Darius Champ Course

1. 1

1.1. When it comes to simple champions, players skip the process of learning their combos - this is a mistake, as Darius has two really important ones you need to know with his flash. You'd never skip learning Zed's combos, so don't sleep on Darius'. First up is Q Flash. Because your Q has a wind up time, if you tried to flash towards your opponent and then Q, it's super slow and easy for the enemy to respond to and outplay you. However, if you simply use your Q, and then your flash right before the animation goes off, then you can easily catch your opponent off-guard, scoring you more kills. Next up is more of a niche combo you won't use as much - but it's one of the most stylish ways you can clean up fights as Darius - which is what he's famous for. During your ultimate's animation, you can actually flash towards your next location - and your ult will still go off on the initial target. This can be VERY deadly in teamfights if you are able to pull it off, because you will cast your ultimate to finish a target off, and in the middle of the animation, flash towards your next target. This means that the second you drop down, you can auto attack them, applying 5 stacks of passive, and IMMEDIATELY ult them right after - dealing massive burst that is guaranteed to catch players off-guard. However, the more common use of the R flash is actually defensively. You may often find yourself super low on health right before you can cast your ult to finish a target off. In those cases, you'll want to R and immediately flash away to safety so that you can both kill your opponent, while staying alive at the same time.

2. 2

2.1. There's a very important tip you need to keep in mind when it comes to maximizing Darius's damage in fights. Although both your W and Q apply stacks of your passive, it goes without saying that most of your bleed stacks will come from auto attacks. Therefore, it is imperative that you do not miss any auto attacks because you're casting your abilities poorly, so you just need to learn how to auto weave. Auto weaving is very simple. It just means that you always try and auto attack before casting a spell, if you can help it. For example, you auto then Q. This way during your Q's animation, your auto comes off cooldown and you get to attack again. This should become instinctual especially before your W since it's an auto reset. You auto, and can immediately auto again after your W. Likewise with your E, you ideally want to auto and then pull someone with your auto coming back up again. It's important to keep this concept in mind as you go through your games. As an example, a rotation you may find yourself doing is auto, W, Q, then auto, E and auto again.

3. 4

3.1. As you should know by now, Darius has 2 main things he needs to worry about to maximize his kit. One, weaving autos between spells, and two, landing his Q's sweet spot. Let's go over your bread and butter combo which will help you achieve both in the smoothest way possible. There's 2 things to learn. First, you can guarantee that you land your Q's sweet spot with your E. By pulling your target, you're effectively stunning them for a bit. You'll have enough time to position with your Q to land the outer edge while your opponent is CC'd. The second thing to learn is that you can cancel your W's animation with your Q. So you go auto W, and then right after you press W you start channeling your Q. As you can see, Darius wastes no time on his W's animation this way. Combine these 2 concepts for the bread and butter combo every Darius needs to learn. E your target, auto W, and use your Q to cancel your W's animation. Now while your target is still CC'd, you land your Q's sweet spot. We recommend going into the practice tool to make sure you can do this as fluidly as possible. This will make your trades and all-ins way more consistent, allowing you to score more kills.

4. 5

4.1. As we've covered previously, Darius loves long fights. It's one thing to tell you that you should only fight your opponent when you can take an extended engage. But the real way to get good at Darius is making that a possibility whenever you want to. Darius may not be the most mechanically demanding champion, but understanding lane mechanics and wave fundamentals will make you an unstoppable god on the champion. Both of which we cover constantly on our main site guides. However, let's cover the easiest and most reliable way to set up a good lane state, so you can always find a good fight during the lane phase. Because most opponents fear fighting you, it'll be very often that you're able to get the wave advantage. What you want to do is crash the wave at your opponents tower. Then, you'll want to patiently wait for the even minion rule to apply. To put it simply, after crashing a wave, your opponent will naturally get a push lead over you since the waves will start crashing closer to your opponent's side of the lane. Therefore, the wave will naturally begin pushing further and further away from the safety of their tower. While that's happening, you want to thin out the wave gradually while it's pushing to you. This way, the wave will naturally push to around here, and by thinning it you won't have to fight your opponent at a massive minion disadvantage. Now that that's done, the rest is easy. Go in and abuse how broken Darius is in extended fights and score a free kill thanks to all your patience and wave fundamentals.

