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Note that this is an AD yi guide, not ap, and my expertise lies more in jungle yi than laning, tho i can do both, tho the orders for stuff gets a bit changed, so ill have 2 separate sections for jungling and laning.

Runes

Jungling
armor pen reds, attack speed yellows and blues, armor pen quints
no need for mp5s or cdr in the jungles

Laning
armor pen reds, mp5pl yellows, cdr blues, armor pen quints
mp5pl yellows so i can maintain regular alphastrikes without having to open with a regen item (esp now that manamune is shit), and cdr blues so that shits up faster.

naturally, the quints can be replaced by hp quints if you find yourself having trouble managing harrass, but ive been weaning myself off of them in general.

Masteries/Summoners
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=129727&currentpage=902#18031
shamelessly steal mog's jungle setup
summoners: smite ghost is pretty much mandatory

for laning, i use 0/9/21 with ghost flash, tho flash can easily be replaced by ignite or exhaust, basically if you see pesky healers get ignite, get exhaust for other physical dps folks, like trynd, standard stuff, yadda yadda.

Skill ordering

Jungle
q,e,q,e,e,r,e,e,q,q,r,q,w,w,w,r,w,w
i dont advocate getting w ever, unless you're ap yi

Laning
level 1 q, then r>e>q>w
e is much more important in lane than q is, tbh. but in the jungles, you need that 2nd level at lvl 3 so that your proc percentage goes up, and yes its noticable enough in the jungle for me to want it that early

What you're doing in the jungles
Start cloth x5 hp pots, wraiths first, use alpha, if either A) you proc on blue or B) proc on 2 or more wraiths, save your smite for wolves. Otherwise, immediately smite blue after the alpha. Then go wolves, mini golems, blue, wraiths again, etc etc. Yi is one of my latest gankers from the jungle, i usually gank at lvl 6, but i have yet to not netting a kill doing so (and many times get doubles). Regardless, im sure its possible to do a gank before, but without any cc, dmg mitagation, or lifesteal, i find it hard to gank before 6, when you get a skill that lets you just straight up beat the tar out of someone.

What you're doing in the lane
Last hit. To help with this I personally like to start doran's shield so i can take some dmg. Runes give me plenty of dmg through apen, so no need for dblade, if you dont have mp5s, it might be worth getting ring since it also increases your alpha dmg (and w heal but i rarely skill it early). Yi is a decent lane presence, but alpha pushes really hard if you let it, so avoid using it unless you're facing retard autoattackers or something else that pushes equally hard. Once you start getting to a point where you actually want to start pushing, then feel free to abuse its great farming power as you will. Again, you probably wont be getting a kill until you hit about 6, but if an opportunity arises before, then by all means...

Shamelessly stolen from myopia (kus i totally forgot about this when writing, lol)


If you know you're gonna take a bunch of punishment in lane, go ahead and invest some points in w earlier on. If you're looking at garen/taric lane or some bs like that, then by all means, but otherwise, i find leveling q and e to be far more productive.

Item build
Core: ghostblade + bf item
yep, thats it, ofc you need boots of some kind, i usually run zerks, but mercs can be totally justifiable as well.

Naturally, if you jungled, you will have a razor as well, to either turn into a wriggles, or bloodrazor as necessary.

With just gb and i.e, i find that i have tons of dmg to stay relevant for a long time which means that afterwards, i can get tank items if im having problems with being focused, or get more ad items if i'm aiming for glass cannon status (i prefer the latter since i usually play with some tank ppl/initiators that i trust to do their jobs). Solo queueing tho, i would probably be sure to get banshees and frozen mallet at some point (thornmail or frozen heart would be totally acceptable against physical teams)

For a final note (since many yi's i see while queueing dont seem to understand this) YI CANNOT INTIATE. If you are in the middle of the ult/cc shitfest that goes down right at the beginning of fights, i garen-tee that you will die, since yi's biggest problem is dying to stray aoe crap and just straight up cc (esp if you run him glass cannon). You basically wait until the fight is like halfway done and then charge in and rape face, obviously targeting the squishier ppl first.

As always, this is a guide written by a lowbie, so take it with a grain of salt. Im no lilballz.

Gangplank

Arrr matey

DISCLAIMER: I read a post saying that different skill levels and expectations make different builds viable for different levels of play. Pretty much correct. So as a disclaimer:
I am currently 1193 ELO. I consider myself to be much higher, and I'm just waiting for the servers to get back up so I can start getting there. I play usually solo que. So this means your team will NOT ward. Will NOT grab buffs at every opportunity, will NOT dragon at every opportunity. Your team will NOT be pro. With this build/guide (it's not really a guide, more me wasting time this morning explaining some of the decisions I've made so you people can disagree with them and I can not care) I usually go something like a 5:1 KDR with 1:1 KAR. So keep in mind that this is for solo que in normal and ranked (normal has much better games as a level 30 summoner than 1200 ELO games).

