Sylas Champion Course

1. 1

1.1. When it comes to combos, fear not as most of Sylas's kit is very straightforward and requires little effort to learn. Generally, you just try to land all your abilities on your opponent, and then spam auto attacks to use all your passive procs. It's pretty simple. The only combos you need to learn are in regards to actually landing his abilities, specifically the second part of his Q, as well as landing your skill-shot E. And to make those things easier, here's the 2 main sequences you want to use in order to more consistently land all your damage. The first is to land your Q2 way more consistently. If you actually read the tooltip of your Q, you'll notice just how much more damage the second part of it does. However it is very easy to dodge, and your opponents are just going to walk out of it all the time. To get around this, here's what you do. First use your E1, and before trying to chain to your opponent, you instead throw out your Q1. This slows your opponent, even if only slightly. That slows makes it much easier to land the skill-shot part of your E onto your opponent. And if you land that, then your target is now CC'd and will be unable to avoid your Q2, taking massive damage. This is your main combo and you should work on doing this as smoothly as possible, in order to get the most damage out of your kit. The second combo is a very slight variation of this one. You E towards your opponent, and then W on top of them. The point of this is to be literally right next to your opponent, making it nearly impossible for your E to miss. Then you just do the previous Q into E2 combo, and you're done. Follow these combos and you will be dealing way more damage than every other Sylas player who doesn't care about landing their Q2 damage.

2. 2

2.1. We won't lie to you, you're unlikely to enjoy the early laning phase as Sylas. Most melee champions in mid lane already have a rough time due to their range disadvantage, but Sylas can often have an even worse time than other melee mid laners. One of the major issues you have is that you have to use all your spells and fully commit to trade with your opponent. But the problem is that after you do, you have to retreat and they'll harass you all the way until you're back to safety. This makes it very difficult for you to ever find good trades vs ranged champions. Fortunately, this isn't so much of an issue vs melee champions, and Sylas is a lot more playable in those match ups. We'll cover some trading tips that are especially useful vs melees in another guide, but for now, let's talk about the best tool Sylas has for dealing with rough ranged match ups. And that tool is simply jungle pressure. We know that your junglers are not going to gank for you every single game, but your job as Sylas is to try and keep healthy enough, so you can abuse how broken your E is for gank set ups. Sylas is nearly as strong as Leblanc is at setting up ganks. The amount of mobility and catch he has in his kit makes him one of the best mid laners to gank for in the game. So although you may get pushed in a lot of the time, your goal is always to be patient, keep your health up, and ping for jungler to come whenever he has time for a gank.

3. 3

4. 4

4.1. Although we talked about how Sylas isn't the strongest champion during the early lane phase, it doesn't mean you shouldn't ever look to punish your lane opponents. Most champions have certain spikes they want to trade around, and for Sylas that will generally be during your odd levels, or more specifically, any time you put another point in your W. It goes without saying that all champions get stronger whenever they put a point into their main ability, however Sylas gains more benefit than most. This is due to the fact that his W has a 2 part effect. One that deals damage, and an other that heals him. Not only that, but the cooldown goes down significantly as you put more points into it. Therefore, you really want to be on the lookout to trade at levels 4,5,7, and 9. This is when you're relatively at your strongest in lane phase trades. Another important tips as far as going for trades is to keep them as short as you can. Until Sylas gets levels and a bit of ability haste, his spells have really high cooldowns. And since he is completely out of damage once he runs out of his passive procs, it makes sense to just go for quick burst trades. Get in, use your spells, weave in some passive auto attacks, and then get out before you overstay your welcome.

4.2. Most early trades during the laning phase will be decided by whether you can land your E or not on your opponent. It's one of the most important parts of your kit due to the CC and gap close it provides, as well as having really high base damage. As a result, your opponents will naturally hide behind their minion waves which protect them from your skill-shot, making it really easy for them to avoid it. Sylas does have a small bit of counterplay against this though thanks to his AoE passive. Whenever you notice that minions are getting low, you can begin going in, hit the wave with your passive, and make a path to landing your E on your target. A very consistent time this happens is always on the first wave vs melee champions. If neither of you is hitting the wave early, then all 3 melee minions tend to die at around the same time. You can often catch your opponent off-guard by dashing forward, killing the defending minions, and getting a quick trade off with your E. That being said, after you've got some levels and maybe a couple of item components under your belt, you can start to do this a bit more aggressively, even in ranged match ups. As you see the backline get low, press Q on it, dash forward, and finish them off with your passive. And once again, you'll have a way to get an E on your opponent to win a quick trade.

