path around minions to find her and leave themselves open to eating up one of her combos, but limiting her ability to poke in losing matchups where she has to stay far away from the minion wave and can't poke without also being at risk of getting engaged on. However she's very strong in all-ins where she can get her full combo out thanks to the DPS she gets out of her plants, especially when buffed by Stranglethorns, and also her combined 2-3 seconds of CC that prevents the targets from escaping the DPS coming from her plants, making engaging on her a scary prospect if her enemies can't burst her down before she has time to get her full spell rotation out, as while they may very well be able to kill her there's also a good chance that with the help of her ADC she'll take 1 or 2 of them down with her.

Understanding How Two Bot Lanes Match Into Each Other

It's a complicated subject since there are some champion synergies that need to be accounted for, but generally a duo's strength will be the sum of their parts. So a high threat ADC with a high threat support would be a high threat bot lane, but a high threat ADC with a low threat support would be a medium threat bot lane, and a medium threat ADC with a high threat support would be a medium-high threat bot lane, somewhere in between; but of course it's all relative so sometimes a medium-high or even just a medium threat duo can be incredibly oppressive towards low-threat bot lanes, depending on the particular matchup.

Drafting Your Bot Lane

Drafting a low threat bot lane is one of the worst things you can do into a medium-high+ threat bot lane. If you have the time feel free to look over this VOD review, otherwise I'll summarise it for you: the matchup is Caitlyn-Bard vs Kai'Sa-Janna. Janna on her own is pretty middle of the pack/low threat on her own when it comes to trades, while Kai'Sa has the potential to deal a lot of damage in all-ins but is very low threat outside of all-ins. Meanwhile Caitlyn and Bard are both long range, trade heavy bot laners who suck at all-ins but are hard to engage on without engage spells like Death Sentence or Zenith Blade. While Janna-Kai'Sa isn't a particularly bad bot lane into low-medium range trade-focused champions and there are worse bot lanes for dealing with all-ins too, they're awful into a trade-focused medium-high threat bot lane like Caitlyn-Bard as they lack the tools to deal with them, they can't win trades since they get outranged so hard so their only way to fight back is through all-ins, but while they would win an all-in if they could actually force one, neither of them actually has the tools to force said all-in against this matchup. Give Kai'Sa a Thresh instead and they could heavily threaten the Caitlyn-Bard lane and force them to play more respectfully, but instead her support is Janna, bringing their overall threat level down to a point where they pose no threat at all to the Caitlyn-Bard lane. The result is Kai'Sa-Janna get their waves shoved in under tower repeatedly, and while they do get a few Rengar ganks to help them out, some counterganks and outplays from the opposing team leave them stuck in their complicated scenario, resulting in their tower falling at 9 minutes and being over 20 CS behind from all the CS lost to tower. But the onslaught doesn't end there. Caitlyn-Bard rotates to top lane and Kai'Sa-Janna have to follow them since they stand a better chance of defending the 4 platings tower than top lane Kennen does 1v2. But 2 minutes later the top lane tower also falls, Caitlyn-Bard having now claimed two separate towers single handedly by the 12 minute mark. They proceed to rotate mid lane and repeat the process there, and it all snowballs into Caitlyn-Bard's team claiming every non-inhibitor tower on the map by 16 minutes while their team hasn't even lost half the HP of a single tower. All because Kai'Sa-Janna drafted a bot lane that had no answers for a long range trade-heavy bot lane like Caitlyn-Bard. How could this have been avoided? Either a change in the ADC or the support could have drastically altered the outcome of the lane:

Looking at Supports

Thresh would have provided a lot more pressure to scare Caitlyn-Bard away from permanently auto-attacking the tower and also could have potentially won them lane priority if neither Bard nor Cait could risk getting hooked for fear of dying. Brand's harass would have provided enough pressure to stop them completely free-hitting the tower for fear of falling too low in HP, and possibly won over lane priority if Brand landed enough of his spells, especially given that his all-ins when landing Sear are pretty scary due to his burst, even before he has Pyroclasm. Morgana wouldn't have won over lane priority but would've introduced the fear of getting binded and provided the ability to force an engage onto a snared target without fear of being immediately stunned by Cosmic Binding thanks to her Black Shield, again not allowing them to hit tower as freely as they did, while also providing far better gank assistance than Janna did.

Looking at ADCs

Draven would have manhandled anyone who dared to get into his range, Cosmic Binding be damned, since his spells give him the ability to engage just by walking up with high movement speed and briefly CC'ing his target with Stand Aside, Bard especially would have been particularly vulnerable to this while Caitlyn is a bit safer with 90 Caliber Net but also has to be afraid of being abused by Draven if she misses the slow. Varus could have snared either opponent close to tower and used that as an opportunity to all-in at the very least getting free damage off, and also makes Caitlyn-Bard much more scared of ganks knowing that getting hit by Chain of Corruption would mark their death and minions offer no protection against it. Tristana would've also had far better gank followup and also far more threat in all-ins while also having the means to engage herself, again demanding far more respect from Cait-Bard than they had to offer against the Kai'Sa.

What Does This Mean?

As you can see, neither Janna nor Kai'Sa in particular was the problem, nor are they necessarily a bad bot lane duo in general. But the world of bot lane matchups is a complicated one and, either because of having had to blind pick or intentionally drafting their duo into Caitlyn-Bard out of ignorance, their bot lane duo resulted in disaster that particular game. Replace Janna with most low threat supports and the same thing would've happened, replace Kai'Sa with most low-threat ADCs and the same thing would have happened. I would hate to write a traditional matchups chapter for bot lane because it's never as simple as "Caitlyn beats Kai'Sa" or vice versa, it's highly dependent on the bot lanes as a whole. Reverse the supports and Caitlyn still would've won but probably not as one-sidedly, replace Janna with Nautilus or Thresh and Kai'Sa probably would've been favoured as suddenly they have the tools to capitalize on Caitlyn-Bard's weakness to all-ins.

SYNERGIES EXAMPLE: Lucian + Braum

Of course you also have to account for synergies between champions, but you also need to remember that synergies between champions also tend to be heavily overrated. The first example that comes to mind is Lucian-Braum, their passives' interactions with each other are insane as Lucian's passive very quickly stacks Braum's passive, and this has given them the reputation of being a brutal bot lane matchup to face. But Braum is one of the weakest laning supports in the game, and his synergy with Lucian doesn't change that. Out of all the supports in the game, Braum is Lucian's 3rd worst performing support in lane where he causes Lucian to fall 250+ gold behind by 15 minutes in the average game when he's a lane bully who should be ahead in lane, while Lucian paired with some of the high threat supports yields a 400-700 gold lead at 15 minutes for Lucian on average. In winrates they're also an awful duo because Lucian is one of the weakest ADCs at the time of writing this and Braum has been one of the weakest supports for a very long time when writing this too. A bot lane doesn't necessarily have to shine at the same points, you can pair a strong laning support with a weak laning support, and despite sounding like they have counter-synergy it actually results in a medium-threat bot lane while also having medium-scaling, which you generally don't get from high threat ADCs/supports who tend to fall off. Despite having opposite focuses, the result is a happy compromise between those two focuses, and not necessarily a bad thing unless your team comp really needs a winning bot lane and the enemy bot has drafted an even stronger lane. So Braum being a weak laning support while Lucian is a lane bully doesn't innately mean that they're a bad duo, each individual's strengths in theory are meant to cover up their weakness MAFIA BRAUM while the reverse also applies and leaves them a perfectly viable but not overpowered option; but their weak tuning does make them a bad duo. They're both individually weak and their synergy doesn't make up for it. When you're playing Lucian, you'd rather have a strong support you have no synergy with than a weak support you have strong synergy with. If you're playing Braum the same thing applies, you'd rather have a strong ADC you have no synergy with than a weak ADC you have strong synergy with. If they were both buffed to a point where they're strong in solo queue then they'd become a great bot lane, but as it stands they're one of the weakest bot lanes in the game, but remain heavily overrated year after year because people overlook their tuning when looking at their synergy, and forget that synergy isn't the only thing that matters, and in this case there's a bigger factor overriding their synergy.

