The COMPLETE SMOLDER STARTER GUIDE! - League of Legends

smolder is without a doubt one of the best Champions we'll ever see for climbing solo que we expect that no matter how many Nerfs he may receive that he will always be an extremely strong Champion especially in the lower ELO brackets in this guide you will find everything you need to get started ranging from his play style a quick ability breakdown combos tips and tricks how to fight builds and much more also we're excited to announce we've done a massive update adding all brand new courses for season 14 on our website skillcap tocom and if that's not enough we upload 10 new Smurf commentaries every week where a challenger teaches you how to play every champion in the exact rank you're stuck in the best part you can try all this out completely risk-free if you don't rank up while actively using skill cap you get your money back no questions asked so what are you waiting for click the link in the description below to get the rank you've always wanted in season 14 so what type of champion is smolder well as an ADC he plays similarly to Ezreal where you're more of a Caster rather than a pure Auto attacker the nice thing is that unlike Ezreal you don't need Korean Challenger mechanics to pull him off as smolder is extremely easy for how effective he is at carrying games now the reason why we mentioned that smoulder is likely to be a Powerhouse in low ELO is because of his infinite scaling similar to Champions like vagar or aelan Soul scaling Champions are without a doubt some of the best in lower brackets and smolder is looking to be an absurd late game carrying typically these scaling Champions aren't for everyone if you think that you'll be sitting in Lane AFK trying to farm Stacks don't worry that's not the case at all you are more than capable of fighting early on sure you won't be Draven levels of strong but you're not going to AFK every Lane you can definitely take chances and look for good fights not only that but the stacking process can actually be quite enjoyable you will be deleting waves quickly while powering up in a very satisfying way so it won't feel like a chore as it does on other stacking Champions that being said stacking efficiently every game is without a doubt the most important skill to mastering smolder so towards the end of the guide we'll give you some quick and easy tips to make stacking a breeze every game for now though let's break down his abilities smolder has a stacking passive based on how many stacks he has his three basic abilities will simply deal more damage not only only that but his queue will evolve based on his Stacks but we'll get to that the way you build this up is exactly the same as the way vagar does it if you hit an enemy Champion with your abilities you will earn one stack but your primary way of farming should be by Las hitting minions with your Q why we mentioned that this won't be as annoying as on other Champions is that your Q can generate more Stacks by killing multiple targets with it and that brings us to our q and its Evolutions to start the game it is a really basic ability it's point and click damage at 25 Stacks it will evolve to deal Splash damage around the target this will speed up your stacking significantly at 125 Stacks you get a pretty big spike your Q will now send some extra Fireballs behind your target to deal roughly the same damage then at 225 Stacks your Q's final evolution occurs now hitting a target with it will apply a Max HP burn that deals decent damage not only that but if your target drops below this threshold they instantly die it's a mini Elder Dragon and it's very very strong this is an extremely powerful Spike so you want to get to this point quickly moving on to your W this spell is much simpler it's just a rolling Fireball it moves fast at first but then it slows down it also does a bit of extra Splash damage around any targeted hits so hitting people that are clumped up will deal very nice damage your e is a very strong repositioning ability you get a burst of movement speed and you're also able to fly over terrain while doing so you will rain fire down on the lowest Health target for his ultimate smolder will Roar calling his mom and puts an indicator on the ground showing the direction then she comes down in a straight line to deal damage enemies in the center will take extra damage and be slowed his mom will also heal smolder a bit if he's standing in the area it's fair to say this is a pretty high value spell with a ton of damage and utility as you can probably tell his kit is fairly simple so smolder doesn't have any complicated combos to learn playing him well is more about understanding how to properly use your abilities but let's cover the couple of simple combos he does have first you can input buffer both your q and W to make them come out a bit smoother so Q flash is a thing as well as W flash unfortunately you locked into roaring for your RS animation so you can't flash to high the direction like you can on some other Champions we figured we' mention this so you don't waste your flashes trying to be fancy the only ability that you really need to think about using is your e for starters the movement speed you get is based on your current speed this means that you ideally