This is how you carry as a support.
Pyke is one of the most fascinating champions that League of Legends has to offer. He’s a support that builds high AD and essentially functions as an assassin, which is a first for any support-style champion in the game. His kill-sharing passive and high cooldowns keep him well-built as a support champion.
As with all League champions, specific items are going to be more effective depending on the situation. But there are certain items that are effective on Pyke in all games. These core items are going to ensure that you have the best possible experience with this champion.
Here’s the best build for Pyke in League season 10.
Runes
Resolve
Aftershock: This is the best keystone to make you deceptively tanky. It allows you to safely engage onto enemies with your hook or dash-stun and survive the encounter. The bonus armor and magic resistance will ensure you survive the trade and get away with a healthy amount of resources.
Demolish: Demolish is a great rune to take down towers fast. As Pyke, your kit doesn’t do anything to towers, so having this rune is a must if you want to be able to take down towers fast and help your ADC snowball. The early tower plates are a huge gold inflow, so being able to take them down faster is a big plus.
Bone Plating: This is a basic rune to grant you more tankiness early on and in the mid game. You aren’t going to survive with your AD-oriented build since you don’t scale with health due to your passive. This rune helps you survive those unexpected ganks by ensuring you take less damage from the initial burst, buying you precious time to escape. It can also deter opponents from engaging on you early, knowing that you’ll just reduce all their damage with it.
Unflinching: This rune is a must to have some tenacity. Due to the fact that you’re most likely going to get mobility boots to roam around the map faster, having some built-in tenacity to reduce crowd control is a requirement. Taking this rune solves that problem.
Domination
Zombie Ward: This is a must-have rune for supports or junglers. It allows you to cover the entire map with a lot of vision, ensuring you can make safe plays around the map. Considering that your first item of Umbral Glaive has a sweeping effect, it’ll be easy to proc and get AD stacks to make you stronger as well.
Ultimate Hunter: With your team relying on your ultimate to secure clean kills in teamfights and give them a lot of gold via the ultimate effect, it’s important that you have it up as often as possible. Plenty of games have been saved by a Pyke rapidly ulting in teamfights to execute the enemy team.
Bonuses: +9 adaptive force, +9 adaptive force, +6 armor
Starting items
Steel Shoulderguards
Having the extra AD early on is crucial for you as an assassin. Steel Shoulderguards grants you the AD you need early on for favorable trades and a great passive to help you sustain your AD using minions. This support item is great and scales freely with the gold income generated by it.
Health potion
During the farming phase, you’re going to take damage from enemy champions. Health potions heal back 150 health over 15 seconds and will give you extra time before having to back to base.
Core items
Mobility Boots
These are one of the best boot options for a support. They allow you to cover huge distances over a small period of time, which is perfect in this roam-heavy meta. Thanks to your stealth ability, you can become a huge surprise for the enemy mid or top laner if you appear after two seconds of missing from the bottom lane.
Umbral Glaive
This is regarded as one of the most broken lethality items in the game, especially for supports such as Pyke or Senna. It allows you to deny vision around the lane and objectives, on top of allowing you to instantly kill wards. It only has an eight-second duration, which is two seconds lower than sweeper, but the instant-kill effect makes it much more valuable.
Umbral Glaive is a must-rush item in every game regardless of how well you’re doing. Denying vision is always a core part of being a worthy support.
Oracle Lens
Once you upgrade your starting support item, you won’t be needing the yellow trinket ward anymore. Swap to an Oracle Lens once you’ve earned 500 gold to upgrade your support item for free wards and use it to deny vision from the enemy. You can set up a gank by using it before your jungler arrives or use it near the dragon or Baron to clear vision so that the enemy has no idea that you’re doing it.
One of the best usages of it can be to set up a death bush when you’re far behind. Clearing all of the vision around you and waiting patiently for that lone wolf from the opposing team can turn the tides of battle.
Control Ward
Always buy two of these bad boys when you can. While the Oracle Lens has a cooldown and can be countered by the enemy team with wards after it expires, the Control Ward remains and ensures that no vision is being allowed in the area you’re using it. As a support, you want to make sure that you have one on the map at all times and one in your inventory for backup, especially if you intend to do objectives.
While purchasing the core items in this guide is important, Control Wards are just as valuable. Always invest in vision.
Late-game items
Yoommu’s Ghostblade
There’s no better way to ensure that you move faster around the map outside of this item once you have upgraded boots. It grants you 40 out of combat movement speed, which is on par with the Domination rune, alongside an active to make you even faster.
It allows you to drift around the map fast, has all the stats you want, and a great active that can be used to escape as well as chase. Ghostblade is flexible and valuable for your kit.
Duskblade of Draktharr
This is a more assassin-oriented item that increases your burst damage output while also giving you the lethality you need to ensure that you ignore as much armor as possible from the opposing team.
The effect is easy to proc due to the stealth in your kit, so you can easily use the bonus damage multiple times per fight.
Edge of Night
Edge of Night is one of the more defensive options of the lethality items. It allows you to negate one spell every 40 seconds, while also increasing your AD by a lot. It’s a core item against champions who rely on picks with ultimates, like Nocturne, Ashe, or Nautilus.
Situational
Guardian Angel
Guardian Angel is a safety net and a requirement against champions who have a lot of burst. Your kit isn’t made to survive such encounters, but Guardian Angel comes to your aid. It grants you a good amount of armor, attack damage, and a great effect to negative all your opponent’s efforts. It’s the perfect item especially when you’re snowballing and you don’t want to give away your gold lead by accidentally dying.
Maw of Malmortius
This is a must-have item against AP assassins. While Guardian Angel will ensure you survive AD encounters more often, Maw’s shield will protect you from that LeBlanc or Zoe burst damage and ensure you can continue the fight. The item is expensive, but you can sit on Hexdrinker for a pretty long time because of how gold efficient it is.
Mercurial Scimitar
This is a more defensive magic resist option if you’re facing a lot of crowd control, like Nautilus, Leona, Zoe, Syndra, or others. This item can also be used to absorb ongoing crowd control onto your carry by jumping in front of the Zoe bubble or Ashe arrow and then cleansing yourself.
Swiftness Boots
Swiftness Boots are a good reliable alternative to Mobility Boots if the enemy has a lot of slow movement speed effects. It grants you a lot of movement speed, even more than Mobility Boots in combat. But the out-of-combat movement speed will be much lower.
Mercury’s Treads
If you’re facing a lot of crowd control and ability power oriented compositions, then getting this item can make your early game much easier. With more mages becoming popular in the bottom lane, this item is perfect to counter them early on. The tenacity is valuable and the more you have, the easier it is to move around a teamfight and be slippery.
But if you’re facing a certain type of crowd control that can be negated by Quicksilver Sash, then think twice before investing in these boots.
Ninja Tabi
This is a great item against heavy AD-oriented compositions that rely on auto attacks. It helps you avoid plenty of their auto-attack damage while also granting you a good amount of armor to reduce the overall physical damage from their kit on top of that.
