Talk:Nautilus/@comment-31827536-20170625210551/@comment-4091261-20170625230053

He can, but you must focus on large early damage. Compared to other Battlemages like and, he does less damage. However, what makes him good is that he is reliable due to how easy it is to land his CC and to chain with it.

For runes, you will want a solid amount of flat and. Due to his how well synergizes with, the damage reduction will help a lot in bullying the enemy laner. On that same notion you want some flat for the same reason. I suggest a single armor quintessence on top of full armor seals since the amount of physical damage encountered is fairly significant due to minion aggro.

His most important item will be. It offers him the damage and waveclear he needs to be viable in that sense and the Eternity passive on helps a lot with getting in their face to combo them.

Fortunately, everything beyond the and  is very flexible--even his boots of choice is. Some priority situational items are and  due to how they increase damage while offering damage reduction.

Everything about his laning revolves around how well he trades, just like every other top laner. Sometimes you might want to them with  first, for convenience. Other times you'll want to look for a chance to throw a to get a combo started. Typically it's divided into two scenarios.
 * 1) If the enemy is sitting in the middle of the minion wave, you want to walk up to them and them with  then use  to DPS trade with them.
 * 2) If the enemy is generally far away and trying to poke, you want to cast into  and then use the same combo in the first scenario.

Since it is laning phase, these trades end up fairly well. The only thing that would screw this over is failing to completely go through with a combo or getting harassed while the abilities are on cooldown.

These combos are as easy and reliable as they sound due to the crowd control attached to it, but many champions can outscale damage output. Getting CDR helps alleviate this fact since it increases the frequency of his CC, allowing him to control many situations.