Counter Guide

How to Beat Elise

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Elise is a jungler with a deadline. Everything she's going to do to your game, she has to do in the first fifteen minutes, and she knows it better than you do.

She's the clearest example in the jungle of a champion whose whole identity is a window rather than a kit. Early on she does percentage damage, gets on top of you from an angle you didn't think was a path, and turns a lane that was even into a lane that isn't. Later she is a squishy champion with a long stun and no way to affect a fight she doesn't start. Nothing about beating her is mysterious. It's about surviving a defined stretch of the game while refusing to hand her the things that extend it.

Matchup Snapshot Elise, the Spider Queen

Where You Meet Her Jungle

Damage Type Magic, scaled to how much health you have

Why She Is Frustrating She arrives from a direction that isn't a path

Mobility She goes over walls instead of around them

Biggest Threat Cocoon [E]

Hardest Counter Briar

What a Counter Needs

Something that doesn't die to a level three gank
A jungler who wins the game she isn't built for
The vision to make her longest range tool a guess

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Elise on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Elise

Briar562 games56.0%
Talon455 games55.6%
Wukong525 games53.7%
Shaco414 games53.4%
Vi472 games52.8%

Picks Elise Beats

Kha'Zix501 games44.3%
Viego907 games47.4%
Lee Sin1,439 games47.5%
Master Yi856 games48.5%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the jungle against Elise. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 17,376 Elise games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Elise Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She's at her strongest before anyone has items. The early duel is hers against almost the whole jungle roster, and she's looking for it from the first camp.
Her damage doesn't care how much health you bought. A percentage is a percentage. Building defensively early does much less against her than it does against anybody else in the role.
Spider Form [R] gives her a second set of tools mid fight. She engages at range and finishes in melee, and the switch happens faster than most people adjust their positioning.
She drops in from places that aren't entrances. Ganks arrive over a wall rather than down the lane, so the ward that would have caught anybody else does nothing.
The stun is long and it starts the whole thing. Cocoon [E] is the setup for everything, and it has enough range that it can be thrown before she's anywhere near committed.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

She stops mattering as the game goes on. There's no late game version of her. A team that reaches the third item mark even is a team playing four against five in every fight from then on.
Everything depends on one skill shot. A missed stun means no gank at all, and it's often a dead jungler in somebody else's territory.
She's fragile the whole time. She never builds for it and she can't. Any crowd control that lands on her in a team fight ends her participation immediately.
She can't take an objective on her own. Slow clear on neutral targets and nothing that secures one under pressure. Contesting a dragon with her is a fight rather than a race.
Vision undoes the angle. The whole gank is built on arriving from an unexpected place, and unexpected is a property of what the lane can see rather than of the wall she jumped.

Countering Elise

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

Ward the walls rather than the river. The path she takes is over terrain, so the wards that would catch a normal jungler are watching the wrong ground entirely.
Stand behind something before level six. The stun (Cocoon [E]) has to travel. A minion wave, a wall or a jungle camp between you and the angle she wants is the cheapest counterplay in the game.
Trade the early game for the map. Granted, that can mean giving her a kill, but take a dragon for it. She can't punish a team that spends her strongest fifteen minutes acquiring things instead of contesting her.
Fight her once and never again. The first duel tells you the matchup. If it went badly, stop offering, because nothing changes for a while and she has nothing to make you.

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

Playing a Bad Elise Matchup

Path away from her rather than towards her. She wants an early meeting and there's no reward for giving her one, and a jungler who's a full camp ahead on the far side of the map is doing more than one who died proving a point.

Ask your solo lanes to play short until the first back. Almost all of her value comes from the two or three ganks that happen before anybody has a defensive item, and a lane sitting near its own tower doesn't offer one.

Play the objective timer rather than the fight. She's the weakest jungler in the game at contesting a neutral objective alone, so a team that arrives together is taking it whatever she would like.

Best Elise Counters

Three ways to beat somebody on a deadline: outlive it, beat her inside it, or spend it taking things she cannot defend. One counter each.

Sejuani Outlives The Window

She doesn't die to the early gank, so the mechanism Elise uses to turn a good start into a good game is gone.

Everything after that goes one direction. Every minute that passes makes one of them worse and the other one better, and neither of them can do anything about it.

Udyr Wins The Duel Anyway

He's one of the few champions who takes the early fight she's looking for and comes out ahead (her best habit becomes her worst one).

The clear speed matters just as much. A jungler who's ahead on camps is already standing in the lane she picked before she gets there.

Nunu & Willump Takes What She Cannot Defend

The objectives are the counterplay stated as a champion. She can't contest a dragon alone and he can take one alone, so her ganks become a trade rather than a profit.

He also survives being caught, and the early game punishment she's looking for doesn't really exist against him.

Itemizing Against Elise

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

Verdant Barrier is the early purchase that addresses her (a shield that absorbs one spell absorbs the one that was going to start the gank). Mercury's Treads shorten the stun, and the stun is the entire sequence rather than one part of it. Kaenic Rookern is the later version of the same idea and it's aimed at the fact that all of her damage is magic, with nothing mixed in to punish a one sided build. Zhonya's Hourglass is worth a slot for anybody she's likely to jump on, since she commits fully when she drops in and has no way to leave a fight that stops going her way.