Counter Guide

How to Beat Gwen

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Gwen draws a circle on the floor and everything outside it stops being able to touch her. The trick is that she has to stay in the circle too.

She is a top laner built around one very unusual idea, which is a piece of ground that only she is allowed to fight on. Inside it she is close to untouchable by anybody who did not commit to walking in, and her damage ignores the thing most top laners buy to survive. Outside it she is an ordinary melee champion with a dash and a real need to be nearby. So the matchup is not decided by who is stronger. It is decided by whether you fight her on her ground or on yours, and that decision is made several seconds before the fight starts.

Matchup Snapshot Gwen, the Hallowed Seamstress

Where You Meet Her Top lane

Damage Type Magic and true, and both go through armor

Why She Is Frustrating You cannot hit her from where you are standing

Mobility A dash that refreshes if she is winning

Biggest Threat Hallowed Mist [W]

Hardest Counter Volibear

What a Counter Needs

Range, so the ground she picked does not include you
Grievous Wounds, because she heals off the damage she is already doing
The early game strength to take the lane before she has items

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Gwen on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Gwen

Volibear557 games55.1%
Yasuo663 games55.0%
Akali491 games55.0%
Jax928 games54.5%
Yone1,403 games54.4%

Picks Gwen Beats

K'Sante901 games43.6%
Dr. Mundo1,320 games45.5%
Sion795 games45.5%
Renekton831 games45.6%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the top lane against Gwen. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 32,062 Gwen games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Gwen Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She cannot be touched from outside the mist. Hallowed Mist [W] is not a shield or a reduction. Anybody who has not walked in simply cannot target her, which turns a four on one into a standoff.
Her damage goes through the item you bought for it. Thousand Cuts [Passive] means armor is doing much less than it usually would, and a tank is close to the worst thing you can put in front of her.
She heals off the same damage. The sustain is not a separate spell she has to spend time on. It arrives as a consequence of doing the thing she wanted to do anyway.
The dash keeps resetting. As long as the fight is going her way she keeps getting it back, which means the escape and the gap closer are effectively the same infinite button.
She scales into a problem nobody has an item for. Percentage true damage does not get less relevant as the game goes on. It gets more relevant, and it gets worse for whoever bought health.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

The mist is a fixed piece of ground. She has to stand in it. A champion who walks twenty steps away has made the strongest thing in her kit into decoration for the rest of its duration.
Range beats it entirely. There is nothing she can do about a top laner who never needed to be close, because following one means leaving the circle she just drew.
The early levels are genuinely bad. Before the mist and before items she is a melee champion with short range and no crowd control, and the lane is very takeable in that window.
Healing reduction hurts more than armor does. Since the damage bypasses armor anyway, the item that actually changes the duel is the one that stops her taking health back while she does it.
She has no way to hold anybody still. No stun, no root, nothing. Every fight she has is one the other person agreed to, and disengaging from her is mostly a matter of deciding to.

Countering Gwen

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

Leave the circle rather than fighting at its edge. Standing just outside it is the worst place on the map. Either commit fully or walk away, and walking away is usually right.
Take the lane in the first six levels. She is at her weakest at the exact point most people are being careful. The lead has to be built before the mist starts deciding fights.
Buy Grievous Wounds rather than more armor. Armor is the instinctive purchase and it is the wrong one. Her damage goes through it and her sustain does not.
Fight her with your team, not with your top laner. She is very good at a duel and much worse at a fight where four people can choose whether to enter the mist. Force the version she is not built for.

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

Playing a Bad Gwen Matchup

Play the wave short and give up the ground rather than the health. Every trade taken inside her mist is a trade she gets to have on her own terms, and there is no version of it that is close.

Buy the healing reduction component before the defensive item feels justified. It is the purchase that changes the duel, and buying it late is how a survivable lane turns into an unwinnable one.

Ask for help on the timing rather than the lane state. A gank into the mist accomplishes nothing at all, and a gank taken thirty seconds later, when it is down, usually just kills her.

Best Gwen Counters

Three ways to beat somebody who picks the ground: never step onto it, beat her before she can draw it, or walk in anyway. One counter each.

Jayce Never Steps On It

He does his damage from a range where the mist is not a factor at all, and the only way for her to answer that is to leave the one thing protecting her.

The lane is also his before either of them has items, which compounds. She is being poked out during the exact window she was already weakest in.

Olaf Wins The Window

He takes the early duel and there is no crowd control anywhere in her kit to slow it down, so the fight goes exactly as long as he wants it to.

The sustain race is his as well, which matters more here than usual, because both of them are trying to win the same long trade and only one of them is getting stronger for it.

Volibear Walks In Anyway

The mist does nothing to somebody standing inside it, and he is happy to be the person who commits and makes it a straight fight.

He also removes her best excuse for disengaging. Once he is in there with her, the circle she drew is holding her in place as much as it is keeping anybody else out.

Itemizing Against Gwen

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

Bramble Vest is the lane item and it is bought for the healing reduction rather than the armor, because the armor is the part of it she has an answer to. Frozen Heart is the one that changes the duel most, since her damage arrives as a stream of attacks and taking the attack speed away takes most of it with her. Kaenic Rookern addresses the half of her output that is ordinary magic damage, which is easy to forget about while worrying about the half that is not. Randuin's Omen is the team fight version of the same idea and it is worth building on whoever she is likely to be standing next to, rather than on whoever is fighting her in the side lane.