Welcome!

This is an intermediate Yorick guide. You need to be at least base-line decent at this champion to get any benefits from this, so if you're just getting started, I strongly advise you to go somewhere else.

This guide's goal is to explain in detail my newest Yorick build and playstyle. It is very high risk and high reward, and will be not very forgiving when it comes to even small missplays.

With that in mind, if played well, it can take over games to a ridiculous degree. It's generally quite similar to Lethality Sion, but with a bit less inting.

If you're a bored Yorick veteran and want to spice things up and give yourself a bit of a challenge, you're in the right place.

As of 12.1, this build is a bit weaker than it was in the preseason, the reason being the massive Eclipse nerf. On the flipside, the Teleport nerf made Yorick stronger in general. I'm yet to try and decide if this build is worth playing after the nerf, but it sure is fun.

This is a variant of Lethality Yorick, but with a few twists. First, you go out of your way to buy Hullbreaker and commit to splitpushing 24/7. Second, you're running First Strike, the newly added (as of preseason 12) keystone rune.

Your gameplan is to dominate the money game - outfarm your lane opponent, gain easy money through First Strike procs, steal the enemy jungle to cripple their jungler, take all the plates and turrets you can. Your goal is to snowball, no matter if you get kills or not, to the point where you can close the game by splitting.

First Strike is absolutely amazing in a Lethality build, because after hitting your Mourning Mist, First Strike is procced and your ghouls make you a lot of money by dealing their obscene damage. Bonus points if you go there yourself, to maximize your gains even further.

First Strike is the beating heart of this build. You are playing for an obscene gold advantage, and First Strike is a tool of major importance in that goal. The 10% damage increase is amazing with your burst too!

Magical Footwear - this is a bit of a filler slot, but most match ups where First Strike is viable also don't require early boots from you. And free 400 gold of worth is always appreciated.

Biscuit Delivery - early sustain, great for making sure your laning is more stable no matter what happens. Not crucial, but appreciated.

Approach Velocity - now this is amazing! Makes your all-ins much easier. Also insane synergy with Serylda's Grudge.

Second Wind - Yorick is still Yorick, his early game is rough in most match-ups. This rune helps stabilize that.

Revitalize - synergizes with your Last Rites, Biscuit Delivery and also strenghtens both the healing and the shielding of Eclipse.

Starters

Doran's Shield start. Health, great sustain, easier farming. Absolutely premium starter for Yorick, with his infamously terrible early game.

Doran's Blade start. Less safety than Shield, but better damage. Good starter if you think you can manage surviving the lane without getting poked out.

Long Sword start. You trade away the 80 health of Doran's Blade for the +2 AD it has. Really cocky, but also optimal for burst damage and First Strike procs. If you can manage it - amazing.

Core

Eclipse - A great deal of damage and decent sustain. You get a respectable shield every 6 seconds, and when you hit an E on your enemy, you get bonus movement speed both from this, your E and Approach Velocity, which adds up to some insane speeds.

Hullbreaker is too OP on Yorick not to build. Great base stats, better resistances than a tank mythic and on top of that it makes the main job of your character easier. This item is also great at rounding the build out a bit by providing some much needed beefiness.

Serylda's Grudge - great AD, flat penetration, but most importantly, slows on ability damage. In Yorick's case, each of Maiden or ghoul attacks is an instance of ability damage, which in practice means you permaslow someone. That means your Approach Velocity is permanent when in combat, your subsequent Es are easier to hit, and what's even beeter - your ghouls cancel way less autoattacks, which means better DPS in general. Absolutely God tier item.

Boots

Boots of Swiftness - speed is amazing in this build. Better chases after a kill. Better escapes when collapsed on while splitting. Enable you to steal the jungle without losing minions. If you can take these, do it.

Ionian Boots of Lucidity - shorter cooldown. Great if you want to Teleport more often or just be spamming Q and E. But not really as good as Swifties from my experience.

The Rest

Black Cleaver - amazing AD, health Ability Haste, and then there's the passives: stacking flat armor pen and combat mobility. And the best part - your ghouls stack it to full in an instant (each ghoul deals a separate instance of physical damage)! Can be replaced with Youmuu's Ghostblade if you like your movement speed boosts on demand, but I firmly believe Black Cleaver is superior in most cases.

Edge of Night - health and lethality are great on their own, but this item really shines when you're against some hard hitting abilities. It's great for protecting your shutdown, that's for sure.

Youmuu's Ghostblade - again, mobility is great for dominating the map. This one also enables some ridiculous escapes even when deep inside enemy territory.

The Collector - not really essential or even amazing, but people getting surprise one-shot by ghouls never gets old.

Umbral Glaive - a free red trinket of sorts. Great if the enemy team is aggressive with their vision control, or if you're facing Teemo/ Shaco/etc.

Serpent's Fang - no longer a no brainer rush item, but still great against shields. So yeah, build against shields.

Chempunk Chainsword - the best anti-heal item for Yorick, gives AD and HP. You want to be building this only when forced to, it's not that great on its own.

Elixir of Wrath - more flat AD, it's all you really can ask for once you're full build. Let the one-shottening commence.

