How you should lane against Draven. Why am I telling you this majestic secret?

I love Draven. It might have been rather apparent, considering I wrote a 1500-word essay on his power as an ADC champion that included numerous calculations about his damage output at level 1. He’s quite simply my favourite champion in LoL, both because of his play style, and his attitude.

Have you read his lore? It’s so bad ass! He aspires for fame and glory, but not in the field of battle; instead, he performs glamorous and over-the-top executions for Noxus. Instead of just killing them, he lets them try to escape, killing them by throwing his axe at them from across the Colosseum. Come on, that’s pretty bad-ass.

His voice acting – that is, his character – is just so bad-ass. He taunts his opponents is cocky and in your face, and when you choose him in champion select he says “Welcome to Leaaaage of Draaaaaven”.

So, as you can imagine, I’ve been somewhat maining him for a long time now. I’m only on about 50 games with him in ranked, but that’s likely closer to 100 total games played with him. If each of those games lat an average of 30 minutes, that’s 50 hours in the company of Noxu’s Glorious Executioner.

What I’m trying to say is, I know him pretty well.

A lot of people seem to have trouble laning against a Draven; too many times I see the enemy team confide in me that they hate Draven when I pick him, or my team saying the same to me when the enemy team gets him. The more conventional ADCs have their counters that are known to many; beat Vayne in the early game, don’t let Tristana get to 6 items + let her push the lane to be ganked, hide behind minions to mitigate Ezreal’s damage etc. But a lot of people simply cannot deal with Draven.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to let the secret out on how to beat Draven, both in and out of lane.

Dealing with Draven In Lane.

The core damage of Draven is the mix of damage on his Q and passive. When Draven trades with you, he’s likely going to be hitting you with 1 Q-empowered AA and another normal AA. Your two AAs are simply not going to best him. I haven’t done the calculations, but I’m pretty sure that Draven’s simple two-hit combo is more damaging than Ezreal’s Q+AA combo.

So, to deal with Draven in lane, you simply need to possess timing. Know when to trade with the cocky bastard. Good Dravens often run Armour Penetration Runes (I do now as well, contrary to my prior article; I’ll make an update about his damage with Armour Pen runes soon) so this means that their last hitting is that slightest bit harder. To deal with this, most Dravens use their Q to farm minions with; in fact, a common trick is to use a Q to last hit a minion, then immediately on catching the Axe, attack the enemy ADC for a large instant burst of damage – this punishes the enemy laner for coming in to take CS.

When Draven last hits with Q (and you can tell when he does, he has a special particle effect around him when he has activated his Q, and you can see it – it’s larger than his normal AAs) attack him. Seriously, that’s all there is to it. Stop letting me decide when to trade. People are afraid of the damage that Draven puts out, so they don’t be aggressive against him and try to start trades, they let Draven start them. That’s a terrible idea. If you let me decide when to trade, I’m just going to only trade when I have my Q activated and I have a minion advantage, ensuring my victory.

So, attack Draven when his Q is being used to last hit. Either he’ll have to activate his Q again (assuming he’s been catching this same axe multiple times, thus the cooldown of his Q is refreshed) which costs him mana, or most likely, he’ll just regular AA you, making you win the trade.

Next, and this is important: don’t die. Draven is, quite frankly, terrible without kills. He has great AD scaling, but without the advantage of items he will begin to lose trades around level 7, especially if you can dodge his ult. Most ADCs have abilities that scale much better than Draven with levels; just don’t die to him in the early game, and you almost certainly win.

Also, please, please stop diving me under tower. What is wrong with you? I have my E (Stand Aside) that interrupts your ability to CC me and try and kill me, all the while hitting you with Qs and stacking my passive on you, thus ensuring me the kill.

Another great tip against Draven is to never forget about his passive. On his Q-empowered AAs, and any critical strike, he will deal a fair amount of extra physical damage over time. Something to note about that is that when you trigger the passive multiple times, it doesn’t simply refresh on the enemy; it stacks. If I’m level 10, my passive is hitting you for (30 + 4 * level)= 70 damage over 4 seconds. If I hit you 3 times, two of those being Q-empowered and the remaining attack luckily being a critical strike, the 70 damage isn’t refreshed, it just stacks and keeps going. That means my passive has given me (70*3)= 210 extra damage over the next several seconds. That’s freaking amazing. That’s what makes Draven so scary.



Basically, don’t just walk up to a Draven and expect to win without seriously considering his passive damage. It’s fairly easy to figure out; his passive scales with level with the formula already mentioned (30 + 4 * level) and you can figure out if he has the cooldown on his Q enough to empower more than two attacks and also figure if he has any crit chance yet. Know your enemy.

Dealing with Draven Out of Lane.

Draven as a champion suffers greatly from his lack of a repositioning skills. Many ADCs have one; Tristana’s jump, Ezreal’s E, Caitlyn’s E etc. but Draven doesn’t. He only has a very, very short Movement Speed and Attack Speed steroid. This means that the key factor to destroying Draven in any kind of teamfight is to simply catch him out, pounce on him and annihilate him.

Honestly, that is it. Armour is always a great counter to him of course, so getting a Randuin’s Omen is definitely a good shout as well.

I love my glorious executioner, but he is most certainly flawed in how he operates with regard to his lack of an escape. However, his simply disgusting damage more than makes up for it!

In summary, don’t trade with me when I have my axe, stop dying to me, and just pounce on me late game.

Hope you enjoyed that!

PS: Apparently, there’s also still an issue with Draven (that I, I will admit, did not notice) that when Draven hits towers whilst his Q is up, he does reduced damage somehow! Worrying, but will require some testing to confirm.

PPS: Holy crap, 4000 views? Thanks guys! If you want to discuss Draven, please do leave a comment below, or in the reddit thread on /r/leagueoflegends here !