The main reason to play Taric toplane is to avoid bad ranged matchups and to fully profit from his supportive power as soon as you finish laning. In fact, toplane Taric is even a stronger tank, duelist and support than taric botlane.

Going on solo lane allows you to fully utilise the champion potential. Drafting Taric versus melee toplaners allows you to dominate the lane and enter midgame with much stronger itemising and higher level than Taric support.

The gameplay also feels more satisfying. Toplane taric is a high apm champion and can actively pressure opponnent, while on botlane Taric is rather passive, and needs to respect ranged enemies pressure.

In almost all melee matchups taric wins both in sustain and all ins. However, he struggles with CS and wave menagement. Once you learn his powerspikes and matchups you can destroy toplane monsters like Olaf, Darius or Illaoi.

A taric that lose his lane still has a supportive role in teamfights. He has tons of kit that is very easy to apply. Fiora for instance, playing from behind can't use her power in teamfights and before she spikes at splitpush, the game is already decided.
From the other hand, a Taric in good draft and after good laning becomes a teamfight monster since only 15 minutes of game!
Sample of midgame taric power(low elo game): Play Video

As Taric you scale with tank support and mage itemising, and can play him as tank duelist and healer. This means champion feels fresh every fiew patches because item and rune changes heavly impact his itemising.

What is very unfriendly for taric beginners is that they overestimate champion build flexibility. In fact, to have success you need to understand your champion limits.
Its not possible to win using same bruiser taric build every game. In some drafts you might be even not be able to adapt to any role even with super optimal builds.
You need to recognise this games and choose other champion for climbing success.
In my opinion this is the most challenging skill to master: "When to pick Taric and which build path will work?"

Good mix of items can fix most or all Taric issues, however sometimes taric wont keep up with his needs.

Lets say you lane against irelia and choose catalist iceborn to have high CS and dueling potential. This is all you need to dive her countless times with good cd and after good laning you will have roa iceborn boots in 20 minutes. However, enemy syndra will see only ~1000 gold value from your itemising - health from roa. Feels bad right? You are a tank with 500(corrupted potion)+ 1100( boots) +2600(roa) + 2700(iceborn)= 6900 gold already spent!

Taric strongly relies on resets, and his Q mechanics is overall similar to lifesteal: if you dont hit you dont heal. In good teamfights you will be able to self heal for even 150 % of ur max health.
However the stronger enemy disengage is and the bigger the gap to close the less you profit from ur Q healing. Add to this the fact that using Q W R self stuns you for 0.25 seconds. Even if you menage to reach enemy backlane with flash, you will still have hard time to run them down.
The only cheap solution is runes and summonners : ghost and glacial are for free.
However it costs you ignite/ tp disadventage and scaling keystone disadventage
Other parts start from 2000 + gold and dont solve other taric issues.
Dead mans plate scales taric in only 1 direction, rightous has nice mix of stats but bad parts. Ardent mejai doesnt grants tankiness, thy serve well backlane and fed tarics, but doesnt grant tankiness.

Beating ranged disengage champions is possible, but often you need to rely on your team, and have small solo carry potential.

The first atack post spell is enough to reset Q cooldown and secure you from being unable to cast spells for many seconds. Technically if you use all spells and dont menage to use passive in 4 seconds you can be extremely doomed and useless for another 10 seconds.

Using first empowered auto resets the timer of the second auto which might be useful for trades and last hitting on top.

Generally try to use 2 auto attacks post every spell to maximise cooldown reduction, dps and healing per second.

Resets cooldowns even during teemo's blind, vs pantheon's and shen's block, and vs jax's dodge.

This passive is one of the biggest dps steroids in entire game. Although the armour scaling is pretty low( you would need like 1000 bonus armour to double the on hit damage, the attack speed buff interacts extremely well with runes like PTA or conqueror, and with items like [blade of the ruined king] or [muramana]

This passive combined with casting many spells might lead to very big APM. In 5 seond combat taric use like 8 attacks 4-8 movement commands and 4 spells which is like 22 actions per 5 seconds ( all affected by your reaction time, animations feeling and PING)

To maximise results go to settings and setup features normally used by high attack speed ADCS (like kog maw jinx)
in game-> ESC-> hotkeys (scroll down)-> "bind auto attack move to left click" (turn it on)
in game-> ESC-> game (scroll down) -> gameplay -> attack move on cursor (turn it on)

WARNING: those settings need to be reseted sometimes by toggling off/on.

