Replay Remix - Ekko Jungle Guide
Ekko Jungle Guide
WaveFinder
Best Overall Runes
Spells
Skill Priority
Q
E
W
Best Overall Build
Intro
My name is Wavefinder and welcome to my jungle ekko guide. I have been playing leauge on NA for too long, and peaked D4 playing ekko jungle in season 10. I am writing this guide because Ekko is the coolest champ ever, and I want to help guide people onto the path of learning ekko for themselves.
Why Ekko
While ekko has a very high skill ceiling, he has a decently simple skill floor and is one of the easier junglers to pilot in the current meta. His gameplans and style is relatively simple and his kit provides a lot of tools and safety for learning to play assassins' in leauge. He also has the most saftey of any assasin in the entire game because of his ultimate, this spell is a very good tool that lets him push limits other champions cannot.
Pros
-Very Safe with ult
-Good single target damage
-Very fast clear, especially with items.
-Great dives with ult
-Simple to understand and execute jungle playstyle
Cons
-Weak against tankier comps with lots of MR
-Vulnerable to heavy CC comps, champion is "numb" in this kind of game
-Combo does not overkill targets, so weak to items like shieldbow or maw
-Cannot do anything about strong split pushers, especially hullbreaker champions.
When to pick Ekko
Pick ekko when you have an AD solo lane, and good dps from your adc. In addition, good setup or zone control will make landing your W easier.
General Gameplan
First Clear
Ekko typically opts for a clear that can give him as many camps as possible while still covering or impacting the lane identified as the wincondition. This typically means that you will opt for a 6 camp clear or a 4 camp of Red Krugs Raptors Blue if you need to get onto the map faster. Red start full clears finish in 3:19, while blue start is closer to 3:27. I think that the full clear is one of the essential skills to learn on ekko, and one of the first things you should practice. If you find yourself struggling, the most time is lost on the krugs to raptors transition, raptors to wolves transition, and wolves to blue transition. You might find it helpful to record yourself performing the clear and compare that recording to the ideal clear below.
Ekko Full clear
Early Game
In the early game, try to minimize as much as possible. This means that you want to look to clear as many camps as possible while trying to reduce the influence that the enemy jungler has on the map via counterganks or simply hovering or covering a lane. You do not usually want a direct confrontation or skirmish with the enemy jungler as you will often lose. It is still effective to look for opportunistic "free kills" around the map if they arise. Typically this means that you will look to full clear camps until level 6 and try to make some small map impact in the downtime. Using your warding trinket on the enemies Raptors or Gromp after a full clear is an effective way to minimize the impact they can have on that side of the map, so it is recommended to do so after your full clear if there is no other opportunities.
Post 6- Continue to minimize
When your ultimate is off cooldown, look for dives or numbers advantage skirmishes as you are heavily favored in these situations with your ultimate. With your ultimate on cooldown, or if there are no opportunities, look to efficiently clear your camps and hold lanes in order to get your rocketbelt powerspike faster. About Dragons I do not recommend taking the first dragon unless you can clear it very quickly with your bot lane. This is because it takes almost 30 seconds and is a huge tempo loss for ekko. You need to be getting as big a lead as possible so that you can hit your level and item spikes and start to impact the map, so a dragon that takes too long can be game losing. However, rift herald gives a lot of value, so prioritize securing it in the early game.
After Rocketbelt + Sorc Shoes
After you get your rocketbelt and sorcerers shoes, your champion is much more unlocked, you will do quite a bit of damage with your standard combo and can take much riskier plays due to this. Continue to look for dives and good skirmishes, especially those around vision deficits. As an assasin, Ekko thrives in situations where he can see the enemy team and they cant see him. Look to set up these kinds of situations with your support before an objective. Another good option is to shadow your split pushing/mid group champions by staying out of vision nearby, making it easy to pick up someone rotating between lanes or if they try to engage on one of these groups. This gameplay basically continues for the remainder of the game, and is standard to most assasin junglers. You may find that you die often when setting up vision and these kinds of situations. I would recommend reviewing these scenarios after the game to see why it happens and try to get to an intuitive sense of what is safe and not.
The Most important thing on ekko is to avoid dying as much as possible, so reviewing where you end up dying and looking for the information you missed can be extremely helpful.
Runes
I recommend taking the dark harvest page below in games where you expect a lot of action, or in lower elos where kills are more frequent. The First strike page is ideal for a game where you want to minimize for a bit longer and scale up or you think you may struggle to get lots of dark harvest stacks. This page is more applicable in higher elo games.