SYNERGIES EXAMPLE: Twitch + Lulu

Another example is Twitch-Lulu, which especially with the rise in prominence of funneling has enlightened the world as to what a terrifying duo Twitch-Lulu can be. But when you look at solo queue performance, Lulu isn't even Twitch's best support, even though Twitch is Lulu's best ADC (though not by a great margin over #2 or #3). She's consistently very close to the top, ranking from #2 to #4, but not on a single patch is she ever actually his best performing support, an honor which is split between Nami and Taric, slightly favoured towards Nami. This is because while Lulu is the support which best enables Twitch in the mid-late game by massively boosting his DPS and also providing incredible protection from divers and assassins, she's also one of the weakest laning supports in the game and Twitch is also one of the weakest laning ADCs, which means if you were to just constantly pick them every game you'd very frequently find yourself in scenarios like the Kai'Sa-Janna from earlier where you're too weak to do anything and fall massively behind with no options to fight back. Whereas Nami is also an excellent scaling support, and while she doesn't scale as well with Twitch as Lulu does, she makes up for it by being far better in lane, especially in those scenarios where you're facing Caitlyn-Bard or similar bot lanes, where Tidal Wave and Aqua Prison give her an excellent engage tool to allow Twitch to open up from stealth and burst down bot laners that just want to maintain their distance and force short trades, and also has heals to keep him healthy and in a position to force those fights rather than being too low to threaten an all-in. Whereas Taric is probably just as weak in lane as Lulu if not more, but again has a much better engage tool especially paired with Ambush, and has an all around much better performance in all-ins after level 6. Then while his scaling with Twitch in particular isn't as good as Lulu's, his contribution to the team as a whole lategame is much better than what Lulu offers. All these factors are mainly what lead to Nami and Taric on average performing better with Twitch than Lulu despite Lulu having far more synergy with him. There are definitely scenarios where Lulu is a better pick, for example if you're facing a low/low-medium threat bot lane like Kai'Sa-Janna then bot lane is probably going to be a farm fest above all else so Lulu will perform much better than she would into stronger bot lanes, but again this example serves to show just how fluid the bot lane ecosystem is. X pick is not always going to be the best counter to Y pick, V pick is not always going to be the best pair for Z pick. It's not commonly talked about and I believe it's also a very poorly understood subject even at the Challenger level, where even Challenger players sometimes think a Soraka-Twitch lane can beat a Tristana-Rakan lane by poking them down, like Tristana-Rakan doesn't have the ability to one-shot either of them on demand the moment they get in range to poke; while Soraka poking down Rakan would actually be a viable prospect if Rakan were paired with Kai'Sa, against Tristana trying to poke is just suicide.

Bot Lane Matchups & Duos Conclusion

It's impossible to discuss every single possible duo against every possible duo, so a lot of it is going to ride on your game knowledge and experience. The purpose of this chapter was to provide you with as much relevant game knowledge to understanding bot lane matchups/pairings as possible, and I hope it has done so. You will still require a lot of experience to perfectly understand how different duos will interact with each other while also accounting for how the different players perform, but unfortunately that's beyond what a guide can teach you. At the very least though I hope I've at least set you on the right path.

This is probably the most important thing I'm going to talk about in this guide. Any good guide will show you what to build, but few of them actually properly explain how to play. This chapter will be a mix between teaching mechanics and game sense.



This is the most basic, yet also by far the most important mechanic to learn for playing AD carry. Orb walking is a term that comes from DotA, but in League it means something different. Orb walking is the act of moving to cancel your auto-attack animation, once your auto-attack has already been fired. The reason you'd want to do this is that it allows you to move around while you auto-attack an enemy, rather than standing still while you auto-attack them. It means you can more easily dodge skillshots during fights, you can constantly reposition yourself to wherever you need to be, you can move away from minion range during a fight, etc.

Proper use of orb-walking will maximize your DPS as you're auto-attacking as much as your attack speed permits you while also allowing you to move around, say, to stay in range of a fleeing enemy. Here's an example of someone orb walking while attacking a Soraka that's running away, and that same person simply right clicking her to auto-attack her while she runs, highlighting difference between orb-walking and just right clicking.



Notice how the Caitlyn that orb-walks stays a lot closer to Soraka for the first few seconds while she runs away, keeping her in range for more auto-attacks, while the Caitlyn that doesn't, quickly has Soraka run out of her range, and she has to begin chasing until she gets back in range. Orb walk Caitlyn lands 6 auto-attacks before she has to begin catching up to Soraka, no orb walk Caitlyn lands 2 auto-attacks before she has to begin catching up. By the time Soraka runs out of orb walk Caitlyn's range, she has already landed 6 auto-attacks. At this point, no orb walk Caitlyn has only landed 4. And this is what I mean by orb-walking maximizing your DPS: by cancelling the "useless" part of your auto-attack animation once you've already done your auto-attack, and instead moving along with your enemy, you'll be able to stay in their range longer, therefore being able to auto-attack more often.

Rather than using orb walking to chase an enemy, you can also use it to run away while still attacking them. This is commonly referred to as kiting. There really isn't much to explain if you already know the basic orb walking. It's just orb walking... but while running. Here's an example of a Vayne orb walking, it was one of the best examples I could find.



After killing Riven she just moves onto normal orb-walking to kill Corki and Leona, but the Riven kill was kiting right up until the end when Riven started to run. Also, notice how after she kills Riven and starts to 1v2 Corki and Leona, she suddenly starts moving from side to side. This makes it harder for Corki and Leona to land skillshots as her movement is so unpredictable.

The reason "kiting" (orb walking backwards) is given a specific name, but orb walking in any other direction isn't called anything other than orb walking, is because orb walking backwards is the most important use of orb walking that an AD Carry should apply. It allows you to keep doing damage, while at the same time running from champions like Riven or Irelia who want to kill you.

Masterful orb walking is when you can do it without cancelling your auto-attack a single time (a very common mistake every player makes from time to time is to begin your movement command before your auto-attack animation has finished, therefore cancelling it and causing you to have wasted your time beginning the auto-attack), while also entering every auto-attack command RIGHT as your attack speed permits you to attack again. If you do it faster than your attack speed permits, you'll move backwards, stand still briefly, then begin your auto-attack, then move backwards, then stand still briefly, then begin your auto-attack... Which is better than no orb walking at all, but isn't as good as it could be. Whereas if you do it perfectly, you'll move backwards, stop and IMMEDIATELY begin your auto-attack, move backwards, stop and IMMEDIATELY begin your auto-attack... This way you spend less time standing still, making you more mobile, and either keeping you safer while you kite or maximizing your damage output as you stick to targets better.

You'll never be perfect at orb walking. I don't think anyone is, I see pros cancelling their auto-attacks pretty often (though not as often as the common player obviously). But you should strive to be as perfect as you can be at orb walking. Never stop practicing it. Orb walk while you farm in lane (moving constantly makes it harder for enemies to land skillshots on you too), orb walk while you farm jungle camps, orb walk while your team does dragon, orb walk while your team does baron... Never ever stop practicing orb walking, it's really hard to get used to perfectly orb walking at all attack speed values, and the more practice you get, the better you'll be, even if sometimes there's not actually any real need to orb walk (if you have Statikk Shiv though, it's almost always ideal to do it as the more you move, the more stacks you generate).



