Overview
One of the great counter-pick champions in the game, Sylas is a mid laner who can thrive or fizzle depending greatly on the enemy team composition thanks to his ability to steal ultimates. When the enemy has a lot of juicy ultimates to steal, Sylas can use them to his advantage to generate a lot of unexpected angles for his team. He’s a champion with a high skill cap as a result of this and can be a monster in the hands of a seasoned player. Click here for the latest data on his best builds, including Runes, Items, Summoner Spells, and more.
Keys to Remember About Sylas
If you want to maximize your odds at winning, Sylas is going to be a hard champion to one-trick. He's just unfortunately going to be better in some drafts, which means it's best to pick him late once you've seen as many enemy champions as possible.
Because there's a cooldown on stealing enemy ultimates, you can't just pick one enemy to steal the whole game -- as long as there are two or three good ultimates, though, you can cycle through those throughout the game.
Strengths
Despite being a melee champion, his laning phase is buoyed by the range on his Chain Lash [Q]. And because he heals up on Kingslayer [W], he can often threaten to jump on the squishier champions that might choose to engage on him and easily win the trade, especially if he’s able to land Abduct [E] on them. This can make it very tricky to harass him out of lane. The initial dash on his E also allows him to juke away from skill shots or to reposition him to more easily land his chains. And once you hit level 6, you immediately Hijack [R] an enemy ultimate, even if they themself aren’t level 6 yet. This can be really helpful against certain junglers and bot laners who are behind the curve as it may catch them completely off guard. He’s extremely strong into the right enemy champions -- a Malphite, for example, can allow him to land huge ultimates onto the enemy team.
Weaknesses
It’s dangerous to pick him early in the pick and ban phase, because if the enemy team keeps that in mind and decides to pick champions with lower impact ultimates, then Sylas is also going to have a lower impact ultimate. Even locking out 2 or 3 options can be detrimental to his success rate -- this means you’ll typically want to wait until you see most of the enemy team, especially the enemy mid laner, before you decide to lock Sylas. And while he has tools to help him in lane phase, a strong opponent that can consistently dodge his Abduct [E] will still be able to whittle him down and punish him in lane.
Game Plan
Early Game: Sylas will often find himself in skill matchups against opponents -- much of it comes down to how often he can land his Abduct [E]. Even once or twice can completely thwart an opponent’s ability to harass him.
Mid Game: You’ll want to steal good ultimates from opponents that allow you to generate picks -- he’s great at roaming and taking extended skirmishes thanks to his mobility and sustain.
Late Game: Sylas can easily burst down squishy champions at this phase, and sometimes he’ll gain access to extremely strong ultimates that can pair really well with his AP scaling to make for big damage nukes.
