The silliest meme theorycrafting: using lethal tempo so you don't have to buy ASPD items

We've all been doing it wrong bois. The REAL HOTNESS with lethal tempo isn't exceeding the attack speed cap; it's using the crazy AS/lvl to just not buy those silly zeal items!

Hell yeah, just buy IE>ER or ER>IE into even more AD (maybe even buy multiple IEs because why the hell not bois)! Fuck the double zeal tyranny! Who needs that extra movespeed to kite? Just buy a fucking Ghostblade, you wuss. Now that you don't NEED those silly-ass zeal items wasting slots, you're free to buy ALL THE AD YOU WANT.

RFC? Psh, who needs that when you don't have fleet? Shiv? Shove that shiv where the sun don't shine! Hurricane? You'll have a storm... of motherfucking AD!* Fuck that weak-ass attackspeed. And phantom dancer? Why are you dancing when you could be HULK SMASHING with an inventory of pointy yellow swords with edges so long (LITERALLY INFINITELY LONG) that all your possible insecurity issues are swept away? Get on it, guys.

REALTALK: THIS BUILD LEGIT DOES THE DAMAGE. JUST AND WATCH THEM MELT LIKE YOU'RE PRE-NERF KAI'SA. (ACTUALLY ALSO LIKE POSTNERF KAI'SA!) TRY IT TODAY!

*Also take with gathering storm for THE MOST AD POSSIBLE.

...

Okay, but seriously.

After actually testing in training, lethal tempo + IE/ER/zerkers does auto damage comparable to or better than (?!) pta+zerker's+IE+shiv+zeal to single targets with constant AA uptime on both level 9 jinx (minigun) and xayah if you just stand there and auto. And this means that your overall damage is probably significantly higher once you factor in abilities. However, this is, of course, on a training dummy. This doesn't account for the real world variables that make zeal items good, like the extra movespeed to kite, or the range on RFC, or the aoe damage from shiv, or the way hurricane interacts with jinx rockets, for example; and, also, it doesn't really account for your scaling before or after (though lethal tempo+IE is theoretically a pretty big spike). However, in exchange, if your champion scales very heavily with AD on their abilities, those will pack a larger punch without sacrificing your theoretical maximum auto damage -- it's just that the uptime to get that sick damage will be harder to obtain.

So, in theory, you really can go a very AD-heavy (and honestly very expensive) buildpath with lethal tempo, and still do comparable damage per gold at many points along the gold curve while ultimately scaling -harder- than you would've before.

However, do I think this is necessarily good?

I'm kind of unsure. I think the raw damage potential is really good, especially on a champ like xayah who has bonkers AD ratios and benefits from using the lethal tempo aspd to spit out feathers before using bladecaller, but the loss of the movespeed and aspd from zeal items means that without a support that can help you zoom around, it's a lot easier for you to fail to kite someone out, and you also rotate around the map a little more slowly. On top of that, completed zeal item effects are good anyways, and you have to sac fleet's survivability or PTA's teamwide damage amp. That being said, you can also see this as a way to take only one zeal item and still output damage as though you had better aspd than you really do, while getting the benefits of building another AD item instead of another zeal item.

So... it's probably not the best, but it does do comparable damage at a lower gold point (with different item spike timings) and open up different buildpaths, which is interesting in and of itself, and might also pave the way to some really wacky stuff. (Can you imagine how nutty rageblade stacking would be on a champ that has that many AD items? etc.) So, as a bit of a tl;dr for everything:

The real payoff here is this: the point of lethal tempo isn't exceeding the attack speed cap, which looks like the jawdropper at first glance, but instead that it gives you a ton of attack speed in fights -without actually buying that attack speed-, opening up different build options.

Anyways, was one hell of a silly, tl;dr thread, but I'm tired and in a stupid mad scientist mood, so there it is.