Ekko relies on getting inside teamfights, assassinating core targets, and ulting out in League of Legends. His area-of-effect crowd-control allows him to decide what is the flow of the fight by either slowing enemies down or stunning them inside his Parallel Convergence.
One of the best things about playing Ekko is that your build path is flexible. You benefit from either tanky or AP-oriented items, allowing you to decide what sort of role you’d want to play in the game based on the game position.
Runes
Domination
Electrocute: This is one of the best keystones to take on Ekko. It increases your burst potential and ensures you get additional poke potential during the laning phase. It’s easy to activate with a simple combo of E, Q, and auto.
Sudden Impact: Sudden Impact is a great rune, giving you magic and armor penetration when you use your dash or ultimate. It can make your trades deadly early on when enemies don’t have any magic resist. If you feel like you’d need sustain, feel free to go for Taste of Blood instead.
Eyeball Collection: Eyeball Collection is a great rune to increase your ability power with the more takedowns you get. It is quite simple to stack due to how much roaming you’ll be doing, and by mid-game, you should have an additional 30 ability power from this rune alone.
Ravenous Hunter: As one of the most powerful healing runes in the game, Ravenous Hunter allows you to heal back up based on damage dealt from spells. While in the early game the impact might not be that high compared to other runes, once the match gets to the later points of the game, you’ll heal back up due to the damage you’ll be dealing with. This rune combined with your ultimate makes you unkillable.
Inspiration
Minion Dematerializer: As a melee champion, you’ll get bullied a lot in the laning phase so having this rune is core to get those early cannons. Good players will zone you out so having this rune as a safety net is great to ensure you get the early gold and experience from each cannon minion.
Time Warp Tonic: This rune combined with your Corrupting Potion will make your laning phase easy. You will be able to scale without issues into the mid-game to your core items.
Bonuses: +9 adaptive force, +9 adaptive force, +6 armor
Starting items
Corrupting Potion
This potion is the best early-game sustain item. Even without any stats, this item can influence the laning phase significantly. For only 500 gold it gives you back 375 health, 225 mana, and has a damage-over-time effect that quickly adds up.
The item without any enhancements is gold efficient. But you’ll have Time Warp Tonic from the Inspiration tree, which increases the effectiveness of this item. You’ll be getting back much more health and a nice movement speed buff, which can help you out throughout the entire game. Other starting items don’t even come close to this one.
Core items
Sorcerer’s Shoes
Sorcerer’s Shoes are a straightforward choice for boots with magic penetration to increase your damage potential. The item can be rushed if you want the additional movement speed alongside additional magic penetration, which combined with Sudden Impact can make you ignore most of the magic resist from the enemy.
Hextech Protobelt-01
Hextech Protobelt-01 is one of the cheapest and most impactful AP items on a couple of champions, Ekko included. This item has a great build path and grants you great stats, however, the mini dash is the cherry on top. It activates your Sudden Impact rune, allowing you to one-shot squishy carries.
Lich Bane
Lich Bane grants you all the stats you need, including ability power, cooldown reduction, movement speed, and a great passive effect which makes your next auto-attack hit like a truck. The effect scales with ability power, making this item extremely gold efficient. While rushing it first might not feel impactful, getting it as a second item is a great choice.