Now, there's one aspect of orb walking which, while it's not the hardest part (that would be ensuring you don't ever cancel your auto-attacks), it is the most lethal when you mess it up; misclicks. It sounds easy to kite, in theory; right click enemy, right click backwards, right click enemy, right click backwards, right click enemy, right click backwards... easy peasy, and just like that, you're unkillable, right? But what happens if your mouse cursor is just a millimeter off of the enemy champion model, and rather than right clicking them, you actually right click the ground and end up walking TOWARDS them, which is the opposite of what you're trying to achieve?

Often this can get you killed, and especially when you're trying to kite with high attack speed (very common with Tristana because of Rapid Fire), it's really hard to move your mouse backwards and forwards for movement commands and auto-attack commands without making a single misclick. Hell, sometimes it looks like your mouse is over the enemy champion but the game just thinks you meant to click the ground.

People misclick all the time, and honestly, my mouse accuracy was horrible when I first started playing AD carry. I've improved a lot in that aspect since then, but I'm still no Doublelift. You wouldn't believe how many times I misclick every single game. But it actually doesn't really affect me that much, if at all. Most good players aren't affected too badly by misclicks, and the reason for this, is just two words: "Attack move". What is attack move? Attack move is a command which is usually set to A, X or Shift+right click. What it does is, is it acts very similarly to right click; if you attack move an enemy, you'll attack that enemy, and if you attack move the ground, it'll move towards that spot. The difference between attack move and right click though, is that if you attack move the ground, your champion will move there, but stop to auto-attack an enemy if they run into one before they reach the spot they attack moved. In the past, your champion would auto-attack whichever enemy was nearest to them if you right click the ground, but in a recent patch, they changed attack move to attack whichever enemy is nearest to the exact spot you attack moved to, which has made it even better than it used to be.

Now this may sound pretty useless, but it actually has a variety of uses, the most prominent being kiting; because when you right click backwards, then attack move your enemy, then right click backwards, then attack move your enemy, etc... If all goes well and no misclicks are made, then great! You just successfully kited. But if you DO misclick (and trust me, you will misclick so so so so often...), then you right click backwards, then attack move the ground instead of your enemy... but because attack move makes you attack the nearest enemy to the spot you clicked if there are enemies around, rather than accidentally running headfirst into that charging enemy, you'll just simply auto-attack them as if nothing happened. Attack move is the cheat code to removing 99% of the negative consequences you'd usually have for misclicking on the ground. Except it's not a cheat, or a hack, or anything like that; it's a command just like right click is, except bound to a different key. Sometimes misclicking with attack move will make you attack the wrong target, which can be annoying and very occasionally fatal (who hasn't accidentally auto-attacked a minion mid-fight before? =D), but using attack move rarely actually hurts you. So the idea is basically this: if you use attack move on enemies instead of right click, and you make no misclicks then there's no difference. But if you use attack move on enemies instead of right click and you DO make a misclick, what could in some situations be a fatal mispositioning error, may as well not be an error at all, because attack move will make you auto-attack your enemy anyway, making it as if there was no misclick. Attack move won't give you the mechanics of a God, but it will significantly reduce the consequences of all the mechanical errors that you do (and everyone does them).

Now, kiting is the most obvious time to apply attack move, as it'll save your life so many times, maybe even various times in a single game, depending on how many misclicks you tend to make while kiting. But when else should you use it? Some people would advise using it basically any time you orb walk, as it'll ensure you're auto-attacking as frequently as you can. But you know when I would recommend you to use attack move? Literally for every single auto-attack. If you misclick, even just while farming, rather than accidentally running forwards and possibly opening yourself up to poke or an engage, you'll just auto-attack the minion anyway. The worst possible case scenario you could get from attack moving in that situation, is that you attack the wrong minion and miss a last hit. Which is bad, but you'll probably never lose a lane or a game just because you missed that one single minion in laning phase; if you accidentally get too close to your enemies because you right clicked and misclicked, then that could certainly lead to you losing your lane. Maybe not often, but it can definitely happen, especially against more competent enemies.

There is basically no downside to attack moving for all your auto-attacks, other than the awkwardness of having to switch from right click to attack move as you move and auto-attack, rather than just right clicking everything. But for me, it isn't awkward at all. For 2 years I've had attack move set onto the "T" key so I can easily click it just as easily as I can click any spell. Clicking A, or X, or, oh my god, shift?!?! Now that is definitely an awkward thing for me to have to be doing with my pinky that's comfortably resting on my Q key. But having it set on T? So I have to slightly move my index finger to the right whenever I auto-attack. That's no problem for me at all, other than maybe once every 100 games where I accidentally click R instead of T and fire my ult into minions... I mean that's embarassing when it does happen, but pretty rare! Attack moving for auto-attacks has become so natural for me that I just can't go back to right clicking enemies anymore; and there's no point. It accomplishes the same thing, but does it better if you happen to misclick.

You don't need to literally copy my own hotkey for attack move, but if A, X or shift are too awkward for you to get used to, then you should just try and find a key you're comfortable pressing on a regular basis whenever you want to use attack move. For me, T works like a charm, maybe you'd rather just find a different key. You can change your attack move hotkey by opening up the Option screen with the Esc key, going into Hotkeys and scrolling down to "Player movement", left clicking it, and finding "Player Attack Move". If you can find a key that you can get comfortable with, there's really no reason for you to ever need to right click an enemy again.



Another thing that might put you off attack move, especially if you're used to smart casting (a lot of people, me included, smart cast literally every spell in the game), is that you need to click the attack move key then left click on your desired destination/enemy, which feels clunky if all your other keys use smart cast. But Riot actually has you covered there! There's basically a smart cast version of Attack Move called Attack Move Click, which is what I use, and have set to T on the above screenshot. If you're the type to smart cast all your spells, then you can make using your attack move hotkey feel as quick and smooth as any of your spell hotkeys.

The last use for attack move (besides just being a superior right click in terms of auto-attacking ememies), is using it for facechecking brushes. Say you're chasing a low HP enemy into a brush (and there are no minions nearby for your attack move to automatically make you attack), rather than running into the brush, having to check where your enemy is when you gain vision of them, and then having to move your mouse towards them to auto-attack them, you can just attack move into the brush. So long as they're in your auto-attack range when you enter the brush, you will immediately auto-attack them as soon as you have vision. This is useful if a 10 HP LeBlanc is running into a brush and you just need to auto-attack her before she suddenly bursts you down to nothing because you couldn't click her fast enough after you gained vision. Or if you're in an area where you could easily be juked, you will immediately auto-attack the enemy as soon as they exit the brush, rather than running into the brush right as your enemy runs out of it in the opposite direction; this applies more to melee champions, but it can help you on AD Carries and ranged champions in general too.

Anyway this has been a pretty long explanation, but that, my friends, is attack move. Seriously, start using it, it really does make a huge difference. Not so much if you don't play auto-attack reliant champions, but definitely on AD Carry.



Laning mechanics are basically every action you do in lane to build up an advantage. Some of it is very obvious and I'm not going to bother explaining them, such as last-hitting, and other things are more subtle and are just things you learn with experience. Well I'm going to make you skip the "experience" part and just teach you everything I've learnt about laning bot lane as an AD Carry. All you'll have to do is remember it and practice applying it.

The theory of getting ahead on bot lane isn't rocket science. If you do more damage to your enemy than they do to you in trades, you'll have higher HP than them. And thus you're more likely to win any fights you get into. But what if your champion does the same amount of damage as your opponent's champion? Or worse, what if they just straight up do more damage? Well that doesn't mean you're going to lose regardless of player skill. It just means you need to play better than them. The more subtle aspect of laning mechanics, besides just right clicking champions and not accidentally clicking a minion during a fight (which totally never happens to me haha...), is all about trading with (damaging) your opponent in ways or situations where they can't easily damage you back, and also the reverse; counter-trading in situations where you're meant to be vulnerable and your opponent tries to poke you for free damage.