5. 6

5.1. Everyone will tell you that Darius wins long fights. What most people don't understand, is exactly WHY Darius wins long fights, and just how powerful he actually is. Not understanding Darius's strengths properly leads to players either being over-confident and dying, or playing too safe and missing kills. So listen up. Each auto and ability applies one stack of your passive - up to 5 stacks. At 5 stacks, you gain a buff called Noxian Might, which gives you as much AD as a B.F sword does at level 3 - which obviously scales much higher with time as well. That, alongside the bleed damage which also does WAY more damage with 5 stacks, makes it almost impossible to lose extended fights. What this means is you want to do your best to avoid fights that are very close to your opponents tower, as you would be unlikely to hit that 5 stacks of your passive. And of course this means if your opponent IS far away from their tower, you want to look to engage - since as we mentioned, if you're healthy enough to hit 5 stacks, then you will win the fight thereafter.

6. 7

6.1. While you may feel nearly unstoppable in duels, you are going to get a cruel reminder that that isn't the case in most team fights. A big mistake we commonly see from newer Darius players is how they'll rush headfirst into a fight and immediately get blown up. What we'd recommend you do is to think of yourself more as a Katarina or Akali in team fights. You more often than not shouldn't be the first one to go in, and your main goal is to finish fights off, not get them started. You especially don't want to dive in too deep and allow yourself to get focused. Remember that it takes a little bit to get your damage rolling, so you'll never kill anyone running straight at the enemy carries before they kill you. But that's a problem isn't it? You want to focus carries, but you can't do so as Darius. So what's the solution? It's more simple than you'd think. As Darius, you will very often want to actually focus the enemy frontline instead. It may sound silly, but remember that Most of Darius's damage comes from stacking up his passive, both for the Noxian Might buff, and the bleed he puts on his opponents. What you need to remember is that once Darius gets the buff from one target, that he will instantly apply 5 bleed stacks to anyone else he attacks. This is why you may want to focus tanks first. It's really easy to land multiple autos on a front line champion, while minimizing the damage you take. Then, once your passive is stacked, you flash or ghost towards the primary enemy carries, instantly apply 5 stacks of bleed on them and absolutely murder them with your ultimate.

7. 8

7.1. When playing Darius you may encounter the very common problem of trying to pull your target in a big wave and then fumbling to target them to get those all important auto attacks rolling to stack your passive. Not to worry, there's actually a neat little trick that solves this problem instantly with no effort at all. When you pull an enemy champion and a bunch of minions, your next auto attack will instantly prioritize the enemy champion in the wave. Therefore, all you need to do is...not click. Instead, just allow your auto to go off, and then press W right after into Q to initiate the bread and butter combo we've talked about already.

8. 9

8.1. While Darius may be strong and players shall fear ever engaging you, that's obviously not always going to be the case. Oftentimes you'll be the one on the defensive, and playing to counter aggression. While the only purpose from Darius's E may seem to engage on your opponents, it's actually a really good defensive tool as well. Remember that it pulls champions towards you. It's especially useful to remember that you can actually knock enemies out of ongoing animations with it. For example, if a champion is dashing towards you, E them and it'll more often than not cancel their ability, which may allow you to turn the fight in your favor. In top lane, this is relevant in a ton of match ups. You can cancel stuff like Camille's hookshot, Irelia's Q, Gnar's jump, etc.

