Orianna is a champion that makes use of powerful control combined with devastating damage to threaten players to stay away from her range. In teamfights, she can single-handedly win fights alongside a coordinated team by targeting the enemies’ most important members in a fight. If you’re a beginner looking to play this champion, you’re in luck because we’re sharing some of the best Orianna tips and tricks to help you out.
Top 5 Orianna Tips & Tricks
Orianna is a champion that most beginners struggle to play because her kit relies entirely on proper execution. Once she misses her big swing, she struggles to stay relevant for a while so it’s important to understand when and how to use those abilities. Luckily, we have a few veterans who have shared some of the best Orianna tips to help newbies get the hang of playing such a complicated champion.
We’ve prepared some of the best Orianna tips and tricks that veteran players and even professional players take into heart whenever they use the champion. These tips will give new players who have no experience using this champion a better insight on how to use her abilities efficiently and look out for the proper timings and positioning to use them. Let’s take a look at some of those tips and tricks.
1. Keep Your Eyes on the Ball
One of the most important Orianna tips that most players tend to forget is to keep their eye on The Ball at all times. Orianna uses the ball for all of her abilities, so it’s important that the user knows where it is in every moment so that they can react to a play if they think it’s within range. The most fatal mistake is forgetting to activate the ball for offensive attacks when enemies are practically stepping on top of it.
Enemies easily forget about the threat the ball has because it’s such a small model on the screen. In heated teamfights, good placement of the ball is almost always game-winning with a well-time Command: Shockwave practically sealing the teamfight. Always keep your eye on where the ball is and reposition it regularly but discretely to set up for that shockwave that will take you on the path to the enemy Nexus.
2. Use Everything to Clear the Wave
Clearing the minion wave as quickly as possible is one of the biggest advantages of being an Orianna player. For beginners, it’s important to understand that being able to clear the minion wave quickly is an important part of playing Mid Lane. This is because this buys you time to roam down mid or top to apply pressure or even secure yourself a quick kill/assist that will net you or your laner a huge advantage in the game.
To clear the wave quickly, it’s important to use Command: Attack through the melee minions towards the caster minions before using Command: Dissonance to one-shot the backrow. Do this while basic attacking melee minions with your passive ability to get the wave out in 10 seconds or less. This buys you at least 20 seconds to move around the map freely to make aggressive plays in other lanes, gather information, or force your enemy mid laner to react.
3. Use the Ball to Defend Yourself
As much as you want to always use the ball to attack enemies, it’s also important to defend yourself when the situation arrives. Most of the time, we’re confident that we can simply retreat the ball and use Command: Protect to keep us from harm’s way but that isn’t always the case, especially in higher ELOs. In situations where you will most likely be targeted by an enemy, it’s more important to keep the ball on Orianna rather than using it to attack randomly.
If you’re against an assassin or a fighter trying to dive on top of you to deal damage, keep the ball on yourself so that you can immediately cast Command: Protect, Command: Shockwave, and Command: Dissonance in quick succession to force a counter-play and potentially get a kill as well. Defensive doesn’t mean just running away, sometimes it’s also smart to way until the enemy makes themselves vulnerable by thinking that you’re an easy target to kill.
4. Ask for the Blue Buff
This isn’t just a useful tip for Orianna players, but also for other mana-based mid laners in general. Once the allied jungler has secured the first or even second Blue Sentinel, if they are not an AP jungler, you should ask for the blue buff so that you can get an advantage in lane. The jungler should almost always cooperate unless you’re playing in low ELOs where there is absolutely no teamwork involved.
Having the blue buff during the laning phase will ensure your advantage by being able to push waves faster and even poke out the enemy more consistently. The enemy mage will not be able to regenerate their resource enough so they have to spend their abilities wisely, which often leaves them vulnerable if the other mid laner is relentlessly using abilities to push the lane. Use this information to get ahead of them as early as the 10-minute mark.
5. Zone the Enemy Team
One of Orianna’s most powerful skillsets is being able to zone the enemy off an objective such as the Dragon, Rift Herald, or Baron Nashor. This is done by swinging the ball with Command: Attack when they get too near to let them know that if they step closer, they’ll immediately get attacked with Command: Dissonance. Use this as a warning but don’t be reckless on how you use the ball and Orianna’s abilities to zone the opponent.
In terms of Orianna tips, learning when to use your abilities to scare opponents or force a play are also very important. If you use your Command: Shockwave too early without your teammates being able to follow-up, you lose a very important teamfighting tool with the enemies being more confident to make more aggressive plays. Use Command: Dissonance to deal damage first and only use your ultimate if they get too close or your teammates are already in position to help you out.