Blogs
Jax - The Grandmaster at Arms
Hey friends, it's Fox, and today I'm going to be talking about a current favorite champion of mine Jax, why he's awesome, and give a few tips on how to play him. Before I go into depth I just want to quickly go over his abilities for those who don't play Jax.
Abilities
Relentless Assault:
Every time Jax performs an autoattack, he gains 4 / 6 / 8 / 10 / 12 / 14 % attack speed. This buff lasts for 2.5 seconds and stacks up to 6 times.
This ability can be really powerful, as over a fight Jax will be attacking faster and faster. During early game, it's hard to keep your stacks up and use effectively, so you won't get much use of it during laning phase. But at it's highest ranks it gives you a 84% bonus to attack speed at 6 stacks, making it one of the strongest attack speed steroids in the game.
Leap Strike
Jax leaps towards a target, dealing physical damage if the target is an enemy. This is Jax's gap closer. It has a great range, and it also has pretty good scaling from both attack damage and ability power.
Empower
Jax charges his weapon with energy, causing his next autoattack or Leap Strike to deal additional magic damage. This ability resets the autoattack timer. This ability is my favorite of Jax's abilities, and I'll go into it a little more in the tips section. It makes his auto attacks additional magic damage, making him deal a ton of burst in the form of both magic and phsyical damage.
Counter Strike
Jax enters a defensive stance for up to 2 seconds, dodging all incoming basic attacks and taking 25% less damage from area of effect abilities. At the end of the duration or if Counter Strike is activated again, Jax deals physical damage and stuns nearby enemies for 1 second. This spell deals 20% additional damage for each attack dodged to a maximum of 100% increased damage.
So this is Jax's somewhat famous dodge ability. It can have a huge impact as a defensive tool to reduce your damage taken, and it also is amazing offensively for it's stun.
Grandmaster's Might
Passive: Jax deals additional magic damage on every third basic attack. The counter will reset if he does not attack for 2.5 seconds.
Active: Jax gains armor and magic resist. He gains more armor the more attack damage he has, and gains more magic resistance the more ability power he has.
So the passive on this causes every third hit to deal quite a lot of damage, causing synergy beteween Jax's auto attacks and magic damage, and if you weren't familiar with Jax before this article, I'm sure you're starting to understand how a Jax can be very difficult to deal with, due to dealing lots of magic and physical damage.
The active makes Jax an amazing brusier. While building pure damage, his ultimate will allow him 8 seconds of very high resistances, making a tanky dps build very effective on him.
Why play Jax?
- He uses a lamp post for a weapon
Yeah that's right, a lamp post. Jax trying his hardest was too much for the rest of the League, so they asked him to take it easy, so now he uses a lamp post instead of a real weapon. And for that I give him style points.
- Steroids
No I'm not saying he takes a performance enhancing drug. In League of Legends, a steroid refers to a champion having an ability that makes them more powerful, often also called a "buff". In Jax's case he's got quite a few. His passive increases his attack speed, his W and R passive give him magic damage to his auto attacks, and the active on his ultimate gives him a defensive steroid giving him high amounts armor and magic resistance.
- High Mobility
Leap Strike has a range of 700 and a cooldown of 6 seconds before cooldown reduction is calculated at rank 5, with a stun on top of that, Jax is a hard man to get away from. He will be hopping around a fight jumping right onto carries. And very common items on Jax are Trinity Force, which gives both a slow on hit and movementspeed, and Hextech Gunblade, which has an active effect that slows.
- Item build diversity
While an AD style bruiser build is most popular on Jax, he has many options availible to him. He has good AP ratios, he has auto attack steroids, and he jumps right into people's faces so building defensive stats is also not a bad idea. So what I'm saying is that Jax has dozens of different builds, and probably has the most potential of any champion for build diversity. I can't think of an item that has literally no use to Jax. I've seen him built full ad, full ap, and as a tanky dps, all with success. I highly recommend thinking about getting Trinity Force, Hextech Gunblade, and Guardian Angel as a core build.
-Good lane match ups
Jax's two most common counters are Malphite and Singed. Malphite is basically permanently banned in solo queue and high level tournaments right now, and Singed has gone down a lot in recent popularity as champions who countered him became very popular. His only other counters are champions who specialize in laning phase. Champions like Yorick, who have great poke and sustain for laning phase, but he doesn't have the strongest late game team fight potential. Jax becomes so strong in the late game that it won't matter if the enemy team had a Yorick who was able to deny you a dozen cs, because Jax scales so well into the late game, you will be having a much stronger impact than Yorick.
- Strong all game, especially late game
Jax is really strong late game champion, sometimes refered to as a "hypercarry" (meaning his late game is among the very best). But unlike other late game champions, he doesn't really pay for it by having a painfully weak early game. In most Jax lanes you can poke and trade decently with a lot of champions, and by level 6 you are quite strong, and can go toe to toe with many champions, and if played right you can be dominating a lane.
Tips and Tricks
So Jax has a some tricks up his sleeve, and I'll tell you a few.
Jax can use Leap Strike (Q), to jump to enemies, everyone knows that. But he also can jump to allies, minions, and even to wards. So if you are in a tight situation, and have an ally close, or have a ward in your inventory, get some distance between your enemies by jump to it. Jumping to an ally or ward on the other side of a wall is a favorite use of mine for this, as some people forget that Jax can do this. It's really quite helpful as soon as you think of pretty much everything in the game as a point of mobility.
Jax's Empower(W) has a few neat tricks you can do with it. First, it resets your auto attack. Which means if you press W right as Jax completes an auto attack, he will swing a second time for his Empower attack, causing a mean amount of poke and damage. If you time this on top of your third hit damage from your ultimate, Jax's poke gets down right mean.
So after level 6, what I like to do is auto a minion once, and then run to my enemy and go for an auto + W (+R proc) and it deals a ton of damage. The second trick I'll mention is that it doesn't only add damage to an auto attack, it will also increase the damage of your Leap Strike. So if you absolutely need the damage now, you can press W as you Q to get that extra burst.
Jax's Counter Strike also another versitile ability. So the most common use I see is to press E right before a Jax player uses Leap Strike so they can get the quick stun off. And that's really useful. But I usually like to be a little more patient. The more attacks Jax dodges during Counter Strike, the more damage it does.
I usually try to get in without using either Q or E start fighting them, start my Counter Strike ability right as they're about to hit me back, and use my Q to jump when it's about to finish(because most enemies are running at this point). Waiting to jump stun them until after they flash will turn an escaping enemy into a kill for your team. Timing everything out to get the most use out of it can help secure a lot of kills.
So in conclusion...
Jax is awesome! He is versitile, strong, really fun, and a dozen other good things I could say. If you haven't tried Jax yet, you should! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed! I will leave you now with this wonderful video.