Taric/Strategy

		"Some things must remain buried." Strategy is highly subjective and may become outdated without any notice. Because of this, the League of Legends Wiki has decided to retire strategy pages and would recommend using other platforms (such as YouTube) to find guides. For more information visit this thread. This page continues to exist for archive purposes.

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Tips

Playing as Taric

• After casting a spell, attempt to attack with Bravado to utilize its  cooldown reduction components. If you need more healing charges for sustain, all the more reason to keep whacking.
• Standing close to, but not directly on top of, a linked ally while make Dazzle very hard to dodge.

• Try to position yourself to evenly distribute your abilities with Bastion over a wide area for your team.

Playing against Taric

• Taric's ultimate, Cosmic Radiance, has a long delay before its effect. Try to quickly assess whether to disengage a fight or attempt to kill his allies before it goes off.
• Taric reduces his spell cooldowns by basic attacking enemies with Bravado. Try to kite him for approaching the minion wave in lane.
• Dazzle is arguably Taric's most important basic spell, but is very telegraphed. He has no more range without it, so is vulnerable to ranged harassment.
• Don't underestimate Bravado's damage in the early game, it has a substantial scaling and frequent uptime when Taric fights.
• Cosmic Radiance does not make its targets immune to CC. Holding him or his allies down can run out the clock and waste its effectiveness.
• Because Bravado reduces the cooldown of all of his spells, using a knockback to disengage him prevents him from casting spells as frequently, and may cause him to miss multiple spells worth of attacks, severely hindering his usefulness until his spells start to come back up on their own.

Playing with Taric

• Remain close to receive the benefits of his AoE spells, it won't cost him any more when catching multiple people.
  • While linked, try to spread out to increase the effectiveness of AoE spells.
• The delay on Dazzle is the moment you need to get into position to stun as the linked ally.

Playstyle

Taric has two roles, enchant his allies with  heals and shields while warding off anyone that tries to intercept him. Bravado can keep Taric fighting, while Bastion asserts more cooperative tactics among teammates.

Ability Usage

Starlight's Touch

• It is ill-advised to cast this costly ability for the sake of Bravado procs.
• In a teamfight, try to heal many allies with a couple charges at once. It's a burst of healing for the same cost as one charge.

Bastion

• Keep linking to allies in distress to give them the shield.
• Most teams are divided in two parts during teamfights - the frontline and backline. If you are in the frontline use Bastion on your ADC, and if you are in the backline use it on your tank/bruiser or your assassin if they are melee like Akali or Fizz.

Dazzle

• This should be used more preemptively than normal due to the cast delay.
• You can cast this on a linked diver as they engage out of range, the effect will still activate on them.

Cosmic Radiance

• Cosmic Radiance has a long delay, and most of the time the enemy team will try to kill your carries before the proc. Use it right after you use Dazzle, this will help your carry defend itself for the 2.5 seconds delay and then kill the enemy during the next 2.5 seconds in which they are immune.

Runes

Resolve has lots of synergy with Taric's kit from active effects to buffs to his durability.

• Guardian is yet another shield that works within the proximity Taric keeps to his allies.
• Grasp of the Undying grants health and sustain, but it can be difficult to apply safely in the bot lane.
• Aftershock grants a burst of resistances, splashing over to the linked ally, as well as increasing damage on Bravado.
• Font of Life turns Dazzle into an ability with the potential to heal allies, meaning every ability Taric has directly keeps the team alive.
• Shield Bash makes Bastion more effective, also granting an increase in damage.
• Bone Plating increases resistance to burst, making it easier to fearlessly engage without stunning both foes.
• Second Wind increases resistance to poke, and is especially effective against damage over time.
• Conditioning increases resistances in the late game, and can be a good pick into champions with a weak early game, but a strong late game.
• Revitalize gives Taric more  heal and shield power to a dramatic effect given how often he can cast his abilities.
• Overgrowth grants health, increasing natural tankiness, as well as scalings on Starlight's Touch and Bastion.

Items

Taric functions best as a tanky protector/support that accompanies an ally while particularly scaling with armor, ability power, and health. As such, build items that grant  Armor,  Cooldown reduction,  Health,  Ability Power or  Mana.

• Righteous Glory helps Taric charge into the fight with his divers, and provides all round stats for tank supports.

• Iceborn Gauntlet's icy zone can apply with Bravado, and helps Taric stay close to his target allowing for more continuous triggers of Bravado.

• Frozen Heart is one of the best defense items against enemies using basic attacks because it makes them do less damage with attacks that occur less often. It also gives high cooldown reduction, mana, and armor, which are very important stats on Taric.

• Randuin's Omen can be paired with Frozen Heart to really cripple attack speed reliant champions. Its critical strike reduction passive also helps in dealing with champions that rely on critical strikes and its active provides another source of CC in the form of a slow. Active and Passives aside, the high health and armor values that this item provides also increases Taric's raw tankiness.

• Knight's Vow is a good item to get for protecting an ally under frequent fire when your abilities can't keep up by themselves.

• Zeke's Convergence can be a good item, slowing foes to keep them in range while boosting a teammate's damage; however, even at maximum cooldown reduction, Cosmic Radiance's cooldown is very long, which means that though the field will not be used frequently, it can be used with every cast.

• Spirit Visage is very effective on Taric even if the enemy isn't heavy on magic damage, because it also bolsters Starlight's Touch for Taric's survival.

• Abyssal Mask can be a good choice because Dazzle and Bravado deal magic damage. As a melee champion you will often be in range to weaken the enemy's magic resistance. The more magic damage both the enemy and your team have, the more value this item brings.

