Counter Guide

How to Beat Ashe

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Ashe can't dash, blink, jump or vault. She has one answer to being caught, which is that you were already too slow to catch her.

She's the most immobile carry in the game and one of the hardest to actually reach, and both of those are true for the same reason. Everything in her kit is aimed at controlling the speed of the fight rather than the damage in it, so a team that lets her set that speed loses engagements it should have won and then can't disengage from them either. The way through is unglamorous. You either come from a direction the slow doesn't cover, or you bring something that makes the slow stop applying, and then she's a champion standing still in the middle of a fight.

Matchup Snapshot Ashe, the Frost Archer

Where You Meet Her Bot lane

Damage Type Physical, sustained rather than sudden

Why She Is Frustrating She decides how fast the fight happens

Mobility None whatsoever

Biggest Threat Enchanted Crystal Arrow [R]

Hardest Counter Twitch

What a Counter Needs

A way to close distance that the slow cannot answer
Something that removes crowd control, because one of hers travels the whole map
The burst to finish a champion who has no way to leave once you arrive

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Ashe on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Ashe

Twitch3,393 games53.1%
Yasuo1,340 games52.2%
Jinx13,565 games52.1%
Tristana7,542 games51.5%
Miss Fortune9,112 games51.5%

Picks Ashe Beats

Vayne2,341 games46.5%
Sivir2,818 games47.1%
Mel1,417 games47.4%
Ezreal8,430 games47.5%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the bot lane against Ashe. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 126,039 Ashe games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Ashe Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

Every basic attack is crowd control. Frost Shot [Passive] means she doesn't have to land anything to control a fight. Standing still and attacking is already the play.
She starts fights nobody agreed to. Enchanted Crystal Arrow [R] crosses most of the map, and it turns a neutral moment on the other side of a wall into a four on five.
Her team catches people because of her. Almost every engage that looks like a jungler outplaying somebody was really the slow landing first. She makes ordinary champions look fast.
She scouts before she commits. The vision she has on demand means her team fights with information yours doesn't have, and it costs her nothing to use.
She's strong from behind. The utility doesn't scale with gold. An Ashe who lost her lane still slows everybody and still starts the fight from off screen.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

She has no escape of any kind. Every other carry has an answer to being reached, and she has to hope she isn't.
Her damage needs the fight to last. There's no burst window. If the fight is decided in two seconds she contributed a slow and very little else.
The arrow is a straight line and it's slow. It's dodgeable, it's blockable, and a team that spreads out while walking through the jungle almost never gets hit by it.
A single item undoes her best moment. Crowd control removal matters more than usual here, because the stun is the entire setup rather than one part of it.
She's the easiest carry in the game to dive. Every assassin, every engage support and every jungler with a gap closer is looking at her first, and there's nothing she can do about being looked at.

Countering Ashe

Based on the strengths and weaknesses above, beating Ashe comes down to champions who can accomplish at least one of the following:

Come from an angle the slow isn't pointing at. She can only apply it to whoever she's attacking. A second threat arriving from the other side is fighting a champion with no crowd control at all.
Spread out when you walk through the fog. The arrow is worth what it catches, and what it catches is decided by how close together your team was several seconds before it was fired.
Buy the crowd control removal if she's the reason fights start. It's a slot most people won't give up, and it's the difference between the stun starting a fight and the stun being a wasted ultimate.
Kill her first and don't be talked out of it. There's no other carry where the correct target is this obvious and this achievable. Everything else in the fight gets easier immediately afterwards.

If you're already locked into the matchup without any of those tools, these strategies still work:

Playing a Bad Ashe Matchup

Play the lane at max range and refuse the short trades. Granted, her early damage is real, but it's delivered one attack at a time, and standing outside the range where those attacks are free removes most of it.

Ask the support to threaten her rather than to trade with her. She can't walk away from anybody, so the constant possibility of being reached is worth more than any amount of poke.

Track her ultimate the way you would track a jungler. When it's available, cross the map in a spread line. When it isn't, that's the window to take the objective she was going to contest.

Best Ashe Counters

Three ways to beat somebody who controls the speed of a fight: out-range her, pick the moment she doesn't see coming, or arrive somewhere she can't leave. One counter each.

Kog'Maw Out-ranges Her

Ashe's lane is standing at 600 units and slowing whatever walks in. Bio-Arcane Barrage [W] adds 130 to 210 range to Kog'Maw's 500, so for eight seconds out of every seventeen she's the one who has to walk forward.

The damage it adds is a slice of her maximum health, dealt as magic, so she can't armor her way out of the trade either.

Twitch Picks The Moment

Ashe controls a fight by seeing it coming. Ambush [Q] takes that away: after a one second delay Twitch goes camouflaged, and he walks in faster while he's facing someone who can't see him.

Spray and Pray [R] adds 300 range for six seconds, which puts him comfortably outside the 600 she fights at (and every bolt keeps going through whoever's lined up behind her).

Kha'Zix Arrives Where She Cannot Leave

He's looking for a target that's alone and can't get away, and there's no better description of Ashe in a side lane or at the back of a fight.

The jump also means the slow never gets applied at all. By the time it would matter he's already past the range where it does anything.

Itemizing Against Ashe

The first two are the matchup and the last two are ordinary insurance:

Quicksilver Sash is the item this matchup is really about, because the arrow is the reason the fight is happening at all, and removing the stun turns a lost engagement into a normal one. Plated Steelcaps is the ordinary answer to a champion whose damage arrives entirely as basic attacks (every one of them crowd control), and it's worth the component early rather than late. Randuin's Omen handles the part of her damage that comes from critical strikes (most of it, once she has items). Frozen Heart is the one to build if the game has gone long and she's being protected properly, since it takes away the attack speed that turns her sustained damage into real damage.