Table of Contents

  • Build for easy matchups
  • Items
    • Staring item
    • First item
    • Chosing between Botrk and Wit's end
    • After Botrk or Wit's end
    • Boots
  • Rammus proxy
  • Matchups
  • Skill path
  • Toplane micro
  • Toplane macro
  • Combos and tricks

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Rammus Top S13

Complete guide

Phoque éberlué

March 5th, 2023 ⸱ 11 min read

Build for easy matchups

This build is great against most of AD matchups and ranged champions. These are my goto runes for most of the games.

Quick Rammus Tank Top Build

Summoner Spells

Starting Items

Best Overall Build

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Items

Staring item



Doran's Shield
Health Potion
is the most polyvalent start, but its harder to proxy level 1 with this.



Cloth Armor
Refillable Potion
is great against attackers and AD matchups. It is also great for early proxying.

First item

When playing against AD champ, going

Thornmail
first is always a great choice.

Against tanks (or AP matchups) like

Dr. Mundo
,
Malphite
,
Ornn
going
Jak'Sho, The Protean
first may be a better choice.

Chosing between Botrk and Wit's end

To begin with: don't build

Blade of The Ruined King
if you are behind in gold! This is a snowballing item. It's usually better to build them as a third or forth item.

Most of the time I either build

Blade of The Ruined King
or
Wit's End
, but if you're so ahead in golds, then you can build both. If you need magic resist then you can build
Wit's End
. If you think magic resist can wait,
Blade of The Ruined King
is way better to snowball.

If you think that both items could be good in a situation, take a look at what the enemy team is building in terms of resistances. If they are building full armor,

Wit's End
's on-hit AP damage could make the difference. If they are building full magic resist, go
Blade of The Ruined King
for sure!

After Botrk or Wit's end

After building

Blade of The Ruined King
or / and
Wit's End
you will lack of HP, here some good items that you can build:

  • Need hp

Boots



Sorcerer's Shoes
great boots, appreciated by a lot of good rammus mains. I personnaly don't like building them but you should definitly give it a try! Since the buffs of
Thornmail
in S13 those boots are really OP. You can build them every games.



Boots of Swiftness
are really strong in the meta, especially on melee tanks.
Rammus
benefits well from those boots because it reduces the slow of
Defensive Ball Curl
, giving him a better kitting potential. Since they removed rammus' self slow those are ontly situationnal. Its great if you need cheap boots.



Mercury's Treads
are great boots agaisnt heavy CC teams.



Berserker's Greaves
are also a great choice as
Rammus
benefits a lot from attack speed.



Plated Steelcaps
are great boots, but
Rammus
already have enough resistances to be honnest. If they have 3 or more AD auto attackers in the enemy team then why not.



Ionian Boots of Lucidity
they could be a thing, but other boots are way better in my opinion.



Mobility Boots
basically trolling, they are so expensive and you just lose the movement speed buff at the second you get hit. The only case would be with a gameplay like bardinette.

Rammus proxy

My goto build agaisnt hard or impossible matchups:

Mordekaiser
Akali
Ornn
Garen
Dr. Mundo
Gwen

Quick Rammus Tank Top Build

Summoner Spells

Starting Items

Best Overall Build

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Agaisnt matchups that are literaly impossible, it can be better to proxy and die a bunch of time than to be poke to death in lane.

It is a risky strategy but it has a lot of rewards:

- You can get almost every CS, that wouldn't be the case in a really hard matchup.

- The enemy top laner is out of sync by 15 to 20 seconds compared to you, as you take the wave earlier. You can then TP to an objective or roam mid, without losing any CS, and in most of the case, get a free back.

- Baiting the jungler, the mid laner, or the support can be an opportunity for your team to make plays on the other side of the map (to take a drake for example)

Going hextech flash helps to jump though wall in order to reach the enemy minion wave before it reaches the T1. You can see the different places I use to go proxy faster on the map bellow.



Matchups

  • Hard
  • Easy
  • Impossible
  • neutral

Skill path

To begin with, maxing

Soaring Slam
at level 11 and 16 is useless, you don't get a lot of damage, and the cooldown now remains the same since the nerf.

The following skill path that I'm going to show all have great potentials, you may chose the one that suits your playstyle the best. Do remember that this guide is more oriented around the Shuffle and Q max. I often rely on the Q cooldown to think about my macro.

Shuffle max

  • Skill Path

Rammus

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My current skill path consist of maxing every basic spells at the same time. I think that rammus benefits a lot from his basic spelss and every spells is great to upgrade. This is a really polyvalent path.

Q Max

  • Skill Path

Rammus

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This was my favorite skill path for a long time. It is great for roaming and coming back to lane faster. The

Powerball
damage at level 5 helps a lot to clear and to trade. This path lack of resistances and is less powerfull when doing long trades.

