Ashe is one of the most popular bottom laners in League of Legends. Her simplistic kit allows her to provide plenty of vision, slow, and damage for her team.
She is one of League’s oldest champions and has maintained her core abilities after all these years, showing how successful she is with minimal changes. While she can carry games with her spammable area-of-effect (AoE) slow and high-speed attacks, she has lots of counters and items to help you keep her in check.
Here are the best counter picks to beat Ashe in the bot lane.
General strategy
Ashe has a telegraphed playstyle, which you can use to your advantage. She throws Volleys (W) to clear waves and try to poke you down. You can sit behind your minion wave to avoid this ability since it stops on the first target hit. Early on it has a long cooldown, so use the downtime as a green light for you to trade blows.
Her other trading tool is her Ranger’s Focus (Q), which she needs to stack up to gain an attack-speed boost and split her arrows into multiple smaller arrows dealing less damage. Ashe’s Hawkshot (E) allows her to scout the map for five seconds on a long cooldown, which can save her from unwanted ganks.
Once Ashe reaches level six, she will get access to an engage tool in her Enchanted Crystal Arrow (R), a global ultimate that deals damage and stuns based on distance travelled. Nearby enemies will take half damage, so this can be quite deadly during the laning phase when the health pools aren’t high. If you get poked down, she can engage with her ultimate and chunk you down even further while you’re stuck in crowd- control. It’s important to keep this in mind and look for her ultimate-casting animation to have enough time to dodge.
Champions
Jhin
Jhin is one of the best ADCs in the game currently and can answer Ashe perfectly with his low-range skills and burst.
Early on, your goal should be to stay behind waves and lower the health of creeps near Ashe to help you increase your poke damage with Dancing Grenade (Q). On top of that, you should aim to use your fourth passive shot to unleash a huge burst of damage on Ashe every couple of seconds. This should be done while her Volley is on cooldown to avoid getting poked down while you try to trade with her.
By repeating these trading patterns, you should be able to poke her down and zone her away from creeps. If she is low enough you can follow up with Deadly Flourish (W) to set up a kill. Once you get to level six, you’ll get access to your ultimate, but be careful since your positioning will be telegraphed and Ashe can stop you from firing your shots with her ultimate easily.
As the game goes by, you’ll be much stronger if you played the laning phase as described since you should have a creep score advantage. In teamfights aim to hit your closest targets, but if you see Ashe mispositioned, try to land a Deadly Flourish or pop your ultimate so that your teammates can delete her from the Rift.
Kai’Sa
Kai’Sa benefitted significantly from the item rework in the preseason. She’s a great answer to Ashe’s game plan since she can do a lot of damage from afar or dive in to unleash her burst and stop Ashe from doing any damage.
During the laning phase, you want to wait for Ashe to throw her Volley out before you go in close proximity and trade with your passive and Icathian Rain (Q). Keep an eye on Ashe’s Ranger’s Focus stacks since she can chase you down easily if you’re not careful. As a result, you should adapt to the support matchup as well and make small trades when you’re out of harm’s way.
Once you get to level six, you’ll get access to Killer Instinct (R), which will help your dive in if Ashe has been recently hit by one or your ally’s abilities. This is your key to punishing Ashe, especially if she doesn’t have flash. She doesn’t have a lot of damage without items compared to you who have multiple sources of damage. As a result, you can dive in and kill her repeatedly and snowball the game out of control. With a small early lead, you can reach your abilities’ thresholds to level up much faster and become the strongest player in the game.
Compared to Ashe, you scale much better since you have mixed damage and have no issues dealing with tanks who have either a lot of armor or magic resist. On top of that, you can easily reach Ashe in the backline in teamfights to kill her before she has a second to deal damage on your team. Afterwards, you can sneak away with your Supercharge (E) and regroup with your team to finish off the remaining opponents.
Twitch
Twitch is one of the more surprising assassin ADC picks to deal with Ashe. Unlike Kai’Sa and Jhin who want to have small burst-window trades before retreating, Twitch goes in and kills Ashe on cooldown. You don’t have tools to peel for yourself, so your tactic during the laning phase is to spam your Ambush (Q) on cooldown to go invisible and nuke Ashe in hopes of killing her with your support’s aid.
By getting a couple of early kills, you can force her to stay near her tower and miss creep experience and gold or get killed by you due to the early snowball. Your damage is quite high and you scale well into teamfights and can use Ambush to roam to other lanes as well.
By making a couple of early roams, you can give Ashe false hope that she can go back to farming before unleashing your Ambush and burst damage on her again, putting her on a farm counter. In teamfights, your Spray and Pray (R) with Ruunan’s will delete the health bars of your opponents. If in teamfights, you see Ashe sitting too far back, you can look to Ambush her from behind and kill her in the blink of an eye before hitting her other team members.
Items to build into Ashe
Plated Steelcaps
This is an alternative boots option to the traditional Berserker Greaves if you want to reduce her auto-attack damage. It’s great to build into a composition lacking magic damage and relying instead on physical damage.
Vampiric Scepter
This is a cheap item to help you out early on against Ashe’s poke. If you’re going for a build which has Vampiric Scepter, you can rush it to nullify the early poke.
Quicksilver Sash
If the enemy has a lot of crowd control or if you’re getting beat down during the laning phase due to Ashe’s ultimate, you can acquire this item to have a way to cleanse her ultimate and escape to safety. Usually Ashe players will be paired up with crowd control supports, so this item can help you stop their engage as well.
Immortal Shieldbow
This is a great Mythic item to stop Ashe from bursting you down if you’re low health. If you’re facing an assassin-oriented composition, you can go for Immortal Shieldbow to increase your survivability. It has a great build path, which allows you to sustain through Ashe’s poke and survive her ultimate if she catches you low health.
Galeforce
If you want to feel how it is to assassinate people as an ADC, look no further than Galeforce. This item has received a couple of buffs since its first iteration and is a core item for plenty of ADCs. You can acquire this item to get a small dash, which deals damage as well to nearby opponents. With it, you can easily dodge Ashe’s arrows even if your flash or movement ability is down or use it to execute her when she is low health.
