Everything said here is still relevant, however there is far more flexibility and slight changes in certain areas which I will update at a later time.

Who is Tryndamere?

Tryndamere the Barbarian King. He has a 5 foot ponytail that he uses as a blanket to keep himself warm at night in the snowy mountains after a day of wrestling bears with his hands because hes such a fucking badass. Oh boy that was a mouthful... Kind of like the mouthful most women beg for when they see this magnificent titan of a man. HA HA HA. 

Enough of that, this isnt about jokes. This is about killing people.

Tryndamere is a melee hybrid that has the option of being a tank, a dps or a little bit of both. You can use your team and the other teams champions to decide how you want to play him. This guide focuses on being on the "a little bit of both" side of things because I believe it is the most effective way to play him.

My experience
Been in beta for about 4ish weeks. After I had a week to settle in, ive spent most of my time in higher ranked games. I have played against almost all of the big names, and at least have 1 win against most of them aswell. Im not the best player in the world, I still have plenty to learn and much to improve on. Im also human, I have good games, I have bad games, I have great games and I have games that give me suicidal ambitions. At the very least however I can at least hang with just about anyone and rarely, if ever, feel outmatched.

After elo ratings stopped being posted ive branched out even more with item builds, heroes and people who I play with. This in turn has probably made me a stronger player even if my w/l ratio has diminished recently. This is how I ran into Tryndamere, my new love in life. I started playing tryndamere about 5 days ago and have about 15 games (give or take) under my belt.

As such, I consider myself at least a relatively experienced player.


Do I want to play Tryndamere?

- First of all he has a beard, thats a pretty big deal. Old Clint Eastwood in his westerns had a beard and he beat the shit out of people. George Bush didnt have a beard and now you guys are in a recession. Do you see how big of a deal this is? 
- Secondly he works out a lot. His biceps are huge and he isn't afraid to show it off. He swings his gigantic sword with ONE arm, not two like every other nancy in the world. 
- Third he doesn't have like 1400 retarded fucking eyes like master yi and jax. 

On another note....

Tryndamere is an aggressive hero. If you are a person who cant commit to fight and just stands half in the fight and half preparing to flee, you dont want to play tryndamere. You commit 100% to everything you do on him, this goes for team fights, laning and ganks. 

For this reason I consider him a semi-advanced to advanced hero because you have to be able to predict the result of every action or battle before it happens to know if you should engage yourself or not. If you are newer to the game, not familiar with all the summoner abilities, champions and items I would stay away for the meantime because you could waste big opportunities and put yourself in unnecessary positions that ranged heroes dont have to worry about as much.

If you like to get in the thick of battle, high adrenaline action with a character who takes a balance of big punishment while dealing out big damage then Tryndamere is your man. Tryndamere is basically William Wallace. He charges into the middle and has all the fun.


First off his abilities


Q: Bloodlust

15 second duration buff that increases attack speed per charge. Every creep kill provides a charge, new ranks of the spell increase the max number of charges you can potentially have. Charges can be consumed to heal you for 65(?) health per charge.


W: Mocking Shout
Put a scared chicken face over your enemies head and make them run really slow.



E: Spinning Slash
A whirlwind ability. Spin in a target direction damaging everything in your path. This spell can cut through terrain and can be used as an effective chasing/escape tool.


R: Undying Rage
Cant drop below 1hp for the duration of the spell. Also provides charges to bloodlust.


Build Order
Unlike most champions, Tryndamere has a very flexible building pattern. While these rules are by no means concrete, they can give you an idea of how you want to play him.

A) If you want a gold/burst damage advantage and play with a mix of farming and fighting, you will be putting most of your points in slash first, followed by shout.

B) If you want to leave lanes early and go ganking for the majority of the game, max mocking shout first.

C) Depending how gay your lane is, you may want to point one or two points into bloodlust, never more. Something VERY important to note though is that you have to actually kill creeps to get healed. If you are getting destroyed so bad in lane that you cant get any creep kills, then putting additional points into the skill wont help you very much. Bloodlust levels only really increase the max charges you can have, so if you cant get many charges, why waste the important skill points early in the game.

D) If you want to farm very hard and try to avoid team fighting/ganking all together like all the boredom seekers who play Ashe, you can max slash followed by bloodlust followed by shout.

