Over the course of the League of Legends championship series for season three, Elise has been consistently one of the most picked and/or banned champions in the game. It does not take long to figure out why. She has a stun, good damage, and one of the game’s few abilities capable of dodging targeted attacks.
She also, for all the great plays she is capable of, has a wide range of tricks players looking to just pick her up may not be aware of. For those players, here are a few things to keep in mind.
Know Your Role
Similar to Zyra, Elise is a champion easily capable of going multiple places in game. She regularly goes both top and into the jungle, but it is not entirely unheard of to see her in a mid or support slot. It is a simple thing to call where you are going, but it can go a long way to preventing a terrible game.
Be Smart With Your Spiders
Elise is called the Spider Queen for a reason. Her spiderlings are surprisingly powerful and dangerous while her volatile spiderling is one of the more flexible ranged nukes in the game.
Starting with her volatile spiderling, never forget that this explosive arachnid gives vision on whatever is nearby. The obvious use of this is to check bushes for hiding enemies, but this ability is not a traditional skillshot, enabling it to give the same vision around corners or well past where you feel safe advancing in lane.
This can help immensely if you also do not have time to take a detailed look or to approach close enough to ward, such as during a Baron fight. If you need to check if the other team is approaching, a volatile spiderling will give you a couple seconds of vision well past where you can normally see.
The spiderlings summoned when Elise is in spider form perform two functions. They absorb damage, blocking skillshots and tanking both minions and turrets, and they inflict a surprisingly high amount of damage in melee. Despite lacking direct controls for these spiderlings, there are still ways to use them intelligently.
When raw damage is the goal, such as against the larger neutral monsters and against towers, wait to use Skittering Frenzy until the spiderlings have reached the target so part of the duration is not wasted while they get closer. Additionally, while you cannot direct the spiderlings to directly intercept a skillshot, you can position yourself to place the spiderlings between yourself and the champion firing it, effectively forcing them to block it for you.
Rappel Is Your Friend
Elise’s spider form is a close-range, high-damage brawler and assassin, but it is Rappel that makes her unique and dangerous in spider form. This single ability is a highly effective offensive gap-closer and one of the most versatile defensive abilities in the entire game.
Used offensively, it can bypass barriers such as Anivia’s ice wall or Trundle’s pillar, crossing over an entire enemy team to land right on their AD carry’s head fangs-first. It also makes Elise much harder to kite, given her spider form’s natural movespeed increase, by effectively negating an enemy attempting to flash away.
The defensive applications of Rappel border on the absurd. The most obvious use is as a gap closer for her, jumping to a non-allied minion within range to escape a pursuing enemy. As this can not only target jungle creeps but also reveals targetable creeps outside of vision range, it can create some escape vectors even Lee Sin can be envious of. Never forget you can activate Rappel even without a direct target to rise up off the screen and reveal all possible targets.
Even just as a gap-closer, getting from that bush all the way to red is impressive.
As an even rarer element Rappel offers, while Elise is off the screen waiting to target something to drop onto, she is completely untargetable and effectively invincible. It will not save her from damage-over-time effects already on her, but any targeted form of damage, like the ults of Caitlyn and Fizz, will be avoided. Learning the timing on using Rappel in this manner should be of primary concern to anyone wanting to truly master the Spider Queen.