First Strike is a new rune, so it's to be expected that not everyone is yet up to speed about using it. It might seem extra useless on a melee, immobile character like Yorick. So this is what this chapter is about.

Your go to use of First Strike is to hit an E on your lane opponent while both 4 graves and your First Strike are ready. When that happens, not only will you achieve an explosive trade, you'll also get a significant bit richer for it.

Note, that the first damage instance doesn't count for the money gain. That's why First Strike is so great on Lethality Yorick! You deal your first damage through E, which is quite negligible, but right after that your lethality roided ghouls jump in, dealing the real damage.

It's generally a good idea to set up graves and keep your E ready whenever First Strike is down, so that once it goes off-cooldown, you're immediately ready for action.

Expect enemies that have at least half a braincell to poke you the moment they see First Strike ready on you, and play accordingly. This is the gambling part of this build.

A neat trick I've noticed early on - you can E an enemy just as you see First Strike is about to become active, then follow up with a chase. There's a tiny chance they'll react in time, giving you a massive heads-up, which means more damage and more money from the rune.

Now, the real Yorick gaming.
In this chapter I'll spill the tips and tricks to optimizing your money game.

The most basic thing - miss as few CS as possible. Wait for minion HP to get low enough, use your Q resets, use your ult's damage amp for new targets. You want to be on top of your CS game at all times.
It's impossible to freeze with your ult out, so your go to option is a slow push. You want to gather a big wave crash. Once the wave crashes, if there's a canon at at least one third HP, you can try throwing E under turret - your opponent will take a lot of damage while the cannon tanks the shots (making this whole manouver safer). If there's no cannon to enable this play - it's time to go stealing jungle.

Stealing Jungle

Stealing jungle is way more viable when you're on red side, but it's still fine and doable on blue side. The core goal is - choke the enemy jungler out of gold and experience. Your gain compared to lane minions will stay rather unchanged, what really matters is weakening their team with the play.

If you're on blue side, the best idea most of the time is to go to Kruggs. Start with the smaller one and kite to the left so the minion wave doesn't have vision on you. You start with the smaller one so that you produce a ghoul faster that then will help you clear (optimizing for time is always good). You can sometimes fish for Red after that, maybe an enemy jungler will come to visit, make sure to say hEllo if he does.

If you're on red side, usually the best route is Wolves into Blue into Gromp. Wolves because as a multi-camp it's going to produce three ghouls for you to help you clear the rest, but also because being the most far off of the camps, it makes your pathing back to lane less awkward.
Also, something cool you can do - you can E over the wall onto Gromp, your ghouls will jump at him, clear him without dropping his aggro, then come back to help you in lane.

Turrets and Plates

If your laner ever dies of leaves the lane unguarded, it's often a great idea to take a plate or two, clear all the enemy minions while you're at it, then go back to base and restock.
If, for some god-forsaken reason, your laner roamed to an other lane and stays there for a long time, just get the whole turret, give your team the massive First Turret bounty. Whatever your opponent achieves with that roam, is most likely gonna be dwarfed by what you just did.

Here's a less intuitive concept, that can have huge impacts on your team winning the game. Just be cautious, that unless premade, you will likely get teammates that can't play around this well, and sometimes you have to pray they are gonna do the right plays by accident, but that's the Yorick life.

Since your plan is to commit to split-pushing, you should expect a response from the enemy team, most likely getting collapsed on by multiples of them. And that's great news! More people focusing on you means a lot of weight taken away from the rest of your team. As long as they don't mind you and keep playing their roles - this is golden.

This part is the reason this build stacks a lot of speed. Your plan is to pull a Singed and waste their time by running away. Of course, proper vision is crucial to pull this off.

And if their response is two people or less? Very likely you kill them, so that's even better. Whatever happens, you win and they lose, because either you carry doing this or enable your team to carry for you.

A neat trick I utilize quite often - overextend on a lane on purpose, inviting an ambush. Shove a wave, then, the moment the last enemy minion dies, recall on the spot. This way, if the ambush arrives, it's gonna be way too late while you just sent a wave strenghtened by your ghouls down the lane. The ghouls very probably will give you free farm and you can go push elsewhere. Just make sure not to summon new ghouls during the manouver, because newly summoned ghouls are created without aggro and will stay with you unless in combat for a good while.

This is the general pattern of warding you should adhere to when split-pushing.

Circles are warding spots, circles with dots are viable Control Ward spots, each spot is connected with a dotted line to a general area of where you are when you want to drop that ward. The color of the area signifies the team you're in, pink means both teams.

Some further notes:

The southernmost ward (near the blue base gate) is the least useful one of these, so I hardly ever recommend it, but it's still an option.

My most usual ward set up is: if on red side, a Control Ward in the river and a regular ward on the intersection below the Blue buff, if on blue side, a regular ward in the tri-bush under the outer red turret and a Control Ward in the bush south to the tier 2 turret. These set ups give you an amazing amount of information.

Made it this far? What a legend you are! Hope you have a lot of fun and success trying this build out.
Good Luck and Have Fun to you.

LunaticDancer out.