I realize this is sounding really ambiguous, so here's a situation with more context: You're laning on bot lane, 2v2, farming. You see that one of your team's minions are getting low, and you know know that your enemy is about to walk up to it to last-hit it. If they're busy auto-attacking a minion, then they can't auto-attack you at the same time; which is why as soon as you see one of your minions getting low enough for your enemy to last-hit, you wanna pre-emptively move forwards, practically next to that minion, so that when your enemy goes in to last-hit it, you're in range to auto-attack them while they're busy auto-attacking your minion. In most cases, they're forced to choose between cancelling the auto-attack on the minion to trade back with you, or more commonly, they'll keep going for the last-hit and won't trade back with you, so you just get an auto-attack on them for free.

And when I say that you need to learn to counter-trade when you're meant to be vulnerable, I'm referring to when you find yourself in the opposite of the previous situation; you're the one going in for a last-hit and your opponent positions themselves to get a free auto-attack on you. As mentioned, you can either a) tank it like a man and hope you'll overall win trades anyway, or b) ignore the last-hit and just auto-attack them back so it's a 50/50 trade. If you go for option B every time and your enemy goes for option A every time, you'll miss a few more last-hits than them, but you'll end up higher up on HP and that means you can transition that into either killing your opponent, or zoning them to gain a higher CS lead than the few minions you missed due to auto-attacking your opponent instead. Every time you go for a single auto-attack on an enemy, you should then back off, preferably into a brush, to shake off minion aggro. If a brush isn't an option, or it's warded so it won't make chasing minions lose vision of you, then you should just run backwards until it re-aggros onto your minions. Sometimes a lone minion might chase you way further than it really should (rito plz fix) and if you go too far then it won't be in aggro range of other minions, so at a certain point rather than running backwards you should run in circles around your caster minions until it decides to attack your minions again. It sounds ridiculous, but yeah, sometimes that's just what you have to do to lose minion aggro.

Positioning is also an important aspect of winning your lane. You want to position yourself in a way that if you're going to trade with the enemy ADC, you're safe from the enemy support too. So for example, say the enemy ADC is positioned to your left, and the enemy support is to your right. If you also position yourself to the right, you're vulnerable to being attacked by both the support and the ADC. If you position yourself more to the left, you can trade with the ADC but you're also out of the enemy support's range, so it'll be a 1v1 trade.

Here's an example of bad positioning:



By standing there, I'm vulnerable to getting attacked by both Ashe and Braum. If I try to trade it's going to be 1v2, and there's no way I can win that trade. Even assuming my support were on the lane, it's still suboptimal positioning if I'm intending to trade with Ashe. And even if I'm not, they can take advantage of my positioning of their own accord.

Here's an example of good positioning:



If I try to trade with Ashe here, I'm out of Braum's range and he'll need to reposition himself before he can join the fight. In this screenshot I'd actually miss one or two last-hits if I try to trade with Ashe, but if Ashe plays properly she'll try to AA me for free damage while I last-hit the minions, so it's ideal to just give up the CS and trade back.

Note that it's technically bad positioning in both screenshots as I can't be positioned so aggressively in a 1v2 lane, but this is just meant to give you an idea of what good and bad positioning is in a 2v2 lane. You'll constantly want to reposition yourself depending on the enemy ADC and support's movements so you can be as safe as possible and have minions between you and enemy skillshots.



Lane freezing is a more advanced-ish technique that you won't usually see applied at low Elo, but becomes more common in Platinum and Diamond. It's actually really easy to do, the reason it isn't common at low Elo is simply that people don't know about it.

Lane freezing is keeping the minions on your side of the lane/in front of your turret, far enough away that the turret can't kill the enemy minions so that you don't accidentally end up pushing. You might want to do this for 3 different reasons: 1) You want to set up an easy gank for your jungler, as the enemy bot lane will have to overextend to farm. 2) You want to keep yourself safe from ganks. 3) You're zoning the enemy bot lane so you don't want the lane to end up pushing into their tower where they'll be able to farm more easily. The way you lane freeze is by not pushing, and only last-hitting minions at the last possible second. This keeps the enemy minions alive for as long as possible, causing them to deal more damage to your minions and kill them faster than the enemy minions die. Once all your minions die the enemy minions will advance forwards, and you/your support need to tank them near your tower until your minion wave arrives and begins tanking them for you. When the rest of the enemy minions arrive, their minions will have the numbers advantage, and will continue to naturally push so long as you don't kill their minions too fast, or their minions don't run into tower range (which is why you need to freeze it far enough away that a melee minion starting to attack a caster minion won't place it in tower range).

To undo a lane freeze, you need to push the minions as fast as possible, and harass the enemy bot lane away from the minions if they try to tank them to create another freeze, to force your minions under their tower. The minions should hopefully die before the next wave arrives and reset the lane.

So this is what the enemy bot lane should be trying to do too if you're the one creating a freeze. However, if you're ahead enough, you'll be strong enough to win trades/fights even while tanking the minions you want to freeze, meaning the enemy bot lane has no way of preventing you from freezing other than getting their jungler to come help shove the wave into your tower. This kind of teamwork doesn't happen even at my level of solo queue though. So if you're ahead enough, you can indefinitely freeze the wave for as long as you want, keeping it very near your tower so you're unlikely to die to ganks, and also forcing the enemy bot lane to over-extend if they want to get last-hits, which would leave them vulnerable to getting ganked.

The only disadvantage to lane freezing is that seeing as the enemy bot lane can't get close enough to farm if you're ahead, you leave them no choice but to leave bot lane and either gank mid or simply group there to take the tower, assuming they're smart enough to leave bot lane. At this point you should just clear the wave that you've been freezing and push hard to take the enemy tower. If your jungler helps mid lane your mid tower might hold 2v3, while the enemy bot tower has no chance of surviving 0v2. At worst you'll trade 1 for 1 if it comes to this, or you might just take their tower then also group mid and make sure that tower doesn't go down.

This is the biggest CS lead I've personally managed to create through freezing a lane.



NOTE: Tristana is possibly the worst champion in the game for freezing, aside from maybe new Graves, due to her Explosive Charge's passive. Every time you last-hit a minion you'll do unnecessary splash damage onto other minions which will slightly push the lane more than necessary. In the right circumstances you'll still be able to keep up a freeze, but in many situations where you should be able to freeze, Tristana can't. It's not terrible, so it's still definitely worth mentioning even in a Tristana guide, but it's not as easy as it would be with any other champion. If nothing else, you can just do a temporary freeze for as long as Explosive Charge will let you, rather than a long-term freeze.



If you shove your minion wave under the enemy tower you'll be forcing them to try to last-hit while the tower tries to kill their minions, which is a little more complicated than last-hitting in normal circumstances. There's a few things to consider in this situation:

1) The enemy tower will slowly be taking damage as your minions attack it, and you might get some auto-attacks off on it while your minions tank it. This can eventually end up costing the enemy their tower.

2) Last-hitting for the enemy ADC will be harder, it might cost them a few CS, how much usually depending on whether their support helps them prep last hits or not.

3) You will be vulnerable to engages, should you not play carefully enough, and it's extremely dangerous to get engaged on near their tower, especially by anyone with any kind of "pull" displacements that can take you right under their tower, e.g. Thresh Death Sentence, Nautilus Dredge Line, Blitzcrank Rocket Grab, Alistar Flash Pulverize Headbutt into tower (this one is the hardest to react to, though fortunately it's cooldown is limited to Flash's cooldown).

When shoving to the enemy tower, you need to play very carefully if the enemy has any of that dangerous engage. It's mostly only safe for you to auto-attack the enemies/tower if you still have melee minions tanking the tower, and it depends on how far back the support is standing. You can't do much while the support has a clear engage opportunity, but if they're being blocked by minions you can auto-attack them as long as it's safe in an attempt to force them to stand further back, where it's harder for them to engage on you.