5. 5

5.1. As we mentioned in the early laning video, you are going to get shoved in constantly towards your tower because of your weak early laning phase. Whenever you play a champion who has to sit under their tower for a relevant part of the game, then you really want to make sure that you learn some quick tips for last-hitting under tower, so that you don't fall too far behind in CS Luckily for you, Sylas has some really easy last hitting under tower, as long as you know what you're doing. All you have to remember is that your passive auto attacks deal significantly more damage to your main target, and a little bit of damage to the surrounding targets. Let's watch this clip of a Challenger Sylas knowing exactly how to use this to last hit under his tower. As the wave comes in, he Qs a few minions to last hit them from far away. Then he uses his W and auto attack to last hit this melee. The important bit here is that he still has one passive proc left. Let's see how he uses it. As the wave crashes at his tower, look at how he walks forward make sure that his passive proc hits this melee minion as well. This is to guarantee that it's low enough so that his next auto attack last hits it. Now he uses his E for another passive proc, and he auto attacks this minion with a quarter health left. This is by making use of the enhanced damage that the main target takes from your passive. And at the same time, the minimal splash damage does enough harm to the remaining caster creeps so that he could last hit them with regular auto attacks.

6. 6

6.1. As any good League player knows, one of the most impactful ways of carrying any game is by setting up traps, and surprising your opponents from the fog of war with a ton of burst, killing them nearly instantly. Now for Sylas, to really maximize your burst, you should abuse the fact that your E's cooldown begins not after the second activation, but it begins ticking down after your E1. So if you notice someone coming towards you like so, press E and wait for the spell to start to time out. Once it's about to run out, pop out of the brush with your E, use your Q and W, and by now your E should almost be up again for another rotation. This does a ton of damage, not just because you get to use E again, but because it gives you another 2 passive procs on top of that. Not only that, but you can basically guarantee that you land both E's in the rotation as well. The first is easy, since it's impossible to miss skill-shots when you get the jump on your opponent from the brush. And the second you can guarantee by saving your Everfrost for that cast timing. The final note to keep in mind is that this damage hack only becomes applicable once your E is maxed out, and you've got some ability haste in your build. Otherwise prepping the cooldown won't do too much, since Sylas's E has a naturally high cooldown.

7. 7

7.1. Something we covered during the early laning phase, is that you should only really be taking short burst trades. This is because Sylas does almost negative damage while he has no spells, and no passive procs left to auto attack with. In regards to this, during the mid game there begins to be a bit of a flow to how you're going to play out fights sometimes. When your abilities are on cooldown, you'll want to create space between you and your opponent and buy time while your spells come back up. Here's kind of how it looks. Sylas engages with his E, uses all his spells, and then auto attacks. This is the important bit, now his E is back up, so he creates distance with it, while his W and Q come off cooldown. When they're back up, he goes in, and deals damage. But once again, his E1 is the only spell available, so he creates distance, waits for his abilities, and goes back in. This spacing concept is very important on Sylas, and should become very natural as you start playing him more and more. Here's an example from a real game. Sylas is fighting Volibear and uses all his abilities dealing a ton of damage, but now he's out of juice since his passive procs are all gone. Instead of just standing there, he kites with his E1, buys a bit of time for his spells, and then crushes the fight once all his abilities are available again.

8. 8

8.1. One of the best parts about Sylas is definitely his W's healing. As a battle mage, being able to stay in fights and consistently regenerate health is what makes him so much fun and gives him so much playmaking ability. There is a small way you can optimize the ability even further though. Sylas's W will heal for the max amount any time that he's below 40% health. Generally, you won't care about this at all, but it can be relevant in situations where you know you'll only be able to cast 1 W in the entire fight. Here we've got an average mid game Sylas build. Notice that when he's missing just a bit of health, his W's healing is only 192 HP. Now that he's got slightly above 50% health, his W increases to 271 health restored. And finally, when he's below 40% health, his W's healing increases to 332. Again, this isn't something we urge you to really play around until you're way more comfortable on Sylas. But, if you're ever in a fight where you know you'll only get to cast W once, then you may as well wait until you get to a lower health threshold to cast it, since it'll heal for more that way.

