Hi, I am Khannuuuuur, an avid Gangplank player. When I was learning Gangplank, I browsed through Mobafire guides to find anything helpful. To say the least, a lot of them were either not updated or had lackluster information, especially when GP was not that meta (unlike now where Kleptomancy has made him broken). Now that I am more experienced with the champion, I thought I could help starting Gangplank players by making a guide.

In this guide, I will be trying my best to teach you how to play Gangplank to a decent standard even if you have not even played the champion. I will also be coving only a specific build/play style for Gangplank; one with a tragically weak early game for a hecka-hella strong late game.

Full damage Gangplank is the most fun way to play Gangplank. Not on any other champion will you feel the sensation of one shotting 3-4 members of the enemy team from a mile away with just a barrel and an ultimate.

Besides the fun factor, I would argue that full damage Gangplank is also the easiest way to play Gangplank it is always straight forward. This style of Gangplank has very few lane match-ups where he has a chance of winning so you can get away with playing passive almost every game while other Gangplank styles that have better early game may play passive or aggressive depending on the match-up. Also, with my style of Gangplank you will ALWAYS one shot carries when you get your items with a barrel + ultimate while as early game focused builds it may take a lot more than that to 100-0 someone.

Here I will talk about the uses and tricks for Gangplank's abilities. I recommend that you throughly read his abilities before reading this portion of the guide.

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Passive: Trial By Fire

This passive is best used in lane to win trades or take towers. During the mid and late game this passive is not that useful.

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Q: Parrrley

When in lane, think of this ability like a Nasus Q; you use it to last hit, but instead of getting stacks, you get more gold. When you are not using this ability to farm, you should be using it to poke your enemy laner to not only deal damage, but also get Bandit gold. Poking your laner constantly throughout the laning phase can result in a lot of gold because of Bandit .

Oh and you can flash during the cast time of your Q, which can make for some sick barrel plays(which I will talk about later).

You always max this ability first.

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W: Remove Scurvy

This ability is pretty basic; all you need to do it to THINK before using this ability. Suppose you use it for healing but realize moments later that it would be better used to avoid CC and maybe a subsequent death. Make sure you know what can happen shortly after you use this ability.

This ability remove ALL FORMS of CC except for ground effects(where you cannot use mobility spells like flash but you can still use movement commands) and near-sighted effects from champions like Graves or Quinn.

You can also flash during the cast time.

You always max this ability third.

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E: Powder Keg

This is by far the most complex ability in the entire game. In fact, I am not going to be covering this entire ability in this chapter as I have created a whole chapter dedicated to it. In this chapter though, I will be just covering the basics.

This ability is your everything. It is your damage, wave clear, engage, disengage, re-engage, CC, poke, burst, zoning tool, etc.; which is why it is so damn important to know how to use these things.

It is very important to note that the barrel HP decay speed increases at levels 7 and 13.

You always max this ability second.

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R: Cannon Barrage

Use this ability much like how one would use Jinx's Super Mega Death Rocket! or Ezreal's Trueshot Barrage; use it to pick off low health enemies around the map. The good thing about this ability is that it can be cast almost instantly and has no travel time, however it trades accuracy for damage.

Killing units with your Q or a barrel detonated by your Q will give you a "Gangplank exclusive currency" called silver serpents. Acquiring 500 silver serpents will allow you to buy upgrades his ultimate. There are 3 upgrades, Death's Daughter, Fire At Will, and Raise Morale. You always get the Death's Daughter upgrade first as it increases this ability's kill potential drastically. Fire At Will is usually the second upgrade, however Raise Morale can also be taken second if your team is ahead and needs another engage tool.

Take a point in this ability whenever you can.

First things first, Kleptomancy is broken on GP. It acts like a Bandit passive and it gives you free items that you can sell for even more money.

Take Biscuit Delivery to help in poke lanes or Perfect Timing in a heavy all in lane. However, when in doubt take Biscuit Delivery because over all provides you with more benefits.

Take Future's Market in most match-ups. Magical Footwear can be useful if your laner only intends on farming and not harassing or taking harass, however I currently cannot think of a match-up like this.

Take Cosmic Insight because Gangplank lives and dies by CDR and having that extra bit helps a ton over the course of a game.

Take Sorcery as your secondary tree because of the extra 10% CDR from Transcendence. This way you can avoid buying Ionian Boots of Lucidity and benefit from a defensive boot that you will need because you will not build any defenses other than that.

For the second rune, you have a multitude of options:

Currently strong runes:
Scorch: This goes very well with your passive and constant poke, very strong for boosting your early game.
Manaflow Band: Especially if you take Spellthief's Edge as your starting item, you will run out of mana fast if you are constantly poking as you should. This rune helps delay the mana problem you will inevitably run into.

Also viable, however weaker:
The Ultimate Hat: Your ultimate is not nearly as strong as it was before due to the removal of Thunderlords. Getting picks with it is a lot harder this season, so don't think this rune is really good on GP.
Gathering Storm: This rune only comes into effect late game, anytime else its stats are negligible. Take this rune if you are against a late game comp.

