Warwick Guide: Five Things You Learn from Maining Warwick
By Josh Tyler
Our Warwick guide will break down the five biggest lessons you learn about the champion and League of Legends!
2. Layering Crowd Control
Warwick has two forms of hard crowd control in his kit. His E – Primal Howl is a 1-second AoE fear (meaning it fears all enemies in an area around him) and his ultimate ability, Infinite Duress, is a suppression (meaning the enemy cannot move or cast abilities). These two abilities in combination give Warwick devastating gank potential.
How you want to use Warwick’s E and ult is that you walk up to the enemy, using the increased movement speed on his Blood Hunt and the small dash on his Q – Jaws of the Beast. Ideally, you want to get behind the enemy so that the fear pushes his back towards the rest of your team or away from safety. Then, as the fear is ending, you use Infinite Duress to immediately suppress him, giving him no opportunity to escape and dealing your max damage.
Learning to chain your crowd control (or “layer” it) so that there is no time where the enemy is not CC’ed is critical because it makes securing kills that much easier. This skill is especially important to learn in higher elos because players will be better at using those small windows of time where they aren’t CC’ed to escape and avoid being killed.
3. Using Abilities Offensively and Defensively
Having said all that, both of those abilities, Primal Howl and Infinite Duress, can be used in a defensive manner. For instance, Primal Howl gives Warwick flat percent damage reduction. If you recast it early to pop the fear (or when the ability ends after 2.5 seconds) you lose that damage reduction.
Infinite Duress is not a point-and-click suppression like Warwick’s ult used to be before the rework. Now, Warwick leaps in the target direction, suppressing champions he lands on, but he can use this to leap away from enemies and over walls even if there are no enemies in the target direction.
This means that there will be some instances where you will want to use these two abilities for their defensive purposes, either to reduce damage in a fight or to create distance when being chased. A lot of abilities in League of Legends have these offensive and defensive tools (for instance, Lee Sin’s Q is a heavy damage ability but also provides him a means of escape if he hits minions or monsters). Learning when to use these abilities defensively is a skill any League of Legends player has to learn.