Counter Guide

How to Beat Lulu

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Lulu never wins a fight. She just makes sure the person you were trying to kill is still alive at the end of one.

Everything in her kit happens to somebody else. The shield, the speed, the size, the crowd control that stops your engage halfway through: none of it is hers and all of it lands on the target you had already picked. That makes her one of the few champions where committing correctly and executing perfectly still somehow produces nothing, because the fight was decided by a button pressed a quarter of a second after you started. Going faster won't get you through. Changing who the fight is about will.

Matchup Snapshot Lulu, the Fae Sorceress

Where You Meet Her Bot lane

Damage Type Magic, and not very much of it

Why She Is Frustrating You are never fighting the champion you aimed at

Mobility A burst of speed she usually gives away

Biggest Threat Wild Growth [R]

Hardest Counter Rakan

What a Counter Needs

A reason to kill her instead of the carry, and the range to do it
Damage that outpaces a reaction rather than one that gets shielded
Something that goes through a shield rather than around it

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Lulu on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Lulu

Rakan1,876 games52.5%
Blitzcrank5,123 games52.4%
Zilean1,577 games52.0%
Senna3,624 games51.9%
Leona4,870 games51.8%

Picks Lulu Beats

Camille1,170 games42.0%
Swain2,116 games46.3%
Neeko1,344 games47.6%
Pantheon2,459 games47.7%

Win rates are for the champion listed, playing support against Lulu. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 111,392 Lulu games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Lulu Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She turns an engage off partway through. Whimsy [W] lands after you've committed (the worst possible moment for it), and there's no version of the fight where she has to guess early.
Her ultimate is a second health bar and a knock up together. Wild Growth [R] arrives when the target is about to die and takes them back out of range of dying, then knocks over everyone who was doing it.
The shield is cheap and it's always available. It isn't a big cooldown being saved for a big moment. It's constant, and it makes short trades in lane pointless.
She makes a carry faster than your engage. For some reason the speed is the least talked about part of the kit and it's often the reason the person you dived simply walked out.
None of it requires her to be good at fighting. She contributes fully from behind, from a distance and from a position where nobody can reach her.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

She is extremely fragile. Nothing in the kit protects her specifically. Everything protective she owns is pointed at somebody else, and she can't be in two places.
Her cooldowns are aimed at one target. She can save one person from one thing. A team that threatens two at once gets one of them through, every time.
She is reactive, so speed beats her. Damage that arrives all at once beats a shield that arrives afterwards, and there's a real difference between a burst and a sustained trade here.
Shields are a resource that can be spent early. Poke that forces the shield before the fight is the fight being won a minute before it starts.
She cannot escape anything. One small dash on a cooldown and a speed boost she has usually given away. A champion who reaches her has already finished the exchange.

Countering Lulu

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

Go for her instead of the carry. The carry she's protecting is unkillable while she's alive and ordinary the moment she isn't.
Force the shield before you commit. A poke, a minion wave, anything. The engage that goes in on a spent cooldown is the same engage that failed a minute earlier, working.
Threaten two targets at once. She has one of each spell. A fight that puts pressure on two people at the same time gets a clean kill out of one of them by default.
Buy something that goes through the shield. Shield reduction is the item nobody buys, and it's aimed squarely at her (most of what she does is a shield or behaves like one).

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

Playing a Bad Lulu Matchup

Play for the level six timing rather than the lane. Before her ultimate exists she's a support with a small shield and no way to save anybody from a real commitment, and that window is longer than it feels.

Push the wave and take the fight at the tower. She has no answer to a dive that puts pressure on two champions at once, and she can't make either of them safe while also standing somewhere safe herself.

Ask your team to pick her out in the mid game. She's the easiest of the five to catch alone (she rotates last because she's slow to leave), and the fight after she's died is a completely different fight.

Best Lulu Counters

Three ways to beat somebody who protects other people: kill her first, out damage the protection, or take away her chance to react. One counter each.

Blitzcrank Hunts Her Instead

Lulu has to stand within 650 units of her carry to use Whimsy [W] or Help, Pix! [E] on them, and Rocket Grab [Q] reaches well past that. One landed grab stuns her and drags her to Blitzcrank, away from the person she was protecting.

Static Field [R] handles the rest. It destroys shields, so the one Help, Pix! [E] just put on the carry disappears, and it silences everyone nearby (Lulu included) right when she needs her buttons.

Zyra Out Damages The Shield

The lane is decided on raw output before any of the protection becomes efficient, and there's a lot more damage coming out of the plants than one shield covers.

It also forces the shield to be spent on nothing, over and over, which is the quiet way this matchup is actually won.

Nocturne Removes The Reaction

Everything she does is a response to something she saw. Taking the vision away means the shield goes on late or doesn't go on at all.

The fear handles the rest. A support who's running in the wrong direction isn't saving anybody, and by the time she has control back the fight is over.

Itemizing Against Lulu

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

Serpent's Fang is the item this matchup exists to justify, since most of what she contributes is a shield and the fang makes every one of them worth less for the rest of the fight. Mercury's Treads cut the crowd control that stops an engage halfway, which is the specific thing she does that ruins a good dive. Banshee's Veil covers the same problem from the other direction, by eating the first spell she throws at you rather than shortening it. A control ward is worth buying every trip back against her, because catching her alone is the cleanest way this matchup ends and it only happens if somebody can see her.