Shyvana/Strategy

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Skill Usage

• Shyvana's strength comes from her innate durability from Dragonborn and her high mixed damage output, AoE, and utility from Burnout and Dragon's Descent, along with her ability to duel effectively with Flame Breath and Twin Bite. However, she lacks hard CC and is prone to being kited.
• With good positioning and timing, Twin Bite can massively extend the duration of Dragon's Descent. By hitting three targets, it generates enough fury to stay in dragon form for another two seconds.
• Twin Bite is a great turret pushing tool, as it allows you roughly three auto-attacks worth of damage in the time space of ~0.8. (taking into account attack animation time and casting time)
• Use Burnout to chase down or flee from enemies, as it grants bonus movement speed.
  • Burnout provides the largest bonus movement speed at the start of the ability. Activating it gives a quick burst of speed that can be used to juke skillshots and enemies.
• Dragon's Descent is an excellent peeling ability, if you see a key member of your team (an ADC or APC) starting to get focused, use the dash the knock the enemies off while giving your ally enough distance to continue attacking.
  • With good positioning, you can use the ability to push enemies away from your allies while diving onto their backline to disrupt them.
• Casting Burnout followed by Dragon's Descent will lead to a flaming trail from where you started Dragon's Descent.
• Dragon's Descent can be used to chase in or escape from any situation.
  • Take note that stuns, silences, snares, knock-ups and knockback effects can hit and stop Shyvana mid-flight. Beware of your enemies' capabilities to do these.
  • Dragon's Descent is one of the longest dashes in-game, as such it allows going over large walls and otherwise impassable terrain.
• Since patch 3.9, Flame Breath passes through units. If you find yourself as a laner (most likely top) putting points in this ability gives you a good harassment tool and can be used to farm easily. It may be worth maxing if you are against a ranged opponent as Shyvana has no other ranged abilities.
• To perform a quick harass, hit your opponent with Flame Breath and run into them with Burnout, following with a Twin Bite to proc the mark twice, putting out good damage and extending Burnout. You can then use the prolonged speed boost granted by Burnout to escape just as you entered.
• When using Dragon's Descent, try to position yourself to be able to hit as many targets as you can with your AoE abilities.
• Attacking turrets, inhibitors or the nexus does not trigger the cooldown reduction for Twin Bite. It does, however, reset her auto-attack timer, build fury and extend the duration of Burnout.
• While both hits triggered from Twin Bite deal on-hit effects, only the first hit is able to deal a critical strike. The second hit only deals a percentage of Shyvana's attack damage as damage.
• Shyvana's kit allow her to do large amount of damage over time at close-range, but it doesn't provide her with burst capabilities. Failure to combine or land Shyvana's abilities together to effectively damage a target will create an opening for a period of time that your opponents can take advantage of, so be aware of your enemies' potential methods to disengage from you.

Build Usages

• Shyvana lacks crowd control aside from the knockback from Dragon's Descent, which tends to be unwieldy and dubious in effectiveness in many cases. Movement speed slowing items are an effective source of CC.
  • Both Trinity Force and Frozen Mallet are very powerful on Shyvana, but buying both is not recommended. Trinity Force gives superior late-game damage and Frozen Mallet is the tried-and-true choice for utility and tankiness.
• On-hit effect and attack speed items have substantial synergy with Shyvana's skillset. They will increase fury generation, lower the cooldown on Twin Bite, proc the on-hit effect from Flame Breath more often, and increase her overall damage output significantly.
  • The attack speed and on-hit damage-effect of Wit's End synergizes well with Shyvana, who can also quickly accumulate the item's stacks.
• Sunfire Cape is an excellent item for  Shyvana in the mid-game, combining a generally effective chunk of durability stats to survive combat with a good amount of free magic damage to stack with  Burnout.
• Items that grant attack speed and cooldown reduction are great offensive items for Shyvana's abilities, especially Twin Bite and Dragon's Descent.
  • Although Zeke's Herald is more of a support item, it offers CDR, attack damage, health, life steal and an aura.
  • Youmuu's Ghostblade is an excellent item for damage purposes on Shyvana. Its active-effect's attack speed and movement speed help Shyvana utilize her passive effects and chase, provides large amount CDR and the armor penetration.
  • Nashor's Tooth is an effective item for her, offering a very cost effective mix of attack speed and CDR that it grants a good deal of ability power that scales well with her Flame Breath and Dragon's Descent.
  • Zephyr is great on  Shyvana as it gives her most of the stats she needs: attack speed, CDR, attack damage, and movement speed.  Zephyr also gives  Shyvana tenacity which allows her to replace  Mercury's Treads with other boots
• While it may seem odd, Abyssal Scepter will make her highly resilient to magical burst, and vastly boost the damage Dragon's Descent and Flame Breath because they scale with AP, but also of Burnout as it deals magical damage and the scepter aura reduces MR
• Randuin's Omen is a great defensive item for Shyvana. Its AoE active is very useful due to Shyvana having a fairly minimal method for crowd control and her kit's plethora of area of effect abilities prefers when enemies that are close together to stay that way as long as possible.
• Aegis of the Legion synergizes with Shyvana's Dragon's Descent passive, granting you a lot of survivability at a small cost in early game.
• Bilgewater Cutlass is a great mid game item as it helps Shyvana's sustainability along with the unique effect that allows her to stick to her target.
  • It can also be built into Blade of the Ruined King, which synergizes well with Burnout and Flame Breath considering the passive and active, and allows her to maintain a strong late game and be a formidable duelist.
• Tiamat and its upgrade, Ravenous Hydra, can be great cost effective items for  Shyvana, offering attack damage, sustain with health regen and life steal along with the active and passive effect, which synergizes with  Shyvana's  Twin Bite, procing twice on a single target.
  • Tiamat and Ravenous Hydra share a unique passive Cleave, so stacking Tiamat/ Ravenous Hydra doesn't increase the splash damage.
  • Twin Bite during Dragon's Descent will only proc the passive twice on the primary target due to an intern timer preventing it from affecting multiple targets in one attack.

