Everyone knows who they are. They are those god-awful champions that always manage to get on your nerves. The ones that you can never manage to kill, the ones that ALWAYS manage to kill you, and the ones that just plain annoying. Here we will discuss these annoying champions and the best ways to combat them. Since there are WAY too many of these despicable losers, this will be made into a series for your reading (and eventually pwning) pleasure.
First up we have Tryndamere. This son-of-a-gun has two main annoyance skills, with an extra skill thrown in just to make you cry harder. Let’s analyze each of his skills and their annoyance level, shall we?
Spinning Slash: (Active): Tryndamere spins through his enemies, dealing damage plus 50% of his Attack Damage as magic damage to enemies in his path.
Not only is this an annoying skill for chasing, but also as an escape mechanism. Tryndamere pops this through walls, making it near impossible to kill him since he also has Undying Rage, (AKA Hax0rz teeheehee).
Undying Rage: (Active): Tryndamere becomes immune to death for 6 seconds. During this time, his abilities have no cost and he gains Bloodlust stacks. This move is usable when stunned, silenced or even suppressed.
This skill is just the most ridiculous, rage inducing piece of garbage ever. You don’t even want to know how many times I’ve screamed and cried to my friends over Ventrillo as Tryndamere runs away and/or mauls me to death under Undying Rage. Tower diving becomes as simple as “Press R and then right click”, which is good for him, but OP to us.
Mocking Shout: (Active): Decreases surrounding champions' physical damage, and enemies with their backs turned also have their movement speed reduced. Lasts 4 seconds.
This skill is just the last golden-straw that breaks the donkey’s back. As if Tryndamere needed MORE chasing/survival skills, Riot decided it would be good to promote gamer suicide over a 42/0/8 Tryndamere. By slowing the poor baby trying to run away and reducing the attack of surrounding champions trying to save him, this skill makes it near impossible to escape a Tryndamere on your tail, although he could just spin through a wall or something. I’ve seen too many chases where Tryndamere is chasing ONE champion with sub-200 health left and the rest of the team is on his tail.
Tryndamere, like most of the other champions, is best combated with disables, notably Silence. Getting a medium sized gank with 2-3 champions against Tryndamere coupled with a slow, stun, or silence makes it impossible for him to use Undying Rage (with the Stun/Silence) or makes him run a lot more slowly. Exhaust on Tryndamere to slow him down for a couple of seconds and then a later Ignite should finish him off. Undying Rage “only” lasts for 6 seconds, so waiting a few seconds after the cast to cast ignite will practically assure you the kill, assuming he doesn’t decide to get some crazy vamp off of some minions as soon as he can. (Make sure to keep up the pressure so he CAN’T do this). Alternatively, you could just nuke Tryndamere so that he has no time to cast Undying Rage. This way he will later cast it out of paranoia; use this to your advantage since it has a cooldown of 90 seconds of level 3, PLENTY of time to organize a beautiful gank.
As a DPS/Physical champion, you want to slow or stun Tryndamere so that you can actually hit him in the first place (and hopefully kill him). Suggested weapons are Phage (to Frozen Mallet), and possibly a Bilgewater Cutlass.
As a Mage/AP reliant champion, you should already be able to cut through his health bars with ease. Rylai’s Crystal Scepter slows him down so he won’t get away as fast.
Stay tuned for next time, when we pick apart Shaco the Demon Jester.