E / W Max

  • Skill Path

Rammus

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A great skill path against 1v1 ad champs that relies on auto attacks (

Yone
Yasuo
Fiora
). it is surely the best path for 1v1 but the
Powerball
is maxed so late in the game, keeping its cooldown at 16 seconds. Not the best build to roam and / or proxy. This path was popularized by the korean
Rammus
top 병찬이구른댜. Here is his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQE0YC61bh38NSiywV7TQ0Q

Toplane micro

Trading

When trading it is great to simply use your

Defensive Ball Curl
and trade with auto attacks. You're not obliged to use your
Frenzying Taunt
instantly if the enemy wants to fight you! Once he realized that your champion deals damage, activate your
Frenzying Taunt
to prevent him from running away, thus giving you a better trade.

Also remember that rammus wins most of level 1 fights thanks to his

Defensive Ball Curl
.

W Managment

The

Defensive Ball Curl
is your main tool to trade, once it is on cooldown you are vulnerable! Good players will try to wait the end of your
Defensive Ball Curl
to trade, so make sure to be safe when it goes on cooldown.

When you take a trade with

Defensive Ball Curl
, you have to disable it as soon as you are in a safe position. It will allow you to get your cooldown faster, reducing your vulnerable spot window.

Q spell usages

Try to keep

Powerball
for the end of your
Defensive Ball Curl
in order to disengage. It is especially strong agaisnt melee champions that dashes on top of you:
Jax
Irelia
Tryndamere
Xin Zhao
, it doesn't work with
Hookshot
.

It can also be used to cancel spells, for example

Riven
3rd Q
Broken Wings
is really easy to cancel if you are in range of
Powerball
.

Pulling the jungler

If the jungler starts on your side, offer him a better pull by tanking the buff.

Defensive Ball Curl
reduces drastically the damage you take, and if you starts with
Doran's Shield
you get free hp regen when getting hit by the buff.

Toplane macro

Wave managment

Before discussing wave managment with

Rammus
with must know the basic concepts. Here is a great video that I used to learn this:



Rammus
has a painfuly slow push... but there is an important trick that helps to fast push when needed. You can grab the enemy wave near to the tower in order to get the aggro of enemy CS, dealing more damage to them.



Combos and tricks

Rammus doesn't have outstanding neither overcomplicated combos, notwithstanding, he does have some optimisations which widens the difference between a beginner and a pro

Rammus
.

W E not E W!

When playing rammus most of your burst will come from the

Aftershock
. Indeed, the armor gained by the rune and
Defensive Ball Curl
gives a lot damage thanks to
Spiked Shell
.

Thats why it is really important to cast

Defensive Ball Curl
before triggering
Aftershock
with
Frenzying Taunt
, because the armor gained by the rune is based on a percentage of the current bonus armor.

Then when doing Q E W, it is useless to reverse the order of E W, as Q already triggers

Aftershock
?

Exactly! Although it is still possible to deactivate the

Powerball
before hitting the enemy, and then do the W E combo. This is really risky as you won't benefit from the Q damage and slow, yet it is a big change in term of damage and resistances. Tt isn't advised to cancel your Q if you are catching someone with no information of
Flash
or dash.

Dodging crowd controls with R



Soaring Slam
makes you unstopable, you can use it to dodge crowd control effects. You can dash through
Veigar
's cage,
Event Horizon
.

You can even dodge

Urgot
Fear Beyond Death
reactivation, but the timing is difficult:

/Dance flat ultimate

Useless (but fun) graphical bug of

Soaring Slam
that you can use to confuse your opponents. Simply cast
Soaring Slam
and press dance animation as fast as possible and rammus will dash in straight line. Use this to confuse enemies when engaging.

Q stop

Use the keybind stop to... well stop your champion, and dodge things y'know.

Example agaisnt the

Riposte
of
Fiora
:

Baiting

Thresh
's
Flay
:



RammusOff MetaTop
AUTHOR
Phoque éberlué
ABOUT

Rammus Top OTP My account: https://u.gg/lol/profile/euw1/tatou%20super%20cool/overview

4 Comments

Share your thoughs, feedback, comments...

1
sackattackxx 8 months ago

This build really made me feel one with the armadillo. "Ok" "Alright" is all I could manage to say while DEMOLISHING enemy toplaners with this guide. I am overjoyed that someone else finally realizes the true potential of the armordillo played up top. There's nothing more satisfying than watching the enemy top laner helplessly killing themselves auto attack after auto attack. Its like meat to the grinder. This guide was Phoque-ing great. Keep up the good guides, I am hoping I can pull myself out of the hell of bronze 3 with this guide.

Best wishes, sackattackxx

1
ToastBoyy 8 months ago- Edited

Rammus has to be my favorite shuriman champ, hey... maybe favorite champ of all time. Thank you so much for this guide. My little 8 year old son loves rammus, i actually got him a rammus plush for his birthday a few months back. Thanks for this guide man, now my little buddy can play all the rammus top he wants without inting!

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sdm9 11 months ago

Based guide, highly recommend to try this out!

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AliceRosenQwartz 11 months ago

As an OTP Rammus I can tell that this build top is on point 👍

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