Fiora is a great duelist. Her kit requires good positioning, smart planning, and cautious execution. Her waveclear is terrible unless you buy tiamat or hydra.
She excels at splitpushing, that requires a lot of map awareness and game knowledge, therefore Fiora is considered to be hard to master.
Champion has a significant amount of true damage, which may come handy while playing against tanks and champions that build a lot of armor. Her weak early game is compensated by great scaling into late game. She is unstoppable once she gets ahead, and it takes multiple people to stop her splitpush.
Fiora is capable of dueling anyone who tries to stop her from taking objectives. The champion utilizes Sheen extremely well and melts down turrets with it. With that being said, let’s look how you can counter Fiora.
Fiora’s Abilities
- Passive: Duelist’s Dance
Fiora creates a vital spot on her opponent. Arc that appears on enemy champion, faces random direction. When she strikes it, Fiora deals a percentage of target’s health as a true damage, receives increased movement speed and recovers some of her health. The most important ability in her kit. In order to outplay it you have to position yourself in the way that Fiora has trouble hitting it. You can also walk away so the arc disappears and then respawns randomly.
- Q: Lunge
Fiora lunges in a chosen direction and stabs a nearby enemy, dealing physical damage and applying on-hit effects. This attack prioritizes Vitals and enemies it will kill. If it hits an enemy, a bit of its cooldown is going to be refunded. If you dodge that spell, Fiora will have a hard time trading without her crucial ability since its cooldown won’t be restored.
- W: Riposte
Fiora parries all incoming non-turret damage and gains debuff immunity for a short period of time, then stabs in a direction. This stab slows the first enemy champion hit or stuns them if Fiora blocked an immobilizing effect with this ability.. Make sure Fiora doesn’t parry your CC, because you will get stunned.
You can always hover your CC abilities (Like Twisted Fate’s W, Renekton’s W, Hecarim’s E) to bait her W and then engage a fight with her.
You can for example pop-up your Renekton’s W, come up and as she uses Riposte you cancel your empowered-stunning auto attack and use Q so it breaks the Riposte and you can successfully stun her afterwards.
- E: Bladework
Fiora has increased attack speed for the next two attacks. The first attack slows the target, and the second attack will critically strike.
- R: Grand Challenge
Fiora reveals all four Vitals on an enemy champion and gains movement speed while near them. If Fiora hits all 4 Vitals or if the target dies after she has hit at least one, Fiora and her allies in the area are healed over the next few seconds.
Striking a Vital deals true damage. In order to beat it Fiora cannot hit all vitals, because in almost every single case she is going to win the trade with you. You need to position yourself in the way Vital is facing towards a wall / obstacle that Fiora will not be able to strike it.
Learn more about Fiora’s abilities here.
Our Top Counter Tips To Beat Fiora
- As a tank make sure to build Bramble Vest. It reduces Fiora’s sustain significantly. Stacking pure armor won’t be a good idea since she has a lot of true damage in her kit. Build Tabi’s and items that give HP.
- Fiora has really bad waveclear pre Tiamat, set up the wave correctly in order to punish her. After Hydra/Tiamat she will push the wave eventually so set up a freeze if possible.
- The duelist has a large cooldown on her W skill – Riposte. Always pay attention whenever she uses it and set up trades while her W is not available. You cannot CC her while she Ripostes because it will stun you and lead to lost trades.
Champions That Counter Fiora
- Cassiopeia - champion that deals immense damage early game, she is ranged and is a kiting beast although she is a high skill level champion. She doesn’t build armour that Fiora’s true damage is strong against.
- Jayce - ranged champion that has a significant amount of poke in his kit and CC. Easy to burst Fiora in the early stage of the game. Phase rush keystone is what makes him shine in that matchup. He is basically a kite machine and pushes Fiora to absolute defensive.
- Renekton - early game monster that has no mana costs and really high damage output. His rage buffs his abilities, Fiora can only trade him on front vitals otherwise he is gonna heal the damage up quickly with his Q.
- Nasus - Fiora may have the edge on Nasus at levels 1-2 but Nasus has no trouble dealing with Fiora and is able to easily outfarm Fiora throughout the entire game. The greatest discrepancy in Gold/Time appears to be around the 10-20 min mark (most likely when Nasus gets his Frozen Heart/Iceborn Gauntlet powerspike), and evens out at 20-30 min powerspike.
- Nasus scales fairly well late game and appears to be able to snowball on Fiora.Whither shuts down Fiora’s mobility and AA, making it difficult for her to hit vitals or do AA-reset combos.
- Poppy - Poppy’s W prevents any dashes from inside its circle, which means that she can prevent Fiora from Lunging to hit vitals within the circle, effectively gutting her mobility. Her ult can disengage Fiora and prevent her from chasing her intended target. Poppy’s strong laning phase and early roam potential is also able to shut down Fiora and snowball the game for her team.
Laning vs Fiora
- As a tank play defensively and set up freezes, slowpushes to punish her strong trades. Usually you should wait for your jungler to gank.
- As a counter mentioned before play around her weak spots and cooldowns.
- Build Ninja Tabi’s as it reduces her damage output significantly
- Build Bramble Vest (on tanks/bruisers) when you feel you can’t deal with her healing
- Always take teleport because Fiora will splitpush and really often you have to match her.
- Use her lack of AOE in setting up wave correctly
- Make sure to set up vision that helps your jungler gank/provides information for your team where the enemy jungler is/denies ganks on you.
- If your champion has a bad waveclear set up deep vision, as her waveclear post Tiamat will give her time to roam.
- Use your CC wisely and hard to predict.
Mid & Late game vs Fiora
- Fiora will try to splitpush during mid/lategame. Take teleport to match her. Make sure you watch the minimap and always pay attention if you have to teleport.
- You don’t want the game to drag on too long while playing against Fiora, try to utilise objectives.
- She scales well into the lategame, you might need 2 or 3 people to kill her later on depending on which state of her build she is.
- Fiora is bad at teamfighting. She is usually killed by hitting a single CC on her. Prevent her from getting 4 vitals due to mass heals she provides.
- As an adc consider buying Guardian’s angel, as AP try to get Zhonya’s.
- When she is splitpushing and you don’t have a TP or cannot match her by yourself try to seek for a good engage since the enemy team will be 4v5.
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