I’ll be highlighting some of the prominent Marksmen in 11.9 to help you get started on the role, while also providing a few advanced tips for those more experienced or those who are looking for a challenge in the role.
In League of Legends, Marksman is a champion archetype that, since Season 11’s rework of the item system, has seen a rise in power due to the strength of each Marksman Mythic. However, most Marksmen still need time to get strong and truly fulfill the namesake of “carry”. I’ll be highlighting some of the most prominent Marksmen in 11.9 to help you get started with the role, while also providing a few advanced tips for those more experienced or those who are looking for a challenge in the role.
Following a series of buffs to Fishbones, Flame Chompers!, and a revert of a nerf to her base health, Jinx has come back into the eye of competitive play and is quite popular in solo queue at the moment. She has the added benefit of being a hypercarry, which means that the longer the game goes, your chances of winning increase significantly. However, like other hypercarries, she does trade off a strong late game for a weaker early game (although less so compared to other Marksmen such as Kog’Maw). With Jinx, you generally want to slowly whittle down your opponent’s health bars as opposed to fighting all-ins like you would with a Kai’Sa or Samira. Here are a few tips to help you scale into that late game monster:
• Fishbones, the rocket launcher mode on Switcheroo!, is a very strong tool within the laning phase for poking your opponent down. Jinx’s attack range is five hundred and twenty five, but when you switch forms, you gain an extra one hundred range on your auto attacks that increases by an extra twenty-five every rank you put into Switcheroo! That means by rank two, you are matching the auto attack range of Caitlyn and Calibrum Aphelios, and by rank three, your basic attacks outrange all other marksmen’s basic auto attack ranges in the game. You can use this range to your advantage and get easy chip damage on your opponents, and if your opponents are sitting in the minion wave, you can also hit them by attacking the minions with Fishbones and splashing the damage onto them.
• Unsure if you should learn Zap! or Flame Chompers! at level two? An easy way to figure out is what your support is capable of doing. If your support is someone who wants to make short trades like an Alistar, or is an enchanter such as Lulu or Janna, Zap! is usually the better ability to learn as you want to keep poking your enemy down, and those champions either make your Zap! easier to hit or want to poke with you. With champions such as Leona and Rell who get in the fight and stay there, Flame Chompers! is the better ability to level as they keep your opponents locked down for long periods of time which allow you to guarantee the root, and will generally net you a kill if they land a good engage on the enemy bottom lane.
• One feature about Zap! that you can only find out if you look at the detailed information is that the cast time of the ability goes down based on your bonus attack speed. Pow-Pow, the minigun form on Switcheroo! also gives bonus attack speed, meaning what you can do in the early lane is stack up your mini-gun attack speed and then look to use Zap! on your opponent, as they will have less time to react due to the bonus attack speed granted from Pow-Pow.
One half of the Lovers Duo, Xayah is a Marksman that has strong early game pressure - especially when paired with Rakan, that also scales well into the late game. She functions very well as an anti-dive character that excels against low range characters that have to play within her feather pull range in order to fight her. Overall, she’s a very versatile Marksman that has the added bonus of having a self-sufficient defensive tool in her ultimate ability, Featherstorm, meaning you can interrupt that pesky assassin’s combo or beefy tank’s engage and turn the tides of battle back in your favor. If these ideas sound appealing to you, here is some advice to get you started:
• Much of your damage within laning is reliant on Deadly Plumage and Bladecaller. This is important to realize because generally you want to save these abilities for when you are able to damage targets consistently, meaning you often want to save these abilities when following up on your support’s crowd control abilities. A small tip as well specifically for the Rakan lane is that you can start Deadly Plumage level one along with Rakan starting Grand Entrance, and what you can do to maximize your damage in this lane is wait until Rakan hits his Grand Entrance and as the target begins to get knocked up, you then activate Deadly Plumage because both you and Rakan are able to make maximum usage of the ability’s damage. You often can secure an early kill or force a few summoners out from the enemy bottom lane due to how much damage Deadly Plumage does early with Rakan being able to apply it as well.
• Be sure to know what abilities are most threatening to you before you have a teamfight. This is true of any Marksman, but especially with a champion like Xayah who can dodge enemy abilities with Featherstorm. It’s important to know what you need to avoid so you can anticipate those abilities in advance and make the most of your usage with Featherstorm. However, don’t be greedy with your ultimate ability. After all, it’s better to be safe than sorry than to be pushed out of a fight because you worried too much about a single ability.
