Reddit Stuff: Smolder Builds
today's post is a special where i combine two of my reddit replies since both of them are about smolder builds. i suppose this also serves as a nice snapshot of smolder builds because builds can change really quickly. at the time of replying the patch is 26.19.
The question asks what runes to take as smolder?
I replied:
i would say in 95% of games you should be playing the default rune page (dft nimbus cel gs + boots joat). you can switch up flat hp vs hp scaling depending on your lane.
then in the 5%, theres a few variations i think are worth mentioning (order doesnt matter im just typing):
transcendence over celerity. its not very clear to me when this would be optimal but it has potential (this was discussed in a recent post).
cosmic over joat. if you can reasonably deduce that you need to be flashing off cooldown in the game, you can consider this.
haste cut down over inspiration. i would consider this if my team is low damage and enemy team is tanky.
comet over dft. an older rune page which moves power into the 2v2 lane. if you dont want to cede 2v2 pressure AND enemy team has 5 squishies, you can go comet cuz dft will suck in fast fights. addtionally you can also go double adaptive shard over mspd, 2 points w. the whole idea is to maximize your lane/early power. it can be a decent tradeoff if smolder as a champion is going to be completely useless in the midgame, might as well try to win lane.
conditioning overgrowth over inspiration. if you are committed to going bruiser smolder + tank items, usually in response to single damage type + low dps enemy comp, resolve tree will give you more value than inspiration imo.
sounds like a lot of choice, but the reality is that you could play those 5% games with the default rune page with barely any detriment. and a lot of the time, even if you identify something in draft and adapt your rune page, the game doesnt play out the way it "should", which then you can argue that having a constant in the rune page leads to better consistency and better overall gameplay blablabla.
tldr is that i would honestly recommend going default rune page every game. but i sometimes get the itch to 'optimize', which is how i got here. take this info however you will
oh yeah completely forgot about fleet i never liked it. its ass in every scenario imo
i further elaborated that "fleet is actually heavily misunderstood, its actually worthless vs heavy poke lanes because the minion heal modifier is extremely harsh. therefore its actually only good when u can proc it on enemy champions, to amplify/improve your lane wincon of trading.
i will admit that i havent played fleet post buff, maybe the buff makes it viable in certain lanes"
the buff grants around 5 extra hp per proc at level 5, so that's still <1hp of healing if used on minions. for midgame healing i think smolder is fully covered by gluttonous boots, so the only healing that would matter would be in a teamfight. in the fights that i watched, using rfc as a proxy for ffw proc, you get like around 4 procs in a fight maybe? and half of the time you are full hp when using it. so in those cases you would heal 15 more hp per proc (level 15, 77 vs 62). gluttonous is giving 10% vamp on a 500 damage q, so does bringing the healing from 112 to 127 really matter?
i just dont think thats enough to justify taking it over dft. next up is boot choice, and i replied:
first of all i dont think theres ever a situation to go cdr boots in this season. let me explain each of the boots below:
your default is vamp boots. vamp boots are currently overstatted and is a good buy on most dealers. however smolder appreciates it more. in short, 1. he is short ranged which makes him susceptible to poke. and 2. you want to give yourself the option of trading health for stacks.
youd do well to buy vamp boots in 80% of games, and i would not fault a player for building it in every game. but in some games, we can do better.
i would rate plated steelcaps as better than vamp boots if its conditions are met. (multiple physical attackers who WILL be hitting you no matter how well you kite). example noc, yi, olaf, kled. plated gives you way more ehp in these games and is therefore a better purchase.
swifties is your second default (was smolders default before vamp boots released). swifties is never "wrong" in any game on smolder and has the best failcase among all boots. that means that if you dont know what to buy, you would settle for swifties. i would also rate it higher in priority than vamp boots in its conditions, for example multiple slows, but lower than plated steelcaps. another frequent scenario is if i delayed my t2 boots until after second item, the lack of stacks on vamp boots could sway my decision to swifties if i need to spike for a fight.
mercury treads is difficult to approach from a practical perspective. on most adcs, mercs are bad because you would much rather have a cleanse than tenacity *due to how fragile you are. however, smolder uniquely has the ability to build bruiser/tank items, which would make him durable and can therefore make use of tenacity. as a result, you could make a case for bruiser smolder + mercury (beat cc by tanking it) over crit + qss (beat cc by cleansing it). if youre not the type of player to engage deeply in item optimzation, i would be completely fine with the heuristic of never buying mercury treads.
cdr boots is simply no longer what it was in 2025. especially since many stat websites did not differentiate t2 and t3 boots, a lot of data on boots was skewed last year, leading ppl to think that cdr boots was as good as it appears. t3 cdr boots in 2025 (upgradeable by feats) had 25AH while t2 cdr boots in 2026 have 10AH. for an adc this difference is massive. (idk if mid smolder buys t3 cdr but i dont play it so i will limit to adc). cdr boots in 2026 is pretty hard to justify considering it already has two strong competitors in vamp and swifties. therefore if you ever find urself wanting to buy cdr boots, please reconsider.
for inclusion sake, aspd boots is already ass on marksmen who want aspd, so smolder has no business buying it. and sorcs is also a no go.
tldr; vamp/swifties = good, plated = conditional bis, mercs/cdr = eh, aspd/sorcs = no
that sums up the reddit stuff this time around. i would want to talk about smolder item builds in the future i think cheers
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