Kindred is one of the most interesting junglers in League of Legends. The twin personifications of Death on the Rift have a playstyle that is both very familiar and different. While Kindred works as a straight-forward AD carry champion on the surface, their unique ability of hunting and collecting Marks over time changes how the player has to look at the game. Each and every Kindred game has a hunt that never goes exactly the same as the last, which is why I personally love the champion. Welcome to my Kindred guide.

Runes:

Primary: We’re going to take Press The Attack. PTA deals extra damage after three auto attacks and after the third auto attack, the enemy champion takes increased damage for the next 6 seconds. As an auto attack based champion, this is a highly useful and needed rune. Next, we’re taking Presence of Mind. Kindred is a spell based AD carry and needs mana to really put out their best damage. With PoM you’ll restore 20% of your mana on takedowns and increase it by up to 500 extra mana. Third is Alacrity. Takedowns increase attack speed (get one stack per individual enemy champion), self-explanatory. Finally, Coup de Grace causes you to deal more damage to low health champions. This helps Kindred finish off kills and synergies perfectly with their E, as it also deals more damage to low health champions.

Secondary: Kindred generally uses the “standard” Sorcery jungle secondary runes. Nimbus Cloak to increase movement speed after using a summoner spell and Waterwalking for increased damage and movement speed in the river.

However, Kindred can take Domination runes, such as Sudden Impact for a damage spike after using their Q and Relentless Hunter to increase their movement speed in place of Nimbus Cloak.

The Sorcery runes are by far the safer and more practical for objective and river control jungle runes, but if you like to play a bit greedier or scrappier, then the Domination runes may be better suited for your playstyle.

Abilities:

The order you’ll want to level your abilities is W (level 1), Q (level 2), and E (level 3). You’ll then max Q first, W second and E third; Taking your ultimate point (R) at levels 6, 11, and 16.

Mark of the Kindred(Passive): A fair warning about Kindred’s passive, it’s probably one of the more complex passives in the game and their kit centers around it. It has both an active and passive component to it and both are central to your gameplay.

Active: Lamb is offered a selection of enemy champions to take down, this cannot be used during combat. Once selected, an enemy champion will become marked for the hunt and can be collected after an 8 second delay. Successfully hunted targets cannot be retargeted for 4 minutes.


Passive: Starting at 3:15, Wolf will select a monster camp within the enemy’s jungle to hunt. Which camp selected is based on Lamb’s current marks for the last 180 seconds.

- 0 marks: One of the Rift Scuttlers
- 1 to 3 marks: A Rift Scuttler, the enemy Raptors or Gromp
- 4 to 7 marks: The enemy Krugs, Wolves, or either of the Buffs
- 8+ marks: The Rift Herald or Baron, the Dragon or Elder Dragon

Wolf will select another camp 40 seconds after the marked monster is killed. If an ally kills the monster within 6 seconds of Kindred damaging it, Kindred will still get the mark. Collecting any Marks will permanently enhance Kindred’s abilities and grant bonus range on their basic attacks and abilities.

Marks are visible to everyone, marked champions will have a ring around them and marked camps will be shown on the map. Marked camps will disappear from the map (with a short delay of 10 seconds) after taken by anyone. (An example of Wolf's passive marks below)


Dance of Arrows(Q): Kindred dashes in the target direction, gaining 25% bonus attack speed (plus 5% addition for each mark) for 4 seconds, while firing three arrows to nearby visible targets. Kindred’s current attack target will be prioritized by one of the arrows.

By casting Wolf’s Frenzy or while using Dance of Arrows inside of Wolf’s Frenzy, the cooldown of this ability will be reduced.

Kindred’s Q is your primary kiting and damage ability. However, you need to be careful how you use it without your W active, as the cooldown is fairly long for such an important ability. With Q, you can hop over most walls on the Rift and chase down enemies with ease. Pair it with W and you have some serious zone control or even more chase down potential.


Wolf’s Frenzy(W): Passive: As Kindred moves and attacks, they build up 100 stacks of Hunter’s Vigor. At full stacks, the next basic attack will heal them for 49-100 (based on level).

Active: Wolf dashes to a target location and creates a circle of territory for the next 8.5 seconds. Wolf will automatically attack enemies in the area, prioritizing Lamb’s target. Wolf’s attacks deal magic damage, scaling with attack speed (and plus 1% per mark). Against monsters, Wolf will deal 50% more damage and slow the target by 50%. The ability will deactivate if Kindred leaves the area or dies.

By casting Wolf’s Frenzy or while using Dance of Arrows inside of Wolf’s Frenzy, the cooldown of this ability will be reduced.

