Hello, I'm Niz, and for about a couple years now I have wanted to make in-depth guides to all the characters I mained. All both of them. Since Awesomenauts has become free to play, I expect a lot of new players to pick up the game, and I figured that this would be the perfect opportunity to create the guide I always wanted to make. This is a guide on Raelynn, the E.L.F sharpshooter. This guide, for the sake of convenience, will be split up into three editions, being the Basics, important stuff that anyone playing Raelynn at any League should know, this includes abilities, upgrades, and basic tactics that anyone can pick up in a few hours. The Advanced tactics that will help you execute actions with greater efficiency with tricks that a lot of the higher ranked Raelynns use. Lastly will be Prep work, which includes Build ideas, play styles, who counters Raelynn, and who compliments her. I will have an indicator on the screen to let you know where each section is separated off to, so beginners can start from the begginning, and people who know the ropes could, say, skip straight to the builds and see what works for them. With the introduction out of the way, allow me to continue to the actual guide.

The first thing that I recommend that you do is a tip that I got from a TF2 guide a few years back that stuck with since, it doesn't matter what your sensitivity is, if you want it lower, you want it lower, if you feel it's better off higher it's better off higher. Sensitivity is fit to suit you, so pick one that suits you, and I recommend once you do, commit to it, because switching sensitivity from something you're used to can easily throw you off for a while. With that being said I myself prefer a lower sensitivity because it leads to finer shots and flicking is thrown off a bit less.

If you're new to the game and are looking for a character to get the hang of, Raelynn is a good choice for beginners with a very straightforward easy to understand kit and some pretty basic upgrades.
Raelynn specializes in:

• Harassment
  
• Area Denial
  
• Long Range Combat
  
• High Damage

As for her Weaknesses:

• She has no actual sustain
  
• Her damage isn't as Reliable as other naut's and their abilities
  
• She is very vulnerable to stuns, time-related slows, and silences.

Raelynn has 1,300 Health
An above average movement speed
She uses ranged attacks,
and has a basic single jump.

75 damage
Fires 2.5 shots a second.

Protoblaster is a very basic ability, it's a gun, you point it at things you don't like and fire at them until they go away. Protoblaster is in genral very reliable for damage, it has a high base damage for a range attack and has a pretty good distance to it, which is great because this will be your most reliable source of damage, it's harder to avoid and easier to ignore than time rift and snipe, but the damage adds up quickly. It's also great for pushing because even though snipe contributes nothing in seiging a tower, and rift is mostly used for blocking enemies or keeping an escape open when attacking a turret, her blaster does full damage to structures, and with her high base damage, despite Lonestar being the better pusher, she has a slightly higher dps to turrets than him in basic attacks.

Now is a good time to go over her upgrades.

