8.8 New Overpowered ~~Korean~~ NA sion
Runes: grasp, boneplating, conditioning, overgrowth ; absolute focus, gathering storm
Why: Grasp - scales up abilities, great sustain for lane, scales up damage of titanic and shield from sterak Boneplating - we won't be getting enough pressure in lane to likely make use of demolish too often, so it's not worth taking it. Conditioning - scale up our resistances - grasp plus w max is more than enough to survive enemy poke damage in lane w/o taking extra regen Overgrowth - same reasons as grasp Absolute focus - we're a tank. We are probably vs a tank. This means as long as we stay healthy, we have more ad for early trades and it scales better than transcendence with most builds unless you spec far too much into cdr. Extra movespeed is ok, but not really necessary for us and the extra ad it would give is trivial with most builds. Gathering storm - sion has crazy base damage with his abilities. He also has respectable ratios. This gives us a ton of extra ad the longer the game goes... helping us hit like a bruiser, but still soak damage like a tank.
Items: core - titanic, sterak, frozen heart secondary/situational - abyssal mask, spirit visage, thornmail, sunfire
When/why to take each: abyssal - rush vs ap champs top; if not vs an ap and you don't have a teammate who will make use of the damage amp later, go visage visage - 3rd or 4th item generally; take if not vs an ap opponent in lane but there is one in game or is decent incidental magic damage (rageblade adc, witt's end user, etc.); amps the healing we get from grasp too thornmail - great final armor item vs ad heavy teams with a lot of aa damage sunfire - take vs a strong ad toplaner when you can't feel comfortable just rushing titanic or glacial shroud (frozen heart component) into titanic; gives nice pushing power and hp as well as some decent early resistances
Why the core items? Combined with your secondary items, you end up with similar hp and resistance values as full-tank sion. Not exact, but close enough to not feel TOO much of a difference - especially since you are running grasp instead of comet or glacial augment. This also gives you more scaling to add to the infinite hp stacking via your w and buffs your durability thanks to the hp scaling in your kit. So why not just go with the normal sion build? Besides the nice 1-shots you see in the vid, the answer is simply that normal tank sion is only good for cc. His damage is never enough to threaten enemies by mid game. With this build, even if you aren't ahead, your autos and abilities (thanks to more ad which scales them nicely) will be doing far more damage. This forces enemies to respect you even when your abilities are on cd. Sterak's is especially a key because people like to punish enemies for diving in by chain cc'ing them and blowing them up. Steraks gives us a 2nd shield (besides our w) and a ton of tenacity to weaken the other team's ability to chain cc and delete us. This again makes us all the more scary in a fight. Titanic gives us waveclear and it gives solid teamfight damage thanks to our high hp which amps the on-hit damage of titanic. Again, this is amped by grasp procs and the bonus hp we get for killing stuff.
Why am I maxing w when everyone goes either q max or e max? W does a TON of damage with it's explosion - flat damage scaling by level AND percentage max hp damage to enemies. This makes it very strong - rivaling e max plus comet - when the explosion damage lands on enemies early on. W max also increases the strength of our shield. Meaning we can trade more damage onto enemies with our e and q without taking any damage in return. Which also increases our chance that they will stay in range long enough for us to get off the shield explosion damage. Thus, we are getting both a ton of defense AND offense all at the same time. E and q max builds only offer damage. Secondly others go e or q max to help sion with his waveclear. But since we are getting titanic early on, we don't really need help with waveclear... and w will help with that too.
Note, I have played this several times over different patches. I've 2v4 grabbed 3 kills/assists vs a fed enemy team with my midlane ekko to stop their baron. I've 1v2 destroyed a decent camille and her ww jg in laning phase when camille was inarguably the number one meta champ. It may not be the best for every game, but when it can work, damn it is worth building this route. It offers the best of both worlds: ad sion with his cheesy strong damage and tank sion with his unkillable nature and cc. It isn't quite either of them, but it is a fun in-between offering perhaps a better combination of both than what either of the others offers.