want to cast your e while you're sped up by something else this can be ghost or maybe the buff from an enchanter support like Lulu's w nami's e and so on the second big thing about it is that you can't do anything else while you're flying if you do you'll drop down so a very important thing you need to keep in mind is to press your q and W before you fly into the air take a look at this smolder duel for example the enemy one only uses his W before flying our smolder on the other hand uses both of his spells while in the air Q comes back off coold down giving us two rotations of our Q compared to the enemy smolder who only used one all right with his super basic combos out of the way let's talk about some gameplay tips to get the most out of his kit smolder has two problems you're going to have to learn to deal with one is his very short range to cast Q or Auto attack which are your primary damage spells you have to be really close to your target we shouldn't have to tell you why being this close to an enemy is usually not good for you on top of that our his weird Auto lockouts on a lot of other adcs a general gameplay pattern is to weave spells between Auto attacks so for example on civer you would Auto QE Auto very smoothly smolder on the other hand can't Auto smoothly after casting his Q or W take a look if you cast Q notice how long it takes for his Auto to go off after same thing with this W it just takes forever for smolder to Auto after casting however you can move immediately after these spells so what you'd ideally do is auto Q kite then Auto W kite or something along those lines basically if you play a lot of other adcs you'll want to break the habit of Auto attacking after casting a spell through ART testing we found that smolder is far less Auto Reliant than most other adcs combined with your short range these Auto lockouts do not give you a lot of time to sit there Auto attacking targets your gameplay pattern is going to be about casting spells and immediately kiting to reposition a lot of the time this doesn't mean you won't ever Auto attack of course Autos are a big part of any adc's damage but you won't be able to weave in as many as other ADC Champions as you can see though this isn't that much of a problem because you already deal so much damage now let's talk about some ways to deal with your short range having the range advantage in League can be pretty oppressive you get to dictate when fights happen poke someone from far away and so on so as smolder you may struggle unless you incorporate these tactics remember that at 25 stacks of your passive your Q will begin dealing Splash damage you achieve this Spike very quickly into the laning phase and will be one of your primary ways of trading so ordinarily your Q's range is fairly mediocre but take a look at its max range when you factor in the splash damage it becomes a very respectable ability when you play around the Splash and allows you to control a lot of space in the lane by utilizing minion waves you need to really play around this you want to Stack your Passive by spamming Q on the wave while also using that Splash damage to threaten your opponents smolder is quite good at spam shoving waves and applying pressure this way so make sure you play around the splash as much as possible at 125 Stacks your range in harass potential becomes even better and follows the same guidelines always try to keep a minion between you and your opponent to maximize your range your R is also a big tool you want to play around the problem is that although it's an extremely strong spell it can be quite easy to miss so before casting it make make sure that your opponents are out of movement abilities in Cc or are stuck next to a wall or something where they can't avoid the damage you can also look to cast it from fog of War although you might still alert them through a roar if they can't see the initial Direction on the ground it'll be much harder to know where it's coming from or where you're aiming it the nice thing about smolder is that these principles continue to apply throughout the game smolder is honestly a pretty easy Champion to play as long as you follow these fundamental concepts in fights hiding your ults direction is a great way to catch an enemy team off guard you also want to continue to take fights around minion waves or jungle camps players will definitely underestimate what you can do around waves as the game goes on take this fed Talon for example look at how smolder fishes for Q's again and again through the wave so that he can poke Talon but never be in range to be attacked eventually he deals enough damage to where he can fly in and burn him down with one final Q which brings us to one of our most important tips about smolder the draft phase we have really emphasized playing around minion wave so far and for good reason like we said smolder Auto and Q range are so small that you will either be out ranged or engaged on if you try to fight normally what this means is that you'd ideally want to avoid drafting smolder into purely ranged comps if the enemy team has four to five ranged Champions you will definitely struggle to play the game smolder will be at his best when there are two to three melee Champions on the enemy team that you can bounce qes off of