- High Variance Runes
- Low Variance Runes
- Harvest into CC
- First Strike into CC
Inspiration is a key rune tree for ekko, as it gives access to two very important runes, futures market and footwear. These runes help ekko to accelerate his rocketbelt spike as well as provide a lot of value throughout the game for hitting earlier item spikes, as well as the value that free boots provides. Domination and sorcery are both good options for ekko for access to the raw combat stats they provide, as well as the bounty hunter tree in domination. If you are building nashor's tooth second, be sure to take relentless hunter as the movement speed is quite good when you don't get that stat from lich bane. If you are building lich bane, take ingenious hunter or ultimate hunter instead as they both provide you with greater windows of opportunity throughout the game by lowering your rocketbelt or ultimate cooldown, both of which are critical for ekko in fights.
Against very heavy CC Make sure to take tenacity in runes as building merc treads is a significant damage drop
Summoner Spells
Flash is the best option for ekko due to the opportunities and safety provided by flash.
- Jungle
Skill Path
Start W for jungle clear, can start Q if you have a very good leash. Put two points in q for full clear, otherwise put the third point in e.
- Full Clear
- Not Full clear
Ekko
Ekko
Item Builds
Mythic and Early Items
In Every game, build Rocketbelt asap, Starting with the Blasting wand. Prioritize the raw ap components over the alternator. I recommend not buying dark seal until after mythic since you really need the mythic spike asap. After finishing your mythic, pick up dark seal and sorcs, and complete mejais if you are a smurfer hound this game.
Second Item
For your second item, you have two main options, you can either go for nashor's or lich bane. Nashors is more damage in combos and over longer duration fights, however, it has a much worse build path than lich bane and notably does not give the move speed lich does which is quite a nice state. In games where you know you will not be taking very long fights where nashors would severely outperform, you can go for lich bane simply for the superior build path. Pick up the AP components first, blasting wand for Nashors and the aether wisp for lich bane.
Third item
There are 3 main options for the third item on ekko. The choice of 3rd item basically comes down to how much MR the enemy team is building, if they have much mr at all, more than just a few merc treads or so, then you will want to go void staff. Rabadons and Shadowflame are comparable damage given the enemy has no MR. Shadowflame has a better build path, so if you cannot pick up the entire rod then this might be the purchase. (However with futures you should be aiming for deathcap). You may also want to choose shadowflame if you really need to get to the situational items asap.
Defensive Options
Defensive options on ekko are usually purchased as the 3rd major item or 4th, if you are very ahead, it is valuable to purchase either zhonyas or banshies. Zhonyas is generally more applicable, but banshies is very good against champions like morgana or veigar who have abilities that the spell shield works well against.
- Core Build
Ability usage and Combos
Timewinder
Parallel ConvergenceHere is a twitch clip of a really bad W placement https://clips.twitch.tv/DarlingTacitOtterAMPEnergyCherry-VkU_t2wdWWTDuMkW
In this scenario, I should have walked closer to the wall, and placed my W further out in aphelios' escape route to cut off his path, then walked parallel to him to slowly close the gap without using my E.
Phase Dive
Chronobreak
EQ>Rocketbelt>Auto - Using your rocket belt as an auto attack reset and casting q during e is the most common Ekko combo and your bread and butter, use this basically every time you engage a fight or look for a pick. you can also extend the range of this combo using flash or rocketbelt(if you have nashors).
Facecheck Combo- if someone is going to facecheck you in melee range, q as soon as they will enter the bush, e backwards then press r and spam A click for a massive burst that is basically impossible to react to.
Ekko combo videos
This video goes through what these combos would look like at about the 2 minute mark, and shows some more advanced tricks as well. One contradiction I would like to make with this video, is that I would recommend leveling ult as soon as you can because especially when learning the champion, it can be very difficult to track where your ult is and level it quick enough to use when needed.
Every Ekko combo ever
This video shows almost every ekko combo except the basic one for some reason, but I would say almost 90% of these will never actually come up and be useful in a real game, but its still interesting to know, and demonstrates the mechanics of the champ well.
Matchups and Synergies
- Counters and Difficult Champs
- Must Build Tenacity Vs
- synergy with
Conclusions
Overall, ekko is an amazing champion to learn the jungle on, he provides a great springboard for learning the assasin playsttyle, as well as many of the fundamentals of the game such as tempo. I hope that you pick up ekko and can enjoy him as much as I have, have fun and thanks for reading.
REPLAY REMIX