Each of Aphelios' weapons have different strengths, so try to find the right situation for your current weapons.
While Nautilus is shielded, he is capable of dealing large amounts of area of effect damage with his basic attacks - consider taking down the shield if you have time.
If Nautilus uses Riptide right next to you, hold in place until the ripple effect finishes before running. Running early will run straight into the secondary explosions, causing you to take additional damage and slow.
The stats shown here feature several valuable Aphelios against Nautilus counter stats that can help us appreciate the distinctions between these two champs. As an example, Aphelios’s KDA ratio ([kills + assists] / deaths) of NaN is better than Nautilus’s KDA ratio of NaN, demonstrating that Aphelios may be more central to his team's team fighting potential than Nautilus. This observation is largely fueled by the difference in kills.
Aphelios usually has a much larger longest killing spree than his opponent does. Commonly, he takes a similar amount of damage to Nautilus. This often reflects different amounts of tankyness, but it can also illustrate that the champ with higher HP has less agility and thus is not able to escape additional damage when poked or engaged.
Both League of Legends champions are great champions. Both champs have their strengths, weaknesses, and counters. In League's current meta, Aphelios usually loses when taking on Nautilus, with a 46.3% win rate. As a result, Aphelios makes a poor counter to Nautilus.
While Aphelios does have a lower winrate than Nautilus, when facing one another, Aphelios also has a much greater level of difficulty that makes him a more challenging character to learn and master. You may get destroyed when picking Aphelios into Nautilusas his relative depth means you may not be able to unleash his full potential without a lot of practice beforehand.
Additionally, Aphelios has only a small amount of utility and CC, a similar amount to Nautilus. This makes her just as valuable during teamfights, especially when facing champions with a ton of burst damage.
While there isn't one best champion in League of Legends, in Aphelios vs Nautilus matchups, Nautilus is the better champ with a much lower win rate, more champion depth, and a similar amount of utility to help out your allied champions during teamfights.
Aphelios is a terribly counter for Nautilus. Focus your gameplay on increasing your gold and cs and destroying objectives. If you can do that, you should hold your own as Aphelios against Nautilus.
To truly master Aphelios to counter Nautilus during both the early game and mid / late game phases of League of Legends, you should keep reading to pick up a few extra tricks and insights into this matchup. If you listen to the build and suggestions presented here, you will increase your win rate by a lot and be that much closer to League of Legends pro players.
Aphelios often picks up much more CS as Nautilus. Champs who on average don't acquire many minion kills typically don't require much CS to be effective, such as sup champs. They are capable of scaling well off of their skills, stats, and first items alone. Yet, champs with a lot of CS, such as hyper-carries, typically require many items to be effective. In either case, try to do better than the values reported here to do well.
The top items to use in your Aphelios versus Nautilus build consist of Galeforce, Infinity Edge, and Bloodthirster. When Aphelios bought at least these three items in his build, he performed a lot better countering Nautilus than with many other typical builds. In fact, Aphelios boasted an average win rate of 46.3% battling Nautilus with this counter build.
To have the highest chance of defeating Nautilus as Aphelios, you should take the Fleet Footwork, Overheal, Legend: Bloodline, Cut Down, Taste of Blood, and Ingenious Hunter runes from the Precision and Domination rune sets. Out of all the rune builds that we analyzed for Aphelios vs Nautilus counterpicks, this combination of runes resulted in the highest win rate. Notably, these runes averaged a 46.3% win rate overall.
If you want to get Aphelios vs Nautilus tips and matchup stats and build suggestions for a an individual skill level, feel free to choose one from the selection menu shown above. By default, the stats and guides shown are computed using all games run with these champs.