How should I be playing battle mages?
Specifically Swain, Malzahar, and Aurelion Sol. Should I roam a lot? What should I do during laning phase? What should I build?
5 Comments
Think of Battle Mages as the Juggernauts in the Mage class. They're meant to deal massive DOT damage, build AP, Mana and HP and are front liners for the most part since most of their abilities are close to medium range. Roam like you would any midlaner, just make sure you have a wave at the enemy tower so the opposing mid laner doesn't take your own. Items that most Battle Mages build are RoD, Liandry's Torment, Rylai's, Archangels and situation tank/AP items. Just try to farm up for your times until you have better mana sustain to start making better trades and kills against your opponent. I hope this bit of information helps.
depends on the battle mage. malzahar has SCARY ganks regardless of his power level post 6 and aurelion sol has roaming built into his kit with that E+Q combo, so they're both good roamers imo
Malzahar is pretty easy. Go ghost flash, lucidity boots, 15% summoner cd reduction in masteries, and then just flash ult people all the time.
Build depends on champ and playstyle - I find 
a must on any mage who's going to be a frontliner, because opposing teams know battlemages snowball hard, and they will be gunning for you any game you start to do really well. Past that - depends on the champ - but 
are all pretty safe bets. 
is often the footwear of choice, since you have to go toe-to-toe with tanks a lot, though other boots can be built. As with any mage, 
is a crucial potential choice as well - however, battlemages tend not to rush it as fast, getting damage and tankiness first, and the rabbit hat in mid-build if an opportunity presents itself.
Laning phase - get fed. Battlemages are not scary unless fed, and then they're really really scary. Focus on CS and on denying your opponent's CS. One thing that battlemages excel at is lane pushing, so try to get in position to take first brick (or just brick generally). THEN roam. Push in other lanes to help get map control, take objectives - the usual LCS-style play. But yes, late game with a battlemage, you are roaming a LOT, hopefully fed, and looking for favorable fights.
- Swain specifically welcomes a frontline matchup with the entire enemy team late game, but only if fed and with ult up. Letting them jump on you in Raven form, then stunning them all and immediately proc'ing , is one of the reasons many lower ELO teams see him as such a cancer. He likes to be wherever the biggest teamfight is happening so he can vamp a zillion hit points off a spread of targets. That being said, if he's fed late game, there's not much he can't 1v1 either - so the mission for Swain (at least until the rework) is thus always to get his CS, and to get . He's surprisingly squishy before he has those items, but after he does he is almost always terrifying.
- Malhazar is, of course, more assassin-y. Your ult, if you are fed, will tend to reliably kill a single champion. However, your voidlings have to be your frontline in a teamfight. So he tends to do much more of the assassin-style sneaky-sneaky where he catches solo laners or junglers out of position and just feasts up, and plays the edges of teamfights where he can reliably assassinate the enemy carries. Vision is probably a must, because Mal really can't survive a facecheck by the enemy in force, and needs to know where the easy single targets are.
- Aurelion Sol is somewhere in the middle. He excels at using his star ring and moderate range spells to fight 1-2 enemy champions at a time, and is REALLY good at roaming thanks to his comet, so he tends to go where he wants to and to roam and play zone a lot to find favorable matchups. He likes to be near the center of fights, but is not a supertank, so there's a lot of duck-and-dodge to maximize your star damage and to keep yourself healthy. He's also an exceptional chaser, who excels at finishing off fleeing foes. Finally, he is surprisingly easy for the opponent to underestimate, and this can be used when trying to get fed if you can get a sense of when the opponent really doesn't understand how much your star damage will creep up on them.