#Hey, everyone.
A long while back, I wrote a guide on playing support Ashe. That guide became obsolete with Ashe's mini-rework and the changes to Black Cleaver and Zeke's Herald. However, with the most recent patch, I have begun playing support Ashe again and felt like sharing some tips for anyone interested.
My last guide showcased Ashe as a damage-building poke support. This guide will be for a tanky Ashe support.
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Masteries:
0/12/18
I take Bandit from Cunning and Bond of Stone from Resolve.
Runes:
Flat armor for everything except scaling MR glyphs.
Skill Level-Up Priority:
R>W>Q/E
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Start:
+ 
x3 + 
I consider Spellthief the best support item on Ashe despite her poor AP scaling (only adds damage to her ult). I treat Spellthief as a throwaway item, like a Doran's item, and I choose to sell it around mid-game. Spellthief with Bandit provides a steady laning income from your poking. Spellthief procs also add quite a bit of damage to your poking early on. Your flat armor runes will make you deceptively tanky, allowing you to win a lot of early trades with the enemy ADC as you harass them with frequent volleys and autoattacks. Try and work with your allied ADC to zone the enemy from farming.
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Laning:
+ 
+ 
+
Grabbing either a 
or 
early on will help you sustain your mana as you spam your volleys at the enemy laners. Either item will greatly enhance your trading while decreasing the cooldown on volley. Your Hawkshot will help with vision. You can also bush-check with Volley, since it will proc spellthief and visibly grant gold if it hits an enemy. Finishing will massively improve your kiting and peel, and the item no longer penalizes ranged champions with smaller slow fields. The powerful slow field makes an excellent followup to landing your ultimate, and results in very good ranged lockdown.
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Mid/Late Game:
+ + 
+ 
+
Completing will provide you with 40% CDR. This is important since it makes it possible to reach an ultimate cooldown under 50 seconds. This will allow you to use your ultimate in pretty much every single teamfight/skirmish. You will want to stick close to your allied ADC in order to help them kite enemies while your Black Cleaver shreds the opponent's armor. If you have accumulated a good number of assists (and possibly some kills), then you may have enough gold to finish . This item will make you quite tanky, even potentially allowing you to outduel the enemy ADC if you were successful in shutting them down during laning. If you or your allied ADC are gap-closed by a melee assassin or bruiser, your active will also help peel them off so that you can resume kiting. The size of your slow field also now scales with bonus armor.
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Typically, the game will not last long enough for you to finish any additional items. If the game does drag on, then you may want to consider some of these items:
This will help round out your defenses and will help a lot in dealing with enemy mages.
Combined with volley, this will allow you to quite effectively stack BC procs and build up Q Focus on the enemy team.
This will further improve your kiting/lockdown while adding some sustain and damage.
The passive on this item will scale with the armor in the rest of your kit, making you an even less attractive target for the enemy ADC.
This will let you apply grievous wounds. By building this, you will allow your ADC to get LDR instead regardless of enemy team comp.
This will give you a decent chunk of damage while making you a more difficult target for mages.
This is an extremely expensive but powerful item both offensively and defensively. The active is very valuable against almost any team.
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Thanks for reading! I hope that you enjoyed this. Just remember, if you are going to try support Ashe, take it into a normal or bot game first!
