A small Azir-talk

_First of all sketching the situation. I am simply a silver player who doesn't play ranked a lot, so this won't be about some crazy microgameplay, but more about the feeling and things I found out about the champ. I see a huge amount of people asking themselves how to play azir or how to play against him and this will just be my experience. _ _This post can also be seen as a celebration for my lvl 5 mastery on him now I decided to pick him up again after the heavy nerfs. _

**Should you pick up Azir? ** There will always be a few pricks that tell you they can play him perfectly after 5 games and that he isn't all that difficult. Don't listen to them. Azir is a hard champion mechanical wise and there is a lot more to him than meets the eye.

• Positive things: He is a really good midlaner to pick up and a must-have if you are a midmain and you enjoy mages the most. He is really fun to play and a high skill cap. You can solo carry your team and climb ranks really fast when you main him. He is really diverse and hard to counter. He has everything you want of damage in a mage and a lot of utility.

• Negative things: He is hard to pick up if you don't play mid all the time and you just want something to pick when you're forced into the role. He has a really steep learning curve and you'll do bad early. (Azir beginners tend to have a 38% winrate.) You tend to pull a lot of attention to your lane, but this might also be used to an advantage.

So these are the things you want to ask yourself before you decide to pick him up.

Azir roles and gameplay _A good Azir provides a lot to a team. It drifts from being the hypercarry to getting all the pressure on your lane so the other lanes can breathe safely. This champ will be a god in lower elo because you can manage the entire game from your solo-lane. _

Azir is a true lanebully that can deny his laner everything and render him useless. The reason of this is because of your ability to play really safe, have great poke, a hell lot of range and amazing waveclear.

The enemy laner has a few options to respond to this:

• What happens most of the time in lower elos is that they get poked down and don't get any CS so that they constantly have to back. The result of this will be that you'll get fed with Azir on farm and get an early tower.
• The enemy laner starts roaming to other lanes: This never takes long, when they decide to roam, you can easily roam with them or even better: destroy the towers in no-time. You have amazing sieging potential and if they decide to leave the azir alone. You can get to their inhib at around 20 min. You can also often take the inner and outer turret in one push if they roam because of your passive. This passive basicly creates a really short lane between their inner and outer turret once you place your passive on their inner turret. If they dive on you under your passive-turret you can easy fight them off and zone them really hard creating windows on other lanes to push and making them waste a lot of resources on you. The hard push when they roam is a really easy way to bait lots of wasted pressure on you or get you two turrets at once if they decide not to respond.
• The last option is that they are brave enough to ignore the poke you got on them and stay to fight you. This is probably the best decision when you play against Azir, because a lot of players fail to fight correctly with Azir. When they take this decision you'll have to rely less on your map-control and more on your Azir-mechanics.

As Azir, you'll probably only get kills in the last two scenarios: When you fight them or when you push hard and make tower plays with your passive. But in the first scenario you'll probably get fed on farm.

You don't always have to be aggressive and push as Azir though. If your other lanes are doing really good, you can lay back a little and bait the enemy midlaner to step a bit further in lane so that you can Shurima shuffle them into your tower, the aggression and pushing is really good for pulling a lot of attention towards your lane so the other lanes can lay low or so that you can create windows to roam to other lanes yourself.

_Now the term Shurima Shuffle is probably a term that sounds familiar. There are some really great tutorials on this and on drifting with Azir. These mechanics are fun and useful and can really turn games. But learning when to use them requires the most training since people who master these mechanics tent to spam them and end up badly positioned and stuff. _ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAzJAEeq_p4 _Here you can find a really great tutorial on these mechanics. _

Build _This is not my strong suit, but this build works really good for me. Also keep in mind that you have to upgrade trinket at lvl 9 and buy a lot of wards pre-lvl 9 if you're gonna put so much pressure on your lane. Always calculate two wards extra to what you want to build everytime you back. _

I generally build: Start: 1st back: (mostly not under 1100G) a second dorans x2 When you back for a forbidden idol you already boost your passive attack speed because of the cdr in it. 2nd back: I mostely stay until I can afford The other items I tend to build are: or Nashors tooth has actually proven to be a bad item on azir but I don't know the math behind it.

Matchups _I won't cover this topic because I don't feel like I'm in the position of talking about it. I think he doesn't have a lot of hard counters. He is really weak though to certain junglers like , and . But that's all I can really say about it. _

I hope you guys have a lot of fun learning Azir and I hope to see you guys on the rift!

Greetings Squareclock