Starter items
You want to pick starting items to give you the best opportunity to not fall behind early game. There are two starts I pick between, and it's important I pick an appropriate start to ensure I don't fall behind early game.
Born in the dark. Moulded by it...
Safe start
Starting with
Vampiric Shroud,
Lost Artifact and 2
Healing Potions is a great start for
Nox. This start will give you great early sustain, and will allow you to stay in lane for a long time during the early game. However it will take a little longer to get your first item on online. Being able to stay in lane longer will make it easier to earn that gold without losing advantage though.
Risky start
Start with
Vampiric Shroud and soul reliquary is a riskier option, but can potentially allow you to start building stacks much earlier, which can make it easy to bully your opponent in the early-mid game. You'll have less mana sustain with this start, so its effectiveness depends on your ability to bully your lane opponent fro. The get go.
I generally only use this start if I'm confident I'll be able to dominate my opponent very early on in the game.
1st Item-
Stacks
Building a stacking item and collecting stacks will help you become very powerful very early and allow you to bully your lane opponent.
You'll be less mobile early game building this first, but as long as you don't push up too far too often, then
Shadow Step is generally all you need to escape any early ganks. Just make sure to save it for when that happens.
If for any reason you fall behind by more than a level or are being bullied badly in lane then you should buy this second and get your boots first, for a cheaper and earlier, but smaller, power boost to help you keep up
Building Fat Stacks
Book of Thoth
Book of Thoth is a great choice as a first item so that you can start stacking it as early as possible, to benefit from the massive amount of power and mana it gives during the early game. Once you have a few stacks built up it will become very easy to bully your opponent out of lane, or even kill them, provided you can hit them with your Siphon-Lock combo.
warlock's sash
Warlock's Sash
Warlock's sash is a perfect alternate to
Book of Thoth if you feel you want more durability. You'll have a fair bit less magical power and mana (although the mana isn't really an issue) but you'll have A LOT more health to help survive any combat.
Soul Reaver
On the rare occasion that it's inconvenient to build stacks (for example, you're playing ***ualt, or another Mage on your team is already stacking in a joust match) then
Soul Reaver is a great alternate choice. It gives you a great deal of power and mana, and the passive chunks a percentage of an enemies health every 60 seconds, when you damage them with an ability, which gives you a high burst potential.
If you are choosing to build this, instead of a stacking item, then I would strongly suggest building it 3rd, after your boots and cooldown items are finished.
2nd Item-
Boots
Next you want to build your boots for the mobility, which will make it much easier for you to try and outmanuever your lane opponent and also make it much easier to survive ganks, which become more commonplace around this time in the match.
Getting up to speed
Shoes of the Magi
Shoes of the Magi give you quite a large amount of power, for their cost, and a bit of penetration, which help with your damage output.
Shoes of Focus
Shoes of Focus give you a bit of power and mana, but more importantly 10% cooldown reduction.
This is my preferred choice of footwear for
Nox, as every extra bit of cooldown reduction makes a big difference to her combat potential, as her base cooldowns are so long.
3rd Item-
Cooldown
Thirdly you want an item with a big cooldown reduction, as
Nox's cooldowns are so long, which will enable you to use your big damage abilities much more often.
Just be cool(down)
4th Item-
Penetration
Buying penetration next will make your abilities hit much harder, by allowing you to shred/bypass your enemies' protections. If however you're behind at this point in the game, then buying lifesteal before penetration will help you stay in lane longer to catch up on minion farm.
More than just the tip
Spear of the Magus
Spear of the Magus is a good choice to get if you have other mages on your team, as they will also benefit from the Spear's protections reductions. As it gives stacks of protection reduction when you do ability damage it works very well with the tick damage from
Shadow Lock and
Night Terror
With the changes to this item, in season 3, it only gives 10 protections reduction per stack, up to 3 stacks, so I would only generally get this if the enemy team has very little to no magical protection, or if you have other mages on your team.
Void stone
Void Stone gives you a bit of power, a bit of magical protection, and a protections reduction aura. This will allow you to mitigate a fair bit of damage from other mages, while dealing a bit more, as long as your enemies are within your aura. This will make laning against another Mage much easier, and will help your damage output too.
Obsidian Shard
Obsidian Shard gives you the ability to bypass a whopping 33% of your enemies' protections with every attack that you do. This gives you a big damage boost on your abilities, especially against targets with a lot of magical protections.
This is generally my preferred choice of penetration, as it works very well against any balanced team comps.
5th Item-
Lifesteal
Buying lifesteal will give you a decent amount of sustain which will allow you stay in the action for longer.
As this item gives you sustain you can sell your
Vampiric Shroud to be able to afford it, if you're at base already and just short of enough gold to buy it.
keeping topped up
Pythagorem's Piece
The immense amount of life steal
Pythagorem's Piece gives you will sustain you in lane very well, and help you recover easily from any damage you take. The extra 10% cooldown reduction will let you use your abilities that much more often too which is always nice on an ability based god.
You'll also be giving an aura of power and life steal to your magical teammates, so everybody on your team will love you for being such a team player!
This is my preferred choice of lifesteal item, as buying it will take you to the 40% cooldown reduction cap, provided you chose to buy
Shoes of Focus earlier.
Bancroft's Talon
Another good choice for a lifesteal item is
Bancroft's Talon. This item gives you heaps of extra power as your health gets lower. But as it only gives 12% lifesteal it will be harder to keep your health topped up, than with
Pythagorem's Piece, making it much easier for enemies to whittle you down and kill you in sustained fights. However, the extra damage will allow you to dispose of enemies faster, provided you can hit them, so this items comes with a risk/reward factor you'll have to weigh up when deciding whether to choose it.