Personally I think option A is the best. Like all physical/tank based classes, trynd benefits greatly from items so you are really hurting yourself and your team if you aren't keeping up with the item curve. 

You are a far more versatile character by maxing slash first because you can participate in any activity at any point in the game be it farming, neutrals, ganks, or team fights. Going the other routes can greatly effect your usefulness in some of these situations. Thats not to say they are bad choices however, if you have a coordinated team and have ganking really worked out for example, higher ranks of mocking shout can be a gamebreaking addition. Play what feels right to you and what you and your team can do most effectively.

Items

The CORE build
At the start of the game buy a regrowth pendant. Im to lazy to check if this is actually the name, but its 475g and gives health regen. You want this. It also turns into your first main endgame item.

1) Boots. Personally im a fan of the attack speed boots. This build doesn't provide attack speed until very late in the game so you will be dying for it. Secondly it makes a very big impact on your farming, both in damage and speed in which you kill things. Speed 3 boots are not an awful option, nor are the defensive based boots, but I dont feel they make as large of an impact on the overall play of the character.

2) Warmogs. Frozen mallet/phage is a decent choice here aswell, but I find that getting warmogs earlier is more beneficial as you get more time to "feed" it and having a maxed out warmogs is a big deal.

3) Atmas.

Personally I dont think there is any other method of building trynd that is nearly as effective. As you can see its a bit of a hybrid build. You have your snare and slash to contribute decent damage to any fight and great utility. Ontop of that you can tank as well as practically any normal tank once you finish your warmogs. Unlike many other carries, you can contribute to the team right from the beginning of the game and can do so without handicapping your farming ability thanks to slash.

Once you finish your atmas you will start doing some pretty decent damage. Its not like your pumping out trist or ashe numbers yet, but you have double their health so who gives a shit.

The extra goodies

Once atmas is done you have multiple avenues you can take. For your 4th and 5th items get two of these based on what you need.
-Frozen Mallet
-Atmas 
-Phantom Dancer
-Infinity Edge
Any of these items, or any combo of these items makes you a fucking animal. I really mean that. A FUCKING ANIMAL. You will be pumping out ashe/trist numbers with 4500hp and a lot of physical damage mitigation. I would go phantom and atmas as priorities with heavy physical dps teams as they provide mitigation along with their massive offensive benefits.

Other options

-Lifesteal (I haven't tried it, but it could be a good item to finish off your build)
-Guardian angel (This is my 6th item or sooner on pretty much every hero in the game)

Summoner abilities

For the first I highly recommend boost. Breaking snares is a big deal on a melee, a BIG deal.
For the second you can go whatever you want really. You could go ghost, exhaust or flash for more chasing, escaping power. You could go promote, rally, heal (works nice with his ulti) for more team based fighting. Personally I stick with teleport. The ability to attack or defend any lane at any time, back without worrying about exp and things of that sort is to big for me to pass up.

Masteries/runes
Im a big fan of offense tree for him getting all the physical talents and down to bonus exp in utility (21/0/9) because of how substantial critical strikes are to his damage set. The 10% in talents plus 5% damage is a huge benefit, ontop of the other solid physical talents in the tree. Honestly though, you could go into any of the mastery trees and have a reasonable result. You take a TON of damage in team fights so defense would be very nice for boost and the 21 pointer and utility is always nice for runspeed and cooldown talents.

For runes crit damage, health, health regen, cooldowns, all the usual suspects can be useful on him.

So how do I play Tryndamere?

Laneing/Early game
As with all heroes this is largely dependent on who you are playing with, who you are playing against and all of the summoner abilities involved.

For the first few levels you can last hit pretty relentlessly. Your health regen should be able to easily make up for the couple auto attacks or maybe a spell or two you might eat. Dont be stupid and stand there to be hit, but dont be afraid to charge up to the creep wave and cut some creeps down even if your taking hits. There are some exceptions to this with the really really ugly lanes, but overall its not to bad of an experience early on. You can also go for champion kills very early on, even at level 1 which I will touch on next.

As I said before trynd is a very aggressive hero. You can go headhunting for kills but it is risky. When I said before that you have to know where you can win and where you can lose, this is what im talking about. Early game lane dominance and kills can literally make or break a game. Even if your in a lane with harassers, ranged or casters that doesn't mean they will win when your charge them and get in their face (even if they beat you up a bit when last hitting creeps). It takes time, practice and understanding of the game, but you can rape a lane pretty good with trynd. Keep trying things out and soon enough youll know what are good opportunities and what are death traps.