From now on use right click only to move your character and left click to attack enemies. The game will order Taric to attack the enemy closest to the cursor which really helps at avoiding missclicks, moving when you want to attack, aiming very movile enemies, attacking enemies hidded in bush and mechanics like kiting, orbwalking.

To orbwalk with this settings with 4Q 2AA W 2AA E 2AA 4Q 2AA combo go to practice tool and try exactly this:

Place an enemy target dummy.
the goal is to make circles around it while flawlesly resetting cooldowns on taric.

4Q, left click nearby the enemy (AA), right click to cancel 2nd half of animation and to move a bit, left click nearby the enemy(AA), cancel the 2nd half of animation with E or any other spell.

Repeat till it will become so fluid that you can freely use flash, aim E precisely and active use items during it. Balance between maximum dps orbwalking and movespeed oriented one, that sacrifies dps for more mobility.

For non-left-click-orbwalking-enthusiasts

4Q, Right click on the enemy (AA), move the mouse right click on ground to cancel 2nd half of animation and to move a bit, move the mouse on the enemy, right click on the enemy (AA), cancel the 2nd half of animation with E or any other spell, repeat.

As you can see, without left click taric needs to move mouse very often between the place he wants to move and the enmey he wants to attack. It makes making errors very simple and is generally mechanics to be avoided.

You can easly get used to left click for attacking and right click for moving in 20 arams if you dont want to int on summoners rift. Tough at first but once you get used to it when you will be filled on adc, you will faceroll enemies with challenger mechanics. I havent made a single missclick since I learnt this mechanic and its been a half a year or so.

TODO GIF

Starlight's touch is an AOE spell. If possible, try to position yourself so you can heal another nearby ally and the bonded ally simultaneously.

Here is a combo for casting 4Q charges every time for maximised results:
4Q 2x AA E 2x AA 4Q 2xAA W 2xAA ...

spamming 2Q 2AA is generally suboptimal. Once you level Q to level 4 try to use Q every 2nd spell.

Healing allies counts as assisting in the kill, meaning that its worth to randomly heal allies when you expect combat to be tied, even if they are near full hp already. It also allows you to reach 4 KDA very easly and stack [mejai] [hunter runes] [boots] very fast. takedown runes like POM and triumph are working extremely well with this spell.

Items like [shurelia] [moonstone] [staff of flowing water] [ardent censer] are very easy to proc while using this spell.

Before every combat try to place W on your nearby ally. During combat try to save W for special moment spam 4Q and E instead. Its usually best to bind to frontlane if you are on backlane and backlane if you are on frontlane to cover as big area as possible

Mordekaiser's R removes bastion. It's impossible to cast spells on untargatable allies (Yi's Q/ Vlad's W/ Kayn's R etc)

Dazzle is a long range stun

Taric vs Darius is a skill matchup and hard snowballing lane. Taric excels both in short and long trades, and can even outtrade darius with 5 stacks of Hemorrhage. Dont be aware of trades, if u have equal gold level and high level of health- u will most likely win any trades unless Darius kite u hard.

So enter the trade pretend u feel like to all in. Darius will lose more health than u and will be going to retreat. This is the momement to disengage and stop the trade, and let the hemmorphage and conqueror stacks fall off, and heal back on minions. Next trade will be way easier becouse darius will have less health than you.

Its worth to pick flash ghost in this lane, since its a quite common summonner spell set on darius. Be aware of the fact that darius can decrease ur dps and healing by kiting, while it doesnt hurt his dps, since part of it is bleeding DOT , and he has lower Attack Speed.

If u fall behind a bit dont worry, u can disengage darius easly by casting stun during his grab animation or just after his W, and heal back on minions. Play Video Play Video

Removed Klepto. Added omnistone and fixed conqueror POM.

Chapters fixed, builds, matchups updated.