Skull Bracelet
Skull Bracelet increases her damage by 22% total, 150 solar each stage for both stages. This is all around a good upgrade, it takes what your weapon is good at and amplifies it. This upgrade that will allow you to chip away at enemies faster and finish them off with snipe. It will work for any build, the only thing that will really change is when you get it, and since it's two stages you can be indecisive, you can decide to get some damage now and hold off on more later for utility, or buy what you can afford, it's a model of convenience.
Alien Hand
Alien Hand is an upgrade that is not going to help you in one on one fights, but this item is still fantastic in how it makes clearing droids with your protoblaster alone at least 50% faster, which allows you to be able to clear without using your timerift, and having timerift always available can give a huge edge in teamfights. Which is really good since timerift and snipe have been nerfed in droid damage, you're really gonna want that pistol DPS to clear lanes and stop pushes. Not only this, alien hand is the poster child of denying melee characters push, if your time rift isn't enough to deterrent them, the fact that you can take out their droids and still do damage to all of them should, while melee characters are pushing you'll be able to whittle them down along with any droids they may have. It also makes this always a fantastic choice on Sorona as you can clear 4 droids at a time in back turrets.
Monkey Hand
Monkey Hand is an upgrade that increases your firing range, and I discourage you from taking it. All the upgrades in Raelynn's row help her deal more damage with her attacks in some way except monkey hand, Raelynn's range is already good enough to manage on it's own, and if you are going to try to go after enemies a greater distance, you're wasting solar and an upgrade slot that could be better used for more damage, because hitting people from a distance who are on the run is what snipe is for. If you want to ever use this, it may be useful against Commander Rocket who is only using his salvo+jump combo to win every trade with you safely, or maybe a Vinnie who is constantly trying to get into optimal range for a dive. Enemies or comps that you simply can't approach and you want to poke with a long range HC bomb shot are your best candidates for this upgrade, but comps like that will usually be in corners and hiding spots where doing this safely to begin with is impossible.
Cat Air Freshener
Cat Air Freshener is one of the more interesting upgrade because it upgrades your blaster's damage to up to 32% while your others only upgrade the damage up to 22%, the downsides are Cat air freshener costs 400 solar in total, and only deals the damage to enemy awesomenauts. It's a great upgrade, especially for one on one encounters with enemy Awesomenauts, but I wouldn't reccomment buying it first, or buying it on it's own since it won't contribute to your direct pushing power and it being expensive.
Joe Doll
This is where things get a bit mathematical, Joe Doll is an upgrade that increases your attack speed by 22%, making it go from 2.5 shots a second to 3.05 shots a second. This increases her DPS to about 225, the problem with this upgrade is that it increases your DPS to the exact same amount as Skull Bracelet and Receding Ponytail would. Joe doll, however, is in total 20 solar less than skull bracelet, but 10 solar more than receding ponytail, but the biggest downside to joe doll is that it doesn't synergize with an upgrade in Raelynn's time rift slot called HC bomb, which triples the damage of your next shot after using Time Rift. I can only really reccommend Joe Doe for two purposes: Maximum pushing potential in your basic attacks, or if you want to practice your hand with protoblaster by firing more often but being punished a little less for missed shots. If you stack Ponytail, Skull Bracelet, and Joe Doll onto protoblaster and push with humming on time rift, you can do a substantial amount of damage at the risk of being more vulnerable to being punished by the enemy if caught out.
Receding Ponytail
Receding Ponytail is pretty easy to go over, In short, if you want to save 30 solar, you just buy this before skull bracelet or rather than Skull Bracelet because it does the same thing, but is one stage and 30 solar less in total, it's very useful because it allows you to do more damage to everything and can work with just about any build, like Skull Bracelet. It also means you're spending less solar total if you're building with Ponytail but not intending to buy Skull Bracelet later.

Snipe is an ability where you go into snipe mode, where you can no longer walk around or jump, and after half a second of an arming time, you left click to fire at an enemy to deal 460 damage, or you wait another half a second for it to go off on it's own, you can fire anywhere between the arming time, and the full duration, doing so will result in you leaving snipe mode.
Snipe fires in a straight line, and goes as far as your screen when aimed straight forward. Raelynn's snipe pierces through enemies and can only be stopped by solid objects in the environment or summons with the same properties such as Skree's totem pole. It also leaves a small indicator of when an enemy naut is in her sight over their head, and if at least one enemy awesomenaut is in her sightline, the snipe's line will thicken and turn yellow, this is really helpful because this helps against invisible enemies and enemies on Aiguillon because it can give you indication that they are there, ruin their element of surprise, and give you the opportunity to snipe them.

Raelynn's most skill ceiling is in sniping, because it teaches you a lot about positioning, accounting for escapes your opponent may have, and where your enemies will be once snipe is done arming. It is difficult (but far from impossible) to arm a snipe competently against a team while not having a time rift up or being safely behind turret. Also, just like any other ability in the game used for finishing opponents, it's good to know where the sweet spot of health is for enemies to die from your ability. This means that although this is more of a general bit of information, but it's still really good to know for finishing enemies, each bar of health on an enemy signifies 200 health. Snipe's base damage being 460, not accounting for any damage mitigation, two bars of health is an ideal time to snipe early game. Keep in mind that snipe is canceled when Raelynn is hit by a stun during the arming, leaving you unable to snipe, stunned, and your snipe on cooldown, getting kills with snipe often relies on your opponenet being more vulnerable than you. Not only that, but silences, although unable to cancel snipe, do not allow you to fire until the silence expires, or full arming time is achieved and it fires automatically.