The best weapon trynd has in lane against the majority of players is that he is infact melee. You can catch many people offguard because they dont expect melee heroes to be harassing or trying to kill early in the game with the exception of maybe rammus. Over the past few days I have seen quite a few people in lane think to themselves "wtf just happened" when they got blown up in seconds with myself and a lane partner because they simply dont expect an aggressive burst attack from something like double melee trynd/jax.

By the time you are 7 or so you can kill any neutral camp without any time delay or effort. Id recommend asking for help on the red rune mobs because they are really awesome to have first and foremost, but it can be a bit time consuming early in the game. This opens up pretty much the entire map to you to gank, push and farm. No matter where you are on the map, there is something you are capable of doing.

Mid game
Gank, push, farm. The same thing you do with most heroes. Look at the map, judge what the other team is doing, what your team is doing, where the creep waves are and what the neutral situation is like. I cannot emphasize enough that you HAVE to be active on Tryndamere. You should always be doing something. This isnt an evelynn where you may sit around for 30 seconds or a minute waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike because its the only thing she does well and what she was built to do. 

As an example of doing "that little extra" while keeping active. If your running up middle lane, you can whirlwind in and practically instakill the 4 wraiths near the middle lane. It takes about 5 extra seconds and you get 4 warmog charges and bonus gold. Always be active, always be efficient, always have an objective, always be doing something.

Everygame is different so I cant go into much more detail than this. Keep in mind that tryndamere is a hero that can do ANYTHING and he can do these tasks better than most of the hero base. You can farm, tank big fights, damage big fights, push towers, push lanes and so on. Wherever you are most needed is where you need to be and where you need to go. Just make sure that you are making the most of your time.

One thing I will add for emphasis though is red runes. GET THE RUNES. I was stubborn my first few weeks and didn't even know what runes did. I just kind of pretended they weren't there and didn't exist. Its now gotten to the point where I feel naked without a red rune on. Everytime its up get it. If its not up, get the enemy one. Im serious when I say this. Dragon, runes, all these things are gamebreaking additions. They are so much larger in importance and effect than I ever imagined. Take advantage of it, its worth it.

Mid/late game

This is when the game starts getting serious. Deaths cost you towers and inhibitors. The strong have gotten very fucking strong and the weak are little more than scraps of food on a table at this point. You should have your atmas done by this point and the heavy team ganks/fights/pushes that have been happening recently are gonna be going into overdrive.

As tryndamere you are first and foremost an "initiator". Before a dps, before a tank, you can bladestorm into an enemy team and get them all panicking and cause chaos for your team to clean up. Ill tell you right now that in a pub or on a dogshit team this could drive you insane because you often wont get backed up. Trust me on that. However with competent players behind you, you will feel far more safe and be far more effective.

Late game

Very similar to mid/late game except if the game has gone this long you should now be an offensive juggernaut. An unkillable, killing machine. Keep in mind you have really good offense now so you can easily push an off-lane and get a tower/inhibitor while your team distracts them. Best of all is your enough of a tank to live through a beating to still destroy a building, escape, or tank people so your team can destroy something.

For team fights same rules apply. Initiate, tank, protect your dps or slaughter theirs. Read and react.

What other fun things do I need to know?

1) Slash is a great escape tool. Use it to cut terrain when chasing or escaping. You can be very creative when fleeing. Sometimes sticking to an obvious running path and trying to brute force or brute run your way back to safety is not the best option. When your in really bad situations get to a significant ledge or treeline near you and use that instead. Even if it throws your farther into enemy territory it can buy you time to run, juke, find another route or have your teammates safe your ass.

2) Ninja skills with your ulti! Slash takes health to cast, when your ultis up you likely have no health. Thus you pretty much have lost your only escape option except for the bloodlust charges your ulti gives you. This can be INCREDIBLY hard to pull off, and you will still often die, even if you pull it off. However this can get you safely away from 5 man ganks and out of team fight losses alive.

Step 1) Make a mental note of what enemy spells have been used, what is likely to be up and what is like to be up within the next few seconds. You have no more than 1 or 2 seconds to absorb all this information so you best be focused.

