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Rakan - The Charmer

Introduction

Rakan is a high mobility, all in engage support who finds most success by hard engaging in late game teamfights, making it easy for your team to score the ace. On the contrary, Rakan struggles in lane. He has a very, very weak lane before reaching level 6 (although he does have one of the best level 6 powerspikes), which makes him fairly vulnerable to snowball champs and early game supports / AD's.

Once mastered, Rakan can be played in a lot of different matchups (even the tough one's exept Morgana) and can be paired with almost any ADC, late game hypercarries like Twitch or early game dominators like Draven or Lucian.

The Laning Phase and Rakan's main combo

  should be the first ability you learn and is your best friend in the early laning phase. Try to poke the enemy bot lane whenever possible, even better when your AD or you ar missing some health to recover it. Even though Rakan has a 300 auto atack range, you shoulnd't poke with autos like on other ranges supports that aren't enchanters (Thresh as an example). 

If you are playing with an AD that likes to fight early (Lucian, Draven) you can to go for good trades with a quick engage. Use  to dash to your ADC, then , auto attack, , auto attack and  back to your ADC (You can leave out the auto attacks of you want to minimize risk but lose dmg). This is Rakan's basic combo and can be used in lane and in the late game for engages. Just make sure that you are engaging at a favorable moment, like when the enemy support is on cooldown.

Once you reach level 6 and learn  is when Rakan starts becoming really dangerous even in lane. To guarantee a safe engage with Rakan, use  and immediately afterwards dash with . This will ensure whoever you dash onto will get charmed and then knocked up because they can't flash / dash the knockup once charmed. The actual R and W pressed really are almost instantly after each other, the more time between pressing R and W, the more time you leave your enemy to escape. 

The full Rakan combo now goes           with auto attacks inbeween. You want to activate  before dasing with either   or  because the speed at which you dash increses with your movement speed. Since  grants 40% bonus move speed, you are able to dash more quickly with both   and .

Late game as Rakan

Rakan is probably one of the best late game engagers you can have on your team if played right. Going back to the full combo above, instead of immediately dashing after ulting, you now want to wait with the dash until you have charmed multiple enemies. The rank 3  charms for 1.5s, so ideally you would want to charm rhe first enemy (which grants another decaying 150% move speed for 2s) and then run through as many enemies as possible in 1.5s (your other charmed victims will follow you due to the charm). Once all are charmed and fathered near you, try to land  to knockup as many of those charmed enemies as you can. If you pulled this off correctly, your team will have 1.5s of charm plus the knockup's duration to dish out as much damage to the anemy team for free, which will win you most teamfights (unless you have a team of 4 tanks and Rakan, then you might be in touble still). Mastering the full combo and this type of engage ("full charm then knockup") is the key to mastering Rakan.

Itemization

Some people like the  support item line for Rakan but I have always been a fan of . Rakan is a champ that can use the move speed really really well and he can't complete  as fast as real poke supports.

 are pretty much my goto boots as you do use your summoner spells a lot but I wouldn't blame you for taking .  or  should only be bought in very specific situations, very rarely though.

I also like rushing  on Rakan, with  as the second item (exept for maybe Jhin). You can swap or even build completely different items from the ones I have listed above. 

 is another item that I've grown to love. It grants you extra move speed so using this right before your     allows for an even better combo.