Here's a chart that I put together for reference to help you get a general idea of snipe sweet spots.


Methods of countering this requires for you to know your enemy, their movement, and their abilities, I'll get back to this. But in general, when you snipe, you want to reduce two of the biggest weaknesses that Raelynn has while sniping and those are time for the enemy to react, and visibility.

Removing visibility is very easy with a bit of practice if the enemy doesn't know where you are, for example, you're in a hidden area, aim snipe on a surface in the hiding area so no one sees the sight of your snipe, until arming time is done, then take the shot at them, like this:
This gives them much less time to react. Also, when you're out in the open, if you know an opponent will come on screen and you are sniping, it is best to aim at the ground than straight forward, your enemy is going to see the laser before you see them otherwise, once they come into vision, then's your chance to aim up and hit them before they can react.

Pump Rifle
Pump Rifle is your basic damage against enemy nauts, which is going to be something that you will always want to buy because snipe does reduced damage to everything else, and enemy awesomenauts are what you're going to be using on Snipe most often. No matter the build, this item is always a good choice. I've seen Raelynns shamelessly bank into it to get that larger kill threshold first teamfight and frankly, I can't blame them.

Casettdesk Magazine
The first thing Casettdesk does is make you feel old, it also reduces Snipe's cooldown by 2 seconds, which CAN be nice for if you want to have prescience with your snipe and want to heavily harass the enemy team with the range upgrade, but in my opinion this upgrade is synergizes with the least useful of snipe upgrades, and honestly I don't think you're going to be sniping that often. On average, most Raelynns snipes after throwing out a time rift, and your snipe already comes back faster than a rift, so if you grab this upgrade, you HAVE to play an aggressive or harassing Raelynn and not depend on your timerift for safety to really get your moneys worth. So usually this is used for the Ravishing Raelynn Skin players who buy range and blind fire down mid constantly to hit droids and nauts clearing, or to play defensive Raelynn with blind to more frequently halt droid pushes. It's far frome useless, but promotes playstyles of Raelynn I really don't like. Mad respect for the insane people who buy this and all damage upgrades and play the spiciest form of shotgun Rae though.

Laserpointer
Laserpointer Is one of the more interesting upgrades in Raelynn's snipe kit, because it's one of the only 2 upgrades in snipe's row that don't just boost a stat, Laserpointer blinds any target who is hit by snipe for 1.5 seconds. This is a really annoying upgrade, but also unreliable compared to other forms of CC since you can't measure how much this will affect a person's performance if at all. Back when it procced on looking at enemies with snipe, it at least had the benefits of stopping droid waves, but now the blind is on hit, so droid waves can still go to town while you're arming which leads to a full second to stop them for a second and a half and knocking them back a bit, which seems even more pointless if you managed to outright kill the droids with the snipe in the first place. In short, this upgrade has seen better days; it no longer is used to help track invisible enemies, it doesn't stop pushes as well as it used to, the most you'll get out of it a bit more defensive power on your snipe. It's like Alien Hand to a lesser degree but at least with blind there is some concrete utility in every encounter, and the blind could still make it easier for your team to set up now that they removed that blind basically was just a color filter when you set the game to low graphics. Personally, I would just get a stage of pump rifle to reduce the chances of them surviving it in the first place.
Flashy Glasses
Flashy Glasses is a very defining upgrade in Raelynn's kit, it's pretty simple, increases base snipe's damage by 20%, but decreases snipe's range by 40%, which is a big catch for a snipe upgrade because none of the other upgrades really have a downside, and Range is one of the things Raelynn's snipe is heavily dependant on, so if you were to get this upgrade, you are pretty much committed to getting pump rifle first because the damage isn't traded off for range and it is generally more reliable for securing kills, and to cancel out Flashy Glasses' downside you're going to need both stages of range. Unless you're bold enough to get Iron Rifle and have an immense amount of faith in your team's ability to set up for you. The only leg up Flashy Glasses has on Pump rifle is that you will end up doing more damage to droids, but Snipe already does reduced damage to droids, so it doesn't even scale as well as one stage of pump rifle vs nauts. In conclusion Flashy Glasses is a bad upgrade comparatively to other items in snipe's row, but it's really good end game because it has you go back to base snipe's range if you have the range upgrades which you will if you want to use it effectively, but also gives you even more room to execute or scare off enemies you hit with snipe during a team fight. It's in no way versatile, and most people who end up buying it is usually because more damage sounded nice and they just happened to not really need anything else in snipe's row.

Iron Rifle
I actually have quite an interest in Iron Rifle, because it's mediocre, but it HAS to be mediocre because if it was actually good it would be permanently engraved as Raelynn's 3rd snipe upgrade in the mandetory trinity. Iron Rifle is an upgrade that puts a shield with a set amount of durability around Raelynn, which is 225, and it scales alright, but it still doesn't amount to much versus abilities and attacks that are upgraded. Not only that, but it gives debuff immunity, which comes in handy with dealing with two of Raelynns several worst enemies during snipe: knockback and stun. Keep in mind the debuff immunity is ended once it sustains the maximum amount of damage it can take, which is fairly easy since the shield is very low, but it also means you will tank that hit and prevent your snipe from being cancelled, which cancels every form of stun as they are typically bursts, and if you're really good at timing you can use it to cancel stuns that are either a DoT like Skolldir's throw, or deal no damage like Ted McPain's stunpack upgrade. This means it is much harder (but not impossible, a good or oily skolldir can absolutely still mess you up) for any singular diver or assassin to prevent you from sniping. It also can be used as a shield to survive delayed or easy to anticipate damage like DoT, Chucho's bomb, Clunk's explode, or an airstrike.
Gryc Lubricator
Just like Pump Rifle it increases one of the two things that snipe specializes in, doing damage to enemy nauts, and doing it a long distance. It's two stages, and when maxed, increases your range by 40%. So Gryc Lubricator naturally is the second go-to item in most snipe build sets, it even makes most of the other snipe upgrades better, allows you to try to predict more off-screen enemies later in the game when the map opens up, and keeps your options open to buy flashy glasses if that's what you want as your third. Although practically speaking, you only really need one stage of range all the way up to end game for most scenarios if you're not buying flashy, it's cheap and lets you hit people who just got off-screen horizontally.

And that goes over the basics of snipe, now it's time to cover Time Rift.

Time Rift is an ability that is fired in an arc, the longer you hold down the button to fire time rift the farther it will go, once it lands on the ground, time Rift will Slow and damage any opponents inside of it, this slow is called a "slowdown" and reduced the speed of everything inside of it by 65% and deals 96 damage a second, 24 damage a tick.

With a duration of 4 seconds at full time any enemy that stays in during the full duration takes 384 damage at base. It also has a 9 second cooldown but it's uptime doesn't influence it's cooldown, so Time Rift can potentially be up with only 5 seconds of actual down time if you're using whenever it comes off cooldown. Although it's stationary, a 65% slow down is pretty potent, time rift is great for area denial, punishing enemies who are in a bad position or clustered, following up on initiation, helping with disengages if things go south, and is said to be great for blocking off annoying exes and if that's the case then Raelynn has dated everyone in the Awesomenauts cast that doesn't have a dash or blink. It's also good to know that time rift's slow down is not immediate like Max's where the slightest contact will have the full slow effect, enemies have to get a bit deeper into time rift, and standing on the edge will proc the damage of time rift, but not have the slowing effect.
Experienced Raelynn players will know that in a lot of cases your rift is a lot more useful than your snipe, because anyone in Awesomenauts can do damage, but the slowdown from timerift although stationary has a ton of prescence for being able to slow enemies, get enemies stuck if they're in an animation that includes a self-stun, and slows momentum of those going through rift, make channeled abilities take longer to activate, and amplify movement-related CC. Anyone stunned or rooted in a time rift has to sit through an increased duration, and makes enemies who are slow even slower, so a traditional slow on an enemy that is forced to walk through time rift is already testing their resolve.
Time Rift's slow makes it easy to block enemies in who are trying to enter from the other side while having player collision, this gives you a chance to stop the enemy from passing your rift and get a bunch of damage in if they don't turn back. Since rift takes longer to deploy the farther you fire it, being chased down by an enemy while you still have some health can immediately be turned around by dropping a rift right in front of you and the enemy, and before they can run through it, block them, if you can match their movements you can get the upper hand in a fight such as being chased down by Rocco, although this doesn't work for all characters since some may displace you out of rift, dash into you, so I took the liberty of creating a chart of characters for body blocking with rift.
Most of Time Rift's blocking outside of body blocks is really opened up along with the map doing so, turret openings are great spots for time rifts because they're often an opening that enemies have to go through to get out of your territory. Time Rift is also useful in just about any situation where an enemy is trying to close the distance on you and you need to keep said distance. Time Rift is also great on the defensive, placing it in front of turret is usually a sure shot way of weakening a push since the primary push in any map is focused on the droids, and most droids are sawblade and need to get within melee distance, this is also good for dealing with enemies that are melee focused and need to his turret from that range. In teamfights it's fairly simple to use rift, you put it in an area you think the enemy is going to be in the most often in a fight, or you contribute a bunch of damage and/or finish an enemy off with snipe.

More opportunities for Time Rift open up with her upgrades, so it may be for the best to start going over those.

Higgs Grenade
is the first upgrade, It increases the height of Time Rift, which in a lot of situations compared to the other upgrades doesn't do a whole lot, if you place time rift where you usually put them not much changes because most characters can't get over time rift to begin with, and if you're getting it solely to get enemies that can go over rift to have to go through it, you won't body block them from that high up so it's basically pointless. No. I would not recommend buying height if you intend to put time rift in the same usual spots, the only time height will come in handy for the same spots is against enemies who still have to go downwards into the rift to wherever they are going, but in a lot of situations this still leads to opening for new spots in that same area. Height on Rift is great for bullying enemies in middle hiding spots by dropping a rift underneath it where it usually wouldn't reach, and a few floorfare tactics I'll talk about in the Advanced Guide.
Nuclear Warhead Is an upgrade that increases Time Rift's attack speed by up to 124%, 62% per stage, maxing out the ticks per second to just shy of 9. I feel that this is a situational upgrade, but the amounts of situations that this can work well are pretty high, more attack speed in general is nice on time rift and will go well with all the other upgrades in her row, and in some rare cases is more reliable than Retro Space Ship's slow because enemies are procced with the damage ticks longer than the slow when traveling through time rift. This upgrade is a good purchase whenever you're fighting a slow character with a large hitbox, so mostly Clunk. It also works well against characters with long self stuns such as Nibbs or Raelynn. But it's not exclusive to them, either, Penny's Pulse, Swiggin's Hook Shot, Lonestar's Bull animation, and many more are also potential opportunities to catch an enemy in an animation where the only movement they have is whatever momentum they've built up before they used their ability, which is still a worthy opportunity to catch them in a rift, but for that, you may want to invest in the next upgrade.
Retro Space Ship is similar to Lubricator, never a bad purchase, at least one stage can be bought at just about any point in the game, and no matter what other 2 upgrades you get, this will most likely be in the trio. Retro Space ship just adds more time slow to your time rift, meaning it's potentially easier to trap enemies, enemies who are stuck are stuck in their longer, and enemies who try to fight you in it's dps will be reduced even further. This upgrade won't really change or affect any of your tactics with rift, just amplify the effects.
T-800 Dome Is an upgrade that spawns a humming droid in a time rift that you place that will travel around and have the same behavior as a normal droid. It has 400 health scaling to 666 at base and does 70 damage per shot, scaling to 116. The initial response to humming droid after rift is that the intention is to help with poking down the turret, but considering how flimsy Humming is in getting a few shots out before getting gunned down by the turret and how little those shots actually do, I would discourage putting your rift on cooldown just to attempt to pluck bits of health off of structures unless you've specifically built for that. With that being said I still find Humming to be a fantastic upgrade with a lot of neglected potential. Humming acts outside of rift, and is the one of the only upgrade that acts outside of rift, Humming can help sustain pushes and tank damage from turrets, and humming's collision helps block enemies inside of time rift if they try to test their like and don't kill it. Humming can also provide vision and lasts until either an opponent kills them, making it so if you're about to push and are willing to sacrifice a bit of raw power, you can clear their jungle and drop a humming and have vision on who is trying to flank you and when. Once you drop another rift, where they will respawn right back inside of it. Since Humming spawns a little above the gorund the time rift was placed, it also makes it potentially effective if you are really good at reading an enemy's burst, as it can block Ayla's evil Eye, Chucho's bombs, and abilities like those that are single target and can hit droids.
T-800 gives you a lot of utility the only downside is it's not as reliable or as potent as other upgrades that do one job.
HC-Bomb is a personal favorite of mine, after placing a Time Rift, your next protoblaster shot is amplified to do 200% more damage, which at first may seem unimpressive at first, because that's just 150 damage at base, but since Base protoblaster has a high damage, this scales greatly, and it also scales with your damage upgrades, meaning if you build nothing but damage on your protoblaster, one empowered shot can easily do about 500 damage on an enemy naut. This can basically be treated as a second snipe with far less counter play and harder to avoid but less potent and with less range, but if you're in the range to use it, you can most likely get more shots in, and a fully upgraded protoblaster will hurt, empowered or not. And any assassin that underestimates the raw power of your protoblaster just because they got past the timerift is in for a surprise. The downside is that this affects your time rift in no way, so if you intend to go a rift-heavy build, or you really want more value in teamfights outside of burst, this is the one upgrade in the row I could see someone not getting.
1.21 Gigawatt Battery is a bit of an anomaly to me, it reminds me of casettdesk machine in the sense of it makes sense on paper that it would be a normal upgrade to get because it just outright makes the ability have more prescience. But in all honesty I find it very underwhelming, also similar to cooldown on snipe, the times I do get it I hardly find it making a difference in a lot of situations, this upgrade is pretty dependent on the idea that an enemy is going to either get stuck in rift for the full duration and you want them in there longer, or more likely that you need to block off a path and they all outright refuse to go through rift, but despite the polarizing opinions on time rift and facing it, there's not much appeal to this upgrade to me, or most Raelynns for that matter, base duration seems to be enough. If the enemy team gets past your time rift, in most situations it loses relevancy, so having it there longer doesn't usually help, most of the surprise and blocking with time rift occurs in the beginning of it, so lengthening it out is more focused on area denial which I think the current duration is long enough to do reliably on it's own.

