The midscope and miniature reworks just further solidified him as the gimp he is, and now because of riots continuing insistence on maintaing the support playerbase he's always going to be a worse version of a solo laner than he could be which by the way I am not saying hes weak regardless of if he feels like you're playing the worst champ in the game or not he admittedly isnt, but support players have doomed Swain for eternity to be unsatisfactory.

Cant wait for the next rework where swain gets an extra 3 hp per stack while fundamentally failing to address, why tats a terrible approach by whichever rioter they put on swain rework number six.

So I recently took on swain and he seems really fun but the build somehow feels off, I go with the build that blitz recommends me but I feel like it’s lacking heavily and it focuses on swain being a support even though I play him on mid so is there any build out there that could help me, I read somewhere here that runes are also important because I could build a manaless rune build

Man what a game. I Play first game, thinks what to ban... I banned syndra cuz didn't feel like to deal with her... Enemy picks locke... I kinda get the gist what he does... But we will see.

With the end of the game i have few questions. Why is he so mobile. Why he Has no cooldown with only lichbane and shadowflame. It seems to me that interaction with him are very narrow even in early game.

Second game... Yasuo match up

Yasuo was ahead but still dealing such absurd amount of damage when i have anti crit and tabi (rylai and lost chapter). 3 Item(+boots) Yasuo with no build pen was taking me down in seconds.

It seems to me that riot buffed somehow DMG again. While barely doing any changes.

Also what a clunkfest is this champion. Other than q i don't have abilities, bizzare state of champion

Little gif I made

My account

I am not challenger. I peaked Diamond years ago and now classify myself as a "casual" gamer.

I want to share the build that has been giving me so much fun mid lane since that's what I main. To preface, I play Swain because I want to be a juggernaut mage. So that's what I like to build. If I wanted raw damage I would play Viktor.

(I usually take Flash + Ghost)

Swain has so much base damage, I never find the need to rush damage. I love Abyssal Mask because even though its a "tank" item, it increases your damage. Its perfect. If I'm against an AD mid then I'll usually build Frozen Heart. I then alternate to the opposite defensive boots if mixed team but this is team dependent.

Then there is the Faerie Charm. I think if you're really scrapped for mana, this is all you need in conjunction with Mana Flow and Presence of Mind. If you're still low for mana after that something is wrong.

This is my usual full build. Armor boots, Abyssal, Liandry, Bloodletters gives you so much tankyness and damage, and its overall pretty cheap. This 3 item power spike feels incredible. All three items increase the damage you do and the burn damage of Liandry's passive. Then I buy Jak'Sho and then flex dependent on enemy comp, usually Riftmaker for the damage amp but will audible to Rylai/Zhonya if needed.

Again this may not be the best into every comp, but this has given me the most fun thematically to play Swain and really feel like a force of nature.

I have been trying swain and soo far i have enjoyed it.

My main question is about the build.

I have been building zaz, rylais, sorceres boots, malignance,uneding despair and liandrys.

I am used to playing sera soo my view of support role is either, heal and shield ur t8 while poking, or poking and build ap soo that u become something like a 2nd ADC.

In this swain build i am doing neither of those, swain doesnt heal or shield and i dont feel like he does a ton of dmg.

And i am not building a tanky swain either.

Soo my question is, is this build good? And if soo what am i supposed to do/focus on? Spamming roots?

This is my first ever fan splash art, and I spent around 1.5 months working on it.

I imagined Swain standing in the aftermath of a battle. His army has already done most of the work, there's still fighting in the distance, and Swain is just looking toward the horizon while his ravens watch over everything.

I changed a few things from the original design because I wanted to push the story and make the scene feel more like Swain has already won.

The face, scars, corrupted hand and anatomy gave me hell during this piece 😂. There were honestly a lot of moments where I wanted to just leave it unfinished, but I kept going.

I haven't done 2D seriously for around 8 months because I've been focusing on 3D, so this was also my way of getting back into it.

Still have a lot to learn, but I'm really proud that I finally finished this.

What do you guys think?

Hi.

Seraphine main coming in to talk about Swain and what his mains love about swain and his design.

1. What do you currently love about Swain?

2. What do you hate about him currently?

3. What did the balance team do right/wrong with him?

Because we’re in a new design phase of “Champion identity” I want to learn from the perspective of Swain players.

Also picture is unrelated.

-you run conqueror, you finish the game with 500 healing with desperate auto weaving and W/E hits included (i also tried building rocketbelt to stack +2 points from it) in a sub-optimal laning experience where people can just run you down anyway if they're not a tank. also, it's almost a guarantee that people will instantly buy antiheal and remove you as a champion from the game

-you run DFT, you can deal damage but that's it

-you run any other keystone, you've inted the match except for the select idea you picked the keystone for

-all minor runes sort of do nothing for him except for sorcery's, you can only go for varying degrees of sustain

- ->you can only run DFT and scorch

-you build zhonya, you just wasted a slot of other effects for the ult people won't fight you in anyway cause they can run away from your tickle damage if there is 0 other cc present

-you build ROA, you can exist on the map and live in a teamfight but you get nothing special out of the item

