Hey y'all, Konduit here. Today I've got some tips and advice for you on how to play Tahm Kench; Tahm is (as intended by the game designers) not a mechanically intensive champion. And yet, using his abilities involves some of the most complex decision making you'll encounter, all very quickly and on the fly - pretty cool right? I'll preface this article by saying this is NOT a full Tahm Kench guide, just an assortment of the observations and strategies I've taken from my play with the champion so far. Let's jump right into it.

1. After using Abyssal Voyage, Devour is set on a 2-3~ second cooldown. I've attempted to make some big plays by ulting into the enemy team with an ally and immediately devouring them, but I quickly realized that your Devour is set on cooldown automatically after using Abyssal Voyage, likely as a balancing mechanic (it would likely be too strong if you could port in and immediately make your ally untargetable). In any case, make sure to keep this in mind if you're looking to port somewhere on the map - you will be unable to use devour for a short while (a couple seconds or so) when you arrive, whether you port alone or with an ally. The situation where I found this becoming the most relevant is when a teammate is in trouble across the map, and you want to Abyssal Voyage over there, eat your teammate, and run away; this line of play becomes much more difficult because of the resulting mini-CD on devour. Your ally would have to survive for a little bit longer before you can make him/her untargetable. Keep this nuance in mind!

2. Take Attack Speed Reds (inspired by this reddit post). Stacking An Acquired Taste is integral to Tahm's kit, and having the extra attack speed makes a load of difference. The 15% you get just from taking the attack speed marks not only helps stack your passive, but it significantly improves your damage output as well (due to the on-hit magic damage you get from Abyssal Voyage's passive). Your play becomes a great deal smoother if you just get even this amount of attack speed; it's such a great help, that I've even started using them on Support, as well as Top Tahm. Try it, you'll notice a big difference.

3. Using the Tongue Lash->Devour combo only costs Tongue Lash's mana - the Devour mana cost is not applied. I'm not sure whether this is intended or a bug, but if you queue Devour during tongue lash (to eat a minion or monster from range), you don't have to pay the 90 mana for devour. This is very useful, as you'd typically have to pay 50 + 90 = 140 mana for this combo, but instead you gain the ability to spit a minion for the Devour AoE magic damage for a mere 50 mana. As long as you're comfortable with losing out on the Tongue Lash damage and putting it on cooldown, using the combo to get the minion in your mouth is much more mana efficient. If you're clearing waves as top lane Tahm and need to conserve mana, using this mechanic is a great play (even if you're just eating the minion at point blank range).

4. Don't wait too long to use your Thick Skin shield. I see of lot of people saying that Tahm's shield effectively 'doubles' your health bar; while this is sort of true, what you really have to factor in is the shield decay rate. A great deal of your 6 second full-hp-bar shield won't actually absorb damage, but will fall off rapidly; in most scenarios, whoever is damaging you won't drop a ton of burst damage in an instant, it'll be more spaced out - in which case you're losing some value from your shield. Now let's consider the opposite scenario - you take one auto attack, get 60hp worth of grey health, and then turn that into a shield. That 60 hp shield will stick around for 6 seconds, decaying at an extremely slow rate (10hp per second) with respect to the amount of health that you have. But if you get a 600 health shield, it's decaying for 100hp per second. Do you see the impact of the grey health shield/duration ratio?

The idea here is that you want to pop Thick Skin when you feel that you'll be able to take all of the damage that you activate the shield for. As a general benchmark, activating it when you're at half health is generally a good idea. You're very likely to get 1.5x your health bar worth of value from the ability, which is pretty nutso, awesome stuff.

5. Use Ally Devour as a Playful-Trickster/Sanguine Pool for your teammate. Ally devour has an immense number of uses: one of these involves applying Devour to allow a teammate to 'dodge' an important ability by going untargetable, and then spit them out as soon as you can so that they can resume dealing damage. This is akin to Fizz or Vladimir dodging an ability they deem threatening and then going back in to lay down DPS.

Check out this video here. In the clip shown, my ADC gets hit by a hook. I quickly cleanse the cc and remove him from combat by devouring, and then reposition him in a more aggressive position behind the enemy as our jungler comes in for a gank (one thing I could've improved on was preemptively eating him to dodge the hook so he wouldn't take the ability's damage, by the way). As a side note, notice how I activate Thick Skin to absorb just the amount of damage I expected to take - I pretty much got full value out of the shield by popping it early, rather than waiting until I was at very low health. This leaves me with a respectable amount of health afterwards.

6. Consider using Devour to "hard-peel" for your carry. Ally Devour is one of the strongest mechanics in the game - but it's not always the right move. Some champions, such as Irelia, Maokai, or Gnar, will stick onto your carry even if you Devour your teammate and try to move away. It's very difficult to get them to a safe location when whoever's diving is so sticky. It's very easy to tunnel into using Ally Devour to peel in teamfights, but in these extreme cases consider using Devour to literally eat whoever is diving your carry and walk away as far away as you can with them. Devour is unparalled cc in this particular situation, because it's 3 seconds of 'stasis', i.e. uncleanseable cc not reduced by tenacity. This means you can hold even the mighty Irelia for the full 3 seconds, allowing your carry to resposition HIMSELF and continue dealing damage. When the diver pops out of your belly, use Tongue Lash to apply a nasty 70% slow for 2 seconds, further preventing them from getting where they need to be. By the way, take the swiftness mastery in the defense tree - the slow reduction helps immensely when you self-slow by devouring an enemy champion.

There's plenty more to Tahm Kench (I'll be releasing another article on him inevitably), but those are some tips to keep in mind as you continue to play him.

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed the article. If you'd like to discuss anything League, have comments/feedback on this article, or just want to say hi, feel free to tweet me @k0nduit (with a zero instead of an 'o') and I'll get back to you.

Until next time.

konduit

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