Rammus has been around since the start of league of legends, and has been nightmare
fuel for adcs everywhere for over a decade. With patch 11.8 hes got a bit of a modern
rework, keeping most of his thematic and skillset intact, with a couple of nice flashy updates.
With this guide we'll be telling you everything you need to know about the reworked rammus.
We'll be covering the changed skills, general strategy/ playstyle, combos, early pathing,
tips and tricks, teamfighting, and finally runes and builds. dont worry if you dont play
rammus. for those of you who arent interested in the champion, we'll be going over how to
counter him as well, so make sure to stick around But before we get into it, lets go
over our question of the day What Champion do you think is most in need
of a rework or update. Tryndamere is another season 1 champ that hasnt really withstood
the test of time. His kit is pretty outdated at this point, riddled with RNG, and overall
just isnt very enjoyable to play, or play against, at least for me. Let us know what
you think in the comments below, and with that, we'll jump into the guide.
So, what exactly has changed for the new rammus, and what does it mean for you? starting with
Q, the only thing that was directly changed was a nerf to his damage. its only 20 at max
rank, so theres not much of a difference. However, the fact that this ability goes on
cooldown at the END of the channel, means that cooldown reduction on it is extremely
important. As you put points in the ability, it goes from a massive 16 seconds to 6, so
youre going to max this ability first. It also has an interesting interaction with his
ultimate, that we'll get to later Next is defensive ball curl, It deals damage
back to attackers essentially like thornmail, and when its active it increases the amount
of on hit damage that your autos do, from your passive. however, Basic attacks now extend
the duration of this ability by .4 seconds, up to a cap of 4 seconds. This is mostly a
slight buff to his clear, as theres not really any way that youll be taking a huge advantage
of this in actual fights. After all, if someone is letting you auto them for 6 seconds on
rammus, theyre probably already dead. E is rammus's signature taunt, which actually
received a nerf to its duration. During the taunt rammus gains a small amount of attack
speed, and if w is active, this buff refreshes. This means in your clear youll take advantage
of this by using your w and e together to give yourself the attack speed buff for longer.
pretty simple but important nonetheless. The taunt duration increases significantly with
level, so you need to max this second to increase your cc capability.
Now comes the most important, and largest change for rammus, his R. Its been completely
reworked, and went from an activatable source of damage that followed you around, to a skill
shot that has a few effects. Rammus leaps to the targetted location, ignoring CC, and
then deals damage and slows enemies for 1.5 seconds. If you use this ability during your
Q channel, instead of a slow, the ability will now knockup for .75 seconds, and deal
damage based on your Q damage. This is why its important to max Q first, as youre going
to get more aoe damage and need the cooldown to come back up once you actually get into
the fight. The addition of a knockup makes up for the slight reduction in taunt duration
on your e, so rammus's kits power was shifted away from his basic abilities, and moved heavily
into his ultimate, relying on using the Q R as a combo to give you the power back. If
you read the skill, it actually doesnt give the whole description, what isnt mentioned
is that your R range will increase as you gain movespeed, so having things like Q active,
homeguards, chemtank, deadmansplate, or movespeed from other kinds of speedups like lulu w will
let you engage from really insane range. One thing to note is that the dash speed is still
relatively slow, so you dont necessarily want to engage from super far away just because
you can, because the hitbox becomes relatively easy to dodge. In addition to this new impact
damage, a small part of his old ultimate is retained in the tremors that occur after.