When you're not under threat of being dangerously engaged upon, you're a lot less restricted in what you can do, and you can auto-attack the enemy ADC every time they try to auto-attack a minion, whether as prep to last-hit it or to actually last-hit it. Naturally this mainly only applies to ranged minions as you'd have to be really close to the tower to do this while they're last-hitting melee minions. Instead you can auto-attack either the support (if it's someone that's safe to attack), or the tower. As Tristana, you should also often be placing Explosive Charge on the tower, so long as you still have melee minions tanking it, and auto-attack it as much as you can. "As much as you can" varies and depends on how the enemy reacts to it. If they stand far back doing nothing, you can go at it as much as you want, probably reaching full stacks (after which you immediately walk backwards to avoid getting hit by the tower). If they move forwards to stop you stacking your charges on the tower, then you move backwards to compensate and attack them back at a comfortable distance where you're either out of range of the tower, or can move out of range before it has time to auto-attack you.

When poking the enemies under their tower, the most optimal way to do it is to take into account the turret's auto-attacks, and its auto-attack "cooldowns". E.g. if the turret just started its auto-attack on a minion, then it has another 0.83 seconds before it can begin another auto-attack. This gives you plenty of time to poke someone, then move out of the tower range. It's not hugely important to take into account the tower auto-attack CDs, but the further back the enemy you're poking is standing, the more time it'll take you to move out of tower range, so the more you're able to abuse it, the more aggressively you can play under tower.

When you're the one last-hitting under tower, which should happen more often given your weak laning and therefore inability to contest pushes, what you need to know about last-hitting under tower is that melee minions take 2 tower shots and 1 auto-attack to last-hit if they start off at full HP, and caster minions take 1 tower shot and 2 auto-attacks to last-hit. Requiring 2 auto-attacks is what makes them the trickiest, as you'll either need to prep the first auto-attack in advance (hard to do while being pressured by the enemy bot lane, especially when you don't have a "dangerous engage" support), or you'll need your support to help you last-hit by auto-attacking it once for you. As you can't control your support's actions, and I often have trouble even getting my premades to do this, that 2nd option isn't terribly reliable. Often the sad truth is, you're just going to have to miss a lot of CS if you're forced to last-hit under tower. Especially true on Tristana as Explosive Charge's passive annoyingly interferes with the regular system.

When minions don't start off at full HP when they're about to receive tower focus, you (and your support if they're smart) need to try and prepare it so after the tower shot, it'll be at enough HP for you to last-hit. Often though, you can just see that it's impossible for you to last-hit a certain minion no matter what you or your support do, again especially true on Tristana because she has no spells like Piercing Light that immediately do a large spike of damage to adjust its HP fast, and you have to just sadly watch as it dies to the tower.




Ever wondered how pros can get 300 CS at 30 minutes before? No, it's not completely down to "insanely good last-hitting mechanics". You can do it too, just by using a simple wave control technique. Watch this video to understand how minion waves work (it'll also go through lane freezing again).



So when 2 minion waves collide on bot lane, in the middle of the lane, you should be there to push those 6 minions. And then you leave bot lane. No, you don't stay to push the 2nd minion wave too and force your wave to hit the tower. Aside from being at risk if you do that, it's also just not smart to do it. Because once you clear the first wave and your minions advance to crash into the next minion wave, your minions will be on the enemy's side of the map, and as you just learnt from the video, that means that the wave will slowly but inevitably start to push towards your side of the map.

After clearing that first wave you just go pressure mid or teamfight or whatever, then you just return bot lane in 2-3 minutes when the enemy minion wave has finished pushing to your tower (and make sure to get there before the minions start dying to the tower). At that point it'll be a 15-20 minion wave. Assuming it's 20 minions, and you've been off of bot lane for 2 minutes, you'll be getting 20 minions for the 2 minutes you've spent off lane, keeping with the 10 cs per minute rule you always want to aim for (though won't always be able to achieve). But even if it isn't quite 20 minions, the time that you've spent off of bot lane, you'll have spent farming mid lane, and maybe even jungle monsters. You'll essentially be farming 2 lanes at once, keeping you easily above the 10 CS per minute rule so long as you can consistently get to the bottom lane wave in time before the minions start dying to the tower. This won't always be possible, as CS isn't the most important thing in the game. Sometimes you'll be busy teamfighting, or making sure you're around in case a teamfight starts. But in general you'll want to go farm the wave as much as possible, then push the wave onto the enemey's side of the map to restart the push, both to get ahead in farm and to avoid having a huge minion wave destroy your tower.

When the wave that you're pushing is a cannon wave, that messes with this technique a little bit. Because you'll be killing the enemy cannon minion and letting your own cannon minion push uninterrupted, the enemy minion wave won't slowly push up to your tower. Instead your minions will continue to push forwards, very slowly. When it's a cannon wave, you should either push the 2nd wave too (if it's safe to do so, not at all safe to do when the enemy team is ahead in towers and enemy threats are unaccounted for on the minimap), or just recognize that you won't be able to get the wave to push back to you in this specific situation and settle for creating a slow push instead, rather than trying to create a farming opportunity for yourself later on.

The video also explains how to create a slow push, but this technique is very rarely useful in solo queue with how uncoordinated everyone is outside of very high Elo. Keep it in mind in case you ever think it could be useful, but most of the time it just ends up creating a huge minion wave for the enemy AD carry to farm, getting him ahead in farm instead of you. It's better suited for ranked 5s assuming your team understands the strength of a slow push, or if you're a high Challenger player and for some reason reading a MOBAFire guide.

In some situations, notably when you expect to be sieging for a while and especially sieging towers that are really close to the enemy base, such as inner towers and inhibitor towers, it's really not ideal to have to force yourself to go back bot lane to farm every 2 minutes. If you do the technique and you can't go bot you'll essentially have just created a slow push against yourself, causing the enemy minions to die to tower, wasting gold, damaging your tower, and possibly even destroying it. Rather than putting yourself in that situation, this is when you want to create a slow push against the enemy team, as they'll hopefully be too busy defending against the siege to send someone to clear bot. This way they'll be the ones losing minions to the tower, taking tower damage, and possibly losing a tower if it's already low. And if they do send someone to clear it, you'll either have an easier time sieging or your team will be able to dive the enemy team 5v4 under tower.



When it comes to team-fighting as an ADC, there is one golden rule which is the most basic team-fighting rule of all, and yet makes you an infinitely better team-fighter if you start following it; attack whoever's closest to you. If you stand at the back, behind your frontline, and just auto-attack whichever enemy is absolutely closest to you, you have the best possible positioning, as you'll only be in focus range of whoever's diving you, or whoever you're attacking. It's recommended in general to take down the enemy carries before the tanks, but as the ADC if you try to attack a carry then you're in range of every single member of the enemy team, and if they all focus you then you'll go down in under a second. By keeping your distance and attacking just whatever's closest, you'll be hardest to kill, and can therefore output maximum DPS by just staying alive and being able to auto-attack all fight long. The only time you should attack the enemy team's carries is when there's no other enemies standing between you and them.

The best players of all know not only when to follow that one basic rule, but also when to take even further measures to stay safe. Before you ever even get into a team-fight, you should have already analyzed what all the threats to you on the enemy team are, and play more safely or aggressively accordingly. For example, if a Shyvana is the one trying to dive you, you'd want to follow the rule of attacking whatever's closest, and just kite her while your team also hopefully tries to peel her.

