I cringe when I see a Skarner on my team.

4NoxiousHours·May 26, 2016·2 votes·1,099 views

He is just terrible in every way. He does no damage and can't even tank properly. WHY do people pick something so weak and useless in this meta

16 Comments

legionnaire99May 26, 20163 votes

He has a top10 winrate the meta support him to well

Fondling GemsMay 26, 20162 votes

Because this is a game and some people like the champ and want to have fun?

4NoxiousHoursMay 26, 20161 votes

[{quoted}](name=Fondling Gems,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=E9ATV9VF,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2016-05-26T19:41:59.803+0000)

Because this is a game and some people like the champ and want to have fun?

IN RANKED?!?

PheonixwishMay 26, 20161 votes

Yep. If they have fun with him and know him well, there's no reason not to pick him unless he's countered .-.

stealthfox94May 26, 20162 votes

{quoted}

IN RANKED?!?

If the person knows how to play the champ and does well with them what's the problem? I've seen really good Urgot players before who get fed.

RookPusherMay 26, 20161 votes

Implication being that fun isn't allowed in ranked? I'd argue the opposite. If you don't have fun with a champ, no amount of counter-pick is going to save you.

The Queen ViperMay 26, 20162 votes

{quoted}

... in this meta

There's a meta in Silver 5?

IncognonymousMay 26, 20161 votes

A good Skarner is terrifying. All the hallmarks of a juggernaught without the weaknesses. Full build is disgusting on someone who can weave spellblade procs well.

AlutrosityMay 26, 20161 votes

{quoted}

A good Skarner is terrifying. All the hallmarks of a juggernaught without the weaknesses. Full build is disgusting on someone who can weave spellblade procs well.

I don't know about it being disgusting but the damage is definitely real.

Wolfram OxfordMay 26, 20161 votes

When you are trying to get Riot to buff your favorite champion while trying to NOT be obnoxious...but end up being obnoxious.

AlutrosityMay 26, 20161 votes

It's not useless, but building him to his strengths is difficult because his w scales off his maximum health, but his damage requires a botrk, triforce, and frozen heart to be truly effective, since he's not just going to be on the frontlines but literally all over the place. You can use the deathfire touch mastery on him, and I promise you his damage will go up dramatically, since you are constantly casting q in fights and reducing the cooldown with autoattacks, which synergizes perfectly with death fire touch since its utility is centered around spell spamming. Wits end is also a good item on Skarner as it buffs the magic damage that comes with using his q during an extended fight.

Trying to build Skarner as a pure beef-tank works the same way it does with Nautilus jungle or top. Nautilus needs at least an iceborn to supplement his cc, fulfill his mana requirements, and make his passive into the true nightmare it was born to be, and a wits end or nashor's tooth to improve his dueling potential. This diminishes his tankiness in no way because warmogs and locket will easily bring him close to 3800HP, and once the shield pops his tankiness goes into the trashcan. Basically both are too reliant on attack speed, cdr, and mana to be effective in teamfights: yes TANKS are meant to to supply a respectable amount of damage with the majority of it going over to the rest of the team. Supports like Taric, Braum, Alistar, and Blitzcrank are supposed to be the true unkillables as they are around to provide the most raw shielding and peeling.

Sightless66May 26, 20162 votes

Deathfire touch is not advisable on Skarner. The base damage for it is very low, and does not increase with levels, so it will continue. It primarily gains damage from bonus AD and AP, and all top-level Skarner builds include neither of either. That means that Skarner will only get 2 damage a second from it no matter how late the game goes. As a rule, this mastery is bad unless someone is going for a glass-cannon build. Skarner can't, so it is bad on him.

I would also advise against building attack speed or on-hit items. His scaling with bonus attack speed is very bad, and his attack speed is very low unless you are in a shrine, which is unreliable to say the least. Making use of a sheen item for damage takes advantage of his high base AD.

AlutrosityMay 26, 2016

{quoted}

Deathfire touch is not advisable on Skarner. The base damage for it is very low, and does not increase with levels, so it will continue. It primarily gains damage from bonus AD and AP, and all top-level Skarner builds include neither of either. That means that Skarner will only get 2 damage a second from it no matter how late the game goes. As a rule, this mastery is bad unless someone is going for a glass-cannon build. Skarner can't, so it is bad on him.

I would also advise against building attack speed or on-hit items. His scaling with bonus attack speed is very bad, and his attack speed is very low unless you are in a shrine, which is unreliable to say the least. Making use of a sheen item for damage takes advantage of his high base AD.

