Hello bros. It's your boy Strike - Best Graves EUW here. BACK WITH SOME BUFFS and CHALLENGER (Yay)

If you want a quick run-down just look at the item builds and scroll down to the Lethality/Crit Build section (will be calling it critality). The guide is still in the works for S14 with a lot of recent changes.

I have been playing Graves for many years now hitting Challenger in S10/S11/S12 peaking rank 4 and holding best graves on several websites. So far hitting Challenger in s14. I am back on the grind in S14 (a little late I know) I have realised Graves is quite weak currently sitting at around 48% winrate across all elos and we are lacking a good graves content creator. Irrespective of this I am currently sitting at Challenger and will impart you ways to make this champion work.

Graves is a shotgun short-range marksman that can be played as an assassin/bruiser/crit marksman. Currently, the meta style you can play him is Critality and will be the ones I go through in this guide. As you know lethality now
grants the full amount and is no longer scaling, alongside the crit buffs to graves I recommend a duo combination!

Although Graves has fairly basic abilities their is a big gap between an OK graves and a good Graves. These stem from understanding his limits/animation cancels and executing his playstle correctly with good builds.

The guide will have a few chapters and go quite indepth. For more things Graves visit my twitch https://www.twitch.tv/strikegraves I stream daily and be willing
to answer any questions you may have.

Lets get into it.

Graves can start blue and full clear or start red and full clear. Both are fine. It depends on the side of the map you want to be. Is your botlane ezreal yuumi and you know they won't have priority + you can't gank...while top is Riven vs GP? Start on the side your botlane is and path to the top laner who has the volatile snowball matchup.

In other words, you path clearing all the camps in the way towards the lane you want to end up at.

However, your path can be changed. Vs champs that can invade you, start red. Red is the premium combat buff early and not having your red vs someone who does feels really bad. It also helps you gank. In addition, you can start red specifically to invade enemy jungler - More on this later.

Make sure to go 2 points Q skipping your W level three if you are full clearing. This will allow you to finish your full clear before 3:30. Only go W lvl 3 for invades/early ganks.

That is about as deep as early game pathing gets I'll highlight some invades you can do on graves though.

Pathing has become quite one dimensional with full clear being the most optimal (most of the time) However, with the removal of 20% damage debuff on enemies camps, counterjungling is more meta than it was. Below I highlight an example.

E.G You see hecarim start blue lvl 1. And you start red getting a strong leash from your shen. Whilst the hecarim seems to have started solo (You see him on the early ward you placed). Due to the leash discrepancy, you are up tempo + hp. Since graves has an E, he can dash over the wall and invade hecarim on gromp (He knows hecarim loves to full clear). At the gromp Graves can kill the hecarim particularly if you have ignite.

The objective of invades in S14 particularly early on is to setback a jungler (full clear ones mostly) from getting a safe start for them to execute their full clear into gank strategy. Or if its a gank jungler, to prevent him from ganking.

Invades early on are not really about developimg massive farm leads particularly on graves who clears really slow until he has levels and items. In other words we wanna delay our invades until we have some items preferably.

In other words. Invading is niche but under right circumstances where you have a vulnerability you can exploit (due to superior leash/matchup/summoner spell advantage/lane priority) it is highly effective.

With the recent Crit Buffs that Graves has received could crit be good on him? How does it work? Well Graves previously had a multiplier of 20% bonus damage per pellet on crit (Formula I am not entirely sure on) which NOW scales upto 30% bonus damage per pellet on crit at level 18. So from 20-30 from level 1-18.
Graves also fires 6 pellets on a crit as opposed to 4, vastly increasing his damage although each subsequent pellet after the first one hits does between 23%-33%

With Buffs to Lord dominiks, Mortal Reminder and Infinity Edge..could crit be back?
It is indeed. Mixing lethality and crit is BiS and allows you to have the utility and burst of lethality items with the consistent DPS of crit items.

Below I will go through my standard build in s14.

So what is the Critality build? The critality build focuses on rushing your opportunity as soon as possible then 90% of time opting for a collector second (rare instances of going LDR 2nd if vs giga tanks)

3rd item I take edge of the night. Simply because a 3rd lethality item allows me to hit everyone except tanks with a truckload of damage while simultaneously the utility and defensiveness provided by edge of night allows me to execute my one shots safely.

4th item varies greatly, need more pen? LDR, need more burst? Infinity Edge...need more survivability? Shieldbow.

At this point you're free to look at the other recommended items I have and just pick and slot w/e fits into the game.

That is the core build, and nothing much else to say in regards to it, do I think my dark harvest critality build is easy to play? no lol. Expect to die a lot but I think it is the BiS way to play him.

That is all for this guide. I will be updating it and improving it as time goes on especially now that I am back. I will update it for upcoming patches as I know he will change a little. I will also add some more chapters and format it better so stay tuned for it. (Mechanics and late game section coming soon)

Other than that have fun, I love Graves and play it every season...and stay safe junglers we get a lot of slack XD

Like and comment! drop stuff you'd like me to add and make sure to tune into my stream, I will attempt to get Challenger as Graves OTP even if he is a D tier champ