But sometimes you need to turn the safety notch up another level and straight up walk away from someone that could be a threat to you. For example, if you're playing vs Zed, you cannot be one of the ones trying to focus him down while he still has enough cooldowns and HP to be a threat. Even if he's the only person in range of you, and you have 3-4 team-mates around you, you still can't be auto-attacking him until the threat he presents has been neutralized ( Death Mark goes on CD, or he gets so low that he'd die before he could burst you). All the skill and mechanics in the world won't stop him bursting you down in half a second if he gets near enough. And you not only need to stay out of his Death Mark range, you also have to account for the extra distance he can cover with Living Shadow, Youmuu's Ghostblade and Flash, and how quickly they can help him close the gap.

No, when you're playing against Zed and you see him running in your direction, you stay as far the f**k away from him as you can get. Don't help your team kill him, that's not your job. The assassin's job is to kill you, your job is to not die to him, and your team's job is to protect you from assassins by killing them. If the assassin commits their cooldowns onto someone else when they realize they can't get to you, that's when it's safe for you to walk back into the fight. Or if the assassin gets CC'd and blown up uselessly before they get to do anything, then it's also safe!

Champions that present such a large threat to you aren't just limited to assassins ( Talon, Zed, LeBlanc) that can burst you down within a second. Other champions, mostly if fed, can just out-duel you so brutally, that even if you have 2-3 team-mates helping you in an effective 1v3/1v4, you're still going to die if they can get in range of you. Champions that can commonly do this when fed are bruisers like Irelia, Jax, Renekton, etc. Champions tanky enough to qualify as tanks while still dealing huge damage to a squishy target like you, especially when fed. Against champions like these, it's really necessary for you to watch out and keep your distance. You can try poking them with the occasional auto-attack if possible, but you can't fully commit to DPS'ing them down until again, they either fall so low at your team's hands that they're no longer a threat, or realizing that they can't get to you, they commit their most important cooldowns (mobility and/or CC) onto someone else. In Irelia's case, it's safe to commit onto her when she's used either Bladesurge, as she won't be able to gap close to you or burst you with it (though Flash may still pose a threat), or Flawless Duet, as it'll prevent her using her deadly stun on you. And if she's used both then until they come off of cooldown she presents almost no threat at all, so long as you maintain good positioning and kite if she tries to walk towards you.

When following the rule of "attack whoever's closest", often you'll have to choose between two champions that are at a more or less equal distance from you, and it'll be optimal for you to attack one or the other, but it's hard to be completely certain about who the right target is. That being said, here are some things for you to consider which will hopefully lead to you making the right choice:

1) Which is the bigger threat?
You'll want to take out whoever's the biggest threat not just to yourself, but to your team as a whole, and disregard the weaker enemy. Sometimes it's not very clear cut, others you have to choose between a fed Riven and a 1/1/5 jungle Sion, in which case it's a very obvious choice which you should focus.

2) Who would die faster?
When the targets are equally threatening, you'll want to focus whichever one is squishiest/lower HP, as the sooner they're out of the fight, the sooner your team gains a numbers advantage. Sometimes even if they're the lower threat, it's still worth focusing them down first if they're going to die significantly faster, but only sometimes, and it depends on how big a threat the other possible target is.

3) Who's least likely to get away from you?
Nothing frustrates me more than placing Explosive Charge on a tank right as they start walking away/otherwise leave my range and I have to start auto-attacking someone else without having placed many/any stacks onto the guy I originally planned to focus. Even in non- Tristana scenarios, or when your Explosive Charge is already on cooldown, you'll want to focus the least mobile one as they're the ones most likely to die if they get low. A tank with gap closers like Zac (and let's just say his passive isn't up so you don't need to worry about that) may get low, then just leave the fight with Elastic Slingshot before you can finish him off. If your other option is an equally tanky Nautilus for example, he's less likely to be able to get away alive when he gets low.

Generally, from top to bottom those would be the most important factors to take into account respectively, but sometimes one factor, if it's big enough, can over-ride a generally more important factor. For example, choosing to DPS down a negative KDA, full AD Lee Sin, over a fed Riven, because you can kill the Lee in about 2 seconds while the Riven is both tankier and more mobile, so takes a fair while longer to kill.



Another important aspect about team-fighting again starts before you ever get into the team-fight; it starts when you're buying items at the shop. You should be looking towards the enemy team's composition and their items and adapting your purchases accordingly. Infinity Edge and Rapid Firecannon are your first 2 core items no matter what so you require no adaptation there, but afterwards you need to build more situationally.

Before you buy, open tab and analyze the enemy team. If they have CC that can be a real threat to you, especially when combined with magic damage, then you should aim to build a Mercurial Scimitar first. It'll allow you to play a little more aggressively against those bruisers I mentioned earlier too; you don't have to be as scared about getting 1-shot during the duration of Equilibrium Strike or Counter Strike anymore. You do still have to worry about the damage both of these guys do against a squishy target such as yourself though, so while you can play a little more aggressively, don't push it too hard, and continue to play with caution if any of these kind champs are fed. If the enemy team has so much armor that it makes Last Whisper a good purchase (something you'll just have to learn through experience), then buy it ASAP or you won't do any damage to armor stacked enemies.

Next I'm going to analyze a Tristana team-fight to show you with a real example exactly what should be going on in your head at the time.



00:20 - Only 2 people are more or less in my range, Corki and Nautilus, which is safe to fully commit to. I begin focusing Nautilus and would have switched over to Corki once the Tempered Fate ran out had he not immediately Flashed over the wall.

00:25 - Nautilus Flashes over the wall. The only nearby enemy is Tryndamere and he's retreating as well as low HP, so I don't consider him much of a threat, especially as my Flash and Buster Shot are up, so I Rocket Jump in pursuit of Nautilus knowing that even if he and Tryndamere turn I'll be perfectly safe.

00:31 - I make the mistake of walking face-first into Amumu who has Bandage Toss and Curse of the Sad Mummy up; however this may have been because I knew I was relatively safe since even if Bandage Toss were to hit me, I had Mercurial Scimitar up.

00:32 - Upon seeing the Bandage Toss I try to juke it and it instead hits Bard. When this happens I know he's going to go for an immediate Curse of the Sad Mummy to lock me down for his team-mates and try to do damage to me himself. Rather than use my 90 second CD Mercurial Scimitar active to get rid of it, I instead pre-emptively Rocket Jump backwards so that the snare goes off while I'm already in my Rocket Jump animation. This way, at the expense of immediately being able to DPS Amumu down, I save my Mercurial Scimitar active in case it proves to be necessary later. ( Bandage Toss or Mocking Shout)

00:35 - Once Curse of the Sad Mummy's CC runs out, I walk forwards to keep attacking champions seeing as it's safe.

00:36 - Tryndamere spins into my range so I turn to him, but after 1 auto-attack I stop DPS'ing since he activates Undying Rage and he won't lose any more HP. I can't turn on Amumu either since I don't want to get trapped between Tryndamere and Amumu so I instead walk backwards until it's safe to auto-attack again.

00:39 - Here I decide it's safe to turn again since Undying Rage is about to run out and Tryndamere has no time to close the gap on me before it does, so he's pretty much out of the fight as far as I'm concerned. I turn on Amumu, but knowing that his Bandage Toss is likely up I only do a single auto-attack before juking to the side. As expected I dodge the Bandage Toss, and it's important to note that it wasn't reaction time that made me dodge it; I dodged it because I knew it was likely to come so I automatically juked to the side as I would against any skillshot champion. If there had been no Bandage Toss to dodge I still would have juked to the side, and then after my next auto-attack I would have juked to the opposite side, making it hard for him to land the skillshot since I'm not standing in one place.

00:40 - I auto-attack him once more while still kiting backwards to make sure he can't get to me, at which point he turns around knowing he'd die before reaching me.

00:41 - Tryndamere's Undying Rage runs out while he's still in my auto-attack range, so I turn back to him just as he tries to spin away. Luckily the one auto-attack I could get off was a crit so it kills him even after he heals.

