5781

I like Black Cleaver more than Last Whisper, only in that it helps your whole team. Last Whisper penetrates their armor with your shots, Black Cleaver lowers their armor for any attacks that hit them while the debuff is on. Also I like the attack speed increase.

5782

Black cleaver is situational item similar to last whisper, there isnā€™t a better or worse, if enemy stack a lot of armor you want to use last whisper. else black cleaver is fine.

5783

I guess cait should have a better early game than Tristana, but with trist I rarely get that many kills. But by late game, Iā€™m carrying team fights which makes up for it.

5784

Grr, post eaten.

According to Therlun, past 170 AD crit is a more gold efficient buy than straight AD. Therlun may in fact be lying about this just to fuck with us. Because he is a fascist. I donā€™t know where the math comes from. Assuming this is correct for a moment, finishing PD from Zeal is roughly equivalent to buying a BF sword. So Cait should finish her PD. PD is a major DPS booster since it adds like 20 crit and 35 AS over Zeal (the move speed is just icing. Delicious, chocolate icing). At this point I am at 1.5+ attack speed, 55 crit chance, with 2.5 damage crits. Lovely.

What you do next, and sometimes what you do from Zeal, is a little more complicated. Yes, thereā€™s times where BC is better than LW. LW scales much better, though itā€™s possible the enemy will never stack armor until that point (if they stack health you may need to adjust accordingly). None the less, itā€™s cheaper and I usually go with LW after PD (and Iā€™ve done BC on her all of once), before BT.

Sometimes before finishing PD you need to get more Armor Pen. Itā€™s a very situational thing. But maybe the real problem isnā€™t Vayne or Annie but Lee Sin. If itā€™s Lee Sin,and he has Atmas and Wriggles, heā€™s probably sitting on 120-130 armor. LW will probably make you kill him in 4 seconds. Iā€™ve swung games in this fashion.

So I go IE, Zeal (both the exact order there is really situational, but I sometimes have zeal before IE is finished), finish PD (usually), LW (usually), BT. But I usually have defenses before BT is finished (or started) and itā€™s rare a game goes that long. Iā€™m totally ok with relying on LW for pen purposes even when enemy armor is in the 80-100 range. Which it frequently will be, even on ā€œnakedā€ carries.

Lastly, I fooled around with a flat-pen build on MF for a little bit. Reds, Quints, masteries is like 31 pen or something. Brutalizer, BC, Starks and youā€™re at like 110+. But I felt like this build was especially dependent on getting out to a farm/game lead. Kind of hilarious though; people look at you and figure your damage as being too low, not considering that you are practically doing true damage or are doing true damage. No reason Cait canā€™t do this, but it never felt like a SRS build. Also, I have trouble imagining not using flat AD quints at this point.

5785

Therlun is most likely wrong, he probably only calculated if you only use auto attack, except most of the AD carries have AD scaling skills which doesnā€™t get affected by crit.

especially on characters like Vayne where adding more attack makes her Tumble attack even more deadly.

5786

Do you know how beautiful it is to pick Rammus against an entire team that uses AD? They should have sent a poet.

5787

Of course heā€™s talking about auto attack. Therlun probably assumed we could figure all the additional stuff out for ourselves. Or some of us could anyway.

5788

Therlun likes to forget about this entirely, which is why he builds Vayne the most retarded way possibleā€¦ maxing her W and thinking that it does more damage to proc the true damage, even though itā€™s nearly impossible to do so in 5v5 teamfights.

He conveniently forgets that itā€™s the Q>E combo that already procs her Silver Bolts, trying to proc it from auto attacks is just stupid.

5789

except that makes the whole statement crit > AD past 170 useless, because out of all range AD carries, only tristana have 1 skill that scale off AD, every other range AD champion at least have 2-3ā€¦

5790

Like Therlun, I too assumed people could figure this out for themselves. I donā€™t particularly care if people can figure it out for themselves though (I might find it funny if they canā€™t). As previously noted, I donā€™t even know if itā€™s accurate for auto attacks (I added the last part because I have some doubts about your ability to realize I was just talking about auto attacks), and thanks to you I have stopped caring. Instead, Iā€™ve decided to stop wishing Therlun would fall out of a plane and wish you would instead. Itā€™s true thatā€™s partly just to mix things up. But thatā€™s only like 15% of the reason.

5791

In league of legend, your goal is to kill towers and nexus, which means the only thing you need to build is Attack speed and AD items, because you canā€™t crit on towers.

so Protip : AD > Crit!!! you need to build AD on everyone.

AD = OP, Riot nerf plz.

