Hey there, I'm Zianni. I'm a challenger mid lane and Veigar is my go to off-role pick. With decent match ups and a heavy emphasis on AD Haste items for S11, Veigar will make a great addition to any team lacking Ability Power. He has a lot of good match ups making it easy to snowball and take control of team fights. If you enjoy stacking gameplay, nuclear one shots or upsetting ADC players. I think you'll enjoy Veigar :). Check out my livestream at https://www.twitch.tv/zianni so you can become a challenger Veigar too!

Electrocute is currently still the best in slot rune for Veigar as it offers additional laning power and giving us access to sustain. Ravenous Hunter and Taste of Blood Due to Veigar's scaling potential, it's important to supplement his weak early game damage with Electrocute so that you can take advantage of heavy support damage meta. If you win early, it's nearly impossible to match Veigar in the 2v2.

ELECTROCUTE

Electrocute awards us for doing short trade windows to set up a kill window, keep your trades short and concise based around your cooldowns until ultimate is available. Alternatively, take advantage of poke damage to ensure a kill combo using the bonus damage.

Taste of Blood is great for trading in lane and helps with healing up poke damage. Makes mispositioning less punishing.

Eyeball Collection What better than another source of stacking damage on a stacking champion, Veigar gets a lot of value out of raw AP but has no use for Zombie Ward or Ghost Poro in lane.

Relentless Hunter is the ultimate form of utility for getting in range to catch boxes or just general rotations. The movespeed is extremely valuable and makes the champion overall more consistent.

Manaflow Band is our first sorcery rune to top off our mana pool and regeneration for a fun stacking experience.

With the changes to Cosmic Insight, we'll be teching into the sorcery tree now for Transcendence for the haste. More CDR, more stacks.

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AP/AP and Armor/Magic Resist shards based on match up.

Due to Veigar's playstyle, there isn't much of a purpose for Liandry's Anguish outside of additional haste. You could technically run an Archangels build, but there is no value in optimizing for mid game when your laning phase is this strong.

For this reason, you're either going Everfrost for the 100% confirmed snare/root combo into a one shot. The item is really inexpensive, giving you immediate stats and overall survivability.

If you don't care about survivability and you're confident in boxing, Flat Penetration will be our core stat making Luden's Tempest our first item. (Note that Rocketbelt offers the same mythic bonus)

Sorcerer's Shoes is extremely important to the build because it reduces the enemy's magic resistance increasing our base damage by a hefty amount for 800g. It's also important to recognize that purchasing Luden's Tempest will bring your total magic penetration up to 24, most carries have a base magic resist of 30 meaning you'll be doing nearly 100% tool-tip damage if the enemy doesn't buy a Null-Magic Mantle. (It's pretty nice to just add up the numbers in your skill descriptions and know when you can one-shot someone.)

Once you finish a Legendary item, the Mythic bonus will put you up to 29.

Most low elo players even up until masters will ego and refuse to buy early magic resist making double Magic Pen an extremely strong combination. (Due to the magic pen formula, flat pen can never bring MR below 0.)

Once our core is completed, we need to ***es the situation and pick our next items based on the game state. Zhonya's Hourglass is a must purchase into heavy AD teams, otherwise Rabadon's Deathcap is the best in slot item for Veigar. If you're lacking penetration, Void Staff is your item.

Banshee's Veil is a good solution for long range initiation like Ashe arrow or Leona ultimates. Most of these items will be interchangable with each other, but the ideal situation is to complete Rabadon's Deathcap for the absurd AP stacking.

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Also Mercury's Treads are a good pick up into a heavy CC team or even Plated Steelcaps if they're all auto attack reliant.

SUMMONER SPELLS All three are extremely valuable and can change the flow of a game. - FLASH is a must include because it’s both a playmaking tool and a defensive tool. The cooldown should always be tracked so you can take advantage of its absence or play around its availability. (I.E Flash ult) Cleanse is an ideal solution to heavy CC teams saving you an item slot from building Quicksilver Sash. TELEPORT while typically inferior in lane for Solo Q has incredible application and a lot more variety to it. You can use it to avoid an unwinnable match up, join team fights, or simply get back to lane faster. While the application of this spell is more difficult than Heal, it has a lot more influence than Heal if you can control the flow.

Outside of summoner spell selection, it's important to recognize optimal compositions for Veigar. He does extremely well into short range teams because of the zone control from Event Horizon making it harder for them to initiate.