60% of your bonus AD is NOT very small when you build warrior, not with a champion who can spam their spells and reduce the cooldown with autoattacks, and it doesn't need to increase with lvl, because it scales off something that will be at a high lvl (bonus AD) in the late game. If it scaled into late game with lvls it would become broken and Skarner would get nerfed due to riot's notorious inability to balance him correctly. Your example follows a full-tank hp build where the only benefit goes to his w, and his e has a fairly high cooldown, and the slow projectile speed puts him at even greater risk unless already in the fight. Couple that with movement speed that ramps up as opposed to being instant, and you have a Skarner who is all but useless if he misses. He needs a fallback for when the team inevitably jumps onto his face, and he's only able to cc the carry who is going to be well protected by the backline.

As for attack speed? He already needs very little to make use of his q, going into the jungle and receiving the boost, is your reward for being able to get people to chase you when you go speeding in from behind and yanking their adc away with your ult, allowing the rest of your team to jump in. The shrine's are most useful for counter-jungling and improving his clear time, not for teamfighting, because most teams don't like to get bottle-necked as it's a guaranteed death sentence. Secondly, if you hit the enemy with your e which is easy to do if you use the aforementioned bait, then attack speed scaling becomes irrelevant because he gets a boost from that alone, which ends up synergizing with the items he's built.

Skarner needs to build sheen early, and sheen items should typically be finished right away, unless the champion has an empowered autoattack like Trundle/Nasus/Nautilus, that lets them take full advantage of their base ad and bonus ad from runes as opposed to trying to combine it with a spell that also has no damage early and a follow-up autoattack that is going to be weak early. As a result, if Skarner tries to build iceborn which will happen around mid-game when the teamfights start happening, the slow field will be small because the size scales with his armor, and he won't have a lot of armor until late game anyway. Triforce is the better option because it will improve his mobility in teamfights which counters the negative effect iceborne would otherwise give by allowing him to get to his destination faster and do what he does best: flank the disrupt the enemy.

If you build full-tank Skarner with loads of hp you're going to be wasting stats, because his goal isn't to stand in the middle of things like Nautilus, who has a 17% max hp scaling on his shield as opposed to Skarner's 14% when maxed and 80% of his ability power which is there for the purposes of items like abyssal scepter and aids in preventing him from getting bursted by a cc mage on the way in while stunning and slowing people out of his way with the e+q combo ontop of should he be looking to rev up the damage of his empowered q. Skarner's goal is to run in there, grab the adc and get the fuck back out, and to do it extremely fast, which means his shield doesn't need to last for as long as Naut's does. Moreoften than not he doesn't even drag the adc back to his team, he keeps going, and pulls the adc toward the enemy base or into the jungle where vision gets cut, likely with one other person waiting for him while the other three start kiting the team trying to chase you.

Top level Skarner players who build neither AD or AP--well at least the ones who don't build AD, AP Skarner is pretty shit, though it used to be pretty damn good back in the day--yet are somehow in the top ranks are in all likelihood winning against bad players, and I'm willing to bet it is in platinum where toxicity and overall arrogance cause players to flip out because they don't know how to play against something and neither does their support, causing them to go on tilt, or the build path winds up being so inflexible or they think they know the champ so well because they are meta-tools that try to pick up a champion like Skarner who requires very precise mechanics like Udyr, but unlike say Ekko who can build full tank, and end up feeding because they don't realize Skarner is like a fast-moving bulldozer on crack. Therefore Skarner's reputation is built on people calling him overpowered to the point of absurdity and vice versa: disparities like that occur it moreoften than not means player's either suck shit at him AND suck shit at playing against him, so he always seems overpowered or underpowered no matter what. The same thing gets said about Urgot, Irelia, and Riven, with her being one of the aforementioned plat types you see in that ELO, so I find it hard to believe that building Skarner as a full tank is useful in a scenario where everybody is decent which is and should be the most realistic means of measuring a champion's worth.

tl;dr Skarner is a bruiser not a full tank.

Sightless66May 26, 20161 votes

Right. That's why he's been sitting between the 10th and 5th highest winrate for almost half a year. Because he's so terrible.

Skarner is actually quite powerful. His problem is that he feels terrible and is boring to most players, and has contradictory design that is annoying to play with. However, boring is not the same thing as weak, and Skarner can compete with pretty much any champion in terms of power alone.