5792

Yes, Idrisz is obviously right. Thatā€™s why AD casters are so good late game. AD is OP, crit is sillyā€¦

5793

Haha, while I love this post idrisz does bring up a good point for Caitlyn in particular. Unlike Ashe or Tristana who do all their damage by standing there autoattacking, for most of the game Caitlyn does like half her damage with her Peacemaker and her ult is pretty crap until youā€™ve stacked up a bunch of bonus AD. Rushing a Phantom Dancer wonā€™t actually help her damage output the way it does Asheā€™s just because they work so differently despite both being AD carries. Because of this a Last Whisper will also be more useful than a Black Cleaver for most of the game, because since her Q and R donā€™t count as autoattacks they donā€™t get any armor pen from BC (and youā€™ll lose your BC stacks on someone while theyā€™re casting) but they do get the pen from LW.

On the topic of things that do more damage than you expect while autoattacking, mathcraft says if someone has less than 160 armor Starkā€™s Fervor will give you personally more damage than a fully stacked Bloodthirster. The team aura is pure bonus.

5794

Asheā€™s volley scales off her AD which is something you spam for high damage.

5795

So what you are saying is that I shouldnā€™t be building Cait (ignoring boots and possible Doranā€™s Blades) - Bloodthirster : Phantom Dancer : Last Whisper : other stuff?

Once again, I think Iā€™m too dependent on having life steal. I really love being able to whap some creeps and instantly be back at full health (or, looking at it another way, essentially get free health as a byproduct of farm).

Of course I suck, so Iā€™m willing to look at it differently.

P.S. Does something like Cloak and Dagger (to offset the fact that I donā€™t get tenacity from boots on Cait) ever come into play for Cait? Iā€™ve been operating under the, ā€œIf you need tenacity on Cait, it means you were somewhere in a fight you shouldnā€™t have been.ā€ But while I think thatā€™s cute, perhaps it might be intelligent to pick up tenacity from an item that provides other boons to an AD carry (+ attack speed and crit)?

5796

Caitlyn is more of a rush Infinity Edge person than a PD person. Though pretty much any AD carry should get IE. Lifesteal is amazing and borderline broken, if you get in a fight with another AD carry a lot of the time the winner is whoever has more lifesteal. I would suggest at least trying a few games where you get the BF sword and Vamp scepter: switch to IE: then finish BT: LW: maybe PD and other stuff.

Caitlyn is definately in the category of ā€œIf you need tenacity youā€™re probably dead whether you have it or notā€ characters in most games. It might be useful if your team is blocking for you but youā€™re still getting hit by Kennen or Amumu stuns, but itā€™s pretty scenario dependent.

5797

Might even be to buy a quick silver slash if the enemy team stuns, if they have lots of slows tenacity should be better.

5798

Good thing everyone knows and understands math.

The point I mentioned is that up to 170 damage pure AD is more gold efficient to buy, while afterwards crit is more gold efficient to buy (and yes, only for auto attacks). Of course there are still other things to consider and different characters still build differently. Doranā€™s Blade is one of the most gold efficient items, but you still donā€™t buy it late game or on casters.
Itā€™s more of a guideline so you can judge whether itā€™s worth buying an item or another first or what to build as your last two items.

As an example: you are building an Infinity Edge. Most of the time you wont be able to one-shot it. You are back at base with a thousand gold and decide what to buy. If you have less than 170 attack damage the pick would be better in most cases, while the more AD you already have the more attractive the cloak of agility gets. At 250 AD the cloak will add almost twice as much damage to your auto attacks. Knowing that you can decide which item to buy first depending on how much auto attacking you do, how much AD scaling you have/use etc.

5799

The Graves patch went out and welp, I was totally stoked about the Skarner buffs. But Iā€™m at a loss. Before, Crystal Slash was expensive enough (mana-wise) that Iā€™d build Skarner for mana, which is great because mana gets transferred directly to health as his passive. But now, I have no need for mana ā€“ I can spam Crystal Slash as much as I want and (especially in Dominion) I never run out. Itā€™ll take a while to figure out my new build.

The extension of his ultimate (the pull) by 0.25 second is huge, and is most felt in two scenarios. First, under the tower: if you can pull an enemy under the tower the extra time translates to an extra turret hit. Second, in Dominion, you can pull an enemy up the ramp into the base far enough that the Nexus kills the enemy. This makes the ultimate way too OP and frankly unfair. My guess is that it will be nerfed back down.

Finally, I know that the Graves patch was supposed to help defense get the recognition it deserves in Dominion (especially bottom). As Skarner, Iā€™m always bottom. Always. And yet, before Graves, I was coming up in the top 3, sometimes 4th on the team when we win. After Graves, in my 3 limited games, I came up last. And I donā€™t think I had played much differently.

I guess players need to get used to all new things.

Graves himself hasnā€™t been a formidable opponent yet, in my limited experience. Maybe it was luck of the draw, but he was so squishy.

5800

basically what therlun is trying to say, if you are Tristana and only on Tristana, itā€™s probably better than buy Crit once you hit 171 AD(still somewhat magical), otherwise, buy AD over crit because most normal Range ADā€™s damage output is from skill usage not auto attack.