On its own, W is really just another auto attack to an enemy. However, the active reducing your Q’s cooldown is an amazing combat tool. Having Frenzy active will allow you to Q roughly 3 times during the Frenzy duration. This increases your mobility and damage output significantly and will often be the reason you win your skirmishes.


Mounting Dread(E): Kindred marks the target for 4 seconds and slows them by 50% for 1 second. Lamb’s attacks against the target will refresh the Mark’s duration. The third basic attack causes Wolf to pounce and deal bonus physical damage ( plus 0.5% per mark) capped at 300 against monsters. Wolf’s pounce will critically strike for targets below 15% - 65% of their max health (based on Kindred’s critical chance).

Kindred’s E has two purposes. The first being a quick burst of damage to a full/high health enemy. Generally, E is best used like this when ganking lanes, due to the follow up you’ll have from your teammates. The second use is as a powerful execute on both champions and monsters. When jungling or taking neutral objectives, you’ll want to save E for when the camps fall to lower health as you can then burst them down into smite range easier. Or when you’re in a one versus one situation, as you’ll maximize your damage.


Lamb’s Respite(R): Kindred creates a ring around themself for 4 seconds, with a 0.264 cast time, where all units inside the zone cannot be taken below 10% health and cannot be healed once they reach that health threshold. At the end of the duration, all units are healed by 250/325/400 health.

Kindred’s ultimate is the other aspect of their kit that creates a high skill ceiling. On its surface, you use the ultimate to save an important carry or yourself in fights. However, because the ability is an area of effect ability that will save both your team and the enemies you need to be careful. Learning how to prioritize using and not using this ability will change the outcome of your games drastically. For example, saving yourself or a carry at the expense of multiple enemy champions living is usually never worth it. The same can be said for letting yourself die because one enemy would live as well. Of course there are expectations to those statements, but playing and learning from your experiences will allow you to make the correct decisions.


Playstyle:

Kindred both feels and plays very similar to an AD carry in the bottom lane. Kindred feels weak in the early game and incredibly strong in the late game. However, because Kindred is a jungler, there are tools built into the kit to make you stronger than the average AD carry in the early to mid game. The cooldown reduction with Wolf’s Frenzy and the bonus damage from Mounting Dread being great examples of this. The most important thing is the Marks though. You’ll want to gather marks on both jungle camps and enemy Champions.

It’s very obvious that Kindred wants to do this, so try to not constantly be showing up to a Marked area. While giving up a Mark never feels good, giving up free kills to the enemy feels worse. You need to get vision advantages and/or lane advantages to invade the enemy safely. If you know the enemy jungler is nowhere near OR if your Mid can come and the enemy Mid can’t, then you’ve got yourself a free Mark (and maybe even a kill or two). Because Kindred scales similar to AD carries, giving up Marks early to farm or even gank while you know the enemy will be on the other side of the map can be more worthwhile. Then later in the game when you and your teammates are stronger you can feel free to invade and take easy Marks.

Early Game:

You’ll want to follow your standard jungle routes but be sure to prioritize getting to either of the scuttle spawns. You won’t know which spawn will have your first mark, but getting to one first and/or at higher health is important. If you think you either can’t fight the enemy jungler early or your lanes don’t seem to be in a position to help, consider taking the crab on the opposite side of the map. Although, it is recommended that you Mark the enemy jungler at the game’s start in any case so that if they misplay you can snag a quick stack off them in the early game. Your first mark will always be on a scuttle crab, so if you miss it and can’t get one before the next crab spawns, you know where to go.

Hunting for marks and farming are your main goals in the early game, as you’ll want at least your completed jungle item for damage. Try not to fall into the trap of only farming and going for monster marks though. If an enemy champion is low consider changing your Mark target to that lane and inform your laner that you’ll be watching for easy kills. I've added a quick chart on Mark scaling below as a reminder/reference.


Mid Game to Late Game:

Hopefully by now you’ll have had some time to get farmed up, get some kills and most importantly some Marks. By this stage of the game you should really start feeling powerful. Your kit should be functioning better with some extra cooldown reduction, attack damage and attack speed. Similar to your bottom lane counterpart, you’ve ramped up. Like any jungler, you should still be focusing on vision control and objective control. However, you go one step further and prioritize areas with your marks. Hopefully, you can get your team to back you up, but at this point they should be spawning on Dragons anyway.

The real change as you transition out of the early game is how you’re picking your Marked champions. While your first instinct may be telling you to Mark either an important carry or a squishy backline champion, you need to consider a few things. You are a squishy, high value, backline champion. The odds you’ll be able to consistently focus the enemy backline are low. Instead you should be looking to Mark the enemy frontline or engage. Those champions are always going to be the most accessible and usually the ones who die first. However, don’t be afraid to Mark a backline assassin if they’re doing poorly. Any champion willing to come to you and who also has a high amount of deaths is always a good Mark target.