9. 10

9.1. It's no secret that Darius is ridiculously strong when he can actually reach his targets for a long trade. Because of this, Darius's biggest counters are ranged champions who can keep distance and harass from afar - never allowing a Darius to go in for an extended trade. While the summoner spell ghost is the perfect solution for this - it obviously has a massive cool-down and can't be used for every trade you want to take. So, a really good solution for this which players overlook - is to simply rush either merc treads or steelcaps as your first item. Not only do they give great defensive stats to negate a lot of harass from ranged champions - but the movement speed is a huge deal, allowing you to catch up and stick to the target much easier than you otherwise would be able to. Boots rush is typically something players are worried will cause them to lose fights even if they can get to their target - but this isn't a problem in this case. Range champions are naturally weaker than you if they're unable to kite - so even if they built DPS items, you will out-value them because you're Darius. All you need to actually worry about, is being able to catch them.

10. 12

10.1. Luckily for Darius players a while back Riot decided to randomly try and make jungle Darius viable. Now while Darius in the jungle is not picking up much traction at all, the buffs he got were actually an indirect buff to top Darius players too. One of the changes was that your Q's sweet spot healing applies from big jungle monsters as well as players. So here's a neat little trick you might be able to pull off whenever you're fighting in the jungle. Try and bait your opponent and position around a jungle camp in the middle of your duel. Q both your opponent and the camp to get double the healing, which may allow you to potentially turn a fight around.

11. 13

11.1. Once you start playing Darius you're going to run into a very common issue. It's one thing to stomp the laning phase on him, but it's a whole other issue translating your lead into a win. Many newer Darius players will quickly learn how to dominate the lane on him, but many will falter when it comes to the mid game and what he should be doing at this time. There's 2 issues that will usually come up. They're either side laning way too much, or not nearly enough. The problem with Darius side laning is that he can't pressure towers or tower dives like a Tryndamere can. Darius takes a while to ramp up his damage, which means that towers are a big safety zone for his opponents. Many players will often just sit in the side lane and not get much done, since their opponents will just play safe and avoid fighting him. On the other hand, other Darius players group way too much. If you're always grouped with your team, you'll lose out on farm and fall behind in levels and gold. Darius is a champion that works best when he's snowballing, so over-grouping will throw your lead very often. The solution is simple and we again cover this way more in depth on our macro courses which you can find here. But for Darius - you want to abuse the fact that you're so strong in 1v1 situations and push your opponent into their tower in a side lane. Then, you rotate over to your team and force a fight with a numbers advantage near an objective or anything else. This strategy is the main way you'll carry games as it makes the best use out of your dueling capabilities, as well as your ability to crush team fights.

12. 14

12.1. One of the key concepts you need to remember when playing League is to not only think about what your champion does well, but what weaknesses your opponent may be looking to exploit too. If we were making a Darius counter guide, one of the very first things we'd mention is how strong Darius's Q is and how you should be playing around it in order to punish him. If we take the reverse of that, then you'll realize just how important it is to hold your Q and make sure you never waste it, unless you want to leave yourself extremely vulnerable. For example, during this lane Darius is laning okay, until he randomly uses his Q while he's too far away, which Irelia easily side steps. This is a critical mistake, because now Irelia has 8 whole seconds to punish Darius who doesn't have his highest damage ability, which applies a passive stack and heals him for a meaningful amount of health. It's a huge window of opportunity for her. Luckily for him, she doesn't punish his egregious mistake, and goes back to laning normally. That is, until Darius makes the same mistake yet again. You won't get lucky every single time you waste your Q as Darius as you can see here. Make sure to hold your Q whenever possible unless you're either positive you're going to land it, or when there's no way your opponent can punish it for it going on cooldown.

