Volibear: What Builds the Pros Trying on Reworked Volibear

We look to the pros to see what builds they are trying on Volibear following his recent rework.

Another League of Legends champion has been reworked, as Volibear’s new kit went live yesterday. Even though he’s only been live a short while, pro players are already taking full advantage of the Relentless Storm, trying out a bunch of builds to see what is the best. Let’s take a look at what a few pros and high-elo players have built on Volibear after his rework.

Position

Per OP.GG, after the rework Volibear has primarily shifted to being a top laner as his main position. 62.3% of high-elo games on Volibear have been played in the top lane. Compare that to 25.5% of his games played have been played in the jungle and 7.2% of his games in the support role.

This is born out by the evidence, where we see a lot of top laners including Fnatic top laner Gabriël “Bwipo” Rau, FlyQuest Academy Mohamed “Revenge” Kaddoura and Vitality’s Lucas “Cabochard” Simon-Meslet playing a lot of Volibear after his release. Among junglers, G2’s Marcin “Jankos” Jankowski has tried out Volibear but no pro has played more games of Volibear jungle than Dignitas’s Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett. We’ll rely on these five pros to let us know what rune and item builds appear to be the best on the reworked Volibear.

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Runes

In the jungle, Jankos went Predator as his keystone rune in the only game of Volibear he played. By contrast, Dardoch went Predator in one game but then went Conqueror in his other two games. Both junglers went Sorcery as their secondary tree.

For the top laners, Revenge has primarily gone Grasp of the Undying as his keystone with Precision as his secondary tree. Cabochard, on the other hand, has favored the same Conqueror rune as Dardoch, but he runs Resolve secondary as opposed to Sorcery. Finally, Bwipo, has experimented with Press the Attack, Aftershock, and even Unsealed Spellbook as his keystone rune.

With all these multitudes of builds out there, it seems like there is still a lot of workshopping of builds to be done. Thusfar, however, junglers seem to agree that Sorcery secondary is the best, running Nimbus Cloak and either Celerity or Waterwalking (interestingly, though, not both).

For top lane, consensus on keystone has not been found, but it’s generally agreed to go some combination of Resolve and Precision runes. I would say Grasp and Conqueror are the two most popular keystones among top laners (it’s most popular among high-elo Voli players). Secondary runes generally have Triumph and Last Stand in the Precision tree, with Second Wind in the Resolve Tree.

Items

For items, top lane has easily the most item diversity. Revenge has tried out a lot of different items, but his only core item has been Sunfire Cape. Cabochard, on the other hand, prioritizes getting Titanic Hydra in every game (though he will also build Sunfire Cape second in some games). Finally, Bwipo has actually been going AP Volibear with items like Nashor’s Tooth, Spirit Visage, and Hextech Gunblade.

For the junglers, we actually see that in his one game Jankos went a fairly standard build on Volibear (Cinderhulk into Stoneplate). However, Dardoch has been going a much more aggressive build of Warrior into Stoneplate, but he’s also experimented with full-AD Voli. The long and short of it is that the standard tank build that you would build on Volibear before the rework should still be fine here.