In this chapter I will be talking about all the items that are viable for the full damage Gangplank play style.

Starting Items:

Spellthief's Edge + Refillable Potion: Take this in most situations. It gives you hella gold and taking Kleptomancy at the same time makes your poke make bank.

Sapphire Crystal + Refillable Potion: This start is especially good for rushing your Sheen item to have a lot more pressure in your lane. Laners that do very poorly against this start include melee champions and champions with very little life steal/healing.

Doran's Ring + 2 Health Potions: This start is best for match-ups where you do not make use of an early Sheen and you are better off power farming.

Standard Items:

Keep in mind that this guide is for FULL DAMAGE Gangplank. The items you see here(except for boots) are for maximizing your damage.

Trinity Force: This item provides Gangplank with every single stat he needs(except crit and lethality). This item's sheen passive also goes very well with his Q, which is why this item is always a must-buy every single game.

Boots: When against heavy lane poke/aggressive laners you will buy defensive boots according to the type of damage. For example, against Pantheon you buy Ninja Tabi and against Rumble you buy Mercury's Treads. But if you are against a passive laner, buy Boots of Swiftness.

Youmuu's Ghostblade: This item gives Gangplank much needed movement speed, CDR and lethality. The lethality will ensure your damage is high going into the mid game(which is why it is bought second) and will also scale well late game.

Infinity Edge, Statikk Shiv, and Phantom Dancer: These items ensure that your damage is high late game.

Lord Dominik's Regards or Mortal Reminder: Swap out your boots for one of these items if you are struggling with tanks. This can be built earlier on, before your crit items if you are having trouble with tanks.

Unlike most champions, Gangplank has many major power spikes that can be taken advantage of to great extent. Here I will be talking about his power spikes and how to abuse them starting from his earliest power spike to his later power spikes.

1. Buying Sheen: At this point, your Q damage has about doubled. Depending on your laner, you can easily poke them out of lane and keep them on dangerously low amounts of health.

2. Getting your ultimate: This one should be obvious. Access to your ultimate move provides pressure on the entire map as you can easily turn a fight around at any time, any place.

3. Hitting level 7: At this level your barrel HP decay decreases a noticeable amount. Especially against champions with low attack speeds, you can set up barrel chains faster and catch your laner off guard more often with sudden barrel poke. Dueling in lane is also way better as you can set up and explode your barrels faster.

4. Buying Trinity Force: Your Q now does about twice as much damage than it did when you only had Sheen. At this point you can easily one shot the caster minions with a barrel + a Q, meaning that you can easily push in your enemy laner, potentially denying them CS and allowing you to roam.

5. Hitting level 13: At this level your barrel HP decay timer decreases to an amount where you can quickly and efficiently setup barrels. A triple barrel combo takes only about 2-3 seconds to setup and detonate. The slow on your barrels is very strong allowing you to use your barrels as effective peel and engage.

6. After buying a few crit items: Assuming you are going even with your opponents, you should be able to kill squishy champions by Q'ing and critting a barrel with sheen and ulting them.


Taking full advantage of these power spikes involve trying to get them as early as possible. You should always be looking to farm gold. And pre-level 13, you should try and stay in lane as long as it is safe to soak up as much XP as possible.

As I said throughout this guide, full damage GP's laning phase is garbage. Your ultimate goal in the laning phase is to keep up in levels, get farm all the farm that you can, and don't die. You should only go for kills/trades if your opponent allows it.

Keeping up in levels: This one is simple; stay around the dying enemy minions as much as possible. Granted, getting good at this does take some amount of knowledge in wave management, but that skill will only come with experience and observing how minions work. I can only give some simple tips for this for now:
- Do not recall if minions are pushing into your tower(unless you have TP up).
- Do not push harder than the enemy laner as this could potentially end up with your enemy freezing the minion wave and zoning you off the XP for long periods of time.
- Try to freeze the minion wave in front of your tower.

Get All the Farm That You Can:
You may have heard that you should be getting 10 CS per minute. However, when you play full damage Gangplank, that should be thrown out the window. You should only get the CS that is worth taking. For example, if you walk up to kill a cannon minion but take massive harass that brings you to a quarter to half health, that is not worth it because you lose lots of lane control and you could potentially die giving your laner 300 gold while you only got 50 gold, which is obviously a bad trade. A good rule of thumb is to simply consider the what you are getting every time you go in for a CS.

Also be sure to harass your laner with your Q whenever you are not using your Q to kill a minion. Since you are running Bandit from Spellthief's Edge and Kleptomancy, you get about a caster minion amount of gold from poking with your Q. Continuous poke during the laning phase can not only have you on a health advantage but also guarantees a lot of gold for you.

This season, poking your laner constantly and missing lots of CS is actually viable because poking gives you hella gold.

Not Dying:
Avoiding death is always important, but for Gangplank it is even more important. In most match-ups your opponent scales better with early items than you do, meaning that even if you and your laner die 1 for 1 your laner probably has a bigger advantage than you do.

