Darius is one of the best bruisers to carry a League of Legends solo queue game. He punishes immobile champions and is a nuisance to deal with, even if he is behind, due to his True Damage on his ultimate. He scales great into the mid-game and becomes unstoppable with a couple of core items.
Runes
Precision
Conqueror: This keystone rune is perfect for Darius. It grants you stacking attack damage and an amazing healing effect once you fully stack it. It is the perfect answer to tanks since you’ll become unkillable when dueling them.
Triumph: Triumph is a great snowballing rune to help you survive low-health encounters and get a bit more gold on takedowns. In teamfights, this can be the difference between you getting enough time to spam your ultimate and dying.
Legend: Alacrity: Legend: Alacrity is a basic rune to increase your attack speed and make your attacks feel more fluid. It is the default rune against all types of teams, but if you’re facing a heavy crowd-control focused team, you can go for Legend: Tenacity instead.
Last Stand: As Darius you’re usually going to be walking to enemy champions and soaking up all their poke while you reach them. As a result, activating the Last Stand effect is quite easy and makes you extremely deadly if you reach them with a low amount of health.
Sorcery
Nimbus Cloak: This rune has been popularized over night and remains core on most bruisers, junglers, and ADCs. It grants you a huge burst of movement speed when you use a summoner spell, giving you the opportunity to either escape or chase down slippery enemies.
Celerity: Since you don’t have any dashes or movement speed-enhancing effects in your kit, you need all the movement speed effects you can get from runes. Celerity is great in this regard, increasing your overall movement speed and making bonuses stronger as well.
Bonuses: +10-percent attack speed, +9 adaptive force, +6 armor
Starting items
Doran’s Shield
This defensive item is perfect to start with on Darius. It grants you health, a passive to help you last-hit and and an amazing health regeneration effect when you get poked down early. It helps you survive laning phase and get your core items with ease. While getting Doran’s Blade might seem better in some matchups, you can never go wrong with Doran’s Shields. You can always default to it.
Health Potion
During the farming phase, you are most likely going to take damage from enemy champions. Health potions heal back 150 health over 15 seconds and will give you extra time before having to base.
Core items
Ninja Tabi
Ninja Tabi is the best defensive option in the top lane since you’re a melee top laner. You’ll be getting auto attacked quite a lot early on and getting this item early on reduces all that pressure on you and allows you to survive the laning phase easier. The only exception would be if you’re facing heavy crowd-control focused teams. Mercury’s Treads would be a better option then.
Trinity Force
Trinity Force is the bread-and-butter item for Darius. You need to go for either it or Black Cleaver as a core item since you need the Phage effect. Without it, you’ll never reach the enemies since the movement speed is too valuable for you to pass up. Trinity benefits of having less health than BC but having more stats overall in other departments as well.
