Counter Guide

How to Beat Ornn

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Ornn loses lane on purpose. He's been shopping the whole time and he'll be worth two items more than you at the fight that matters.

Most top laners are trying to win the first fifteen minutes. He isn't. He farms, he takes the poke, he never buys a recall, and he hands his carries upgraded items nobody paid for. Then a team fight starts and there's a wall in it. So the counterplay is less a duel question than whether you can convert an early advantage into something permanent before the part of the game he's good at arrives, and whether the champion you picked can still hurt him once it does.

Matchup Snapshot Ornn, the Fire Below the Mountain

Where You Meet Him Top lane

Damage Type Magic, with heavy crowd control attached

Why He Is Frustrating He gets a lead by doing nothing

Mobility Slow, and one short dash

Biggest Threat Bellows Breath [W]

Hardest Counter Singed

What a Counter Needs

Damage that scales off his health rather than around it
Range, because he has to walk to you
A reason for him to be somewhere other than the fight

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Ornn on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Ornn

Singed460 games55.0%
Gwen745 games53.3%
Olaf462 games53.0%
Shen816 games52.6%
Garen1,553 games51.2%

Picks Ornn Beats

Gnar551 games41.9%
Jayce889 games43.9%
Pantheon436 games45.0%
Vayne537 games45.2%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the top lane against Ornn. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 34,244 Ornn games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Ornn Overview

Strengths: What Makes Him Dangerous

He never has to go back. Shopping on the spot means he keeps a wave he should have lost and comes out of every recall window with tempo he didn't spend anything on.
He makes his team richer. The item upgrades are free gold spread across the people most able to use it, and it compounds every minute the game goes long.
He builds walls. Terrain control decides more team fights than damage does, and he can put a piece of the map wherever the fight was going to happen.
His ultimate is a fight by itself. It hits everybody (twice) from a range where he wasn't even a threat a second earlier, and the follow up is a team's worth of damage on people who can't move.
Losing lane costs him almost nothing. He was never trying to kill you, so denying him a kill he didn't want isn't the win it feels like.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

Health is what he's made of, and health is exploitable. Anything that deals damage as a percentage treats his whole build as a target rather than as a defense.
He can't chase and he can't run. One short dash, no real movement speed. A champion who wants to leave a fight with him in it can simply leave.
He's bad at solo kills. The pressure he applies in lane is mostly imaginary, so a top laner who's confident about the wave can shove him in repeatedly without much risk.
A side lane forces a bad choice. He's needed in the fight, and he takes forever to get anywhere. Making him decide between the two is how you win games against him.
The early levels are slow. Before his ultimate he's a melee champion with a pillar, and the window before six is longer for him than for most of the people he's laning against.

Countering Ornn

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

Deal damage based on his health instead of fighting his armor. Percentage damage makes his entire build read as a liability. Flat damage against a champion who stacks resistances is the fight he wants.
Take the lane from range if you can. He has to close the distance to do anything, and every wave he takes under tower is a wave that costs him levels he'd rather have.
Make him choose between the fight and the map. He's the slowest person in the game at being in two places. A side lane he has to answer is worth more than a kill on him.
Break the wall instead of walking around it. The pillar is destructible and for some reason people forget. Hitting it once is faster than the detour, and the detour is exactly what it was built to cause.

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

Playing a Bad Ornn Matchup

Shove and freeze rather than fight. He'll take the CS loss quietly and that's fine, because the levels he misses are what his ultimate is scaled off and the pressure you generate elsewhere is what wins.

Buy the percentage health item before it looks efficient. Granted, against most top laners it's a luxury purchase. Against him it's the reason the matchup exists.

Respect the level 6 spike and nothing before it. The lane is close to free until then, and a lot of people play it carefully for ten minutes and then get hit by the part they should have been careful about.

Best Ornn Counters

Three different ways to make a wall stop being one: melt it, ignore it, or be somewhere else while it's busy.

Gwen Melts Him

A Thousand Cuts [Passive] adds magic damage off his maximum health to every basic attack, so the health he stacks to be a wall is the stat she hits hardest.

Hallowed Mist [W] is the other half. While she's inside it, enemies outside can't touch her at all, so the fight happens inside her circle or it doesn't happen.

Kennen Ignores Him

A ranged top laner denies him the only thing lane was going to give him (levels), and he has no way to reach past minions to stop it.

In the fight they're doing the same job from different places, and only one of them has to walk into the middle of five people to do it.

Shen Is Somewhere Else

Stand United [R] puts Shen next to any ally on the map, shield first. Ornn has nothing like it, so a fight on the other side of the map is one Shen joins and Ornn only hears about.

Lane's fine too. Twilight Assault [Q] adds magic damage off the target's maximum health to Shen's next three attacks, and the tankier Ornn gets, the more of it there is.

Itemizing Against Ornn

Two of these are the reason the matchup is winnable and two are for the crowd control:

Blade of The Ruined King is the item the matchup is built around for anybody dealing physical damage, because a big health bar is what it's designed to eat and his is the biggest one on the map. Liandry's Torment does the same job on the magic side and it's worth taking on whichever of your mid or top laners is going to be pointed at him. Mercury's Treads is about his crowd control rather than his damage (almost nothing he does actually hurts, and almost everything he does stops you moving). Serpent's Fang addresses the shield that comes attached to his engage (the part that lets him walk into a fight he shouldn't survive and then survive it anyway).