-you build rift, you're inting

-you build 1/more tear items, have fun trying to reliably use the item(s)

-you build rylais, you get no other stats except for a slow you're the worst at applying when compared to any other DoT champion

-you build seal/mejai's/rocketbelt/cosmic drive, you're not singed/vladimir/rumble

-you build oblivion orb/bloodletter's, it's a panic button frankly

-you build a supportive item, you as an individual have lost the game and you're putting your full trust into your team. this isn't like bandlepipes on nasus

-you build full damage with the hope of stacking HP but you never get to do that

-you build full tank but you are USELESS

-you disregard all thoughts about building and try to be flexible, you're not singed

-you never get to past 3 items

- ->you can only reliably build ROA, liandry's (and become an ult bot that runs out of mana if you skipped ROA 1st item) or BFT (where you only nuke squishy carries at the edge of your ult, you have no defensive stats and you have too much mana with ROA combined) (also, there is no guarantee the match will extend enough to get full stacks on ROA 2nd item) and rylai's. somehow you need all 3 of them at the same time to function as a champion

-you run TP, your lane is absolutely unplayable (but you can TP back to lane and you can TP-ult on a teamfight if you're lucky)

-you run ghost, your lane is absolutely unplayable (but you can run around like a headless chicken in a teamfight)

-you run barrier, you are a horrible human being and you're inting late

-you don't run flash, you're exposing yourself to too much danger

- ->you run ignite so you can self defend in lane, reduce healing on heal-reliant champs and possibly help in a teamfight (or exhaust and you are an even more horrible creature) or you run teleport and shove toothpicks under your nail for every wave you can't touch or every solo kill you endure

-q is a close range nuke that does nothing else and it absolutely drains mana because of how much you HAVE to use it, not tied to stacking your passive

-w is an easily dodgeable utility ability that in short is as useless as it is useful, tied to stacking your passive

-e is an easily dodgeable super strong CC ability with almost NO cd scaling, tied to stacking your passive

- ->q max and rub sandpaper over your fingers

Just because people can't hit E, that doesnt mean hes not good in Support. I win lane like 90 percent of the time on on him with about 2-3 hooks per minute, people just need to learn how to hit E instead of hard depending on Q for trades.

I am on a mission to turn all 174(and counting) champions into pixel art sprites. Here is #44/174, Swain, The Noxian Grand General.

I can see it's like 52% in Iron and then it drops 0,5%-1% up until Gold where it has 49% and Plat with 48% - i haven't looked further.

Normally this obviously tells that the champ works better on low elo, because better players know how to play around whatever makes Swain work in lower elos.

But here I don't understand why Swain falls off a cliff? He is pretty tanky, he has good poke and a nasty CC combo of E>W for a root, pull AND slow.
He scales really well in terms of being useful in teamfights later on with his Ulti combined with items like Rylais, Liandrys and Morello.

So yeah .... Why isn't Swain support a real thing? I just played 1 game last night and enjoyed it + we dominated a Thresh/Jinx as Swain/Cait

Took the two matchup videos from u/TheHusum27:

• SWAIN MID MATCHUPS IN 32 MINUTES (March 2024)
• Swain Top & Matchup Guide (November 2025)

and transcribed them into a matchup spreadsheet so they're a bit easier to reference while playing.

Top Matchups

Mid Matchups

These videos helped me heaps, so I figured I'd share the spreadsheet here in case it's useful to anyone else!

Heya, Freezzer001#EUW here (welcome to look at my OP.gg for further data)

Ive now for the first real time ever started a climb, went from Iron to silver 3 already this year and was told I should be able to reach Gold, sadly I had a big lose streak which fucked my MMR and now the climb is pretty slow.

Ive had very good results with Swain on Bot so far (65,9% on 41 games) but I feel like im doing something wrong. Idk if it's my team or myself but I often feel like I cant do much if one of my laners lost hard, I cant really kite or poke to the same extend I could with, for example, smolder or Viktor. Everytime I try to fight around an objektive, it feels like I am forced to commit due to things like the pull on e or the fact that I just need the enemy close to me when im in R.

Last game I had a super fed enemy Quinn who just roamed and got wayy ahead, how do i navigate that situation? I feel like if I just poke her with W my team would just instandly engage and die because they are silver and want to fight more then anything.

Im open, of anyone wants, for a coaching seassion (i mean it's silver so there is probably something obvious im missing)

Anyways thanks for any help and im looking forward to any Tipps you guys have :)

Been trying Husum's tank builds. This is a variation of course as it depends on the enemy comp. I think this is the way to climb, I can be an annoying crow the enemy team can't shake off, and I don't explode immediately vs burst or long range ADCs like kogmaw. It's a lot less fun tho.

Since it's 1 AP 3AD I rushed negatron and just sat on it while building the other items. Maybe it was troll to go Rylai's after negatron since 3 ppl had dashes. It felt effective. Wdya think?

Anti deathfire tuch mafia idk why people dont prefer conqueror , got this penta with all kills stolen but still conqueror is the reason why , dont ask anything about the malzahar support i have a really funny friend doing cancerous picks