Oh yeah, if you're somehow too lazy/pathetic to read a bunch of text there's a "TL;DR" at the end. If you think this is a lot of text, turn off your computer and go read a book ffs.


Masteries can be whatever. However you need the full 9% CDR, you need the +3% MS, +2% critical chance, and you need the 5 mana regen/5 sec mastery. I also run Exhaust and Ghost currently.


Before I get to runes I want to talk about some "Magic Numbers." (A phrase from competitive Yu-Gi-Oh!). Understanding magic numbers in a game is important for being as efficient as possible without waste.

So, magic numbers:
You need 30 mana regen/5 secs to be able to spam Q and E. 34 mr/5 and you have no problem.
APen, there are two uses for APen, last hitting and for hero killing. Creeps have ~4 armour for most of the game. If I remember correctly Super Creeps have 14 armour. If you really want to run +crit% runes, I would suggest that you run either 1 APen Quint or 2-3 APen Marks. 9 Malice runes and the mastery gives you 10.1% crit chance, so lowering that to ~8% isn't going to do too much.

So those are some "absolute" magic numbers I've tracked for GP. 30 mr/5 and a minimum of 4 APen at all times.

Some more preferential magic numbers:
50% crit is fine. My new "aceplank" build that will be detailed in this guide hits 51% w/ mastery, random malice rune, and items.

Everything else will be covered in the item choice explanations. Oh yeah, might as well say it here: You do NOT need mana regen/lvl glyphs. They simply do not give enough to be worth the space at all. Off the top of my head I don't remember the math I did but mr/5/level glyphs are basically completely worthless and running flat mr/5 seals + glyphs is inferiour due to when scaling mana regen runes overtake flats.


Runes:
9x Desolation
9x Replenishment
9x Celerity
3x Swiftness


I'm a big fan of Celerity runes. I'm a big fan of CDR in general. I've been rolling with Quints of Celerity for the longest time and am in the processing of switching them for MS quints. Running celerity quints and glyphs, and CDR masteries gives you 24.80% CDR. So with just one 15% CDR item you hit just shy of max CDR. I seriously don't understand how people don't play with CDR but maybe it's just me. Being able to Q every 4 seconds instead of every 6 seconds, I cannot fathom how one would even play GP with a 6 second Q, let alone a full 18 and 25 sec W and E.

Otherwise, runes are pretty simple. Glyphs really don't have a whole lot of variety to them in terms of what's good or feasible. Some prefer magic res/level, whatever floats your boat I guess. I prefer having my ulti up every team fight as well as a 39.80% DPS increase on my Q, the entire purpose of this hero. Sounds good to me.


Summoner Spells:
I ran Ghost + Flash 'cause it's useful. I've switched to Ghost + Exhaust and I find that far more useful for GP. The way I play GP is to control tempo, so I find that I really don't miss the Flash that much since I'm rarely in a position where it would have actually saved me or helped me (global ult and Cleanse as a skill and whatnot). However I'm beginning to think that Exhaust is incredibly synergistic with GP. Having the early game level advantage and then all of a sudden removing your enemies ability to run away has net me a lot of First Blood's as well as simply forcing them to Recall, which does something so god damn super important I'll talk about it later.


Skill build:
E first. Always. Sit at Nexus, deny a second creep. Win the game. If you can partner with a strong laning hero then it's basically GG as the enemy team has two level 5's while you're level 10. God forbid you 2v1 as GP and a strong zoning hero vs their solo. They'll be completely crushed.

I do R > Q > E > W. One point in W early obviously. It's match-up dependent though. If they have a strong harassing lane W > E. If they have a team who's CC spikes in the mid-game, W > E, etc.

Generally though I prefer E > W, and this is because of my spiffy new item build (which is the entire reason for me writing this "guide.")

So, now to the items of epicness and why I jokingly call this build "aceplank." I'm not a big user of DPS heroes, usually playing support or playing my own crazy version of heroes (Clair/Flash Bruta + LW Ashe, Morgana w/ Will of the Ancients, etc) so some of these items may be common knowledge to you but I only recently figured out the synergy with them and have had great success thus far.