• An easy combo to get fast roots in lane is to walk at your target and activate Deadly Plumage, get off a single auto attack, and then immediately use Double Daggers and then use Bladecaller. The reason this works is because Xayah will pull back on feathers that are outgoing when you casted the ability, meaning that even though your first feather from your auto attack will be the only one to initially pull back on the cast, it will also pull back the feathers from Double Dagger as soon as they land on the ground and count them towards your root. This tactic is extremely effective at catching your opponents off guard as most players don’t realize you can delay your feathers for the root in this way. However, it is important to make sure that you hit at least three feathers using this as it is the minimum needed to root a target. If your opponent is able to react quickly enough to get away from this combo, it may be best to just use Double Daggers into Bladecaller for quick poke as this short combo still does a hefty amount of damage if you can hit both feathers.
Although not as widely picked as she once was, Ashe is still an excellent starting champion for someone new to the role of Marksman due to her ease of play as well as playmaking potential with Enchanted Crystal Arrow. However, she remains deadly in more experienced hands due to the kiting capability her kit provides with her slow and high damage output with Ranger’s Focus. Here are some tips to make the most of Ashe’s kit:
• As cool as is it to get clips of cross map snipes with Enchanted Crystal Arrow, it is generally better to save your ultimate ability for your own lane or jungle skirmishes near you. Many Ashe players fall into this trap and miss critical moments to win the two versus two fights or three versus three fights around the dragon because they don’t have Enchanted Crystal Arrow available to them because they tried to make a one in ten chance of working shot down mid instead. It is an important tool that allows your jungler and support to then follow up on your crowd control and secure the kills, and because the metagame is currently centered around bottom lane much of the time due to the power of slaying as many dragons as you can for the dragon soul buffs, it’s better to save it for when the plays inevitably come to you.
• The best usage of Hawkshot often comes from getting as much vision as you can in the enemy’s jungle. You can often figure out where the enemy jungler wants to make their next play based on their camps left up. For example, if you are playing on Blue side and you use Hawkshot and see that the Red side Jungler’s Wolves, Blue, and Gromp are all gone and they are currently are on their Raptor camp with their Krug camp still alive, they are likely going to look to make a play on mid or top lane. As a result of having this information, you can look to be a bit more aggressive in your lane. This can also help your team to play safer and avoid the enemy Jungler’s gank, while also giving your Jungler a chance to make a better decision for what they want to do next. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t ever use it to spot ganks you might see coming through your lane, but if you have little to no vision of the enemy’s jungle it helps a lot to establish some baseline knowledge for you and your teammates.
• Ashe’s trading patterns can vary a bit in lane with Volley. Volley is a powerful spell that you can use to help get you in range to hit your opponent with auto attacks to start stacking Ranger’s Focus, but it also works very well in trades where you can only do a few autos and can’t quite get Ranger’s Focus off. In the case that you can only do short trades, you want to look to auto attack your opponent first and then use Volley, as it will grant your Volley a bit more damage due to Frost Shot increasing the damage of all spells and abilities onto targets affected by the Frost affect which is applied by your auto attacks. However, be sparing with your Volley usage and try to mostly use it for attacking the enemy champions, as it costs quite a lot of mana and you will quickly be unable to use any abilities if you use it too frequently.
• Ranger’s Focus takes time to come online due to you needing to attack four times in a short period to use it, but you can do a few small things to get better use out of it. If you think you are about to start a trade in a minion wave, you can hit a minion a few times to get a few stacks and instantly use it by the time you start fighting the enemy champions. Ranger’s Focus also works as an auto cancel, which means that you can send out an auto attack and then immediately activate Ranger’s Focus to get another auto attack, which adds a surprise burst of damage to your trades. This is also good to maximize your damage from Ranger’s Focus, as your first shot from Ranger’s Focus shoots out an extra bolt of damage and combined with the increased damage from Frost being applied means you are doing an extra twenty one to twenty five percent of an auto attack’s damage that is also amplified by an one hundred and ten percent of it’s damage plus your critical strike chance. Finally, make sure to use Ranger’s Focus when you have the most time to deal damage consistently. Sometimes it’s better to hold onto your fully stacked Ranger’s Focus and not immediately activate it if you can’t get the consistent damage off.
Similar to Ashe, Sivir is a Marksman champion that enables her teammates to engage with her ultimate ability, On the Hunt. However, unlike Ashe, Sivir has the added bonus of being a powerful scaling carry due to Ricochet’s ability to crit and the flat damage increasing based on your AD and ability level. This means that in teamfights by around two to three completed items, you will be putting out massive amounts of damage to multiple targets at once, and it also makes your wave clear extremely fast, meaning you will have an easy time killing minions and getting more gold the longer the game goes on. With this in mind, here are a few hints to lead the charge to victory:
• The most important part of your kit is your spell shield; good spell shield usage separates a good Sivir from a great Sivir, and it’s important to know when you should use your cooldown. For example, if you’re against a hook support such as a Blitzcrank and a marksman like Ezreal, if you use your Spell Shield against an Ezreal Mystic Shot you then leave yourself open to being Rocket Grabbed by Blitzcrank. Instead, you should try to save your shield for important engage abilities like Rocket Grab, so then you can freely damage whoever afterwards. Treat this ability similarly to Xayah’s Featherstorm in teamfights as well, and try to anticipate important engage spells that the enemy may try to use on you, as that will improve your reaction speed to these dangerous spells and allow you to win teamfights off of clutch Spell Shield usage.
