Xin Zhao How To

Xin Zhao will almost always start Red Buff. From there he can gank top and invade blue, or gank mid and 3 camp clear. You can ward him out with 2 wards on both entrances of his red side Jungle (Tribush and in front of Raptors), deflecting ganks and giving yourself a heads up to invade. If you start Red, Xin will likely path to Top and Invade. If you start Blue, Xin Zhao will path towards mid and/or 3 camp clear to match you. In the off chance he starts on his Blue Buff, he'll 3 camp clear (affording Wolves if he has time), and you should respond accordingly.

There is a small handful of champions who can duel a Xin Zhao at Level 2 and 3. For that handful, the strongest move is starting opposite of whatever lane you want and doing a 3 camp clear. For everybody else, match Xin Zhao's invade with your own if you start Red, or Reverse Clear if you start Blue.

He's basically got Lee Sin or Elise type scalings; aggro early game, crazy mid game spike if he snowballs, but he's on a timer before he's forced to be a really inefficient tank bruiser by the late game. Because of this and his amazing early game gank potential, he's really on the lookout to snowball at least 1 lane or effectively eliminate someone from the game before he baton passes his carry duties onto someone with better scaling than him. Play to your own strengths with the goals of either outscaling him or protecting your own lanes with counterganks so that Xin Zhao can never really baton pass before his time runs out.

Xin Zhao's win conditions are Pick primarily and Splitpush Secondarily. Rarely, when builds align, he can also pull off a nasty Juggernaut/Bruiser carry role, but this win condition will be ignored for the sake of brevity. Xin Zhao excels in smaller skirmishes where he can eliminate his targets without as much worry of focus fire. However, his short range and squishy build makes him horribly ineffectual in front to back teamfights and/or against teams with even a decent amount of peel. Any standard (defensive) teamfight formation and any peel for the poor sod that Xin Zhao is targetting will quickly shut him out of teamfights. As a backup then, he will often switch towards Splitpushing. The bright side is that his dueling potential is rather middle of the road unless he invests specifically for it (and sacrificing his teamfighting potential even more), so it's not hard for most dedicated Splitpushers to simply shove him away or even kill him, especially once his scaling falls off that much.