Good day! It’s Librarian Husky. Aurora is an extremely fun Champion with a ton of tools available to carry games. The best part is that she’s super simple to pick up, adding her to your Champion pool while also having a ton of potential skill expression, which will definitely reward putting in the time to master her Kit. In this guide, we’re going to run you through everything you need to immediately start playing with Aurora. We’re going to break down her Kit first, keeping things as simple as possible for you to understand. Then we’re going to share the best Combos and tips for using those spells, then Laning or win conditions, and much, much more.

Breaking Down Aurora’s Kit

Aurora’s Kit is designed to be straightforward yet rewarding for players who invest time in mastering her abilities. Each spell has specific uses that can be combined creatively to outplay opponents. By understanding the basics of her abilities, you can start executing more advanced strategies as you become more comfortable with her playstyle.

Best Combos and Tips

To make the most out of Aurora’s abilities, learning the best Combos is crucial. These Combos will help you maximize damage, control, and survivability in different scenarios. We’ll also provide essential tips that top players use to gain an edge over their opponents, ensuring you have the tools to succeed.

Laning and Win Conditions

Understanding how to play Aurora in the Laning phase and recognizing your win conditions are key to climbing the ranks. We’ll discuss strategies for early game dominance, mid-game power spikes, and late-game objectives. By focusing on these aspects, you’ll be able to carry games more effectively.

Breaking Down Aurora’s Kit

Let’s break down her Kit first. Starting things off, she comes with a standard three-hit passive. Any combination of spells and autos three times will deal percentage max damage on your opponent and give you a spirit. The more spirits you have following you, the more you’re going to heal and the faster you’ll go, but they do run out pretty quickly, and you’re going to lose all of them at the same time, so it’s hard to keep them up for too long.

Main Damage Ability: Q

Her main damage ability, Q, fires a skill shot that’s going to curse any targets it hits. You have 4 seconds to press the spell again, which will end the curse, dealing damage to anyone hit by the initial Q. A couple of key details here: this does execute damage, so you want to use those 4 seconds to deal as much damage as possible so you can finish off your target with the second part of the Q. Also, the cooldown goes down after the initial cast, so don’t worry about holding it too long. This works almost exactly like Lee Sin’s Q does. Finally, one of the best parts about the spell is that the return damage from your second Q is going to damage any enemies between the target all the way back to you.

Mobility and Stealth: W

Moving on to the W, your W is a hop and a stealth. It’s going to also boost your movement speed by giving you your passive’s buff, but without the healing.

Countering Aurora

If you’re reading this to learn how to counter Aurora, don’t worry. It sounds more OP than it actually is. Here’s what it looks like when one uses it in front of you. It’s typically easy to tell where they’re going to go if the Aurora doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Mobility and Wall Hopping

The hop is decent Mobility around the Jungle. You can see the type of walls that you can hop over; typically, you can get over small to medium-sized walls. The best part is definitely the fact that this spell resets on any takedown. This reset is part of the reason you’re going to see that Aurora is such a team-fighting menace. You just keep resetting in fights, hopping all over the place.

Aurora’s Ultimate Ability

You’ll almost never do this. Okay, let’s move on to her R, and there is a lot to cover on the R. This is one of the most ridiculous spells released in a very long time in League, so a lot of Aurora‘s power and skill expression is going to come from it.

Basics of Aurora’s R

Let’s start with the basics. Aurora will dash in a direction, creating an area around where she lands. Any enemies inside are going to take damage. Your opponents can’t walk out of here; they also can’t dash away either with spells like Lucian’s Dash. They have to use a blink ability like Ezreal’s E or Flash to escape.

Teleportation and Repositioning

If Aurora goes to the edge of her ult, she’s going to teleport to the opposite side. If you’re imagining some crazy plays where you attack someone with Q and then reposition to drag the return damage through multiple people, well, yeah, you can do that. You can also knock yourself into the wall with your E.

Managing the Teleport

The right of passage required to pick up this Champion is that you 100% will kill or troll yourself with this teleport. It’s so, so, so easy to forget it’s a thing when you first pick her up, but there is an easy solution to this problem. If you want to avoid that disaster completely, then you should know that you can simply cancel your ult by pressing R again.

Maximizing Aurora’s Abilities

So you can actually walk out of danger. Now that we’ve covered her Kit, let’s talk about all the ways you can make the most out of her abilities with some tips and Combos. First things first, your bread-and-butter trading and kill pattern is going to be Q-E-Q. This procs your three-hit passive and Electrocute if you happen to take that rune.

Smooth Spell Combos

The most important thing about this sequence is that pressing E before your Q will lead to a big delay between your spells, making it easy to react to. You should always press Q before E, since this is the smoothest way to combo both spells together. Since this combo is so important, you should know that you can input buffer Q before Flash for a faster cast.

Advanced Combo Techniques

You can do this for your E too, which is especially important since it’s such a telegraphed ability. If you have fast fingers, you should definitely combine these Combos together and do Q-E and then Flash, buffering both spells for a fast kill combo that’s hard to react to. This is an extremely useful combo that’s going to net you a ton of kills, and we’d highly suggest practicing it a bit if you’re not used to pressing all of your keys so quickly together.

Final Tip for Q

A final tip for your Q is to remember about its execute damage. This allows you to finish off low-health targets efficiently, making your combo even more lethal.

Optimizing Aurora’s Ultimate

You should almost always wait out enemy shields or let burns tick before using the return part of the damage. This may sometimes be the difference between you scoring a kill or not. Like we said before, a lot of Aurora‘s power is in her Ultimate, so let’s break down a ton of ways that you can optimize using her Ultimate.