Jungling

• Shyvana is one of the fastest junglers, having great clear speed and mobility, allowing her to counter jungling exceptionally well. However, her lack of CC diminishes her early game presence and is more focused on denying the enemy jungler.
• Starting items: Hunter's Machete Health Potion × 5
• Skill progression: Burnout→ Twin Bite → Flame Breath → personal preference.
• Possible Jungling orders:
  • Standard:  Blue golem Blue golem( Smite)→ Wolves Wolves  → Wraiths Wraiths → Red Lizard Red Lizard ( Smite) → Small Golems Small Golems → Gank
  • Gank:  Red Lizard Red Lizard( Smite)→ Wraiths Wraiths  → Small Golems Small Golems → Wraiths Wraiths → Wolves Wolves → Blue golem Blue golem ( Smite)

Gank at any time after killing the Red Lizard if an opportunity presents itself.

Recommended builds

Countering

• While Shyvana is auto-attack reliant and is likely to build attack damage items, Shyvana's Burnout deals magic damage, which scales off bonus attack damage, and the on-hit effect of  Flame Breath deals magic damage based off the target's maximum health - this gives Shyvana high mixed damage that is difficult to itemize against.
  • Overall, it is better to build magic resistance over health and armor to counteract her kit's magic damage, though attack speed slowing items such as Frozen Heart and Randuin's Omen may help to lower her damage output considerably.
• If you notice Shyvana using her Dragon's Descent, move away from the spell path to avoid it damaging you - at full range, it will take her 1.3 seconds to reach you so you usually can hope to dodge it from a long distance.
  • If you have stun, silence, snare, knock-back or knock-up abilities, use them quickly on Shyvana when she casts Dragon's Descent to stop her mid-flight.
• Shyvana has a lot of potential for AoE damage while using Dragon's Descent. However, Twin Bite and Flame Breath strike in front of her, so splitting apart to make Shyvana unable to face as much of your team at once will reduce the effectiveness of Twin Bite and Flame Breath.
• Take note if Shyvana's fury bar is full while you are attempting to kill her. The long range of Dragon's Descent can easily allow her to go over walls even while a fair distance away from them, so avoid wasting abilities with significant cooldowns and costs on her.
  • Dragon's Descent is not limited by cooldown - quickly gaining fury allows her ultimate to be ready long before yours if you misuse it.
• Dragon's Descent requires fury, which is quickly gained by Shyvana auto-attacking. This time period is a good opportunity to harass her from range and delay her ultimate.
• Shyvana shines in an extended close-combat fight over time. Use champions with many options to disengage and do your best to avoid such a fight against her.
  • Shyvana has no natural ways to keep you in place for her to auto-attack you. After using Dragon's Descent, she has little ability to catch up if crowd-controlled out of melee-range. Using crowd-control effects to hinder her movement during Burnout can also stop her from getting the ability to its maximum duration or damage.
• Burnout provides a very large amount of bonus movement speed at the beginning of the ability, which decreases a bit in effectiveness over time. Try to avoid using skillshots against Shyvana until after she casts Burnout, as the movement speed boost, especially at the ability's initial use, can allow her to easily dodge them.
• Shyvana tends to jungle and normally, Shyvana's jungle route starts at red. Thus, considering stealing her blue is a likely safe method to take experience away her early jungle and to prevent any enemies from having it.
• In her dragon form, Shyvana is more powerful than during her human form.
  • Her passive during her ultimate is doubled, therefore it is recommended to buy armor penetration or spell penetration items.
  • Keep your allies spread to avoid her Twin Bite and Flame Breath as the spells are turned into AoE spells.
  • Beware overextending into tense situations to chase her in her dragon form. Burnout increases her movement speed to make catching her difficult and leaves a fiery trail that can deal significant damage if you do not avoid it.
    • Following the burning trail allows you to find her easily, but you also take DoT - if you and  Shyvana are both fairly weakened, underestimating the DoT can firmly put the tide in her favor.
• Shyvana lacks any gap hard gap closers across from her ultimate, Dragon's Descent and she is highly dependent on her movement speed with Burnout to get into range into the enemy. As such, ranged top laners with good kiting mechanics such as Teemo, Kennen, Jayce, Nidalee, Ryze, Lulu, and Kayle can easily zone Shyvana out and can harass and farm safely in a distance.
  • Keep in note that Shyvana is one of the few bruisers that do not use mana as a resource and can easily build life steal items such as Ravenous Hydra, Blade of the Ruined King, and The Bloodthirster to sustain herself in lane longer, so build accordingly to counter her.

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