Shaco is a trickster who can be played in multiple roles in League of Legends. While his jungle role is focused on building AD items and assassinating enemies, his AP playstyle is focused on setting up traps and baiting enemies into death bushes.

While a good chunk of the player base has focused on a couple of power picks in both the jungle and support role, Shaco’s capabilities were ignored. After people began experimenting with the new itemization, however, his popularity skyrocketed in both roles. As with all League champions, some items are going to be more effective for Shaco depending on the situation. But there are certain items worth building on the champion nonetheless as either the jungler or support.

Here’s the best builds for Shaco in season 11.

Jungle

Runes

Domination

Hail of Blades: This rune helps you burst targets down with the additional attacks it grants in a brief period of time. You can use your invisibility, sneak upon a target, and then land a couple of auto attacks to either force them to Flash or outright kill them if you have enough attack damage. It is easy to activate and a great source of damage overall throughout the entire the game.

Sudden Impact: With the low-cooldown blink in your kit, you can activate this rune to get a lot of armor and magic penetration every couple of seconds to increase your damage.

Eyeball Collection: This a great scaling rune, rewarding your early snowball by giving you additional attack damage and a flat amount once it’s fully stacked.

Relentless Hunter: With so many mobile junglers in the meta right now, it’s important to take this rune to be able to move as quickly as them around the map to counter gank as often as possible.

Precision

Coup de Grace: This is an execution rune to help you finish off low-health targets.

Legend: Alacrity: This rune is needed to help you clear the jungle faster, since your clear relies on auto attacks and not spells unlike other junglers.

Bonuses: +10-percent attack speed, +9 adaptive force, +6 armor

Starting items

Haiblade

This is your jungle item you should start with to upgrade Smite to Chilling Smite after five camps. The slow helps you stick to targets, especially in the current meta, where most champions have a lot of mobility.

Refillable Potion

With the 150 gold left after buying the jungle item, investing into an Refillable Potion is a great idea. It will keep you healthy during your jungle clear and allow you to regain stacks once you return to base.

Core items

Berserker’s Greaves

Your goal is to assassinate champions in short amounts of time, and these boots help you achieve that goal with the additional attack speed they grant. In some cases, you can forego them for Plated Steelgraves or Mercury’s Threads.

Galeforce

Galeforce should be your primary Mythic item every game. It’s a great source of damage and has a dash on top of it, which can give you more opportunities to activate Sudden Impact for indirect bonus damage. The stats granted by it sync well with your game plan and the Mythic passive is great to help you move around the map quicker as well.

The Collector

There’s plenty of situations where you might feel like you lack a bit of damage to finish off a target after an all-in. The Collector solves that issues by executing targets below five percent health and giving you an additional 25 gold for champion kills. Statwise, the item is great and is a wonderful addition to your damage profile.

Late-game items

Infinity Edge

This luxurious and expensive item is your go-to item if you’re ahead and want your crits to hit hard. If you have 60-percent critical strike chance, you’ll gain an additional 35-percent critical strike damage, making your critical hits capable of one-tapping enemies.

Essence Reaver

This item increases the damage of your next auto attack after using an ability. The attack damage, ability haste, and critical strike make it a valuable item if you have spare gold, and the low cooldown allows you to easily activate it plenty of times during skirmishes or teamfights.

Guardian Angel

If you’re finding yourself assassinated by enemy champions before teamfights begin, this item might prove to be useful for you. It allows you to get a second life if you get caught and the ability to use your Q to blink away to safety. For 2,800 gold, you’ll be getting a nice AD boost alongside armor on top of the item’s passive ability.

Support

Runes

Sorcery

Arcane Comet: This rune will provide additional poke early on, which should be your primary goal. You want to harass the opposing laners on cooldown and prevent them from farming creeps without taking damage.

Manaflow Band: Since your goal is to use your abilities on cooldown, you’ll run out of mana quickly. This rune comes to your aid as a great source of mana regeneration.

Transcendence: This rune offers additional ability haste depending on your level. It will prove useful when you need to set up death bushes or be as slippery as possible with your invisibility. On top of that, at level 11 it refunds 20 percent of your basic abilities’ cooldowns on champion takedown.

Scorch: Scorch offers great additional poke damage early on, but it doesn’t scale well compared to other runes in the row. Since your game plan is to take over the games from the laning phase, this rune is a great choice.

Inspiration

Magical Footwear: The Slightly Magical Footwear boots are a great investment since they give you additional movement speed compared to regular boots and can be acquired early on in the game if you get a couple of kills. This allows you to spend the 300 gold you would otherwise spend on boots to purchase your items faster.

Biscuit Delivery: Biscuits give you more health and mana to play with during the laning phase. The mana cap increase is also a great addition from this rune.

Bonuses: +9 adaptive force, +9 adaptive force, +6 armor

Starting items

Spellthief’s Edge

This is your primary starting support item in most of your games. You want the additional poke potential it grants and the ability power it gives you for free after you stack it up. In certain matchups where you feel like the poke won’t do much, you can go for Relic Shield to help your ADC survive the laning phase easier.

Health Potion

With plenty of trades going on in the laning phase, it’s important to have some health potions to recover health. It’s much better to consume a health potion early on and stay in the laning phase than to back without gold.

Core items

Ionian Boots of Lucidity

The best boot options are either Ionian Boots of Lucidity or Sorcerer’s Shoes. Both have their uses, but by default Ionian Boots of Lucidity come out ahead due to the ability haste and summoner spell haste it grants you. If you’re facing a composition which most likely won’t stack up magic resist, you can go for Sorcerer’s Shoes. But in all other situations, go for Ionian Boots of Lucidity.

Imperial Mandate

This is your bread-and-butter item that can be activated in various ways. It has a great AP-oriented statline with health, ability haste, and mana regeneration. The best part of this item is its effect, which deals a lot of damage to enemies after you immobilize or slow them and gives your ally a chance to do even more damage to the marked champion. The item by itself will be doing a huge part of your total damage over the course of the game.

Chemtech Purifier

With so many healing items and abilities in the game, it’s important to get a Grievous Wounds item. Chemtech Purifier has been recently buffed and has great stats for a cost of only 2,300 gold. It’s a great investment to ensure your team has healing reduction for skirmishes or full-on teamfights. Without it, you might run into issues if you’re facing a Sylas, Yone, Aatrox or other bruisers who can top up their health bars in seconds.

Late-game items

Zhonya’s Hourglass

Zhonya’s Hourglass allows you to engage on enemies before going into stasis and using invisibility to run away. It can also help you survive an assassin who has targeted you. It has plenty of uses you can explore in various game states. For the cost of only 2,600 gold you become tankier against AD-oriented champions while also gaining 65 ability power and 10 ability haste.

Demonic Embrace

If you’re facing various tanks who are proving to be a huge pain to deal with, you can go for Demonic Embrace to burn their health away. This item is best if combined with the Mythic Liandry’s Anguish since you’ll get a double burn effect. But it can work out with Imperial Mandate with no issues as well.

Rabadon’s Deathcap

The dream item of any AP-oriented champion, Rabadon’s Deathcap gives you a flat 120 ability power boost and increases your total ability power by 35 percent. This item is your go-to option if you’ve accumulated enough gold in the later stages of the game. The damage it gives you is worth its expensive 3,800 gold cost.

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