Don't forget that enemies can also use your Magical Journey doorways, and that your ultimate can also hit your allies!
Let your Caretaker's Shrines charge up - they heal for a lot more when at full power.
It's important to collect chimes to improve your meep's attacks, but don't neglect your lane partner! Try to make a big entrance by bringing an ally into the lane with you with Magical Journey.
Each of Aphelios' weapons have different weaknesses, try to exploit the ones that work best for your champion. Watch out for the purple Gravity gun, it can root you.
The stat comparisons provided here feature some important Bard against Aphelios matchup stats that can help us interpret the differences and similarities between the two. As an example, Bard’s KDA ratio ([kills + assists] / deaths) of NaN is greater than Aphelios’s ratio of NaN, highlighting that Bard may be more central to his team's team fighting capability than Aphelios. This observation is in large part a result of the differences in assists.
Bard typically has a significantly smaller longest kill spree than his matchup does. On average, he takes a similar amount of damage to Aphelios. This is usually reflective of differing health capacities, but it can also show that the champion with increased health has less mobility and thus is not able to flee from further harm when engaged or poked.
Both League champions are great champions. Both have their pros and cons. In the game's current meta, Bard usually fairs equally well when playing against Aphelios, with a 50.7% win rate. Thus, Bard makes an ok counter for Aphelios.
While Bard does have a higher win rate than Aphelios, when they face off with one another, Bard also has a lower learning curve that makes him a less complex champion to learn and master. You should be careful when picking Bard into Apheliosas his relative depth means that you may not be able to reach his full potential without a lot of practice beforehand.
Furthermore, Bard has a good amount of CC and other utility, a similar amount to Aphelios. This makes her just as valuable during team fights, especially when fighting champions with a ton of burst damage.
While there is not one best champion overall in League of Legends, in Bard vs Aphelios matchups, Bard is the better champion with a similar win rate, less champion complexity, and a similar amount of utility to help out your allied champions during late stage team fights.
Bard is a decent counter to Aphelios. You will do well by focussing your strategy on increasing your gold income and taking out objectives. If you do that, you should hold your own as Bard against Aphelios.
To learn all of the intricacies of Bard to counter Aphelios during both the lane and mid / late game phases of League of Legends, you should continue reading to learn a few extra tips and tricks for this matchup. If you listen to the build and stats presented above, you will grow your win rate by a lot and be that much closer to League of Legends pro players.
Bard often racks up a lot less CS compared to Aphelios. Champs who on average don't get many minion kills typically don't require much CS to be valuable teammates, such as sup champs. They are able to scale well off of their abilities and first items alone. Yet, champs with a lot of CS, such as hyper-carries, often require many items to be effective. In either case, try to do better than the numbers reported here to do well.
The most important items to prioritize in your Bard versus Aphelios build include Locket of the Iron Solari, Frozen Heart, and Shard of True Ice. When Bard used at least these three pieces in his build, he did a lot better vs Aphelios than with many other typical item sets. In fact, Bard boasted an average winrate of 50.7% battling Aphelios with this build.
To have the best likelihood of defeating Aphelios as Bard, Bard players should use the Guardian, Font of Life, Bone Plating, Unflinching, Zombie Ward, and Relentless Hunter runes from the Resolve and Domination rune sets. Out of all the rune builds that we analyzed for Bard vs Aphelios LoL games, this set of runes yielded the greatest win rate. Moreover, these runes provided a 50.7% winrate overall.
By default, tips, statistics, and builds on how to beat Aphelios as Bard are given for all ranked divisions combined. If you would like to narrow the stats and builds to a particular skill level, you can use the selection menu at the top of this page.