Hello, I'm Tenacious Dean and I've mained Malz since Season 5 before his rework.

That year I was silver, the next I was gold, and this last year I reached Plat. I am currently Gold 3 (in placements for 2) climbing back to Plat.

When it comes to Malzahar, I've always been a fan of some weird builds on him, particularly an old spellvamp one I used to run like this.

That being said, this is my first guide for him, although I did make one for Zilean just before the pre-season where I built him Tank with Ardent Censor.

However I do have 50k mastery points on Malz so I know him more or less inside out at this point.

Okay so overheal is kind of the reason I chose this build. Basically when you synergise it with gunblade, enemies will really struggle to burst you down, especially if you ult them and recover a **** tonne of health as well. I used to run domination as a secondary (for taste of blood/ravenous hunter) but Coup De Grace is actually incredibly useful on Malz with his E and especially in 1v2 situations when you can burst one down.

I've also tried Electrocute Malz and whilst it does seem to give more dmg than Aerie, his overall dmg output seems to be a fair bit lower than with Sorcery. This in turn reduces the effect of his healing and overall feels like a worse build, although I could do more testing. After already playing with manaflow as well you start to miss the ability spam.

I choose Manaflow because it is just too helpful during the early laning phase. It erases almost any problems you might otherwise have against manaless champs and once you have lost chapter pretty much the only time you want to b is when you have an item to buy or you're low, which is where the gunblade comes in.

I also choose absolute focus because with this build you're not going to below 70% for very long at all, the extra AP is incredibly nice and in most situations you don't miss the extra cdr you can get from Transcendence, or the extra movement from celerity.

Overheal in particular is stronger than you think as well due to the Liandry's and Rylais that you will almost always build. In all once at full build you should be negating 200-300 dmg just from this rune alone, and that's not even accounting for the health you will recover as well from Gunblade.

So the only item that isn't really standard on this list is the gunblade. I abuse this item personally to almost always take the turret down in mid. Once the enemy laner roams bot and you have this, you will almost always manage to take their turret by the time they get back into lane. Malz is a great split pusher anyway, and with this item he's even better than usual.

So not only do you get unlimited health sustain for when you don't really want to go back, but you also shred turrets and have that incredibly underrated active on the item which will deal a **** tonne of dmg for burst and slow them enough for you to land another ability on them.