I've been playing Yorick off and on and I've noticed his issue of being either too squishy or too mana starved in the early game.

I've been trying to figure out how I should rune and gear him for the best early game advantage. So far I've been goin dr seals mr glyphs (clueless on marks and quints for him) and starting with meki's pendant and 2 pots. I want to try out, though, runing for mp5 and starting doran's shield for durability and SOME mana regen.

What do you higher elo players do? I've got my gear down for his endgame (fratmogs, manamune, boots, and spirit visage) but the whole more mana vs more defense in the early game thing has got me stumped.

And pointers? Anything that works better than what I said?

For Reds, AD is usually the way to go. It gives easiest last hitting, plus pumps your ghoul damage and your AD-based nukes (Q,E).
Armor penetration is fine too, although it doesn't work with your W/E nukes since they are magical. As such, AD seems more general purpose.

Yellow is usually flat armor, since top lane is vs melee/physical much of the time.

Blue is magic resist per level.
Quints can be anything.

Start is typically boots+3pots, or meki+1ward/2pots. Depending on the expected resistance.

Very cool, appreciate the feedback.

How do you usually spec your masteries?
I've been rolling 0/23/7 (I mean, whatever the defense tree actually is, I'm not level 30 yet), but I see a lot of people doing like 19/0/11 and 11/0/19, what's up with that?

Ive been using yorick alot lately and he is mana hungry early game, for me I only have one rune page and its filled with magic and armor resist and health until I can afford to fill another page. Starting with a sapphire crystal and building it into manamune solves most of my mana problems.

Get a tear of the godess and rush a manamune, your mana problems are over, it gives you some damage as well, if you want to get tanky get a frozen heart, 99 armour and 500 mana (get AD from Manamune) or even get a triforce. Just don;t spam your abilities, if you spam them make sure you are hitting the enemy champ and not minions.

Spam your moves like crazy, just make sure they LAND

I personally go with 2 offense, 21 defense, 7 utility.

Offense is +2 AD.
Defense is the 5 health boosters, 3 armor, 3 MR, 3 movespeed, 3 CDR, the capstone, and some filler.
Utility is the max mana pool (great for manamune) and extra movespeed.


Offense itself isn't really an ideal tree for Yorick because there is a lot of wasted points. Yorick doesnt care about Attack Speed, especially early. So theres 4 wasted points at tier 2.
Yorick does both magical AND physical, so both penetrations are less effective than on a more focused champ.
Lifesteal mostly sucks on Yorick.
Crit is pretty useless.
Armor penetration flat as mentioned isn't all that great.

Like I said, lots of waste. Whereas he can make great use out of ALL the defensive points.


Um, not exactly.
Make sure you always use your W and E TOGETHER! An E by itself even though it has faster cooldown is a bad plan.
They will eat the small nuke and 1 ghoul hit and run off.

Togehter the W has longer range, slows them so you can easily get off the E. Then BOTH ghouls will beat on the slowed opponent as he tries to crawl off. The W is especially good when they are close to the bush...use it on the far side of the enemy into the bush so he can't juke your ghouls in the bushes since 1 spawns IN the bushes themselves.