00:42 - After Vladimir Flashes away, Corki tries to turn on me but knowing I'm a lot stronger and that his 2 team-mates are too far away to immediately aid him, I take the fight while kiting backwards to make sure Tryndamere and Zed won't reach me for as long as possible.

00:44 - Zed manages to close the gap just as I land the soon-to-be killing blow on Corki so I Flash away to make sure he can't land any fatal damage to me while I turn to kill him.

00:45 - After my Flash Zed has no means of getting to me and killing me before I could kill him so he begins to run away. I switch from kiting to chasing him while orb-walking.

00:46 - He realizes running away isn't enough to get away from my auto-attacks thanks to red buff (spectator mode bugged and doesn't show I have one, but that's where all the slows are coming from), so he Flashes away. Corki's running right to me so I could turn to finish him, but I realize that my Explosive Charge is going to kill him anyway, so rather than immediately finishing him off I Rocket Jump after Zed while Corki's still alive, so his death will give me a reset to use a second Rocket Jump for chasing.

00:47 - I Rocket Jump forwards and focus down Zed first, since he's the squishiest and I need to kill him before his Living Shadow comes back up and saves him.

00:49 - 2 auto-attacks in I'm still in auto-attack range but I Rocket Jump forwards anyway to close as much of the gap onto Amumu I can, knowing that after I kill Zed I'll get yet another Rocket Jump to chase with that'll guarantee his death.

00:51 - Getting another reset off Zed I Rocket Jump on top of Amumu and get the slow on him, at which point it's clear he'll die so he just turns on me and attacks me for the sake of doing something, even though he can't kill me either. Rather than immediately kill him I run behind him and kill him with an unnecessary Buster Shot in BM.

And thus the team-fight ends with me having barely received a scratch, but having 100-0'd Nautilus, last-hit Tryndamere, 100-0'd Corki, 100-0'd Zed and 40-0'd Amumu. I still had Buster Shot and Mercurial Scimitar to spare to keep me safe had I needed them, so the team-fight was played well enough that I was really nowhere near falling at any point. When I had to back away I did, and when I had to go aggressive I did.





Before you even get into lane, you should know that Tristana is an ADC with a fairly weak laning phase. This means that often, you'll find yourself on the losing end of lanes, at least at first, even if you think you're playing fine; that's just how Tristana is, unless you're vastly superior to your enemies. But even then...

The key to getting through lane phase on Tristana even when you're in a lane where just because of the matchup alone you can't possibly win early-game, is to farm safely. Sometimes you'll need to stand far back and miss a few last-hits. Sometimes you'll even need to stand out of XP range. It's okay. It goes against your every instinct to just give up the lane like that, but it's what you need to do to survive. It's okay for you to fall behind, it's not okay for you to die a few times in lane when it can be avoided. During your death you'll miss all the CS and XP that you would have missed by standing really far back anyway. Just play really safe, avoid dying, and get whatever CS you can. If you have a chance to win your lane, either because it's a good matchup or you're way better than your opponent, then great, do that. But when you're losing your lane, remember to farm safely. It's fine to lose lane, you just need to lose lane gracefully.




During laning phase, your objectives are to out-CS your opponent, kill them if possible, and take down their tower ASAP. Most of the damage you do to the tower will be while your enemy is off the lane, either shoved out or dead, so you don't have to worry too much about wearing the tower down when the lane is pushed towards them. In those situations I mainly focus on harassing the enemy, and attacking the tower when that's not an option.

Before getting into lane, you should help your jungler do red buff by auto-attacking it until it drops to about ~200 HP. If your jungler isn't starting on bot side, you and your support should instead go into the bot lane brush on the enemy's side of the lane and wait until minions spawn so you can immediately start pushing and get a shove going.




As soon as you get into lane, you should immediately start spamming auto-attacks on the minions, starting with the melee minions, to push faster than the enemy bot lane and therefore be able to hit level 2 faster. You should be aiming to last-hit all the minions too even though you're also meant to be spamming auto-attacks. This means that when an auto-attack would leave a minion on very low HP and cause it to be finished off by minions, you need to wait until it gets low enough for you to last-hit. That doesn't mean you have to waste time while you wait; instead you auto-attack a different minion, then when you're able to auto-attack again you turn back to the original minion to last-hit it.

FYI: It takes 6 minions of the first wave and then another 3 melee minions to hit level 2 on bot lane.

If the enemy bot lane hits level 2 before you you have no option but to back off and let them zone you. Don't try to trade, don't try to last-hit, don't try to fight them when they engage on you; the level advantage is a huge one, and they can win any fight they force on you from there. You'll only miss a few minions since if they've hit level 2 before you, then they're pushing the lane, so the minions should end up near you tower soon enough, allowing you to hit level 2 as well. If, on the other hand, you and your support are the first to hit level 2, this means you can zone the enemy bot lane. Even once they hit level 2, they'll still have to stay zoned until the wave hits their tower and the lane equalizes, as you'll have the minion and positioning advantage to dissuade them from trying to contest your zoning. If when you move in to zone them they just try to fight you, it should be an easy fight for you and your support to win. Tristana has a very dangerous level 2 if she's fighting level 1 enemies, as they'll be so weak that she can freely Rocket Jump into melee range and still out-trade them. If your support is on the same wave-length as you and trying to fight them, you should Rocket Jump onto the enemy ADC/the support if they're easier to kill, and place Explosive Charge on them mid-air. When you land you'll instantly place one stack, and the huge slow should keep them in your range long enough to possibly get full stacks on them, providing you with a Rocket Jump reset and possibly allowing you to use it a second time in one fight, should they still be far enough away from the tower for you to Rocket Jump on top of them again.

All in all, if they don't respect your level 2 advantage, they will either die, take a lot of damage, burn some summoners, or all 3. And the same will happen to you if you're slow to hit level 2 and you don't respect their level 2 power.




You'll notice while playing Tristana that Explosive Charge's passive can make last-hitting complicated. I wish there was some secret trick I could give you to help you get past that, but truth is, it's just a case of getting used to it. The only thing I can tell you is that sometimes you'll need to aim to last-hit a minion in a way where the explosion will also kill another minion that you'd otherwise miss.

Your playstyle should revolve around what kind of a support you have. If you have someone like Leona or Nautilus, it's often viable to Rocket Jump on top of one of the enemies for extra burst and an Explosive Charge stack when they engage, especially after level 6 when you can add Buster Shot into the mix, as your being in melee range won't matter because you'll be bursting them down very quickly, leaving them no time to abuse your positioning. With other more passive, trade-focused supports, such as Janna, Nami, Karma, you'll want to hold on to Rocket Jump either to finish enemies off or to get away when a fight goes wrong, and just focus on short trades with enemies without over-extending too much. The way you do this was already explained in How to ADC.




If you manage to force your enemies (or at least the ADC) out of lane, by killing them or otherwise, you should shove your minion wave into their tower as fast as you can to make them lose out on CS and XP, then recall for items, which should usually give you some form of item advantage, as well as XP advantage.

Sometimes the enemy has a large enough minion wave, or has another minion wave incoming, that you won't be able to shove your wave into their tower in time to make the enemy ADC lose all their CS. But instead, often you can just recall, get your items, then get back into lane just in time to catch the minions as they reach your tower. In that scenario this is the most beneficial option, as rather than losing your minions to their tower, the enemy is losing your minions to their own minions, because of their minion advantage, explained in the video linked in Farming Out of Lane.

But sometimes you can't do this because either a) the enemy minion wave is too big, and would push to your tower before you have time to get back into lane (you can try to remedy this by thinning out the minion wave in some cases, leaving it big enough to still push but not too fast), or b) you need the gold from pushing the minion wave for your next item, in which case it's worth shoving the wave even if it doesn't cost the enemy ADC any CS.

