Counter Guide

How to Beat Kindred

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Kindred tells you exactly where she's going to be and when. Almost nobody does anything with that.

She's a marksman pretending to be a jungler, so she's fragile, she kites, and she gets meaningfully stronger every time a hunt goes her way. That last part decides the matchup. A Kindred who collects is a problem nobody has a clean answer to by thirty minutes. A Kindred who doesn't is a squishy jungler with no crowd control and a lot of hope. Deciding which one you're playing against happens in the first ten minutes, and it happens on the map.

Matchup Snapshot Kindred, the Eternal Hunters

Where You Meet Her The jungle, and wherever the mark is

Damage Type Physical, scaling off your health bar

Why She Is Frustrating Nothing you can do about her ultimate

Mobility Constant, in small pieces

Biggest Threat Lamb's Respite [R]

Hardest Counter Master Yi

What a Counter Needs

Enough early strength to contest a hunt on her side of the map
Crowd control that doesn't need her to stand still
A way to punish her for being the furthest forward person in a fight

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Kindred on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Kindred

Master Yi1,679 games58.2%
Rammus557 games57.5%
Nunu & Willump409 games55.5%
Evelynn411 games55.5%
Wukong982 games55.2%

Picks Kindred Beats

Rengar511 games46.0%
Jarvan IV975 games47.0%
Qiyana610 games47.1%
Lillia658 games47.9%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the jungle against Kindred. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 34,653 Kindred games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Kindred Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She gets stronger on a schedule you don't control. Every successful hunt is permanent, and the gap between a stacked Kindred and an unstacked one is larger than almost any other champion's good game to bad game spread.
Her damage scales off health. Building tanky against her is the reflex, and it turns out to be the wrong one, because the health bar you just bought is the number her damage is calculated from.
She kites better than she fights. The dash is short, frequent and cheap (so she's never quite where the skillshot was aimed).
Her ultimate cancels a kill outright. Lamb's Respite [R] is the rare ability that doesn't make a fight better or worse so much as declare it void, and a team that committed everything into the four seconds it covers has thrown the fight away.
She takes objectives fast and from range. She doesn't need her team to be there, and she doesn't need to be in melee to be doing it.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

The marks announce her. She's telling the map where she wants to be. A jungler who shows up to that camp instead of farming his own has taken the stack and the tempo in one trip.
She's very killable early. Before the stacks arrive she has a small health bar and no way to survive being caught, and there's no version of her kit that fixes that in a duel she didn't choose.
She has no crowd control worth the name. Nothing keeps anybody still, so every gank she attempts depends entirely on her laner having something she doesn't.
Her ultimate helps you too. It's a zone (everyone in it is unkillable, enemies included). A good team walks out, or steps in on purpose to survive something that was about to kill them.
She's always the closest one to danger. Kiting means standing at the front edge of your own team (a position with a very specific set of champions who punish it).

Countering Kindred

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

Contest the mark, don't just note it. Showing up at the marked camp is the single highest value thing anyone does against her, and it costs one path deviation.
Fight her before she has stacks. The early jungle is where this matchup is decided. Playing safe for fifteen minutes hands her exactly the game she wanted.
Don't stack health against her. Armor works. Health doesn't, and buying a lot of it is how a front liner ends up being the person she kills first.
Walk out of the zone instead of waiting it out. Standing inside her ultimate arguing about it is the outcome she paid for. Leaving costs a few seconds and takes the whole ability away.

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

Playing a Bad Kindred Matchup

Track her first clear rather than her mark. The mark tells you where she's going eventually; the clear tells you whether she's currently on the wrong side of her own jungle, and that's the invade window.

Take an armor item earlier than the build order suggests. It's the one defensive stat that actually reduces what she does, and it stays useful into the part of the game where health has stopped helping.

Play the fight to a second wave. Her ultimate covers a window, and a team that keeps its own big cooldowns for after it usually wins a fight it looked like it was losing.

Best Kindred Counters

Run straight through the kite, beat her with something that doesn't miss, or make her own attacks the problem. One champion each.

Master Yi Runs Through The Kite

Her defense is spacing. Dance of Arrows [Q] hops her away and Mounting Dread [E] slows whoever is chasing, and Highlander [R] cleanses slows and makes Master Yi immune to them for 7 seconds. The chase she plans to win turns into a straight race.

Alpha Strike [Q] takes him off the map for a moment (he vanishes and can't be targeted) and puts him back next to her, which is the one place a kiting marksman never wants him. A takedown also cuts his basic ability cooldowns by 70%, so a skirmish that goes his way tends to keep going his way.

Warwick Can't Be Kited

Suppression doesn't miss, and there's no amount of small dashes that answers a champion who just runs at you and presses a button.

The sustain matters too. She wants a long fight where she's chipping away from a safe distance, and she's very bad at one where the other person keeps getting health back.

Rammus Punishes Every Arrow

Kindred does her damage with basic attacks. Defensive Ball Curl [W] piles armor onto Rammus and hits back with magic damage every time one of them lands, and Frenzying Taunt [E] makes sure he's the one she's shooting (taunted, she can't hop away with Dance of Arrows [Q] either).

Powerball [Q] covers the distance her kiting was supposed to keep. The hit knocks her back, stuns her briefly and slows her, which is plenty for a champion with nothing between her and him.

Itemizing Against Kindred

The first two are the matchup and the second two are what her damage type asks for:

Executioner's Calling is here for the heal at the end of her ultimate (the part people forget about while they're busy being annoyed by the four seconds before it), and cutting it turns a fight she reset into a fight she merely delayed. Randuin's Omen is the right answer to a champion whose damage arrives as a stream of basic attacks, and the slow attached to it is a real problem for somebody who lives on repositioning. Plated Steelcaps is the cheap early version of the same idea and it's worth buying in the jungle rather than waiting to see how the game goes. Frozen Heart is for whoever is standing between her and your carry, and it's better on a champion with armor already than on the person she's actually shooting at.