Avoiding death in most match-ups often involves being the underdog for a little while. You should be OK with being harassed but not being able to trade back. You should be OK with being pushed under tower. While it may feel like **** being pushed around all the time, just remember that no matter who you are against you will diarrhea all over them late game.

If your laner likes to run up to you for trades you can usually peel away from them by placing a barrel on top of yourself and detonating it whenever they come in attack range. Keep in mind that the barrels early game have long HP decay so be proactive and always have the "peel barrel" prepped in advance.

Trades and Kills:
Only go for trades that you know you will win(meaning that you dealt more damage than you received). Trading with Gangplank is fairly straight forward. You hit them with an auto attacked barrel, Q them and run up to them with an auto attack. This will proc your passive, proc thunderlords and because of your passive you can usually run away.

Going for all-ins/kills in lane are usually initiated with similar fashion except you may ult them for flash onto them once you have landed a slow/barrel combo on them.

I will be just covering a lot of match-up specific information here.

Throughout this chapter I will be mentioning "safety barrels" a lot. Let me tell you what these are.

Safety Barrel: A barrel you preemptively place on top of your self that you detonate when your enemy laner tries to engage on you. The slow on your enemy and movement speed you gain will be usually enough to run away from them. The safety barrel also deters your opponent from making aggressive moves on you because they know you will just run away.

I will be only covering some match-ups because many of them are very straight forward and you only need basic knowledge(e.g whether they are early or late game champion, whether they have sustain, poke, range, etc.) to understand how to play against them.

Pantheon: This is one of the hardest match-ups for Gangplank but it is very simple to play against. Use safety barrels and don't push to prevent him from freezing and zoning you off the minion wave. Be sure to ping MIA whenever he leaves lane after he hits level 6. You need to prevent him from snowballing himself and his other lanes.

Tryndamere: Many people struggle with this match-up. However once you understand Tryndamere's weaknesses and strengths this match-up is fairly easy. You can actually out duel this guy early game... IF his fury is not stacked. You should never let him stack his fury for free. Try to fight him and make him choose between keeping that fury for combat advantage or using it to regen health. You should never let him have full health and full fury. If you do ever let this happen, just play passive and use safety barrels. If he tries to tower dive you with his ultimate, kite him out using the slow from your barrels. Be sure to have barrels prepped in advance before he tries to dive you.

Teemo: Before you get Sheen, do not try to exchange poke with him. Your Q damage early does less damage than his Q + an AA. Besides that, this match-up is like any other top laner match-up versus Teeemo; it's annoying.

Camille, Jarvan IV, Riven, Yasuo, Aatrox, Irelia, Pantheon etc.: These guys are grouped together because they have counter play against your safety barrels. They can engage on you with CC and quickly destroy your safety barrel while you're CC'ed and start hitting you giving you no chance to trade back. To counteract this, you can place two safety barrels on top of yourself instead of one. If they destroy one barrel, you can always use the other.

Jarvan IV: His ultimate can give him a huge advantage because you have no room to kite him out with barrels fight him with barrels. In general you will struggle a lot in fights with Jarvan early the only thing you can really do is prevent him from killing you. You can do this by playing very passive(as usual), don't stray away from your tower often and prep barrels on the side of the lane near your tower. This makes it more risky for him to all-in you since you're under tower and you can chain barrels into his pit to not only deal more damage but also slow him making his chances of escaping lower.

If you get past the laning phase, and you are only a little behind XP and gold you are doing OK. If you are even or ahead in XP and gold then you are doing great.

Whatever the case may be, during the mid and late game you should be focusing on 3 things:
- Wave clear/Farming
- Objectives(towers, inhibitors, Baron, Dragon, winning the game)
- Teamfighting

Wave Clear and Farming: It is highly likely that you have the best wave clear on the team. It is your job to constantly push waves all over the map, creating map pressure on towers. If most of your team is behind it is your job to prevent sieges with your wave clear. You should always be looking to safely clear side lanes and get more farm to reach your beast late game.

Objectives: Going for objectives is very important. To win the game, you need to focus towers, inhibitors, barons and dragons that give your team advantages to ultimately take down the nexus. You should constantly be asking yourself "What objective can my team pressure" or "How can I extend my team's lead". Generally with Gangplank, you go about getting objectives by winning team fights and then getting an objective with out the pressure of some or all of the enemy team.

You can also split push, but you must realize that by doing this you are trading a lot of team fight potential.

Team Fights: As I said before, you have a lot of potential in a team fight. Especially once you get 2-3 crit items, your damage is massive. Generally in team fights you should be looking to setup barrel combos onto the enemy backline, ult them and win a fight. This is hard to do if the enemy team recognizes your barrels as a huge threat because they will prioritize destroying them. A lot of the time you cannot ever land a barrel combo without someone distracting the enemy team. You are best off just saving your barrels and waiting for an opportune moment.

Transition from mid to late game: This is simple, late game you should be focusing on team fighting and taking objectives like baron. In general, you shouldn't be split pushing because your damage is so important to your team.

I haven't had time to do this section, but it is very easy to find videos showcasing all the tricks and combos with the barrels.