Unkillable Alistar Top Top

This version of Alistar practically transitions from a pushing lane bully to a healing tank that still is a threat to champions unfortunate enough to not buy any Magic Resist items.

In lane, your objective is to play around your strengths. In practice this means you should try to abuse your waveclearing power with your Pulverize and passive, and use that to reduce the cooldown of the heal on your E. A standard maneuver would be to walk up to the enemy caster minions, where occasionally the enemy champion will be as well, and press the following buttons E->Q->E. This usually wins you the trade, but watch out for people with enough MR in their runes. How this works is that you practically melt the caster minions, even one-shotting them with a few points in your Q, and the melee minions need time to get aggressive and walk to you to hit you (if you happened to have hit the enemy champion.) Furthermore, you can extend the trade by Headbutting your enemy champion into your minion wave. I have found that with the heavy AP runepage, the enemy often does not respect the damage Alistar can put out in a short period of time, and when spamming your E to keep your passive going. Going all in for a kill before level 6 can be risky, but as long as you know where the enemy jungler is, and you can overwhelm the enemy out of lane, or even into a kill, especially when the enemy laner does not run ignite.

If there is a very low amount of kill pressure from the enemy top/jungle combination, you can keep your lane pushed as long as you have vision, slowly chipping away at the enemy turret. Playing around with the heal also makes it a hell for the enemy to farm under his turret, especially early on, making them use up their manapool, allowing for a simple way to safely start building a lead by outfarming them.

Once you manage to get your Rod of Ages, it's time to push. Now you will generally melt the minion wave, and have plenty of mana to do so, and if a gank or collapse comes, in a lot of situations pressing R is enough to get you out of there, but your kit gives you plenty of tools to deal with them. Don't be afraid to use your Headbutt on a minion to get out of there!

With the right communication, you're also a terrifying companion to your jungler for roams to midlane, or to claim the enemy's jungle as your own. Just keep the wave pushed (If the turret has survived this far), and use that pressure to your advantage.

Later on, your damage does fall off, but your utility certainly doesn't. With your heal, you can siege very well in combination with your ranged teammates, usually making your minions tank one or two more turret shots than they do normally. You still have enough damage to easily push out waves when necessary, and can rejoin your team easily with the mobility boots.

In teamfights, you have two options, depending on the teamcompositions. It's possible you're the one who has to engage, when that is the case, go for it, your ult will protect you through most of what the enemy can throw at you. The other option is to peel for your carries, making sure that whoever jumps on them, gets knocked away, or knocked up, all the while healing any damage they're doing.

The runes I provided would be appropriate if you have only one rune page to spare on this build, and then you're going for health as an universal option against the varied enemies of the toplane. I personally have the space for two pages, running 16.2 Armor/25.8 Ability Power, and 13.75 Magic Resist/26.1 Ability Power.

The main idea with the runes is to get as much AP as early as possible, to surprise your enemy with your damage, and to boost your heals to keep you in lane for as long as possible. It might not sound like the most efficient setup, but you're here to use the AP scaling of Alistar.

For Teleport users: See the masteries below to get the most out of that: