Duelist Cramorant Cramorant - Wrought

Guide

Ability Breakdown:

Gulp Missile (boosted attack): Very strong passive combined with Dive, causes your attacks to bounce to another target and deal bonus Sp. Attack damage when over 50% health and even more damage and slow when under 50%. Makes him a deceptively strong duelist even on low health.

Whirlpool: Good for cleaning up wild Pokemon early, but not worth much unless your lane partner has CC.

Feather Dance: Legitimately pretty bad. You won't have to rely on it for very long though.

Dive: One of the best moves in the game. Great for engaging, retreating, chasing, scoring, you name it. Stores 3 charges on a 1.5 second cooldown each that allow you to teleport to a location, deal damage to any enemies nearby and knock them back, and gives you a charge of Gulp Missile. Upgrade makes it do more damage, which is welcome.

Air Slash: Very good with Dive. Shoots an arc of 3 air bullets that deal damage and reduce the ability's cooldown on hit. You should be looking to use it immediately after going in with Dive and shooting a Gulp Missile. Upgrade makes it heal for each bullet hit, which can make your sustain capabilities for dueling even stronger.

Gatling Gulp Missile: Very strong ultimate. You repeatedly fire off Gulp Missiles at the nearest enemy, prioritizing enemy players, for a set period of time. Can be a great way to turn a teamfight around. It makes you completely stationary for its duration, which means you have to put yourself somewhere where you won't get CCed or bursted down, but if you can stay up for its full duration there's almost nothing the enemy team can do to stay in the area. Similar to your passive, the damage is greatly increased and the ability slows if you're under 50% health.

Item Breakdown:

Shell Bell: Synergizes very well with your low cooldown abilities to give you a lot of healing and increase your dueling and sustain capabilities.

Choice Specs: Similarly to Shell Bell, low cooldowns means lots of ability usage, which means lots of damage capabilities with Choice Specs.

Wise Glasses: You can swap these out for Sp. Attack Specs if you want but I find Wise Glasses to be more consistent and don't like the win-more advantage of getting more Sp. Attack if you're already doing well which doesn't protect you if you fall behind.

Full Heal: Cramorant is fairly slow, which means that one of the only ways he can get out of rough situations is to use Dive, which you can't do if you're at risk of being CCed. You don't need Eject Button when you have 3 Dives.

I decided to make this guide to set the record straight about Cramorant, because every guide I see recommends the "easy" way to play Cramorant, which doesn't make use of his full potential using his strongest moves and instead elects to use Surf/Hurricane to play him as a bad, slow, longe range control mage. I've made a lot of progress in ranked just by playing Cramorant and I haven't even touched anything other than what I consider to be the default build for Cramorant. This Cramorant guide will help elucidate what makes cramorant uniquely good. I consider him to be one of the strongest Pokemon in the game because he has a crazy amount of mobility and sustain in 1 on 1 situations that other Pokemon can't really match.

First, you don't want to try and fight early unless you have someone with strong CC in your lane. Whirlpool and Feather Dance are both pretty bad abilities, taking Whirlpool first can help clear out some pokemon and level up early, but realistically most matches you'll use Feather Dance once before you replace it with Air Slash and you're not going to miss it. You should try to avoid fighting until 6 when you get Dive, then you can start going in to harass people by using Dive on top of them, hitting them with the Gulp Missile, and Air Slashing to get out. This can easily be done multiple times as the close proximity you get into with Dive allows you to refresh most of Air Slash's cooldown and once you get this combo off multiple times you can easily chase for a kill.

You'll want to try and bully your opponents out of lane as soon as possible so you can go for Drednaw. The synergy between Dive and Air Slash makes Cramorant extremely capable of soloing Drednaw as long as he has some health to spare and your team will thank you for it.

Cramorant excels at sneaking past enemies to get goals, if you get a lot of points you need to dump, just wait in the bushes until they move up so you can get an easy goal by Diving in. You can even go to a different lane to Dive behind their goal where they least expect it and dump your points there.

Overall, a lot of Cramorant's strength comes from Dive and from Gulp Missile. The extra damage and slow under 50% HP with the frequency that Dive allows you to reset it means that you should never be auto attacking for long, just Diving around the battlefield and into opponents to shoot off more and more Gulp Missiles.

Since Gulp Missile's strength scales with how much HP you're missing, don't be afraid to go in half health. If you have Air Slash+, you can be surprisingly tough to kill (provided you don't get cced), and do an insane amount of damage once you start spitting Pikachus at people.

Overall you should be trying to pick fights with isolated targets wherever you see them, chasing them off to secure goals and wild Pokemon or chasing them down to kill them. You can also do very well in teamfights, picking enemies off around the fringes or flanking with Dive or sitting behind tankier teammates to fire off your Gatling Gulp Missile.

Overall, I hope I've outlined how Cramorant is uniquely situated to perform as an incredibly strong duelist rather than the middling control mage he is often made out to be and illuminated how you can use his advantages, namely low ability cooldowns, mobility, and high sustained damage, combined with a high potential for self-sustain to outperform enemies and create holes in the enemy team's defense to Dive through and score goals.