While Zhonya's Hourglass is a good deterrent it can be difficult to play Veigar into long range poke or hard initiation. Tank items can help supplement this weakness by building MR/Armor boots but it doesn't stop his inherent weakness against gap closing champions.

Finally, Veigar is a fantastic pick when your team is lacking Ability Power. Once again, S11 has a lot of strong AD items making it more likely to get an AD mid and if you're unlucky you'll find your team is running full AD. While armor penetration items are certainly stronger, it makes sense to maximize your potential by avoiding these situations. Being the only AP makes it harder for the enemy to itemize against your one shot potential while making room for your teammates to breathe.

It's ideal to pick Veigar in 1AP-4AD comps or 2AP-3AD comps. Most supports do magical so it's hard to achieve 1AP-4AD. As long as you're avoiding 4AP comps you'll be fine, Veigar has a very difficult time against multiple tanks due to their lifepool + resistances.

Veigar's lane phase is incredibly simple. All you need to do is farm, use your Auto Attacks to create situations where your Baleful Strike can get +2 AP as opposed to +1 or look to last hit minions while tagging an enemy champion with the second hit. It's honestly frustrating to lane against a Veigar because if they're committed to farming there's not much you can do to interrupt him.

Low elo players refuse to wave manipulate which means you'll always find them pushing the wave into your tower. This is extremely beneficial to Veigar as it creates a larger threat with your Event Horizon but it almost means your farm is uncontested. It's nearly impossible to be tower dived as Veigar if you're in a decent match up so take advantage of that to safely farm until you hit level 4.

You can opt to trade with Veigar pre-level 4, but your ultimate goal is one shotting the enemy anyways making it irrelevant. Prioritize Ability Power and last hitting so you can pick up a Lost Chapter on your first back.

This is especially important because it solves your Mana Issues while also granting a decent chunk of haste to stack easier. With the addition of Electrocute you'll be able to one shot most champions if your support is on the heavier side of damage, if you're unable to find a favorable situation it's acceptable to ignore the match up entirely until level 6.

Primordial Burst is essentially the death bell for this lane. The moment you unlock this ability, it doesn't matter how awful your support is or how bad lane is going. It just takes one combo to take a life. While using Event Horizon can be difficult, it's also a great zoning tool to close distance for your support or you can simply wait for others to land CC to chain it.

The nice thing about Veigar is that the box is the ideal set up for jungler ganks or to prevent being ganked. It's an extremely versatile skill that is the backbone of our laning, but it also represents a vulnerability. Play around the cooldown, don't be over-confident when it's down or you'll be punished. You might have one shot potential with just a simple Baleful Strike + Primordial Burst electrocute combo but only one of these skills is targeted.

Every death is equivelant to time you're not stacking, always put your life ahead of ego.

Once you've finished Luden's Tempest, there is almost nothing that can change the match up for the enemy outside of hard CC. You can continue to free farm or you can signal the end of laning phase by taking tower so that you can rotate mid lane.

It's important to recognize that if you run Teleport it's ok to side lane as Veigar once you've taken the bot tower, but you'll want to typically go mid lane for priority on objectives like dragon or rift herald. With a large amount of Ability Power, your auto attacks will shred tower making it easier to create dead zones on the map as opposed to just spending your time bot lane. You're a scaling champion, but you're a team fight menace. It's important to be there for important objectives or you'll never get the opportunity to utilize your champion's strengths.

Veigar is completely dependent on Event Horizon in the middle game to ensure his safety but also to create pick opportunities. If you're playing front to back, you'll be extremely safe with the protection of your teammates. Otherwise, you'll need to follow up on your teammate's engage and look to use Dark Matter as a psuedo execute. It honestly just takes one good box to change a fight entirely or deny the enemy due to it's massive zone control + duration. (3.5 seconds btw)

Primordial Burst is our biggest form of damage and should be typically used to remove carries from team fights, but it's acceptable to use it defensively if their front line is disrupting the fight too much. Regardless of ult targetting, the only thing that a Veigar player should focus on improving is their ability to control fights using Event Horizon. It interrupts dashes, it'll zone off carries, and it'll make it easier for your teammates to navigate through the fight.

To simplify things, Event Horizon is god. Your game is decided by Event Horizon have faith in it. Otherwise, enjoy nuking carries that overstep their boundaries.

If you're struggling with positioning it'll be much more meaningful to itemize towards that by purchasing a Zhonya's Hourglass or Banshee's Veil as you can't do damage if you're dead.