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If Early Game is the weakness of marksmen, why don't more of them take Inspiration?

iiGazeii··1 votes·1,207 views

From what I can tell, the majority of the Inspiration runes function to smooth out the early game, offering you things like free boots, free potions, extra waveclear, more gold through debt, etc. The tree seems to be geared towards giving you more gold, and ADCs love gold.

However, with the exception of Ezreal and his Kleptomancy shenanigans, very few marksmen actually build Inspiration, even secondary. The dominant builds all involve some combination of Precision, Domination, and Sorcery.

What's worse, there's very little variety within those trees for marksman. They generally go for Triumph, Alacrity/Bloodline, and Coup de Grace. Sorcery is usually taken secondary for Absolute Focus and Gathering Storm, and Domination is usually taken for the sustain of Taste of Blood and Ravenous Hunter, or the extra AD from Eyeball Collection.

I'm just curious why a rune tree with all sorts of options that give you more gold and make your early game easier is not popular with the class that scales the hardest with gold and has the hardest early game. Sure, Inspiration gives you no damage, but it gives you so many other things that help empower your early game, let you stay in lane longer, and spend less gold on things that aren't your core items.

11 Comments

LeftyRaydy1 votes

Cause ADC's Also love Damage and having more damage to enemies with less health is more important late game then free boots. Also Sustain to stay in lane vs poke lanes is important to get CS to get Gold to Get Items.

iiGazeii1 votes

But if you don't survive the early game, you won't have the items in the late game to be effective regardless of your runes. It's a risk vs reward scenario. Yes, if you take all the damage runes, you will deal more damage if you get fed into the late game. However, if you don't get fed into the late game, those damage runes won't make you relevant.

Inspiration does offer sustain. Biscuit Delivery + Time Warp Tonic gives you four free super-potions and turns every potion you get into a mini-Heal early on for when you are taking damage, with an added movement speed advantage.

I'm not saying that Inspiration is the best for marksman or that it should be the best. All I'm saying is that it should be an option for really tough lanes where you are at a disadvantage and can't afford to be risky.

Nimblepaw1 votes

Well, for an ADC unless you're a DUO the only options are Kleptomancy and glacial augment.

Glacial augment isn't great unless you have a thresh ready with a hook for example, as it's a 2 second slow once in 30 seconds or something like that. Other champions have silly requirements for the klepto proc, for example ashe would have to W then aa for a proc, where ezreal just lands a Q

iiGazeii1 votes

Glacial Augment is a 2-second slow with a 7-second cooldown at level 1, scaling down to a 4-second cooldown at level 16. It's also tracked per-champion, rather than a static cooldown.

J Eevo1 votes

It's also bad.

Just saying.

DuskDaUmbreon1 votes

Because inspiration is rarely useful in late-game, and you can't just gut your late-game damage and still be useful.

A lot of the runes aren't useful right off the bat, whereas almost every precision rune gives something immediately.

iiGazeii1 votes

So, not going for Absolute Focus + Gathering Storm secondary guts your late-game damage?

I just feel like the majority of a marksman's damage is coming from their items empowering their attacks, not their runes.

DuskDaUmbreon1 votes

Not having Tempo/PtA, not having AS runes, not having cut down/coup de grace...

Yeah. That can hurt your late game a lot.

iiGazeii1 votes

And you can have all of those with Inspiration secondary. The Inspiration keystones are pretty garbage for marksmen anyway.

Boatwhistle1 votes

In lane the benefits of kleptomancy, biscuits, futures market, and minion dematerializer don't greatly out weigh the damage options. The boots rune is nothing less then a risk you hope will pay off, meaning hopefully you don't miss out on way more valuable kills, fights, and objects... also not getting set back by dieing. Even if everything goes well and you missed out on nothing you only really benefit from earlier power spikes until everyone reaches full build, at this point your runes lose tremendous value. They just aren't as worth while over the span of a game over many games for most adcs. Lucian can do it well cause he is a lane bully that can still out compete adcs in lane without damage runes while having the dash to make the boots rune safer and the passive to guarantee klepto efficiency, he is also very mana hungry. Ezreal wasn't trying to do all out fights opting for constant poke anyway due to being weaker until he stacks up so klepto is very convenient for him. Its also nice for him being mana highly dependent and building a 3700 gold item no other adc does as a second item no less.

The thigh guy1 votes

Because yes we love gold, but doing this causes us to give up power over all, which with as weak as the role is right now we can’t afford to do.

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