Just one last thing to go over in this section and that's Raelynn's utility row.

Power Pills are the least useful item in this row in my opinion, Power Pills scale with health percentage and Raelynn's health is pretty standard, you won't really notice the health difference, I'd reccommend getting these maybe as your 3rd utility item if the enemy team lacks in the CC department and you didn't take piggy bank. But I'm gonna be honest, if you got this at some point instead of piggy, you might have made a mistake or dislike piggy bank as much as I do.
Med-i'-Can Is one of the two upgrades I highly reccomend you get, because since Raelynn has no sustain, she should have a sustain item in her utility row, and the regen from med-i'-can can be extremely helpful in both stages, especially on squishy nauts as the regen rates the same across the board and it scales really well proportionately to lower health characters.

Denny's Boots are a must-have for Raelynn, Some people have different preferences of when, but they're your only source of mobility, and they're your way to closing gaps in chases and making your leave when your enemy gets through the time rift. Denny's boots increase your movement speed a slight amount passively, but then give you a massive movement speed boost while you are out of combat. This is a very helpful upgrade that raises Raelynn pretty high on the movement speed scale, especially if the opponents don't buy boots. There's not to whole lot to talk about with the boots except for their standards for "out of combat" which are... Generous. As long as you're not using an ability other than your jump, you are out of combat. Taking damage does not count as being in combat as long as you don't fight back, and Ronimo has proven that when it comes to 'out of combat' it is the laid back father. Because you can have a time rift out or go into snipe, hit an enemy, and get the out of combat movement speed right after as long as you don't tell mom. What I'm trying to get across is that dealing damage doesn't even count as being in combat, and damage your rift does while Denny's Boots are active don't count, doing damage with snipe doesn't count, just the acts of activating these abilities, protoblaster doing damage doesn't count, it starts counting the out of combat timer immediately after you fire, not as the bullet travels or hits something. So Denny's boots are super helpful because if an enemy is after you and needs to run at you to reach you, you can snipe them, and the knockback will push them back a bit, and if not that, at least kill their momentum, giving you a headstart because your out of combat speed is already active.
Wraith Stone is the only other sustain upgrade available to Raelynn, this alongisde med-i'-can are your two sources of sustain, and I highly recommend you take one, Wraith stone gives you bonus health from critters that you kill. Wraith Stone is a lot more helpful in some maps such as Ribbit where the critters are nearby and give you a bunch of bonus health and med-i'-can's passive feels a bit too slow, but keep in mind enemies and teammates will take critters for the sake of an exp edge, so this can be far less reliable than med-i'-can, but if you're caught a fight in the jungle and manage to get a critter that's about a healh pack worth of health back to you, and can immedaitely turn the tide of a battle it can especially work wonders with Raelynn if you drop rift in the jungle area the critters run through and they get killed walking into it. Seriously, think about getting this upgrade sometimes. years after making this guide I can attest that this upgrade is an absolute life-saver in clutch battles in the middle area or preventing you from dying pre-emptively when getting health from a critter because the healing from Wraithstone is instantaneous, meaning it could also even block a bit of burst. This upgrade also means that if you wipe the enemy, you can body block the turret and extend droid life span and clear jungle and be back to full health instantly, even one critter will get you nearly full. If an upgrade like this is good enough for Ayla, it's good enough for you.
