hey, im diamond level volibear main and i jungle him with:
AS reds
armor yellows
AS quints
MR blues vs mixed dmg or armor blues vs full ad teams.
masteries 9/21
stalkers blade: cinderhulk (yes, stalkers), boots (ninjatabi/mercury) with alacrity
2nd item:
vs heavy ad: randuins
vs mixed dmg or ap: glory
3rd item:
vs heavy ad: glory
vs mixed dmg: randuins
vs tons of ap: spirit visage
4th item:
vs tons of ap: maw of malmortius
vs tons of ad: frozen heart
vs mixed dmg: spirit visage
5th item:
spirit visage or frozen heart, depending on whats missing.
i tried innummerable builds and variations and i can tell you for sure now, frozen mallet, botrk and all that crap is not worth it on volibear. if you are hypersnowballing, i.e. you got like 3 kills by level 5 and tons of farm, you can go trinity force second. its the only damage item worth building right now. otherwise, just be tank. with the 29 AS from runes and 60% from W, you attack too fast for attackspeed items to have good goldvalue allready. maw is good vs heavy ap, especially ap dps like cassio or karthus, as it pops the shield right when your passive pops too, so that you can heal in peace for a moment.
ganking with him usually is only worth it if you secure a kill. with lee sin, its allready cool to just Q Q auto EE auto W and the lane is won. with volibear, to get a real solid gank off, you most likely need chilling smite to catch up to your target and at least 3 auto attacks to bite them, so no burst possible. you need to make your enemy fight you or catch them SUPER off guard which happens too rare. to make them fight you, you can bait them with your passive and i also run exhaust smite very often for that reason. a successfull gank takes almost all of your resources, but voli snowballs hard from only a few kills, so its worth the investment.
also, just as a general guideline for beginners, never gank mid or bot when your passive is down and only gank top without passive when there is no way the enemy jungler could be there or the enemy could fight back. nautilus is tanky with his shield in the BEGINNING of a fight. he pops the shield and once its gone, he aint that tanky anymore. volibear is tanky in the middle and towards the end of a fight, when his passive kicks in and the enemies used all their cooldowns and are like "oh fuck"
generally speaking, you want to practice playing without flash, as its not very usefull on volibear. the only times when i pick flash is when the enemy team has alot of disengage and pokey-kitey stuff like ahri, janna, fiddle or whatnot. things that will 100% safely prevent you from running at them regardless of your movementspeed. so you run at them with glory, flash over charm and Q that pesky kogmaw into your team. other than that, you just want the exhaust and learn to abuse people for trying to fight you.