to hit the enemy back line as you can see in this example as Diana chases smolder can threaten arri with his Q's spread damage you make it extremely difficult for range Champions to follow up on their melee front liners by constantly barraging them with q's and W so just keep this in mind as one of the main factors for when you will succeed or have a hard game as smolder if you're versus multiple melee Champions you will have much more opportunities and angles to bounce qes off of to spread fire everywhere this won't mean that you'll be worthless into comps with range but it will give you less opportunities to deal damage and you'll have to play around your cooldowns a bit smarter as for your build you'll likely be building very similarly to ezal as an ADC Caster you'll do this Rune page and for your items go Essence Reaver cool down boots into navori there's also the option of going the Trinity force and Mir Mana route from our testing the crit variation felt a bit better to play but that might change with item balancing one thing we want to mention is that smolder seems very similar to adcs like kgma Vain and Varys adcs with percentage based damage can typically build one to two damage items and then go into tank your options rather than continuing to build damage so if you see an enemy team composition that is countered by armor or magic resist then you can very easily adapt your build to go for much tankier options with good passive stack farming your base damage is more than good enough and you should feel very comfortable giving up some damage for survivability and that brings us to our final section where we'll give you some tips for stacking your passive an extremely important concept to keep in mind on smolder is that getting ahead will usually mean you stay ahead the more passive Stacks you have early the more Q evolutions and damage you get this lets you play more aggressively Farm more waves look for more trades and so on basically if you do well early you'll be able to keep that momentum easily and keep stacking super fast and snowball out of control on the flip side if you struggle early on and don't get many passive Stacks then you'll slowly fall behind you can't Farm as many waves take as many fights Etc and as a result you will stack your passive super slowly and not be nearly as effective as you should be what this means is that super small optimizations can add up a lot since getting to a q Evolution even just one minute faster might be the difference between a one or lost game first things first we recommend you run biscuits in your Rune page while you will eventually fix your Mana issues you won't be able to spam spells early on having biscuits to replenish your Mana when you run out will usually let you spam your queue the entire laning phase without much worry having a solid start to your passive stacking is much more easily achieved with biscuits the second thing to keep in mind is that after 25 Stacks you can obviously start farming multiple minions per with the splash damage smolder will be building a Sheen item however the sheen only amplifies the main target hit not the splash damage what this means is that when you're preparing minions to last hit you always want to prioritize casting Q on the highest health minion in the clump so for example here smolder is preparing this group of four minions the melee is the one with the highest health left so he uses sheen on it while the Lesser Splash damage is enough to get the rest next if you're one stack away from evolving your que that cast will go off as if you'd already evolved it so if you're at 24 Stacks you should try try to prepare the wave as if you've already got the splash damage this can get you a couple of extra Stacks at your Q's Evolution break points finally if you want to use your W to trade try to throw it through the Caster creeps this basically prepares them instantly to be farmed by your que and is a nice way to trade and farm at the same time and remember if you truly want to improve and rank up fast head on over to skill cap.com we just finished a massive update adding all brand new courses for season 14 we even upload 10 new Smurf commentaries each week where a challenger teaches you how to play every champion in the exact rank you're stuck in and remember you can try all this out risk-free if you don't rank up while actively using skill cap you get your money back no questions asked so what are you waiting for click the link in the description below to get the rank you've always wanted this season all right that should be absolutely everything you need to get started playing smolder immediately good luck and thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Skill Capped Challenger LoL Guides

Views: 162,660

Keywords: lol smolder, lol smolder guide, smolder, smolder guide, smolder league of legends, smolder abilities, smolder build, smolder runes, smolder champion spotlight, new champion lol, league of legends, league of legends guide, lol guides, league of legends tips, league of legends coaching, skill capped, lol tips, lol tips and tricks, league of legends pro guides, lol coaching, skill-capped, league of legends season 14, lol s14, lol season 14

Id: SldA09cDb1M

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024