He never leaves the jungle. Except he does, and when he shows up in the top lane he's winning almost fifty five percent of his games.
Warwick appears in six out of every thousand top lane games in Ranked Solo/Duo (roughly the pick rate of a champion nobody has thought about in two years). Weirdly, the people playing him are winning anyway, and they're doing it with a build that looks nothing like a jungle Warwick page.
So how does this actually work?
Weird Pick #168
Top Lane Warwick
He never leaves the jungle. Except he does, and when he shows up in the top lane he's winning almost fifty five percent of his games.
Warwick appears in six out of every thousand top lane games in Ranked Solo/Duo (roughly the pick rate of a champion nobody has thought about in two years). Weirdly, the people playing him are winning anyway, and they're doing it with a build that looks nothing like a jungle Warwick page.
How to Play Top Lane Warwick
- Abilities
- Q, E, W to start, then prioritize R > Q > W > E
- Summoner Spells
-
Flash 
Barrier - Starting Items
-
Doran's Blade 
Health Potion - Strategy
- Farm to Blade of The Ruined King, then start taking every extended trade the enemy top laner will give you. Warwick heals more the lower he drops, so a fight that both champions walk out of at twenty percent health is a fight he actually won
- Core Items
-
Blade of The Ruined King 
Plated Steelcaps 
Stridebreaker 
Death's Dance 
Sterak's Gage 
Spirit Visage
Top Lane Warwick Runes Setup
Precision
Resolve
When to Pick This
Top lane Warwick wants to be drafted against melee juggernauts who win by walking at you and swinging. Mordekaiser, Darius and Renekton all have to stand still and commit to a long trade to do anything, and that's exactly the fight Blade of The Ruined King and Death's Dance are built to survive. Every point of damage they land feeds Warwick's healing, and none of them can leave once the trade starts.
He's also worth taking when your team already has plenty of burst and no reliable way to lock down a single carry. Infinite Duress [R] is one of the longest hard suppressions in the game, and it doesn't care about tenacity, shields or a second health bar. If the enemy comp is built around one fed champion, a Warwick who can walk into the back line and remove them for four seconds is a real answer that a normal top laner doesn't provide.
How It Works
He Heals More The Worse Things Look
Eternal Hunger [Passive] heals Warwick on every auto attack, and that healing triples once he falls under half health. Layer Blade of The Ruined King, Death's Dance and Spirit Visage on top and the trades that should kill him become the ones he wins, which is why the extended top lane duel suits him better than a jungle skirmish ever did.
Free Vision On Every Wounded Enemy
Blood Hunt [W] shows Warwick every enemy below half health through walls and hands him a large movement speed boost toward them. In the top lane that turns into permanent information about whether the enemy jungler is nearby and healthy, which is worth more in a side lane than it ever is in the jungle.
An Ultimate That Ends Any Duel
Infinite Duress [R] suppresses through everything short of cleanse and heals him for the full duration. Against a top laner with no summoner spell up, landing it means a kill, and it comes back off cooldown fast enough to be a laning tool rather than a teamfight ultimate.
Potential Pitfalls
Dashes And Parries Undo The Whole Plan
Warwick's worst top lane matchups all share one trait, which is a button that cancels the trade he needs. Fiora holds him to a forty four percent win rate because Riposte [W] both blocks Infinite Duress [R] and stuns him out of it, and Jax, Irelia and Ambessa all have the mobility to leave a fight the moment his healing starts outpacing their damage. Ban phase and draft matter more here than they do for most weird picks (so does pick order, since you want to see the enemy top laner first).
The Numbers Get Worse As The Elo Goes Up
Warwick top sits at a shade under fifty five percent across Silver and above, but that drops to just over fifty percent once you only count Emerald and higher. The pick leans on the enemy laner mismanaging a long trade, and that mistake gets rarer the higher you climb. It's still a fine pick in high elo, but it stops being the free win the headline number suggests.
Nothing Happens Before The First Item
Warwick has no waveclear, no poke and no way to punish a ranged top laner who simply walks backward. The first eight minutes are about surviving to Blade of The Ruined King rather than winning anything, and a jungler who camps that window can end the lane before the build ever comes online.
Top Lane Warwick Conclusions
Top lane Warwick is a matchup pick. Don't blind pick him. Drafted into a lane full of juggernauts who want the same extended fight he does, he out-sustains all of them and brings a suppression ultimate his team has no other way to get. Drafted into a Fiora or a Jax, he spends twenty minutes farming under tower. Look at the enemy top laner before you lock him in and this is one of the more reliable off-role picks on the board right now.
Suggested Tier: Tier 2
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