Piggy Bank Immediately gives you 100 solar, and takes up a slot in your row. Can be a really useful upgrade for when you're falling behind or want to get an edge with an upgrade early in the game, but I wouldn't reccommend getting it for Raelynn, since she lacks any alternatives for sustain or movement speed increase, so you're going to need boots and sustain upgrade, I like to keep my 3rd row open for anything else I could use, especially now realizing that some of my friends harbor a strat where they don't buy CC items until two or more enemies fill out their utility row so that they can't buy BKM.
Baby Kuri Mammoth Reduces the effect of all abilities by 30%, this upgrade is usually a good buy on any character because it reduces all CC and most characters don't have anything else to reduce CC except a couple, and in reality, CC is everyone's counter.

And that's that, that covers all the upgrades.

Quick Note
These are some builds that you can use, or reference to get a general idea on what Raelynn builds are like and create one that suits you based off of them, mind you these builds can vary on maps and against enemies, and the orders can vary, I myself get boots immediately every time, but I know a Raelynn main who will rush height on rift instead, some will get a bit of med-i'-can, some are confident enough to bank into pump rifle. These builds are best used as stepping stones, you don't have to follow any of them step by step, even if you do the build the exact way, you can still change up the order so that it suits you.
Standard
This is a build that will work in just about any situation, the third in the snipe row can be just about anything you want, but for the most part, it just gives you more of the things that are good about Raelynns abilities in the form of upgrades, and some upgrades in her utility row that make her a bit more slippery.






Push
This is an upgrade set that gives you a ton of lane control, you can still contribute a lot in team fights but some of it will be less of singular damage and more of crowd control effects and spreaded out damage among enemies, in general this build relies on snipe for most of the damage, and gives you a ton of pushing power that your team may lack otherwise.




Anti-engagement
builds primarily into rift and making sure enemies don't go through it, Humming for body block, slow for keeping them in longer and height to prevent anyone from just going over it in some positions, this is mostly used when fighting enemies like Clunk or Skolldir where it is ideal for them to get within melee distance.





Personal Build
This is the build I run the most often in this upgrade order, it offers a bit of push potential and a lot of singular damage, the downsides are that it neglects snipe for the most part until late game, early game is a bit slow because this build has you rushing 500 solar worth of utility, but your mid game will have a serious power spike and it is great for winning fights against squishy enemies quickly, and doing deceptive amounts of damage to tankier enemies over extended periods of time, protoblaster is your primary source of damage, your time rift is utility focused, and your snipe is just for finishing off opponents.

The last thing I want to cover is that if you really want to be great at Raelynn it's just like any other character, you need to practice, you're not going to become some sort of demigod overnight just because you read through this guide. The know how is here, but the experience itself is what will make you able to execute on it well, if you don't think Raelynn is the naut for you, that's fine, but if you really want to do well as her, you need to remain tenacious and learn from the experience of actual matches. Good hunting.