Keybinding and Area Awareness

First and foremost, you want to really make sure that you have a normal cast keybind for it, at least until you master Aurora. This is going to be important so you can see the exact area that’s going to be covered by your Ultimate. Knowing this lets you do quite a few useful things.

Leading Targets

For starters, it lets you lead your targets where you want them. Let’s say you’re setting up a gank and your Jungler is coming with you. If you simply R towards your lane opponent, you’re going to give them so much more room to kite away from your Jungler. But if you angle your ult properly, you’re going to give them way less room to work with, making the gank much more likely to work.

Using Ultimate Defensively

This can also apply to keeping yourself alive if you’re the one being ganked. You can angle your Ultimate to give yourself an instant wall to teleport to safely. For example, if Aurora was getting caught out, angling her Ultimate can create a quick escape route.

Diving and Escaping with Aurora’s Ultimate

She walked right next to herself with the other side away from the enemy team, letting her quickly hop away. Another thing to keep in mind is how Aurora can use her Ultimate in tricky ways to dive. For starters, you can use the tip we just talked about to give yourself an easy escape route after diving your opponent. But you can also use your ult to outplay tower aggro.

Outplaying Tower Aggro

While you’re traveling by bouncing through your R’s walls, you aren’t something the tower can aggro. So in between shots, you can send yourself back and forth through the wall to damage your opponent without taking any damage. While that’s very useful, it’s not completely broken. This trick isn’t going to cancel out any existing tower shots already on their way to you.

Timing and Precision

As you can see, that second tower shot actually dealt damage, so canceling them requires precise timing, which isn’t easy when diving an actual player. As a final tip regarding your Ultimate, remember that sometimes you won’t trap your opponents in with you; you’re going to be trapping yourself in with them.

Positioning and Itemization

Aurora fits into that category of mage like Kennan, Vladimir, and Fiddlesticks that want to go in the middle of the enemy team but don’t have the resistances to do so. Buying Zhonya’s Hourglass can be crucial in such situations, allowing you to survive the Burst and continue dealing damage.

Engaging and Building with Aurora

Engaging with your Ultimate without fearing death is an option that you should definitely consider. Through our testing, we found that Aurora has so much Mobility and stealth built into her Kit during a team fight that Zhonya’s Hourglass didn’t really feel necessary early in the game. We’d recommend building it as one of your last few items rather than feeling like you have to rush it every single game.

Laning with Aurora

Aurora is a fairly simple Champion with clear trading patterns, so there are only a few things that you really need to keep in mind to win most trades. First things first, your Q-E-Q combo will be your primary way of trading throughout the lane. It’s simple, it’s effective, and there’s really not a whole lot to say about it.

Trading Effectively

Both spells have a pretty short range, especially if you’re playing Aurora in Mid Lane. Compared to other mages, Aurora is definitely on the losing side of the range battle, but that’s where your W can really come in handy. If you’re having a hard time reaching your opponent, you can W towards them. Remember, your hop gives you both stealth and movement speed. This lets you reach your opponent and set up a Q-E trade that they probably won’t be able to dodge since you’re casting your spells from stealth.

Accuracy and Skill Shots

One small tip to keep in mind is that you’ll inevitably miss your skill shots; you’ll never have 100% accuracy. Accepting this and focusing on improving your aim will help you perform better in the long run.

Advanced Laning Techniques

You may want to try and Q your opponents in the wave at the same time when casting Q. A common fundamental is to push forward when your opponent misses a spell to punish them with your cooldown advantage. But if you land a Q on minions, you can defend yourself from this timing a little bit better. Once the enemy walks past the minions, you can use your return Q to deal damage and help you trigger your passive a little bit easier for a clean trade.

Using Q in Trades and Skirmishes

The second part of your Q is going to come in handy not just in trades but also during ganks and 2v2 skirmishes. Always make sure you keep track of what targets you’ve hit with your Q and try to reposition like a Zed would to get the most out of the return part of the damage.

Setting Up Kills with Your Ultimate

Other than that, your primary focus during the Laning phase is actually setting up as many kills as possible with your Ultimate. The engage range on this ability is absolutely insane, and it’s almost always a guaranteed flash or kill when you press it at the right time.

Example Scenario: Bot Lane Fight

Take a look at this moment, for example. Aurora sees a fight happening in bot lane and teleports in Samira’s face. Normally, this would be a terrible teleport, and you should never do it since they can just react and run away. But Aurora can close so much distance with her W and her R that she easily catches up and sets up a double kill.

Engaging with Aurora

It’s absolutely ridiculous how little counterplay there is to this engage. Your opponents genuinely just can’t react to how much distance you can cover. You can just stealth into a lane and engage from over half a screen away. If your opponent doesn’t have flash, there’s literally nothing they can do. This should be one of the main things you abuse throughout the Laning phase as Aurora.

Post-Laning Phase Strategies

Let’s move past the Laning phase now and talk about all the ways Aurora should be looking to win the map. This can actually depend quite a bit on your build. Aurora can go a ton of different paths, looking to Burst or be more of a brawler in fights.

Executing the Perfect Ambush

This works really well when your opponents are looking to contest mid priority and are predictably just walking forward. If you stealth into the lane as they are walking into you, you’ll close the gap with just enough time to catch them off guard for a quick Q-E-Q combo to instantly Burst them. We found this was pretty reliable and it’s good to do even in higher levels of play.