He is known for his fearless and unconventional playing style, and thus he managed to secure the title of being one of the best Sion players in the world. His approach to the champion is anything but ordinary, transforming Sion into a scaling monster with unique builds and strategies that push the boundaries of traditional League of Legends gameplay. We’ll go over Thebausffs Sion build for Season 15 and break down how his runes, items, and gameplay techniques helped him achieve legendary status in the League community.
Thebausffs Sion Runes
The first big reason of Thebaus’ success are his unique rune and item choices. He essentially takes all of the best scaling runes he can get in order to guarantee that his late game will be phenomenal even if his early game plan would get ruined.
The exact rune page is Phase Rush, Manaflow Band, Celerity and Gathering Storm with Demolish and Conditioning secondary.
Keystone
Believe it or not, but Phase Rush is actually the hardest scaling rune on this entire page, and the reason is of course Sion’s passive. Due to Thebaus’ special item build taking full advantage of zombie Sion’s fixed attack speed. All he needs is the movement speed from Phase Rush and Youmuu’s to stick to his victims and destroy them in Sion’s passive form. Getting out-kited is a huge problem for melee champions in general, but Phase Rush fixes this issue perfectly.
Primary Path
Manaflow Band helps with the early game mana problems. Celerity give him even more movement speed. Gathering Storm on the other hand further boost the DPS of zombie Sion in the late game, who is a true auto attack machine. However, Sion’s two most important damage dealing abilities, namely his Q and his ultimate, also come with impressive AD ratios.
Secondary Path
The runes on the Resolve path, however, are chosen because of Sion’s W. W’s passive causes Sion to permanently gain bonus health whenever he kills a unit, and since Thebaus’ strategy heavily focusses on power-farming, this stacking health passive will generate a lot of value. The effectiveness of all the bonus health gets multiplied by the bonus resistances from Conditioning. Therefore, this rune page in combination with Sion’s unique traits turns him into a ridiculously powerful damage dealer in the late game while also making him very hard to take down.
The rune that is most crucial to Thebaus’ playstyle is still Demolish. Again, Sion stacks tons of health with his W, and Demolish deals bonus physical damage to towers based on your own HP stat. Split-pushing, taking tower plattings and tower-taking is Thebaus’ main way of contributing to the game. Especially with his item build, the value he gets from Demolish is absolutely crazy.
Thebausffs Sion Build
With this AD Thebausffs Sion Build, he goes Flash and Teleport, due to Ghost nerfs. He goes with the following skill order: R>Q>W>E. But tends to go W>Q>E from level 1-3 for trading early on.
Core Build: Youmuu’s Ghostblade, Axiom Arc & Opportunity.
For your 4th item, you can go Lord Dominik’s Regards for more armor penetration or even Serpent’s Fang if the enemy team has a lot of shields.
The 5th item, The Collector or Lord Dominik’s Regards, whichever one you didn’t build on the 4th.
Thebaus goes Boots of Swiftness every game, since it’s great against kitting champions and getting back on the map.
Example Full Build
Items for AD Sion
Youmuu’s Ghostblade: Thebaus uses Youmuu’s for the additional movement speed, which is crucial for sticking to targets and triggering Phase Rush.
Axiom Arc: Grants attack damage, lethality, and ability haste, reducing cooldowns and increasing Sion’s damage output.
Opportunity: Provides lethality for increased damage, synergizing with Sion’s passive, and grants bonus movement speed after takedowns.
The Collector: Thebaus picks The Collector to enhance his crit damage and AD scaling in the late game.
Lord Dominik’s Regards: Provides attack damage, critical strike chance, and armor penetration, enhancing Sion’s damage against tanks.
TheBausffs Sion Gameplay
For the early game, you want to trade like a mage-burst-assassin, your trade patterns are going to be quick trades into 1 or 2 auto attacks then disengage. A great way to enable this is through freezing waves under your tower. When you have nothing to do after shoving a wave or something like that, you want to be looking for cheeses using a fully charged Q from Bushes or Fog of War.
TheBausffs favorite way of laning is to not lane at all. He prefers proxying, ideally, you want to be level 5 with Bami’s Cinder for Tank Sion or Serrated Dirk for AD Sion. TheBaus also dies strategically (people might refer to it as INTING) in the lane so he can break the enemy’s freeze by killing the minions with his passive. He typically does this when facing champions he can never beat 1v1 like Irelia.
In the mid game, you want to be side laning to gain solo exp and all the farm that you need. Never stop farming, always make sure to catch every single wave on side lanes. And again, you want to always be looking for picks using Fog of War, to fully charge your Q’s.
Late game, same thing, keep looking for picks using Fog of War. With Tank Sion, you are going to be looking to group with your team and front line for them. For AD Sion, you want to prioritize split pushing. Trying to make the team fights 5v4 due to your fast rotation with ult.
Sion Tips and Tricks
Sion’s passive: Probably one of the most fun things for AD Sion. The passive can be used to deal damage or clear waves when you die (or both). Learning how to AA move is really important to make the most out of it. Make sure only to use your boost ability when you are out of range of the enemy champion to maximize its effectiveness. However, watch out for enemy CC, as getting hit by one (for example, Irelia E or Thresh hook) can make you useless.
Sion’s Q: Charge it for as long as you can as there’s a big difference in damage even at .2 seconds. Whenever someone CCs you when you are charging your Q it goes on a 2-second CD, which you can use to your advantage and catch people off guard. To make the most out of his Q you have to play around the fog of war throughout the entire game.
Sion’s W: You want to make sure you get max value from it. This means you want to block as much damage as you can but also make sure to deal damage.
Sion’s E: You want to set up your abilities with the help of it. Before you Q, ult or die make sure to slow the enemies first.
Sion’s R: Make sure you press R again right before you are about to hit the enemies. You will have a larger hitbox/AOE damage.
TheBaus Special: Ulting in between the nexus towers so both towers get hit by the ult AOE. With the correct build, it will half or more the tower’s HP, even Tank Sion will do a decent chunk. Ideally, you want to be level 16 and have minions nearby.
Credit
This guide is purely based on the playstyle and build path of Thebausffs AD/Tank Sion. Baus is known to be the number one best Sion player in the world. His innovative approach to Sion gameplay has made him stand out in the League community. With Thebausffs as my mentor, I am confident that this guide will help you take your Sion gameplay to the next level. If you want to learn more about Sion, I highly recommend following Thebausffs on his Twitch stream and YouTube channel.
Amazing guide man. Thank you very much