instead of following rammus around like before, the impact site is where the tremors stay
for their duration. This incentivizes CCing someone within the impact site to get the
maximum damage. To recap, the skill order is R, Q, E, W. For
the start of the game, youll level W first, and then go q second if clearing red side
camps, but E if you want to do blue side camps. Single target damage is much better with W
E. After that, just level your last ability at level 3 and follow the skill order.
Rammus tends to want to spam ganks. This is mostly due to the fact that his ganks are
really strong, as lots of movespeed and point click cc is a great combo to have. However,
its also a necessity for him. His clear speed, is...well, lackluster. Its basically impossible
to even clear 5 camps before crab spawn so youre definitely not going to be outpacing
a lot of champions in jungle, especially with the current meta of fast full clearers. So,
we basically just want to get on map as soon as we can and start making plays. Rammus has
a very weird power curve compared to most champions. A lot either tend to be all in
on early game, or all late game, with very few spiking mid game and falling off. however,
thats exactly what happens. You spike at around level 13 with 2 items, and after that you
pretty much fall off a cliff once everyone completes percentage penetration itemization,
and your base damage starts to not be enough to kill people. there are exceptions, like
if youre into a full ad assassin team, but in general your early is weak and so is your
late game. so its very important to actually take advantage of the time of the game that
youre extremely strong, make sure to force fights on your early item completions. In
general youre going to want to avoid fighting the other jungler early, since most meta champions
will win against you early, and focus on instead getting ganks off on the other side of the
map, or counter ganking. You want to be really careful to not leave yourself super vulnerable
to invades, which is where the spam ganks come into play. Not only will you get a good
amount of resources from them, youll get priority in your lanes, which will discourage others
from invading on your camps. with that in mind, lets talk a bit about your early pathing
Since ganks are super important, you usually want to use the trinket swap strategy, and
switch to sweeper. If you dont know how to do this, or why, feel free to check out our
video on it on our website at skill-capped.com. We have professional courses by the top players,
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in the description below. To speed up your relatively bad clear, youre
almost forced to start at your red buff, if you want to make decent pace. From there,
youll 95% of the time want to just do krugs into raptors, but as with all junglers, be
on the lookout for adaptations, this is just a suggestion, but other paths may be good
in your specific game should other variables happen like level 1 flash burns or extremely
low hp laners. after raptors, you have the benefit of being
able to look for ganks on all 3 lanes, and this will help you establish priority for
a crab. If no ganks are available, you can just look to go to blue and do it and gromp
at the same time using your q and w to give good aoe damage. Make sure to refresh your
red buff on both camps and try to kill them at the same. then you can continue looking
for ganks, or just go to do a crab. If crab isnt possible, then just clear your wolves
and keep looking for other opportunities. As far as combos go, there really isnt that
much, the main one to know is just your Q into R. But rammus is just a pretty simple
champion. With the change to his R you now have a decent escape in a lot of situations,
so your Q R combo isnt just to go in, but can be used to run away as well. Also dont
feel the need to use Q R every time. If you can get into the fight by just using Q, saving
your R will allow you to respond to dashes or flashes and close the gap on slippery champions,
only use it if the CC is the difference maker, or you really need it to get into the fight.
Lets go ahead and jump into some tips and tricks
We'll mostly focus on things you can do to speed up your clear. youre going to want to
use powerball at the start of your camp to do damage, since the cooldown begins at the
end of the channel, and you want it to be up once the camp is dead, so you can get to
the next one faster. Once the camp is dead, be careful about using powerball right away,
for example going from wolves to raptors can take longer than the duration, and you wont
get the damage. Make sure to time powerball to get the majority of the channel to take
advantage of the movement speed, but also get the damage as well. This will change based
on your items, and level, so its just going to take a bit of playing the champ to get
a feel for when to use your abilities. Try not to use q at the end of a camp, so you
can avoid a situation like this where you have to walk to another one without q
For aoe camps, you can just focus down the higher health targets. you want everything
to die at the same time to take advantage of your aoe, so smiting krugs generally tends
to be your best bet, and on raptors and wolves, just hit the big ones. the smalls will die
from w damage. As we briefly mentioned earlier, you can do blue and gromp at the same time
to speed up your clear a bit, so pull them together in this spot here and try to kill
them at the same time, unless your health gets really low, in which case finish one
off early to avoid dying and reduce the amount of damage you take.