Here's a video by SoloRenektonOnly, that recently hit the front page of reddit, which does a good job showing you exactly how this works.


It could also be helpful for you to go through the comments of the thread at some point and read SoloRenektonOnly's responses to questions, it can teach you a lot about wave management and answer any questions you might still have after reading this and watching the video.

The exceptions to going back after forcing your enemies out of lane are when you can't afford any important items and you're already full HP and stocked up on Health Potions anyway, in which case you can shove the wave to the enemy tower and just do as much damage to the tower as you can, or when you think the enemy's absence from the lane will be enough for you to take down the enemy tower, which if you succeed, will give you 650 gold if tower FB, or 250 gold if not.

If you want the lane to deny some CS from your enemy while you're taking the tower and you know you're safe from ganks and guaranteed to take the tower, you can bounce your minion wave off the enemy tower. Bouncing means that when you've pushed your minion wave to the enemy tower and have the tower on low HP, rather than auto-attack it and destroy it right away, you leave it on 5-10% HP for a bit while it kills your minion wave, denying CS from the enemy ADC as they're not on the lane. You time it in such a way that once it kills the last minion, you need only attack the tower a single time to destroy it. You can then either go into the brush and recall or shove the wave before recalling, depending on how much you can get away with in the situation, and whether you need the gold or not.




If your jungler successfully ganks you should ping him to help you take down your tower. Most junglers would rather either take dragon or just leave the lane to go keep farming, but the gold you get from taking down a tower is worth more than either of those options. Don't flame them if it doesn't go your way, just ping the tower and try to communicate with them to say that it's important for the team for you to take down the tower. Once it's down, it'll be easier for your team to transition that into dragons anyway.

Once you've taken down the enemy tower, you should recall for items. It's extremely risky to start laning at their inner tower, due to the risk of jungle ganks, so once you've pushed the wave past their turret, you should either take dragon with your jungler if he's around and willing to do it, or just rotate mid and try to gank and kill the enemy mid laner if possible, or otherwise try to take the tower down 3v1. It may take a while to do so, and you may find that you'll have to go back bot lane a few times to defend the tower, farm the minions and push it onto the enemy's side of the map again, then rotate mid for a little more tower damage, then move back bot to defend the tower. Every time you return mid lane you can try to go for another gank if the enemy mid laner is overextended, if you manage to kill him then you can definitely take the tower. If the enemy mid laner is someone with amazing waveclear, such as Anivia, then you might find it would take you way too long to actually take the tower down even 3v1. In that situation it's better that once you've taken down the tower, you ask your top laner if he'll lane swap with you. If he accepts, then you and your support will go top lane into a 2v1, where you'll be trying to take an easy tower, and your top laner will go bot lane to lane 1v2 and just try to survive and get as much farm as he can. On your way to top lane, ask your jungler in advance to come gank top and dive 3v1, at this stage of the game there's almost no top laner that can survive that kind of tower dive even when at full HP. If he sees your jungler coming through wards, or otherwise manages to escape alive, you can still just zone him away from the tower with your jungler and easily take the tower down in one wave as 3.

The enemy team obviously has the potential to do the same thing as you, but you're the one setting the stage. You're prepared in advance for what's to happen and know what to do, and the enemy team is being taken by surprise and most likely won't immediately know how to react properly. Not to mention, having lost one of their towers already, they won't be preparing to shove into your tower, rather they'll be trying to freeze on their side of the wave for as long as they can, to stay safe. This is bad for your top laner in the sense that he won't be able to CS properly until the wave does reach his tower, if at all, but good in the sense that they won't be able to dive him straight away even if they do think to do it. He should also have the sense to place defensive wards so he can see the enemy jungler coming in case he does come for a dive, which the enemy top laner won't know to do in advance as he isn't prepared for the 1v2 situation he's about to be placed in.

Once you've taken the top lane turret there's not much else left for you to do other than group and make plays as a team. Having taken two towers your team should hopefully be at a large gold advantage. If the enemy bot lane is trying to take your bot tower you can recall, go bot and try to kill them 4v2 with your jungler, or 3v2 with your top laner, or 5v2 if your mid lane and jungler are willing to help. From there on it's mid-game, and you should be going for whatever objectives you can get with your team.



Outside of laning phase, your objective is to destroy the nexus. No I'm not kidding, that's literally the best way to describe it. Every action you take in laning phase is to set you up for mid-late game, every action you take outside of laning phase is to bring you one step closer to destroying the enemy nexus. The way you do this is by performing actions that will make killing the enemy team easier (aquiring gold, dragons, barons) so that you have less resistance, and destroying towers as a way to acquire gold, have better control of the map, and open up routes to the nexus.

At this point you should be grouping with your team as much as possible to teamfight and siege down towers. Tristana is one of the best ADC's in the game for sieging towers, due to her extremely high auto-attack range, Explosive Charge and Rapid Fire. She can also keep herself safe from aggressors by Rocket Jumping away should someone try to engage on her while she sieges.

Sieging towers is pretty simple, but you need to be careful about it. When both teams are alive and your team is trying to take a tower, it's your job to do as much damage as you can to the tower without dying. You need to do as much damage as you can while remaining safe. This means you can't just walk up to the tower, press Q and stand there auto-attacking until it dies; this leaves you open to get engaged upon, unless there's no resistance from the enemy team. Instead you have to repeatedly poke the tower. Walk up to it, attack it a bit, back off if someone dangerous is walking up to you. Now you might think "but what if they never stop protecting their tower? Doesn't that mean it's never safe for me to auto-attack it?". If they're constantly standing in a defensive position in relation to their tower, then they're in range for your team to attack them and force them back. They need to be in a place where it's safe for them to sit and look for a good engage, where your team has no way to attack them besides tower diving them, which only works when you're super ahead. And if they advance, that takes them further out of safety, so if you match their movements to stay safe from an engage, they'll be forced to move back for their own safety again, as they don't want to get engaged on either, nor poked down to a point where they need to back to recover their HP. So you should think of sieging as, slowly whittling down a tower. It almost never takes a single minion wave to destroy a tower (unless you have baron buff), it can take many, many waves, but slowly but surely, the tower will go down if you can siege it properly.

When you're attacking a tower with enemies nearby you always want to be positioned at max range from the tower while you auto-attack, and in between auto-attacks you should move backwards then forwards, so that while your auto-attack is "on cooldown", you're not spending any more time closer to the danger than necessary. It's also good habit in case they start to try an engage and you're already automatically moving backwards the moment you finish your auto-attack, meaning you'll often protect yourself from an engage faster than you can actually react to it, so long as you notice in time to not move back towards the tower for your next auto-attack.

Against teams with very high wave clear (f**k you Anivia), it can be very hard if not impossible to siege down towers, especially inhibitor towers that actually recover HP all the time. Your options in these situations are to engage on the enemy team under their tower, which only works when you're reaaaaaaaally far ahead, or go get baron. The enemy team won't usually just give up baron for free though, and so you can use this to bait them into a fight. They'll need to constantly have vision on baron to make sure you're not doing it, which can be hard to keep up if your team places pinks and uses Oracle's Lens to clear their wards, so at some point they might have no choice but to face check baron to make sure you're not doing it. Even if you are, you can take the opportunity to turn around and team-fight.




I hope this guide helped you learn to play Tristana. She was the first ADC I ever took a liking to, back in season 2, and since starting to main ADC she's always been one of my favourite ADC's both pre and post rework, not specifically because of her strength as a champion, but just because she's always been so fun to play. I hope this guide will help you see that and play her to her full potential. :)

Special thanks to Janitsu as well for coding my guide when I asked him on such short notice, I think it turned out pretty great so kudos to him!

If you still have any further questions after reading the guide, feel free to ask in the comments, I'll try to answer them as soon as possible and consider addressing them in the guide so future readers may not have the same questions.