LoL Champion Guide: Renata Glasc

In this guide, we'll go over all the best tips and tricks to playing LoL's newest Enchantress Renata Glasc.  You'll learn how to impact the battlefield and manipulate your opponents into exploding their own Nexus.

Renata is only a few days away from release, but we've known ever since her ability reveal that she is an incredibly unique, and powerful champion. Equipped with both a ressurect and mind control, Renata raises the bar for all future champions to come.

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How do you play Renata Glasc?

Renata could be described as anything but a support, and yet she finds herself in the support role. She has an extremely unique kit, that has quite a lot of damage and CC that normally isn't found from support champions. Keeping this in mind is extremely important to getting value out of this pick.

To start, Renata's kit encourages her to focus on the enemies more than her allies. While some champions like lulu stand back and buff their allies, Renata likes to be towards the front picking enemies and enabling her teammates to do large amounts of damage with her passive. Doing this is difficult however because Renata has very few defensive tools, so staying at the front is very dangerous. Good Renata players will know when they can walk up and throw a Q or use her Ult to catch enemies out without dying.

Because her abilities reward helping an ally focus a target down, Renata will be very good at peeling. When an assassin jumps a carry Renata can lock them down, slow them, and chunk them out. Even in situations where the carry dies, Renata can help trade the kill onto the assassin which causes the carry to revive.

During the laning stage Renata wears the pants in the botlane. Because of her passive, her duo partner kind of has to focus who Renata chooses or else they're missing out on a lot of value. Renata's Q will also be incredibly powerful in lane for displacing enemies and throwing them into your carries abilities. Against dive champions make sure to use your Q to peel them off your carry, and try to hit both your ally and the enemy with your E for maximum value.

Teamfights is when Renata becomes a monster. Equipped with one of the strongest teamfighting ultimates in the game, a good Renata player will decisively end games given the opportunity. It's pretty hard to land the ultimate without any set up, so normally you want to sit in the backline with your carries unless you find a good opportunity to Q.

Once the teamfight has started, try and catch as many people in Renata's R as possible, once they are stacked together make sure to use your E for maximum value. If her Q is up it is advantageous to use it on an enemy champion and throw them into their team for huge damage and CC. When enemies are mind controlled this is pretty easy and makes for an extremely powerful combo.

A lot of games Renata will be a pseudo-carry kind of like Senna. Due to her natural affinity for doing damage Renata will no doubt get kills. Just like Akshan and his revive, it's really important to stay alive as Renata, because you can revive your team only if you're alive. So you dying is worse than anyone else on your team in most situations.

How Do You Build Renata Glasc?

Renata doesn't very many traditional heals or shields like other supports. The only abilities she has to boost her allies is her E which is a small shield and her W, which is an attack speed and move speed steroid with a ressurect tacked on. While this makes itemization tricky because support items are catered to buffing allies, it also makes Renata unlike any other support.

For the most part Renata will build Imperial Mandate and then go into AP items like Rylai's or Horizon Focus or Zhonya's. Renata has some really good scalings on her passive and Q abilities, so building damage on her isn't bad at all. Any item that increases healing or shielding isn't as effective on Renata unfortunately. Because of the AOE from her E ability she can probably get away with items that buff her allies like Ardent Censer or Staff of Flowing Water. Supports tend to have very low income so building expensive damage items can feel really bad, thankfully items like Rylai's, Morello's, Zhonya's, and Banshees are quite cheap so she has some good options if she isn't able to build other items.

Because her abilities have extremely high impact such as a revive or a displacement, Renata get's a lot of value out of ability haste. There's a pretty big chance Renata will build items like Cosmic Drive or Staff of Flowing Water to keep her cooldowns low.

For runes she's pretty flexible, but she tends to really like the sorcery tree because she's a magelike champion. For the keystone Arcane Comet or Summon Aery are recommended because Renata has long range and can poke easily. Manaflow Band, Transcendence and Gathering Storm reward a more spell casting oriented playstyle, where as Eyeball Collection and Cheap Shot in the domination tree give her more burst/all in damage.

For secondary runes she can take domination or sorcery depending on what her primary tree is, but if you're looking to be more supportive Font of Life and Overgrowth from the Resolve tree are very effective.

When is Renata Glasc Good?

Renata is one of few champions to have Max Health damage built into her kit. This means that she is extra effective against tanky or frontline champions who rely on their high health to survive. 

She also excels Vs. team compositions that like to group up. This is because she has a lot of AOE damage from her Q and E, and her Ultimate becomes one of the best abilities in the game when it hits multiple enemies. If you can hit 4 or more people next to each other with her Ultimate, you've almost certainly won the fight.

While Renata has some good range, she doesn't have as much as some mages or marksman. Because of this she will struggle Vs. champions like Vel'Koz or Xerath because it's really hard for her to damage them. 

On the other hand, Renata really enjoys playing with carries that can utilize her W and passive. Champions like Jinx or Samira that can easily chain kills will be really strong with Renata because of her W revive and ability to set up kills on enemies.

Overall Renata is an incredibly unique champion, and until we can get our hands on her in a more competitive environment it's extremely hard to tell how good she is and how she'll play. Until then we'll just have to do our best and hope we don't int our ranked games by building Rabadon's.