Divine Ruin
If you're REALLY having trouble with healers like
Hel or
Aphrodite then you can build
Divine Ruin for its anti-heal passive, to give your damaging abilities some anti-heal properties. I wouldn't recommend this though as you'll be losing out on a lot of sustain or power that a different choice would give you. I also generally find that with the amount of damage
Nox puts out, you can usually kill any squishy gods much faster they can be healed.
Soul Reaver
Alternatively you could choose to skip lifesteal completely and buy
Soul Reaver instead, to really maximise your burst damage potential. However you will have no way of sustaining yourself without lifesteal, so you will need to be very careful to avoid any damage.
This item can be a particularly effective choice of you have a good healer like
Hel or
Chang'e on your team, as their healing capabilities will make up for your lack of self-sustenance.
Final Item-
Power!
At this point in the game you should have every thing you need to fight your opponents effectively. This final item will be the pitch black icing on the cake of your enemies suffering.
afraid of the dark? You should be...
Rod of Tahuti
Rod of Tahuti Is a great choice of final item If you've chosen a more defensive build. It's a plain and simple MASSIVE boost to magical power, which will help make up for the power you lack, over the full offensive build, due to it's passive power boost. This will make you a fearsome presence late game, provided you can land your abilities.
Spear of Desolation
Spear of Desolation is an expensive but brilliant item. At 3800 gold it can take an age to get online, but with it's cooldown reducing passive it can prove to be more than worth it, provided you can get the kills to activate it.
If you have max cooldown reduction, securing a kill with this item will take your 3 main abilities straight off of cooldown and give you a huge reduction to your ult's cooldown, which give you some fearsome combat potential. Just be aware that the passive can only activate once every 30 seconds, so you can't just constantly kill and reset your abilities.
I would only recommend buying this item if you've chosen to build all damage items, as with a more defensive build it will be much harder for you to secure kills, which can end up making this s redundant item choice.
Relics
As
Nox is a squishy Mage you will want Relics that help with your survivability. It is up to you what to take at level 1 and at level 12, but you generally want to have the one you think you'll need most at the start of the match.
Covering your shortfalls
purification
Purification
purification is the relic you generally want to pick first every match. It allows you to negate the effects of any CC which is a huge benefit and will save your life on countless occasions.
Sanctuary
Sanctuary
You should consider getting sanctuary] first if you're up against a lane opponent, or team, with a lot of big damage abilities, for example [[scylla or
Vulcan with their ults. Using it will give you temporary invulnerability so time it right and you can eat any ult or ability without taking damage. It's best to save using until you're about to take big damage that you know you otherwise won't be able to avoid.
Just can't find a time when I can bring myself to update them.
This is a very good build. Similar to what i would do. But I would disagree with only 1 Cooldown item. Get pen boots. Warlocks is fine. Then go Breastplate of valor into a Chronos Pendant. Then a shard. Then Rod. I play league. Thats why i prefer a more tanky mage. Vids up on my channel Drop a like and sub.
PS
I personally think cooldown boots are pointless. Unless your mana hungry early game. Then you can get max cooldown and sell up.
Yeah, I've come to find that the season 3 changes to penetration have really hurt Nox in the damage department, so I tend to build her a little tankier than my recommended build on this guide.
I now usually build
Cooldown boots, warlock's, Chronos/breastplate/spirit robe (depending on what I need), spear/shard/void stone (again depending what I need), Pythag (cos I like lifesteal on Nox), and either tahuti or desolation to finish.
I'll update the guide soon, to reflect this, but I'm a little busy at the moment.
Anyways, thanks for the feedback!
PS
I personally think cooldown boots are pointless. Unless your mana hungry early game. Then you can get max cooldown and sell up.
When to use your Dash
When you need to escape, or reposition yourself quickly.
How's that? ;)
The reason I don't really explain into it much is because 99% of the time you'll be using it to escape or reposition.
Fair enough it is a very diverse skill, so I may add in a bit of detail about other ways you can use it, but using it for anything other than escaping or repositioning leaves you VERY vulnerable for the duration of its cooldown, so it's something you need to know in your gut when to commit to, so by not explaining I thought it would allow people to build that instinct of when to use it offensively by themself.
Does that make sense?
Anyways cheers for the feedback, I hope you give Nox a spin!
Also I could give you a few tips on BBcoding if you want, just send me a message!
Happy Noxxing this season guys and girls!
I'm having with nox builds and would be a big help for me. I recently started smit two month but picked up noxs after about a few weeks. I get wins here and there but since I'm doing a team I want to improve on that game.
As my first builds I go for breastplate of valor and boots of focus to boost cool down and have defence and mobility.
Then I use warlock stash and then into spear of the Magnus then to rod of tahuli then final bancrGifts talon or obsidian shard.
I hope my guide can help you improve to a level you're happy with.
As a general rule - I wouldn't build Breastplate of Valor first unless you are against a physical God in lane (which is very rare for nox). If you're against another Mage then the Defense from breastplate will not help you against them.
Against a Mage you're better off building into warlock's saah first for the extra health, which will help you against them, then start building your Shoes of Focus.
Or you could build the shoes then the sash, if you want your cooldown before your health.
Hope that makes sense, and you find it helpful
As my first builds I go for breastplate of valor and boots of focus to boost cool down and have defence and mobility.
Then I use warlock stash and then into spear of the Magnus then to rod of tahuli then final bancrGifts talon or obsidian shard.
And if you read through the comments on this guide you'll find a bunch of BBcoding tips that some of the users gave me, which would probably be useful to you too.
Thanks for the feedback :)
Tried out Nox last night for the first time and this build definitely brought me some glory. Mainly played Clash and had a lot of fun with her combo. Great guide I think I found my go to Mid-lane god.
Glad to hear that!
Thanks for the feedback