Regrowth Pendant + Mana Pot.
This is how you open. Back in beta I played Philo Stone Ashe and opening Pendant again has made me realize just how good it is. I would loosely throw around the term "broken" but I don't hyperbole like that. Mana Pot timing is important. It depends on the lane somewhat and a familiarity with GP's magic numbers and stuff. Rule of thumb I've figured out so far, is that you can use the pot after your second Q (So you hit level 2, get Q, deny some more creeps, last hit for some gold, and then hit pot) Using Mana Pot too late may or may not give you some issues. This is really a playstyle/efficiency thing and is up to you.


I'm going to take an aside here, and explain something so important about GP that.. I don't know, you're either good and you know this or you don't know this and you're bad.

GP needs to stay in lane. GP going back to base and running back up a lane is so bad, it's not even funny. It's like Mundo rushing mana regen items. Even if you're at like 50 life and tower hugging hardcore, just by the fact that you're using your E means you're winning. You can always come back from a bad farm via Q (kill some wraiths and wolves and there's a free 100 gold just from your Q). The most important thing is just to sustain the XP deny via his E. This is why I am very confident in my current build of GP. Opening Pendant allows you to be basically unscathed by any early-game harassment and gives you great staying power. His mana becomes quite dicey to use correctly, and I would suggest that you become familiar with his Q and E timings if you really want to play GP. Especially if you're running CDR.

Back to items:
Honestly, a bad game is me sitting in lane until level 10, I'll have like 3k gold and nothing but Pendant before I go shopping for the first time. I will usually get First Blood or will force an enemy to go back to base, at which point I will also recall. Next items are Philosopher Stone (this thing is so cheap now, is it even fair?) and boots1.

If you have the 410 gold, get a longsword. You'll be building a Sword of the Occult. To me Sword of the Occult is kind of an odd item, not something one would usually go for. But after playing Gangplank for a while now, I've realized 3 things:
1) Gangplank never really dies. Careful play and good use of his W and E (for the MS buff) means you'll never really die.
2) Gangplank gets a lot of assists. Even in games where I'll go 14-1 or 8-0, I've noticed a very strong trend for me to go 14-1-12 and 8-0-8.
3) Gangplank suffers from the fact that items in this game are crit OR damage. There's really nothing there to help him scale damage to keep up in the game. I've tested rushing IE, going Bruta/GB. I've tested going crit asap and hitting over 75% w/ elixir, I've tested all kinds of things. And Gangplank really has no way to scale his damage in a way to maintain himself as a threat. Which is what he is.

So because of all of this, I've discovered that Sword of the Occult is actually incredibly good and synergistic on GP. According to the Google Documents Spreadsheet on item efficiency, Sword of the Occult breaks even at 6 stacks, which is pretty easy to get by the mid-game. Get a kill or two, assist with global ult, pretty easy. After that it is pure +dmg and more importantly, sets up another magic number: 150 to 200 damage.

Back to items:
Usually I'll get FB or a reprieve of some kind and get Philo Stone + Boots1 w/ 700 gold by the 5 minute mark or so. Then I go sword of the occult and start building Kindlegem. You want to hold off on making Shurelya's as long as possible. I usually only make Shurelya's when I'm running out of inventory space.

Finish Sword of the Occult asap, finish Kindlegem. And then comes the next super-important item for my aceplank build: Atma's.

Gangplank needs 3 things: Crit chance, damage, and survivability. Atma's gives crit, around 50 damage, and extra armor. I never really knew about Atma's before this point so to me this was like a "Wait, an item like this exists? GG" type situation. With 2000 life Atma's gives a free +40 damage. By the time you make this in a game where you aren't completely dominating you'll have around 2k-2.1k life. Near end-game with Shurelya's you'll have near 2.3k life.


So this is the basic outline of my build. Philo Stone -> Sword of the Occult -> Atma's. It solves all of the problems I had with GP when I was testing different things like "Rush crit hurr durr" or "build IE and stack BT's" etc. After Atma's I go for PDancer or IE depending on what's needed more. During this time I'll complete Shurelya's and then go for BT.

And if you ever manage to get 20 stacks on Occult, woah man. I had what, base movespeed of 522? Put that on a hero with a 3.6 second 50% crit high damage nuke and you have a hero who will outrun you even if you're using ghost and will nearly instagib all squishies.


When I'm bored, I'm bored.

TL;DR:
9/0/21:
Crit
9% CDR
5 mana regen/5
Boosted Exhaust and Ghost
+3% MS

Desolation M
Replenishment S
Celerity G
Swiftness Q

E, Q, Q, E/W, Q, R, Q > E/W > W/E

Regrowth Pendant + Mana Pot
Philo Stone + Boots1
Sword of the Occult
Kindlegem
Atma's
Zeal/BF Sword
Shurelya's
PDancer/IE