9. 9

9.1. One of the few intimidating things about playing Sylas is trying to figure out which ultimate you should take in every game. With 5 different choices that change from match to match, it can feel overwhelming for a newer player to think about which ult is going to have the most impact. Trust us when we say that it's almost always going to be obvious which ultimate you choose. There's a clear winner between a Rumble ultimate, over something like taking some Teemo mushrooms. However, something that isn't very intuitive is how the damage scaling works on each individual ultimate. For example, if you take the ult of an AD champion, what happens as far as damage goes? Well, let's break that down. When you take the ult of a champion that has an AD scaling, such as Riven, then the original ult's AD ratios will actually convert to AP ratios once Sylas uses it. You don't have to do a lot of mental math here. The whole point is that you should never hesitate to take an ult, because you might think it won't do a lot of damage. Riot already took care of that problem for you. However, something you should definitely abuse is the fact that AP ratios remain the same, if the original ability has one. This is especially useful vs champions who have magic damage ultimates, but don't tend to build ability power, since those ults usually have insane AP ratios. For example, tanks like Leona and Thresh will never build AP. Therefore, Riot gave their ults 80 to 100% AP ratios. If you take one of these ults, especially later into the game, you're going to do insane damage. There's tons of other examples, such as Ashe and Tristana. Both of their ultimates have 100% AP ratios, because they're both ADCs. As you can see in this clip, a late game Ashe ultimate is definitely something you want to be gunning for, because it does insane levels of burst. Here's a list of some notable ults that you always want to look out for that have these crazy AP ratios. Amumu, Ashe, Leona, Tristana, Varus, Thresh, Blitzcrank, Irelia, Hecarim, Malphite and Xin Zhao. A lot of those may seem like they're just crowd control ults, but they all do devastating damage once you have a good amount of AP on Sylas.

10. 10

10.1. Alright, so you've gotten to one of the most fun parts of the game, team fights. Let's talk about what your role in fights should be and how to make the most out of playing Sylas. There's one big thing you need to think about when playing team fights. You generally NEVER want to be in the biggest clump of the fight. You know the area where there's like 3-4 melee champions all next to each other and all the ranged DPS are hitting them. Like this fight for example. Sylas is safely in the midst of things due to Mordekaiser's ultimate for the time being. But as it runs out, he should have been kiting towards his team. Instead, he's in the exact situation we just described. He's trying to frontline for the rest of his team, but he's not super tanky - so he gets disposed of very quickly. It's not like you can't do this frontline playstyle, but you generally need an ultimate that aids you in doing so. For example, Alistar's ultimate is the best one in the game Sylas can take for being able to tank multiple members of the enemy team. However, this is not how you actually want to play team fights. As this fight develops and his ultimate runs out, Sylas turns to what the champion is actually good at, small skirmishing. In team fights, you should constantly be looking for those isolated fights in the outskirts of the encounter. Sylas is at his best when he's in smaller scale fights, and making us of his powerful healing and high late game burst. But again, don't forget your versatility. You can also function very consistently as a backline diver, so long as you have an appropriate ultimate for it. Champions like Hecarim, Malphite, Jarvan, Akali, Nocturne, etc, have great ultimates you want to steal which will actually let you reach the enemy carries and assassinate them much more easily.

11. 11

11.1. As you know, we mentioned how Sylas has fairly weak laning. That sucks to go through, but it's required because this champion just gets more and more OP as the game goes on. Generally players think of champions like Kayle or Kassadin when they think of late game powerhouses, but Sylas is definitely up there as one of the best late game team fighters. And one of the major reasons for that is actually how low of a cooldown his ultimate has at level 16. With just a little bit of ability haste, the cooldown is under 20 seconds in the late game. That is ridiculous, especially in games where you have access to a lot of powerful enemy ultimates. For example, take a look at this late game team fight where Sylas is starting off with Malphite ult. He immediately asssassinates Ahri, and almost kills the enemy Ezreal before he's forced to retreat. But by now, his ultimate is already back up. He takes Graves's R and chunks him, before going in and instantly deleting the enemy Malphite. Sadly Graves crits him for a huge chunk, so he ends up dying, but it's clear as day just how broken Sylas is when he gets to these late game encounters. With enough AP, his sustain is insane, he has effectively 2 to even 3 ultimates per fight, and he deals crazy damage. So, always remember your late game scaling before you press that FF button.

12. 12

12.1. While Sylas may not have Talon levels of mobility around the map, his E does give him some pretty solid movement capability in the jungle, which you should definitely be abusing in order to either escape or catch up to your foes. The reason his mobility is so good is due to his 2 part E. The initial dash can go over a lot of terrain. And his chains after that actually have a fairly long range, which means that he can often pull himself to a lot of jungle camps to travel around. Just so that you don't have to think about it in game, here's some of the best and most common ways you'll be using your E to cross the jungle as quickly as a Kayn would, well...almost. The best one is definitely the one from the dragon pit to the red buff. This gets you across 2 thick walls, making running away a breeze if you need it. Obviously this works on the Baron side as well. And after that, here's some more super common double wall jumps. Try to make a note of a lot of these, as Sylas players make very good use of them in a lot of their games!