13. 15

13.1. Throughout this guide we have made it excessively clear that you win long fights because of your passive. However Darius players can often tunnel vision on this and forget to outplay their opponents. They'll instead just run in and mindlessly fight thinking they'll win no matter what. This is not always true, and just like any other champion you should try to play around your opponent's abilities whenever possible. One of the main ways of doing this is through spacing as Darius, which we can demonstrate through this next encounter. Darius walks into lane and proceeds to fight Garen. Without any hesitation, he doesn't back off and commits to the all-in which he just barely loses. And this is the exact problem we want to highlight. Let's look back at this fight and analyze how easily Darius could have won if he actually tried to play around Garen's abilities. At the start, you need to remember that your sweet spot Q has a higher range than most melee champion's auto attacks. You can often look to Q and kite away afterwards, rather than give your opponent the opportunity to fight back after you land it. Although he messes that up, he could still make up for it here with his E. Remember that your E effectively stuns your opponent for a moment. Combine that with a W slow, and Darius could easily kite out of Garen's E range right now and wait for the spell to wear off. All the while, he could be waiting for his Q's cooldown to come back up. Instead, by committing to the fight and not spacing or kiting the Garen, his Q comes up when he's already nearly dead and he barely has any time to abuse the big DPS boost he gets once he stacks his passive. Remember that you can't always just go in face first into your opponents. Darius is also good at spacing out his opponents with his Q and kiting with his E to buy time to stack his passive and play around enemy cooldowns. Keep that in mind and you'll outplay your opponents way more often than most Darius players.

14. 16

14.1. A lot of champions have big ticket abilities in their kit that both feel very satisfying to land and are incredibly potent for scoring kills. It goes without saying that Darius's ultimate is one of those abilities. If you already knew that, then your opponents definitely do as well, and there is a major issue that can plague newer Darius players who don't play around this problem. Some champions have easy ways to deal with your ultimate's damage in their kit. And since your ultimate has such a long and reactable animation, it is impossible to catch someone off-guard with it. For example, take a look at this duel between Darius and Pantheon. Darius engages and fully stacks his passive, and throws out his ultimate. Pantheon easily counters with his E, both negating the damage and dealing damage back at the same time. This was a horrible misplay by Darius which can be avoided with the following mindset. If your ultimate is so easy to react to, then just don't press it in fights vs champions like this. Your opponent HAS TO save their counter ability for your ultimate. If they use it randomly, you'll crush them in the fight later. Therefore, if you don't press your ultimate, they can't use their counter ability, which means they don't get value out of one of their abilities. All Darius needed to do here is keep auto attacking and crush the pantheon with his Noxian Might buff. But by pressing ult, he allowed Pantheon to get a ton of value out of his E, both negating a ton of damage and dealing substantial damage to Darius at the same time. This concept is most relevant in these following top match ups: Fiora because of her W, Kayle because of her ult and Sett from his massive W shield as well as Pantheon. All of them both counter your ult's damage and deal damage to you at the same time, so don't ever press your ultimate until after they've pressed those spells.

15. 17

15.1. As Darius, you'll often come across the problem that you may not actually have the time in a fight to ult a target with 5 stacks of your bleed. Is this an issue? How much less damage will you deal if you do it on 4 stacks instead of 5, etc? We'll break down all the questions you may have about this here. Let's put simple numbers to this so you can easily understand this concept. So an ultimate with 0 bleed stacks will deal 100% of your ult's base damage as true damage. The thing is that each stack of your bleed will increase that base damage by 20%. So 1 stack is 120%, 2 stacks is 140% and so on. Let's demonstrate. Here's a 0 stack ult dealing 129 damage. 1 stack does 154 2 stacks does 180 3 stacks does 206 and 4 stacks does 232. This may lead you to believe that the difference between a 4 and 5 stack ultimate will only be around 25, as was the case all the times before. You'd be very wrong though. There's over a 100 damage difference by getting 5 stacks of a bleed on a target before using your ultimate. Remember that when you fully stack your passive, you get a massive chunk of AD with Noxian Might. Your ult's AD scaling is very generous, therefore this buff is crucial for dealing big damage with your ult. The point of this exercise is to help you really understand the mechanics behind the damage of your ult and passive. If you feel like you don't have the time to stack your passive, then remember that the damage difference between of 1 to 2 stacks of your bleed isn't that big of a deal to your ult's damage. However, the difference between 4 to 5 is huge, so you should almost always try to fully stack your passive if possible in fights before you use your ultimate.