Overview
Aphelios has a bit of RNG built into his kit in that your ability to carry can sometimes be limited (or unlocked) based on whatever weapon you happen to be using at the time. While this can be managed a little bit, there will still inevitably be situations where your team needs to wait for your weapons to cycle, or they’ll need to be more proactive if you have the weapon you want. Which weapon is good or not can also sometimes be dependent on patch cycles, which means Aphelios mains will always need to be on top of what is strong depending on both the patch and the team compositions of your allies and the enemy. Click here for the latest data on his best builds, including Runes, Items, Summoner Spells, and more.
Keys to Remember About Aphelios
You always need to be cognizant of what guns you currently have and what gun is coming up next -- it can be prudent to save ammo for a good gun if you have a big objective coming up (or use the ammo to cycle to the next one if you don't like your gun).
Because he's extremely immobile, there will be times where your main goal should just be to unload your damage quickly and on as many people as possible before dying. Ideally you can position properly to stay alive, but certain team comps will make that very difficult for you (especially if your Flash is down).
Strengths
He has a lot of damage potential that can come in a multitude of ways throughout the game thanks to the different weapon combinations he’ll have access to. Combined with a powerful AoE ability in Infernum Ultimate [R], Aphelios becomes a champion that can instantly chunk out significant HP from enemy teams -- and it can become even deadlier depending on which gun he has equipped at the time. The different weapon combinations are difficult to master, but that means it’s even harder for enemies to properly react to your guns as they won’t have the same level of understanding as you -- this gap only widens the more you practice!
Weaknesses
He’s an extremely immobile ADC, and while weapons like Severum can help offset that immobility, he’s still going to be very susceptible to hard engage from enemies. This means he’s going to require excellent positioning throughout the game, and especially in the end-game, if he is going to maximize his damage output. Aphelios is also going to go through periods in the game where is weapon combination is not optimal for specific situations -- he may be worse at team fighting at one point and then worse at small skirmishes at another -- and he’ll constantly need to juggle his guns to be in the right spots at the right time. And, unfortunately, the communication to optimize this is going to be hard to establish in Solo Queue.
Game Plan
Early Game: He’ll be forced to push at times, especially if he has Infernum active, so you’ll need to adapt how you lane based on your weapon. You have kill potential if you can root enemies with Gravitum, but it’s okay to play to farm and scale!
Mid Game: Your ultimate pairs great with Infernum, and you can look for big damage opportunities with it in team fighting at this phase. You can also find big roots with Gravitum!
Late Game: You’ll want to prioritize positioning -- you have hyper carry potential and should be active in communicating about when you want to fight or not.