Step 1.5) In the 2 seconds you are thinking about your enemies abilities, you must also have an escape route planned. If you are in the enemy base, the wall right in the middle of 2 lanes if possible is your best option as an example.

Step 2) Get as close to your escape route or as close as humanly possible. This can be insanely hard with all of the snares and stuns in the game.

Step 3, 4 and 5) All of these have to happen within about a second of each other so im grouping them up. First you boost, get rid of snares, roots and absorb the next bit of shit flying your way. Next you hit bloodlust and consume your heal charges (if you have summoner heal and didnt have to use it in a team fight use it here aswell). This is very important to do AFTER your boost because you need as much damage protection as possible up because this sliver is gamebreaking. Now you slash over the terrain. 

The timing for this has to be incredibly fast because with 5 heroes on you, that couple hundred health will be gone literally instantly. That health that you got from your bloodlust is only there to give you enough health to cast slash so you have to have fast fingers and have everything planned out beforehand. Keep in mind this is an emergency get out of jail free card, its not going to work 100% of the time. Often people will blink, karthas will ulti, you will have a zilean bomb on you, you will run into a MOTHERFUCKING MUSHROOM, or some other stupid thing will get you.

3) Movement speed effects currently SLOW your slashing movement speed as well. This can make chasing, escaping and attacking an absolute nightmare. Thankfully that because of how bullshit this is, I think riot will be changing it very soon due to complaints. It sounds like in the future its either going to break snares, or to just have a static movement speed. Either way, for the next little bit, keep in mind that snares will ruin your life more than you can possibly imagine. Be prepared to stand still and just absorb damage a lot in team fights. This is another reason boost is so important. Teams with a lot of snares will completely shut you down.

4) Lastly Tryndamere is not a big last hitter on champions. Dont concern yourself with scores or killing blows, the important thing is that they die and that your team stays safe. You wont start massively wrecking people until 30+ or more likely 45+ minutes into the game. Before that you are a tank with average dps. You may get 7 killing blows early, you may get 0, its all irrelevant. Tryndamere is a roleplayer first and foremost, not to say he cant have huge offense, but keep in mind what you should be doing. If you want big scores or play for your ego pick karthas.

EDIT NEW SECTION!

What will make my life suck as Tryndamere?

First and foremost snares. As I mentioned before these will turn you from a dps class to a punching bag. It really is kind of stupid how many snares are in the game and how there is nothing Trynd can do about them outside of boost. Sadly you will just have to do your best to avoid them, or if there are simply to many and you find yourself unable to do much of anything, just go pure tank.

Bad starts. I had 2 of these today and you have to climb up a mountain to get back into viable range. While this is true for many heros, it is really shown on trynd. This goes back to the all or nothing thing I said before. If you make some bad decisions or get extremely unlucky, your in for a rough 20 minutes to turn into a helpful asset for your team. For new players dont be afraid to play on the side of caution early in the game and only be reckless later in the game when you are forced to initiate. The worst thing you can do is set yourself far behind.

Champions that will make you break your keyboard.

Anyone with a snare, or anyone with aoes will certainly make your life harder. However there are a few that really stand out.

Ashe. A single multi shot might as well just teleport you back to your base, it really is stupid how much a minor ability like this takes you out of the game completely. It is impossible to close distance on anyone because you cant break it and you have no abilities that make you immune to snares or can close distance even when snared. If you see an ashe in the game, your likely going to be tanking.

Articuno/Cryophoenix

His ulti and his icebolt, same story as ashe. Walk away from your keyboard and grab a drink while you slowly walk out of it. You are 100% shutdown here. 

These two champions will piss you off big time, but there are others that can cause problems to some extent or another.

With karthas you have to watch very carefully for his wall. If you go through it, you are effectively taking yourself out of a fight. Singeds pool can be an annoyance but usually you wont run into it in team fighting. Zileans slow wont often be casted on you due to everything else he will doing. Other things like amumu's ulti, shackle, nunus slows and cardmasters ulti can also hurt you a lot in a team fight.

Thats all I can think up at the moment, ill add more if I remember. As you can hopefully see and find out, trynd seems best played as a hybrid champion at the moment. I hope this is helpful and people get some use out of it. They better. I thought this was going to take 15 minutes and it took like an hour and a half.