Hey everyone!
A new OP pick has been on the rise in play rate as of late, especially from the goat
himself, Faker.
This pick is very easy to play, has a very strong lane phase, clear win conditions, and
will only get better with the next patch since they are nerfing seekers again.
The pick Im going to break down for you today, is Nocturne mid.
And, Im going to use a bunch of recent games from Faker to do it.
Were going to talk about runes, build, how to play it, and the small tips and tricks
you need to know to be successful.
So, lets get started with a quick rundown of his abilities incase you dont know them.
Nocturnes abilities are pretty simple, but the really important one for midlane, is his
passive.
His passive is an aoe auto attack that does extra damage, and restores health.
The more targets he hits, the more health he restores.
It has a cooldown of 14 seconds, but its reduced by one second if hitting minions, and 3 seconds
on champions.
This ability is insane for pushing waves and gives so much sustain.
His Q is a skillshot that does damage and gives him movespeed and attack dmaage when
hes on it.
There are some small important things with this one though.
First, if it hits a champion, they also leave the same trail behind.
And second, nocturne is ghosted on the trail, meaning he cant be creep blocked.
This is important for when you are trying to fight somone in a minion wave.
You should max this ability first, and we will talk more about it later.
But his next ability, his W, is a spellsheild, that also gives him a passive attack speed
bonus.
If he blocks something with his spellsheild that attack speed bonus is doubled.
His E puts a tether on a champion, and if it doesnt break they are feared.
Nocturne also gets a huge movespeed boost towards feared champions.
Then his ult most of you already know, but he reduces the vision radius of everyone on
the enemy team, and can cast it again to launch himself at them, doing a good amount of damage.
This ability also has some tricks that we will talk about later.
For now, lets talk about how to lane, using a few different examples.
For this first one, Faker is playing against Katarina.
Katarina has ignite and exhaust, while faker only has exhaust.
We dont recommend bringing exhaust like Faker does, not because its bad, but because its
much harder to use properly.
YOu should take ignite or TP depending on matchups.
We will also talk aobut this more indepth in a bit.
But, Faker walks up to katarina, uses Q, and chases her trying to get an auto attack off
but just barely couldnt get in range.
If she tried to trade back he would win veyr veyr hard, and then he could go back to the
wave and heal it all up with his passive.
Katarina plays it smart and doesnt trade with him, and doesnt even hit him with Q, because
she knows he will heal it with his passive auto.
Hes going to grab his last hits, then use Q on her when she walks up, then hit her with
1 auto.
Thats actually a lot of damage for just a Q and auto, especially without any AD from
an item, as he has corrupting potion.
Its the bonus AD from the Q that gives him so much extra damage.
Then hes going to make sure his passive auto hits all 3 of these minions to give him as
much health as possible.
THis is very important when playing nocturne.
Remember it hits everything around him, not just infront, so you want to position yourself
to hit as many minions as possible if you need the health.
But now Fkaer is going to finish shoving this wave in, and crash it on the tower.
When he does that, he tries to hit Katarina and the CS with Q, as thats the most efficient
use of it, and its what you should try to do everytime as well.
Notice when Katarina is farming under tower, Faker is not throwing Q to poke her.
This is an important part of nocturne mid as well.
Your Q isnt really a poke ability, its one thing to use it to grab CS and poke at the
same time, but if you throw it JUST for poke, it would cost too much mana overtime.
Also, he wants the wave to come back to him, so spamming Q would keep it pushing where
2 things would be a problem.
First, he cant do much to kat under tower, and second, he has no mobility so he can easily
be ganked.
ANyways, the wave is going to push back to him now, so when she walks up he tries to
hit her wth Q and an auto, but couldnt reach with the auto.
Then shes going to use Q and jump to the dagger, but with his passive auto he heals up a good
portion of the damage anyways.
Then something big is going to happen.
They are both going to hit level 3 here.. and Katarina is going to immediately get aggressive,
jumping on Faker with her E and W. The first thing hes going to do, because hes
faker, is use Q on the 2 low health minions.
Most of us would use Q on kat here to hlep trade but faker cares more about the CS and
knows how to win this trade without the Q damage anyways.
Then hes going to walk forward away from the dagger, and then start auto attacking the
kat, making sure to stand on the trail to give him extra AD.
She uses Q and goes to jump to the next dagger, now that she has at least 2 seconds before
she can jump again, he uses E to tether, and blocks the dagger damage with his W spellsheild.
Kat gets feared, and is forced to pop exhaust or she would take way too much damage from
Faker, so he backs off.
So, as you can see, even after using his Q on the wave, he out damages katarina very
hard with how strong Nocturnes all-in is.
She still has ignite though, and faker needs to heal up a bit.
But the lane is in a very dangerous spot for both of them now.
What I mean by this is..
Katarina wants to finish shoving the wave so she can recall, and Faker wants to stop
that.
Katarina has potions, and faker does, but she has the minion advantage.
