“A good axe will fell a tree. A great axe will fell an army.”
Ornn is one of the champions who defined League of Legends season 10. He has an all-inclusive kit that has a slow, gap closer, game-changing ultimate, an AoE stun, and much more. One of his best features that makes him highly contested in professional play is his ability to upgrade items. Those items can sometimes ensure that you win a lost game due to the huge difference in stats you receive with the upgrades.
As with all League champions, specific items are going to be more effective depending on the situation. But there are certain items that are effective on Ornn in all games. These core items are going to ensure that you have the best possible experience with this champion.
Runes
Resolve
Grasp of the Undying: This rune is one of the best for tanks. It scales with maximum health, making it effective for the entire duration of the game. One of the best aspects of it is that it grants you health as you proc it, making it especially efficient against melee champions which you can proc it often.
Demolish: Demolish is a great rune to take down towers fast. As Ornn, your kit doesn’t do anything to towers so having this rune is a must if you want to be able to push quickly. It allows you to take early tower plates for a huge gold inflow.
Bone Plating: This is a pretty basic rune to grant you more tankiness early on. While you will have a lot of health, armor, and magic resist as the game progresses, early on you are easily killable. This rune helps you survive those unexpected ganks by ensuring you get less damage from the initial burst, buying you precious time to escape.
Overgrowth: This rune is one of the best scaling runes, especially if you can farm efficiently. It needs some time before you notice the effect, but overall it’s a great rune which will help you along the way during the entire game.
Inspiration
Biscuit Delivery: Biscuits offer extra lane sustain to ensure that you can recover from unfavorable trades. The extra mana granted by this rune allows you to spam your abilities more often as well.
Cosmic Insight: Cosmic Insight is an overall great rune, giving you additional cooldown reduction (CDR) to get your abilities back faster. The summoner spell CDR is really good as well, ensuring you have flash available more often and teleport to help your team.
Bonuses: +10-percent cooldown reduction, +6 armor, +6 armor
Starting items
Doran’s Shield
Having extra health regeneration is crucial for every tank. Doran’s Shield grants you 80 bonus health to make you tankier early on and a great passive to help you last-hit with five extra attack damage against minions. This item is great early on but loses value as the game goes by.
Health potion
During the farming phase, you are going to take damage from the enemy champions. Health potions heal back 150 health over 15 seconds and will give you extra time before having to back to base.
Core items
Sunfire Cape
As the main core item of your build, Sunfire Cape helps you waveclear with ease and has a great teamfight effect, doing a lot of AoE damage when you use crowd control on opponents. It grants you health and armor on top of these two effects, making it a huge priority in your builds.
Abyssal Mask
While Sunfire Cape is the core item of your build against AD-oriented champions, Abyssal Mask is the core against AP-oriented champions. Instead of the armor from Sunfire Cape, you get some magic resist, mana, and CDR. While it doesn’t have the amazing AoE damage effect from Sunfire, it has an AoE aura, increasing damage taken by enemies by 15 percent.
Due to the fact that your entire kit does a lot of damage magic, the passive increase of damage taken can allow you to delete carries in the span of a combo if they’re not careful enough.
Mercury’s Treads
Mercury’s Treads are the best defensive boots option available, especially if facing heavy-AP oriented compositions who have a lot of crowd control. It grants you valuable magic resist early on while you get going and reduces the duration of all crowd control—the perfect combination for Ornn.
But if you’re against teams with not a lot of crowd control, look to go for Ninja Tabi or Swiftness instead.
Late-game items
Locket of the Iron Solari
This is the best utility-oriented tank item in the game. It scales with bonus health, making it very valuable as the game goes by. While the item itself grants you only armor and magic resist, the effect can win you the game during a teamfight. You can deny heavy AoE damage from the enemy composition, saving your team from that Orianna or Karthus and winning the game.
One of the best aspects of this item is that it can be upgraded via your passive, making it even stronger than usual, ensuring your team can win teamfights easily.
Redemption
Redemption is the second-best utility-oriented tank item in the game following Locket of the Iron Solari. It grants you valuable stats in health and mana regeneration and an AoE effect that heals allies and is usable even while dead. It can help your team a lot in teamfights by giving them back a portion of their health or finish the low-health members of the opposing team instead.
Just like Locket, this item can also be upgraded, making it even stronger than usual. It can be purchased as a second item against some compositions to help your teamfights early on.
Gargoyle Stoneplate
Gargoyle Stoneplate is a great tank item, giving you solid armor and magic resist on top of an effect to increase your effective health. While the item doesn’t do a lot in one-vs-one scenarios, it can be a huge difference in teamfights when you are surrounded. If you engage and pop the item, enemies can use their abilities but they’ll all be absorbed by your bonus health.
Just remember not to pop it instantly, otherwise enemies will wait the effect out and then you’ll be left out in the dry.
Situational
Thornmail
Thornmail is a must-have item against enemies who rely on healing via items, runes, or abilities in their kit. Notable champions would be Fiora, Camille, Jax, and Irelia among others. Bramble vest is quite a cheap component, allowing you to hold onto it until the late game to be upgraded.
While the overall efficiency of Thornmail is quite lackluster, you need to invest into it if you are split pushing against heavy healing-oriented champions or if you are with your team but they don’t have any healing reduction items.
Warmog’s Armor
Warmog’s is a simple and effective item that increases your health and CDR alongside a great passive to keep you topped up. If you are against heavy AP compositions who don’t have any percent health damage abilities or effects, Warmog’s is a great investment.
But if you’re facing a champion like Vayne, then avoid getting this item since it will just amplify Vayne’s damage against you. Think twice before investing into this item against champions with maximum percent health damage.
Frozen Heart
This is a requirement to get against champions who rely on attack speed to be effective. The item gives you a lot of armor, CDR, and an amazing AoE debuff for enemy champions to reduce their attack speed.
While the lack of health on this item might make you skeptical, if you are facing a heavy AD composition, the armor will grant you more effective health overall.
Adaptive Helm
Adaptive Helm is the best magic-resist item in the game against champions who spam the same ability like Ryze or Cassiopeia. It nullifies a lot of their damage and has decent stats to back the effect up as well.
But if you’re not the target of such champions, then don’t waste gold into acquiring it and invest into other utility items instead like Redemption or Locket.
Zeke’s Convergence
If you have champions who would highly benefit from this effect, such as a fed ADC or Yasuo, then invest into this item to make them even stronger. The stats from the item are useful for you and it’s also quite cheap. You can get it early on after your core items to amplify their power.
Randuin’s Omen
Randuin’s is a valuable item if you want to become tankier. It grants you health, armor, an attack speed reduction debuff for enemies, and an AoE slow to allow you to kite even better. If you are the main target for enemy AD champions and need a bit more survival, then this item is perfect for you.
It can also be purchased to allow your ADC to have more space to kite. If they get chased down in teamfights by opposing champions, you can use the effect when they engage and buy them precious time to kite and do their job.