Make sure to turn your w off if you need to run, or chase people down. It self slows you
so it can be a huge detriment in a lot of situations. A great benefit of rammus is that
he is pretty simple, so you dont need a ton of optimization to play him well, in general
its just going to be about finding ganks and showing up to fights at the right time, with
that being said, its important to also play the fights well, which is what were going
to get into now. Rammus is going to want to dive onto the backline
in most situations, but as with all frontliners, its really important to create space for your
carries to actually take advantage of your CC. If you dive onto the backline, and the
enemy assassins just kill yours, youre probably not coming out ahead in that fight. as a priority
peel for your carries first, and if theyre sufficiently safe, or have enough self peel
to survive, then go in to CC. A lot of tanks make the mistake of rushing
teamfights too quickly, so its the number one thing to check yourself on. Make sure
that you arent engaging from a screen away where no one can follow. if theres too much
distance between you and your carries, not only can they not follow up, but the enemy
has a chance to rush inbetween you to fill the space. You have to play a lot slower than
you think most of the time, and might not always be able to taunt carries, but instead
have to taunt enemy divers. and peel instead. stand between the enemy and your team, and
just move back and forth to create space when your abilities are down.
now, lets talk about runes and builds. Theres going to be 2 main setups. predator, for stronger
early ganking, and aftershock, for more frontline capability.
In games where youre going to be mostly diving in, take predator to get access to the backline
and increase your range. In games that youll probably be peeling, go aftershock to survive
for longer to create space for your carries. feel free to switch out legend tenacity for
legend alacrity if theres not much CC on the enemy team, and switch around one of your
armor runes for MR in an AP matchup. Notice that most of the runes here are focused on
early game snowballing, with things like demolish, and cheap shot, meant to be small early power
runes to help you get more gold and get to your items quicker
Like we mentioned before, you really spike at 2 items. In 99% of games, your core is
going to be going bamis cinder rush, with boots 1 whenever you have the gold, into boots
2 rush. After this, finish your chemtank, and then build into thornmail. This is going
to be the strongest youll be throughout the game, so make sure that you take advantage
of this spike by looking for as many good fights as you can at this time. You can finish
your build out by going more tank items, like deadmans plate, randuins, force of nature,
stoneplate, or even frozen heart. However, tanks in general fall off in the late game
once people get penetration items, and your base damage gets less effective. Rammus does
have some armor scaling, but the majority of his damage is actually AP scaling, which
you definitely cant afford to buy unless you want to blow up instantly. so if youre playing
against rammus this gives you a couple of great options to counter him
The main ones are actually items, early rushing things like lord dominks regards, or void
staff, help to deal with him, but the biggest one is actually QSS and cleanse. Since rammus
r doesnt follow him around anymore, all of his damage comes from the impact area, and
ccing someone inside of it. If you cleanse or QSS, and then walk out of that area, not
only are you not forced to hit him to make his w work, you dont take any damage from
his R either. these 2 things are even better than they were before and really remove the
threat that rammus presents on the backline, so make sure to get them
For gameplay counters, the easiest thing to do is just to path into him, and force him
to fight you in the early game. Rammus is mostly going to look for spam ganks, so if
you counter them, most champions will just beat him in the 1v1, 2v2s or 3v3s. If you
stop the ganks from the source by invading him, his 1v1 is extremely weak early, and
his clear speed is slow. so you wont really have to deal with him becoming a major threat.
If you set him behind during his weak early game, his 2 item spike will happen too late
in the game, and he'll be useless. If you can track him well and counter jungle
for a level advantage, all the fights you take afterwards will probably go in your favor.
Even at challenger level, rammus is never going to keep up in farm, even from ahead.
so you have to use that level advantage to stop his ganks and then his strengths are
neutralized. The main way you lose to rammus is by letting him run wild on your team, or
by playing away from him on the opposite side of the map. Dont let him get random kills
early through good jungle tracking, or at least punish on his camps when he does. kills
are worth less XP than a few years ago, so spam ganks are very punishable. However, most
people playing against rammus will not know hot to counter him, which makes him a great
low elo pick. And that brings us to the end of the video, we hope you enjoyed this rammus
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