Season 3 Mastery Guide - Which Masteries Do I Pick?

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A lot of you are probably a little confused by which masteries to take on which heroes after all the recent changes in the pre-season patch. Well, that's okay, it's the first few days! So how do we figure out which points to put where? Let's start by checking out some common mastery allocations and you can work your way out from there.

First up, AD Carries:

Doublelift's masteries

Here we have Doublelift's masteries, the classic 21/0/9. It's pretty much identical to the old masteries, and most AD players should be comfortable playing with this set-up.

Chaox's masteries

On the other hand, here we have Chaox' masteries, who's known for being a little more open to interpretation, rocking with 22/5/3. 

My thoughts: As an AD carry, as long as you have those 21 in offense, you're off to a great start. Where you put the rest of your points is up to you. Personally, I favor this set-up:

SSJSuntastic's masteries

AP Carries:

As for AP carries, similar to the AD carries, these 21 points seems to work best with any other combination of 9 points somewhere else similar to above:

Bigfatlp's Mastery Set-up

The new "spellsword" mastery (5% AP damage in each basic attack) is interesting, every 100 AP you have it translates to 5 damage (some high level math here) which you sacrifice 2 AP from Mental Force to get.

Tanky Champs:

The tanky top lane/jungling champs are a little different, and as always if you're running 21 defense, a lot of the points are based on personal preference.

Voyboy's Masteries

Just for reference, you can see Voyboy's masteries showcased above for I believe Rumble. This is of course not to say that Voyboy's masteries are the BEST top lane masteries. Just to show you how different they can be, here's a set of Dyrus' top lane masteries.

Dyrus' Masteries

As you can see, besides the obvious offensive tree differences, they've picked pretty much oppositely in terms of the "optional" masteries near the middle of the tree.

The strongest single point move here is probably "Block" (reduces 3 points of damage from champion basic attacks), which most people will probably opt to get for early game.

"Reinforced Armor" (reduces damage from critical strikes by 10%) is probably largely going to be ignored, although it might save your life more than once late game. I think it's more useful than "Defender" (1 armor + 1 mag resist for each nearby enemy champion) unless your team intends on doing a level 1 battle, in which case Defender will be HUGE.

Supports:

Last, but not least, we have the supports! There's a lot of stuff in the utility tree that seems awesome for supports like that pickpocket move, but most higher level players opt to be tankier to help soak hits in lane rather than be aggressive. Here's Nhat Nguyen's masteries as an example:

Nhat Nguyen's masteries

Random Olaf Mastery Set:

Just to show that I'm not just sheepin' I ran this set of masteries on olaf top lane on my smurf and did perfectly fine; I still prefer 21 in defense over the utilities though.

Conclusions:

As you can see, the masteries are actually fairly similar to the way they were in season 2, albeit with some interesting new unique masteries. Note that these aren't the end-all to mastery selection, simply a collection of mastery sets that top level players have chosen to play with these first few days.

Feel free to experiment with your own! Which masteries points do you think are super valuable? Post below!