[14.12] IKeepItTaco's GrandMaster Zeri guide [Crit] (2024)

I'll be honest out of all the builds I've seen over the past few days I did not expect a bruiser build to become the most reliable and best performing build on Zeri at the moment. How the build works is that it gives you amazing surviability in the early-mid game, multiple sources of extra mobility, and very good early damage which is usually her weak point. With the Crit builds her DPS is pretty low until she reaches the mid game and onwards while the Bruiser build focuses more on getting fed early-mid game and using those leads you accelerate yourself and become a monster late game too. All your power is in being able to stay alive and keep your ultimate Lightning Crash going on forever so keep that in mind as to how you should use this build.

The goal of this build is to be a sustained DPS fighter that's extremely fast and hard to catch. You will use your ultimate Lightning Crash to start stacking up your Overcharge stacks and by staying alive & being incredibly hard to catch you just keep slowly chopping off the enemies HP until they're all dead. Now I'll be explain the purpose of each of the core items and why they're important.

The first item in the build will be Trinity Force. It gives you a nice little bit of everything that is useful to Zeri. It gives you +35 AD, +20 Ability haste, +30% Attack speed, and +200 Health. The AD helps you with auto damage, ability haste lets you use your E and R more often, the attack speed reduces the cooldown on your Q Burst Fire, and the health will make you less squishy. It has a few passives. The first one is Threefold Strike which gives you 20 bonus movement speed for 3 seconds each time you auto and it grants you 1 stack that increases your base attack damage by 6% for 3 seconds up to 5 stacks total for a 30% increase. The total base damage increase can range anywhere between 17-28 extra AD at full stacks depending on your level! The next passive is pretty big for you which is Spellblade which works very well with your Q Burst Fire and it will apply a 200% base AD bonus physical damage on-hit and it has a 1.5 second cooldown on top of your regular auto-attack. Your Q Burst Fire procs on-hit to 100% efficiency so it works very well. The last passive is the mythic where it gives you 3 AD, 3 Ability haste, and 3 bonus movement speed per legendary item. So all-in-all this item gives you very good early damage and has alot movement speed to provide you with where when stacked with the rest of the items + combined with your kit, you'll be going so fast and be extremely hard to catch!

The second item in this build is Runaan's Hurricane and it gives you +45% Attack speed, +20% Critical Strike Chance, and +7% movement speed. The attack speed is great to further reduce the cooldown of your Q Burst Fire and while the critical strike chance won't do a lot on its own you get +7% movement speed to benefit with the other movement speed sources and the passive is the most important reason behind this item. This might get removed in the future, but Runaan's Hurricane fires additional bolts at up to 2 enemies around your original target and deals 40% AD physical damage and applies on-hit effects at 100% effectiveness and currently your ultimate Lightning Crash applies ligtening with attacks and it counts as an on-hit so it becomes incredibly powerful with Runaan's Hurricane. It will also help in stacking your Trinity Force passives as well as Black Cleaver passives even FASTER while applying Titanic Hydra's Cleave non-stop.

The Third in this build is Titanic Hydra. We used to build Ravenous Hydra, but the reason why Ravenous Hydra isn't the go-to anymore is because of the fact it has a 10 second cooldown while Titanic Hydra does not. This key detail from Ravenous Hydra "Can only hit each target once per attack or ability, and may only trigger once every 10 seconds from the same cast" means it isn't good as we thought it was and now people, including me, have been experimenting with Titanic Hydra because it also has a cleave, but no cooldown! It gives you + 30 AD and +500 health in stats. The AD it gives you is a lot less than Ravenous Hydra in terms of stats, but it has a unique passive called Colossus which gives you bonus AD equal to 2% of bonus health which is where the gap in AD closes. Total AD will be 45 AD when you complet Titanic Hydra then when you complete Black Cleaver it will go up to 53 AD with Ravenous Hydra being at 65 AD so the gap in AD closes overtime which is nice. The Cleave from Titanic Hydra has no cooldown unlike Ravenous Hydra so you can apply it non-stop on enemies with your ultimate Lightning Crash and Runaan's Hurricane combo. The cleave also deals more damage based on the extra HP you get which is great considering you're getting a lot of HP from Trinity Force and Black Cleaver!

The Fourth and Final build is Black Cleaver. It gives you +40 AD, +25 Ability haste, +450 Health. It's essentially a big HP damage with nice damage stats onto it in the form of the 40 AD and the passive which is Carve and when you hit a champion it applies a stack of Carve for 6 seconds up to 6 stacks total. Each stack reduces their total armor by 5% up to a total of 30% at 6 stacks! This Armor Pen will increase your damage and the physical damage of your teammates! The most important part of this item is actually Rage where if you attack an enemy champion you'll get a stack of Carve which gives you 3 bonus movement speed for 2 seconds up to a total of 18 stacks which totals at 54 bonus movement speed which as I mentioned earlier is huge when combined with all the other movement speed amplifies in the build + kit!

OVERALL SUMMARY: you're going to have a lot of early-mid game damage compared to the Crit builds, you'll have a lot of movement speed coming from your first 3 items and when combined with your ultimate Lightning Crash overcharge stacks you're going to be zooming around kiting like crazy applying damage left and right, and the final part is that you're going to be really tanky for an ADC so it's going to be way harder to actually kill/burst you down and this allows you to play aggressively with your ultimate Lightning Crash to snag some nice kills.