In teamfights you should be positioning yourself in between your frontline and backline. While you'd ideally be playing backline, you want to be able to hit the enemy and potentially keep your frontline alive. Obviously don't go diving in front of your tanks but playing with them isn't always a bad idea. Also, while using your ultimate to save yourself or another backline damage dealer may feel like a better decision than saving your tank, sometimes it isn't. Make sure to understand how your team wins fights and who is an important ultimate target.

Builds:

There are currently two main builds for Kindred, a more orthodox and general power build, and a more scaling and AD carry centric build. Both are viable and have their specific benefits, it depends mostly on your own team composition and the enemy composition, luckily both use the same set of runes.

In general, the Warrior Build can and will work in any situation you find yourself in. Whereas the Bloodrazor build will work better against enemy tanks and/or with teammates who also want to scale into the late game.

Warrior Build (General Build)

This build focuses on Kindred’s natural attack speed enhancers to build damage and cooldown reduction. With this build, you’ll be able to use your abilities a bit more, as you’ll have some more cooldown reduction, and will do more flat damage.

The core items are:

The Warrior enchanted jungle item (Smite modifier decided by game) for the AD and CDR. Kindred gives themself enough bonus attack speed to warrant the Warrior enchantment. You’ll also do enough damage to objectives with your kit alone, so having this flat damage as opposed to percent health damage makes Kindred generally prepared for all enemies. Runaan’s Hurricane mainly for the Wind’s Fury passive to hit multiple targets at once, which makes clearing much easier. But also the bonus attack speed, critical chance and movement speed are all nice, as you are essentially an AD carry after all.

Black Cleaver for the armor shred and added bulk. Paired with Runaan’s and your Q, you’ll be hitting a lot of targets to apply the shred effect. This will allow your other AD teammates to have an easier time in fights. The added Health and cooldown reduction with only further help keep you alive and mobile during fights.


From there, you’re welcome to build additional zeal items, lifesteal items, or more utility items (such as Guardian Angel or Executioner's Calling). The remaining slots are really for what the game dictates you need to continue being strong and dealing effective damage.


Bloodrazor/Manamune Build (Scaling Build)

This build focuses on turning Kindred into a late game carry, similar to how most bot lane champions build and scale to be. You’ll give up early game power and cooldown reduction, but gain more power in the late game. Also because you’ll be building Bloodrazor over Warrior, you won’t be able to “spam” your abilities as comfortably, but you’ll do more damage to monsters and neutral objectives due to the percent health damage.

The core items are:

The Bloodrazor enchanted jungle item (usually with Challenging smite for dueling). We’re going to build a lot of AD and critical chance/damage modifiers so we really need to attack speed from this over Warrior. You’ll be weaker to most champions early on but will hit tanks harder.

Manamune for the extra mana and scaling damage from the bonus mana. Much like how many AD carries are currently benefiting from Manamue’s scaling, so does Kindred. Having more mana on a spell based/caster AD carry is always a plus. Not to mention that with this item you’ll get bonus AD from your maximum mana (once fully charged).

Infinity Edge, self-explanatory, but you get a lot of bonus AD, 25% bonus critical strike chance and increases your critical strike damage from 200% to 225%. Since we’ll be stacking critical chance items, this is a must have.


From there, you’ll want to continue building items such as Stormrazor, Rapidfire Cannon, Phantom Dancer, things that give you more critical chance, range, attack speed, etc. Your build will look and function as if you were playing the game as an AD carry in the bottom lane. However, because of Bloodrazor you’ll hit jungle camps, neutral objectives and tanks especially hard (while also dealing a healthy amount of damage to everything else).


Tips and Tricks

Marks scale in an interesting way when it comes to your bonus range. After you’ve gotten your first 4 marks, you receive 75 bonus range and then 25 more range every 3 marks until you cap out at 25 marks. In short, 4 marks in the early - early mid game is an ideal minimum and 7 is what you should try and be at going into the mid game to maximize your power.

As stated before, don’t become too focused on taking Marks. You don’t want to be constantly dying for them. The lower number of Marks means the closer to the River they’ll spawn. As the game progresses it’ll be easier to take those and catch up. Trading early power boosts for consistent Mid to Late game power is usually a pretty good deal.

Kindred can cast any of their abilities while in the Dance of Arrows animation. So you can Q and instantly W to begin the cooldown refresh. Or you can flash, Q and drop your ultimate if you’re trying to save a teammate.

Kindred has good matchups against both tanks and assassins. Against tanks, Kindred farms quick enough and is mobile enough to avoid them while fighting. Against assassins, the early game can be rough, but Lamb’s Respite counters everything an assassin wants to do in fights, timing it correctly will totally shut them down.