13. 13

13.1. Anyone playing League for any amount of time will know just how dangerous it can be to check unwarded brushes. Walking into an opponent's full combo is obviously not ideal. Luckily, Sylas has a tool he can use to check brushes, so that he gets off-guard way less often. Try to walk up to brushes at an angle where you can't get spotted. Then, Q the brush. Your Q will actually indicate if it has hit an enemy champion with a little mark. If you spot that, then you know it's dangerous to face-check and you can play accordingly. There's a ton of brushes on the map that you can approach from an angle where you aren't spotted. Use this technique whenever possible, so that you avoid enemy death traps and giving away a free kill.

14. 14

14.1. There's nothing quite as satisfying as asserting dominance over your opponent with flashy plays, or tower diving them. Making sure your inferior foes know their place is what League is all about. And this next trick is sure to do just that. Something you should know about how Sylas's E works is that he can actually continue to walk around and cast certain abilities while his chains are travelling. And only after the chains land does he begin pulling himself to his target. Which brings us to one of the best diving tools you can have up your sleeve, which is to secure an escape route before killing your opponent. Let's say both you and your opponent are super low, but they're under the safety of their tower. You want to dive, but if you do, there's no way you live. In that case, you can E forward, and instead chain minions behind you. As you do, flash to your opponent, finish them off, and then your chains will drag you back to safety. And keep in mind that if you're fast enough, you actually have just enough time to sneak in an auto attack on top of your W, though this is a bit risker to go for since the timing is so narrow.

15. 15

15.1. Okay, so this is a mechanic that is a bit more important the higher elo you're playing in, since it relies on the competence of your opponents. You can actually cancel your chain's pull to your opponent, by W'ing another target right as the chain is about to go off. Now the reason why this is more relevant in higher elos, is that people will buffer certain abilities, if they see that you're chaining them. For example, you could bait an Orianna that you're going to dive her. As a response, she'll buffer her ult before the chain lands, but you fake her out by cancelling. Surely you can see why this matters more in higher elo brackets, since lower elo players would never do that. That being said, this tactic does have other uses. You can deal damage to your opponent with just your E without having to dash to them, which would have put you in a bad spot. And just so you know, you can also cancel your chain's dash with a flash. That way you can bust some rhymes while outplaying your opponent. Just keep in mind that this timing is fairly precise. You have to use flash right as you're about to begin pulling yourself, so we'd recommend practicing this before busting it out in ranked.

16. 16

16.1. In a previous section, we covered how you can press some other abilities while your E's chain is flying to your target. While Sylas's base kit may not have a lot of crazy interactions with that, he can definitely get very crazy with the different ultimates he can steal Possibly the best interaction in the game is actually with Skarner. If he's ever in your game, you can steal his ult, E2 backwards, flash ult a target, and it'll drag you all the way back to your chain target. This is definitely a montage worthy play if you ever get to make it. There are some other cool ones with Azir's and Lee Sin's ultimates working a bit similarly. You push them into your team, all while dragging yourself back to safety. Or you could even dash forward to engage with a Cassiopeia R, while at the same time making sure you can't be counter-engaged on. There's definitely a lot of cool interactions you can pull off with this trick, so get creative and have some fun with it.

17. 17

17.1. In a previous section, we covered how you can press some other abilities while your E's chain is flying to your target. While Sylas's base kit may not have a lot of crazy interactions with that, he can definitely get very crazy with the different ultimates he can steal Possibly the best interaction in the game is actually with Skarner. If he's ever in your game, you can steal his ult, E2 backwards, flash ult a target, and it'll drag you all the way back to your chain target. This is definitely a montage worthy play if you ever get to make it. There are some other cool ones with Azir's and Lee Sin's ultimates working a bit similarly. You push them into your team, all while dragging yourself back to safety. Or something like Jarvan's ult, where you lock a target down, and then E to safety so that maybe your teammates finish them off. There's definitely a lot of cool interactions you can pull off with this trick, so get creative and have some fun with it.

18. 18

18.1. We've taught you some really critical stuff so far, but this is the most important video you'll see in this course. It's one thing to win games, but it's way more important to crush your opponents' spirits, so they understand how demolished they just got. Other characters all have their own BM techniques, such as Alistar's cowbell - a true classic. However, Sylas has one of the best BM techniques in the game, and we'll show you how to do it. First, for some reason whenever Sylas is in stasis, if his Q is off cooldown, then if you press it, Sylas will face in the direction that your cursor is in. On its own, this isn't really that cool. But if you go into stasis while throwing out your E's chain, then you can constantly change the direction around and around and really have fun with it. Guys, if a literal world champion goes out of his way to learn how to BM this way, then it goes without saying that you need to pick this up too. It'll tilt your opponents beyond belief if you pull this off after killing them, and will guarantee the mental victory, even if you end up losing the game.

18.1.1. note for VO person, pronounce this as "BEE EM"