• In lane, it’s important to get the maximum amount of damage you can out of Boomerang Blade, but you also have to be smart about when to use it. Watch your enemy’s movements and wait for the proper time to throw it out when they can’t dodge. Some good opportunities are when your enemy is hugging a wall as they have little room to move around and it’s easier for you to match their movement on the return hit, or just following up on a crowd control ability that will guarantee both hits of Boomerang Blade. If your enemy has a lot of room to move and can easily walk out of range, it might be best to hold onto it since it costs a lot of mana and you will become reliant on needing to get Spell Shield mana back, which can be dangerous if you are being threatened by a gank and need to save it.
• On the Hunt is a powerful tool in engaging fights, but it’s also very useful in helping you to get to fights faster. If you see your jungler fighting the other jungler in the bottom river, it can be more beneficial to activate it to get to the fight so that you can arrive before the enemy bottom lane and win the fight before the other team has a chance to respond. It is also worth remembering that On the Hunt provides attack speed while Ricochet is active. This means that in your build path, you can opt for AD items like Essence Reaver, Galeforce, and Infinity Edge as your three items and still output fairly consistent DPS while you have Ricochet active. There is also a build used by some Sivir players that takes advantage of this by building Phantom Dancer and Kraken Slayer, as combined with Lethal Tempo and her Ricochet attack speed, she is able to get the Kraken Slayer active true damage out incredibly fast.
Rounding out the list is one of Bandle City’s finest, Tristana. She is an extremely powerful pick in competitive play and in solo queue due to her incredible early game snowball potential, as well as being able to go to multiple lanes (primarily Mid and Bot, but she can go Top as well). Because of this, she can work well for any Marksman player in case you get autofilled in Mid or Top in solo queue, while making the enemy second guess where you will be going as well. With that said, here are a few pointers to get you jumping up the ranked ladder:
• Tristana can cast any of her spells during her Rocket Jump, including Explosive Charge and Buster Shot. What this means is that if you’re looking to engage an enemy, you can start your Rocket Jump and while you’re in mid-air, you can cast Explosive Charge. This is important to know because Rocket Jump landing on someone counts towards a stack of detonating Explosive Charge sooner and for more damage. You can then auto attack, use Buster Shot, and then as the enemy is flying away get in one more auto attack to fully explode the Explosive Charge and deal an incredible amount of burst damage. This combo is slightly more difficult to pull off with lower attack speed, but the keystone rune Hail of Blades can help make up for your lacking early attack speed. You can also use this casting during Rocket Jump defensively as well, as you can begin your Rocket Jump and Buster Shot away a melee champion who may be right on top of you. However, this is much harder to do and generally it’s easier to first Buster Shot and then Rocket Jump away from the threat.
• Make sure to know when to use Rocket Jump and when to hold it. It’s become a bit of a meme at this point in the LCS that Tristana is sometimes referred to as Malphite by players because people will jump in on top of people with her and die for no reason, and it’s important to note that when even professional players are making this mistake, that this is a very difficult concept to handle. In general, you don’t want to be using Rocket Jump in teamfights to be getting on top of people. Rather, it’s best to save your Rocket Jump in case you need to reposition to be in a safer spot or to chase down kills once the enemy has used their dangerous skills that can kill you. However, keep in mind that it does have a channel and travel time, meaning that if you have a Malphite walking in your direction, you may be better off Flashing from his Unstoppable Force rather than trying to Rocket Jump away from him.
• One way to harass under tower as Tristana is to use Explosive Charge on the Tower when you get a big wave and build up your stacks on the Explosive Charge while the enemy is trying to last hit the minions under tower. When it’s about to explode, backstep just far enough as the explosion goes off to avoid taking tower aggro and then decide what you want to do from there, whether it’s go ward to protect yourself from a gank, continue to pressure tower, or push an incoming wave in to keep up the pressure. This is especially good if you can do this while the enemy still has minions to kill, as it can force them to either take the damage from your Explosive Charge going off or having to drop minions in order to avoid taking damage, while also granting you tower plate damage which gives you even more gold. It’s important to know that especially as you get better, it will become harder to kill your opponents in the two versus two, and so it’s important to think about how to generate gold differences in other ways such as plates and last hitting better than your opponent.
These are just a few noteworthy Marksman currently available in the bot lane. Some are a bit more of a challenge to play than others on this list, and this is only scratching the surface of this complex role. However, these champions are ones that can find varying amounts of success based on your experience level and offer a good variety in playstyle, allowing you to find a style you like to play and building from there.
Best of luck on the Rift, and stay safe out there!