• Ardent Censer can be a good choice because in addition to boosting the power of Starlight's Touch and Bastion, it also gives both you and an ally attack speed when healing or shielding, which allows you to apply Bravado faster, bringing your abilities up more often.

• Redemption can be a good choice because in addition to boosting the power and uptime of Starlight's Touch and Bastion, it also gives health, and as the active has an identical delay, it can be used shortly before Cosmic Radiance for a team heal to keep everyone alive into the invulnerability.

• Mikael's Crucible can be a good choice because in addition to significantly boosting the power of Starlight's Touch and Bastion, it also can be used to cleanse allies of crowd control, also granting slow immunity for two seconds. It also grants magic resistance, a stat is is easy to forget to build amongst armor scalings.

• Athene's Unholy Grail can be a good choice because in addition to granting ability power to boost healing power, more so when combined with the other healing items above, the passive is very useful because good use of Bravado means every time you would heal or shield you have full blood charges boosting the power. It also grants cooldown reduction and magic resistance

• Thornmail can be a good item, granting health and armor. Because this does not help your teammates very much, this is only an advisable purchase if nearly everybody on the enemy team relies on autoattacks or if they have someone with a Runaan's Hurricane because they will be unable to stop the bolts from hitting you and applying the damage, grevious wounds, and attack speed slow.

• Archangel's Staff, or even just a Tear of the Goddess can be a good item, especially if you want to be able to cast spells more often. The mana refund paired with the large mana granted allows for constant casting, as well as boosting the power of Starlight's Touch and Dazzle with ability power.

Alternatively, Taric can build a mixture of  Attack Speed,  Attack Damage, and on-hit effects to synergize with Bravado's attack speed boost and damage. Although it can do very high damage, building this way is not recommended as Taric lacks an easy way to stick to targets and a lot of his kit will be less effective.

• Essence Reaver is very strong in such a build, allowing for Dazzle to come of faster after ulting, as well as having a higher uptime on all spells, resulting in more Bravado triggers and damage.

• Guinsoo's Rageblade can be very good, as proper timing allows for consuming both Bravado triggers in one attack, which drastically increases how often spells can be cast. However, this is difficult to do consistently.

• Corrupting Potion is a good starting item, as this build is most often done in top lane, so relic shield isn't a viable option, and this provides a needed mana sustain.

• Wit's End is can be very good in an attack speed build because much of Taric's damage is magic damage and this steals their magic resistance.

• Hextech Gunblade is a good substitute for lifesteal as Taric's damage on his autoattacks is not all physical. The active can also be used to keep foes in range with the slow.

• Manamune is very strong in such a build, allowing for more spellcasts while boosting damage after it transformes into Muramana. it also grants mana on autoattacks, providing a form of mana sustain in lane.

• Many of the standard items, particularly the tanky ones such as Abyssal Mask or Righteous Glory can be added to the build to keep taric alive long enough to get into range.

Synergies & Counterpicks

Taric's frenemies are champions with high mobility engage that can position themselves for Dazzle, such as Divers or certain Marksmen.

Taric has two glaring weaknesses: Poke and magic damage.

Works well with:	Struggles against:
Graves - the Outlaw Graves and Taric pair up pretty comfortably, and thrive when they get aggro. Graves' short range means he pretty much has to get real close to the things he wants to shoots holes out of, at which point Taric has a much easier time landing Dazzle on his Bastion buddy. What's more, while other marksmen might die before Dazzle and Cosmic Radiance kick in (remember they both have delays in their cast time) Graves is usually tanky enough to survive a few seconds of punishment.	Zyra - Rise of the Thorns Zyra's a real headache for Taric, particularly during laning. Not only does she have plenty of slows and snares to punish the Shield of Valoran's lack of mobility, but she can effectively counter his hard Dazzle engages with Grasping Roots and Stranglethorns, too. What's more, Taric's generally pretty vulnerable to poke, which Zyra has in spades. And yes - that is a gardening reference.
Vi - the Piltover Enforcer There's no two champ wrecking crew quite like Vi and Taric. The pink-haired punching machine always looks to go in hard on her engages, but she can go so much harder while she is Taric's Bastioned ally. Dazzle complements Assault and Battery perfectly, stunning Vi's target as she lets loose with her very own fists of fury, while Cosmic Radiance and Starlight's Touch protect her from whatever enemy attention comes her way. Taric's safety net might just encourage Vi to build more damage than usual, too, letting her knock out her targets in record time.	LeBlanc - the Deceiver Area of effect heals and invulnerability is cool 'n all, but it's all a bit pointless when an enemy assassin's able to dart in and blow up Taric's ally before Cosmic Radiance actually kicks in. The ult takes a couple of seconds to arm - more than enough time for a nimble-fingered and opportunistic LeBlanc player to unleash her combo and blow up whoever Taric's trying to save.
Diana - Scorn of the Moon Similar to Vi, Diana loves diving squishy enemy targets, but lacks the hard crowd control she needs to secure her kills. Not with Taric on her side, who can cast Bastion on League's grumpiest mid laner before Dazzling her target as she lands Crescent Strike and Lunar Rushes in. And while Diana lacks the traditional escape tools other assassins have, she'll be able to lean on Cosmic Radiance alongside her natural tankiness to keep her ticking as she makes her way to safety.	Corki - the Daring Bombardier Taric's generally a pretty tanky chap, but if there's one chink in his glorious armor, it's magic damage. The permanent armor boost on Bastion, for example, won't do a thing to slow down the magic damage pain train. Enter Corki, the most magical of marksmen who also happens to come equipped with plenty of abilities that handily expose Taric's other weakness: poke.