So it comes down to who knows their limits more here..so lets see what happens.
Katarina uses Q on the wave to try and clear it as fast as possible, then Faker does what
I was talking about earlier with the passive auto, and runs into the middle of all the
CS to use it.
It gives him a huge chunk of health, and now things arnt as dangerous as they were a few
seconds ago.
Katarina jumps to this dagger now, getting greedy to clear this wave, and Faker immediately
tethers her with E since she has 3 seconds before she can jump again.
But Korean challenger really is crazy because Katarina somehow almost had the damage to
kill Faker here but his exhaust was well timed and he had such a big health advantage he
got the kill.
So, this was an exmaple of a melee matchup, and how Nocturnes sustain and all-in is extremely
strong.
Lets look at a ranged matchup now.
In this one, Faker is vs orianna.
Ori has a lot of poke in lane and can be difficult for some melee champions.
To start things off, Faker is coming into lane and immediately poked by ori, he uses
Q to grab CS and poke, then uses passive auto to grabthis last hit.
If Ori didnt have phase rush here, he would have went all-in on her, but since she has
it, he just grabbed the last hit instead.
Then hes going to how us a perfect example of how to use passive auto for sustain.
He walks into the big wave and auto attacks, and it heals him about 150 damage, as much
as a potion or corrupting pot charge.
Thats insane for a 14 second cooldown.
But them, Faker is going to really outplay the hell out of this Ori.
So he went pretty deep at level1 to get that passive auto, and also grabbed a CS while
doing it.
Ori is trying to punish as hard as she can, so shes chasing andauto attacking.
But she threw her Q again right here, and thats when Faker knows to go in.
This is important against Ori as any champion though.
If her E is down, and in this case, not skilled upsnce shes level 2, she has no way of getting
the ball back onto herself quickly.
So if she doesnt use Q here and faker goes in, she can W herself to speed her up and
slow faker down, then continue kiting.
But since she used Q, and Faker is 1 cs from lvl 2..
He turns around and goes in, hits her with Q, autos this minion to hit 2, then immediately
uses E on her.
because of Nocturnes very strong all-in, shes forced to flash here.
She tried to return harass after, and procs phase rush, so once it drops faker tries to
Q and flash in to finish her, but he just barely gets tagged by Ori W and get sslowed,
otherwise she was dead.
But after that hes going to finish shoving the wave and recall.
Alright, you have a general idea on how to lane now.
Lets look at how to use Nocturnes ultimate effectively.
Generally, you use nocturnes insane clear with his passive and Q to quickly clear a
wave, then start moving to a side lane whenever your ult is up.
In low elo, players dont ward often, so your ult is a free kill pretty much everytime.
But we have a nice trick in this next one thatyou need to know.
In this clip, a fight breaks out in mid and Faker wants to ult and kill Ori.
What he does is super important for Nocturne.
You can use your abilities while in midair, and remember nnocturnes Q gives him bonus
AD.
So, as hes about to hit Ori, he uses Q, which gives him the bonus AD, which makes his ult
do about 50 damage more.
Thats an insane amount of extra damage.
You should be doing this everytime you ult somone.
But his Q has a cast time so you need to time it taking that into consideration.
In teamfights, your ult can be tricky as once you jump in, you cant really get out.
So lets go over how to do it right.
In this clip, Faker is coming from bot, looking to teamfight in the enemy jungle.
He uses Q and stridebreaker to initiate onto hec and use his E, but the rest of the enemy
team arrives..so he starts running away Then, he uses his ult.
This is the important part, he didnt use it because he wants to jump in, he used it because
reducing everyones vision is extremely strong in teamfights.
The backline thinks hes about to jump in so they wont go forward, and this lasts 6 seconds.
So you want to use ult early in fights.
Then Faker uses the second part of his ult at the last second, jumping in onto the Kaisa
and easily kills her once shes feared.
After that he chases down the rest, flashing over the wall and uses stridebreaker to catch
hecarim..and aces the enemy team.
Alright so you know how to play nocturne now.
Im going to quickly end the video with item build and runes so you can be on your way
and get the freelo before its nerfed.
For runes, the most standard page is this: Lethal tempo has insane synergy with his E
and W, letting you shred anyone in a 1v1.
You can swap most of the secondary rune choices around to your liking as lethal tempo is the
most important rune.
For build, his core item is stridebreaker, as it lets you stick to the enemy champ you
are tethered to very well so you can get the fear off.
And most of the time if you get a fear off you win the 1v1.
After stride breaker you want steraks so you can dive into fights without dying, then a
guardian angel third.
THis gives you some extra AD and makes it even ahrder to kill you after you dive in.
After that is becomes situational, you can go blackcleaever if they have armor, randuins
if they have a lot of crit..force of nature if you need MR, or even wits end if you are
really ahead.
Alright guys you should be good to go now.
But thats going to bring us to the end of this one.
We hope you enjoyedit and thanks for watching!