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the lack of ap itemization choices

rushingRabbit··5 votes·567 views

Ad assasins just got a new item, and i'm really getting annoyed by the amount of great utility items ad casters, assasins and bruisers have compared to ap counterparts. All of that would be fine considering ap champs used to have completely different goals in a game, but Ad's are invading everything right now and share more and more the same goals that used to be mostly exclusive to ap champs.

Sustain: A yasuo, zed or whatever, get poked down, they go to a jungle camp and lifesteal up, or go right back to splitpushing after a trade. Ap champs get nothing of the sorts, in fact, the 2 remaining items with spellvamp are ad items.

Anti tank/ health stacking. There is one ap item giving you health% damage and it's way less then blade of the ruined king which procs on autos, even giving you attack speed to boost, compared to spells where you have to wait for cooldowns. Sure, you get a nice burst of Health% damage from an ability rotation but when trading against a juggernaut for example, if you add the utility options for ad's i mention later, it becomes much easier to kite those juggernauts and consistently deal that health% damage.

Penetration items: If you compare the list or armor and magic pen items it gets pretty obvious how useful and overloaded armor pen is against the magic pen items, only advantage they have is that they are a lot cheaper which massively hurts at full item builds and comparing how much bang ad's get for their item spots compared to ap's

Utility: With the Frost Queens Claim, Ap's finally got a decent chase item that is also very useful beyond that, but if you consider it's a support item that proved useful for other mages makes the whole thing a little bitter. And overall Ap's got some nice movement speed items with the introduction of ether wisp, but comparing it to an ad with ghostblade and blade of the ruined king, iceborn gauntlet, trinity force and frozen mallet and dead mans plate, the 2 items with slows for ap's and no speedburst items kinda pale in comparison.

Burst: Ap champs have Ludens Echo and Lich bane to help with some burst. Ad champs have Blade of the ruined king, Ravenous Hydra, Trinity Force and now even a new one in duskbalde which is pretty much a better version of an old ap burst item that got taken out? I mean, what is that?

Defense: This is less one sided then the other ones because Ad champs actually have to go for tank items to get armor while ap's have zhonyas with a really great passive, and abyssal is a great item against heavy magic damage. On the other side you have Maw of Malmortius which is very good, but the one item here that really needs an ap counterpart is Mercurial Scimitar which i think outshines Hourglass. Being able to trade back and be mobile while saving yourself from sure death is way more versatile then what hourglass offers. It has less counterplay because hourglass can't be activated during hard cc and in a lot of situations leaves you just as vulnerable as you were when you activated. In my opinion qss needs an ap upgrade like the Scimitar is for ad's

2 Comments

67chrome2 votes

Most of this I can at least agree with and see where you're coming from, but not this:

Penetration items: If you compare the list or armor and magic pen items it gets pretty obvious how useful and overloaded armor pen is against the magic pen items, only advantage they have is that they are a lot cheaper which massively hurts at full item builds and comparing how much bang ad's get for their item spots compared to ap's

item 3036 item 3033 item 3035 specifically working vs. _bonus _armor makes them increase overall DPS output vs. squishy targets by essentially nothing: which makes them very unreliable as a means to increase DPS in general. item 3135 Alternativly Void Staff works off of total MR: making it very relaible as a secondary multiplyer vs. even squishy targets when you start getting large amounts of AP, while maintaining better anti-tank potential than the AD variants due to tanks having a lot of base armor and MR you hit 100% of with Void and 0% with Whisper.

item 3156 item 3134 item 3142 All provide rather low levels of flat armor penetration, making it fairly difficult to gain much of an advantage with flat pen here. item 3136 item 3020 item 3001 Alternatively, you get more flat magic pen for a much lower gold investment here as well.

item 3071 Black Cleaver only penetrates armor -after- you smack someone upside the head with a physical damage source, meaning you get 0.00% bonus DPS on the first hit: and only getting the maximum 30% armor shred on the 7th time you deal physical damage to your target. This is substantially worse than Void Staff penetrating 35% of magic resistance on every source of magic damage you unleash all the time every time.

Concerning penetrations: it's also worth mentioning base armor tends to start at ~20 and grow up to ~75 on average. Base stats are also pretty close in general: a tank is going to be a tank from items/runes/masteries/abilities, generally never from their actual bases: same goes for squish being squish.

(funny side note: Sona @18 beats Shen @18 in HP and armor via bases).

Armor items also generally provide more armor than MR items, armor items have a wider selection for tanky and tanky DPS champions, and due to towers/baron/minions/dragon/auto-attacks all being of the physical persuation: it's more advantageous to build higher armor than MR even when itemization flips that around. With that: Armor is usually ~35% to ~50% higher than MR.

Which is really important concerning flat-penetrations and itemization. Contradictory to their name, flat penetrations actually get countered pretty hard by armor/mr, not the other way around (where %penetrations counter armor and MR and are countered by a lack of them).

Vs. 30 MR: 30 magic penetration will cause you're attacks to do TRUE DAMAGE, penetrating all the MR your opponent has. Vs. 300 MR: you won't.

Penetrating 30 MR to 0 is the equivalent of 30% more damage. Penetrating 300 MR to 270 is the equivalent of ~8 more damage

Concerning %Penetrations: those actually work how you'd expect a stat specifically named as a counter-stat would work.

Penetration 30 MR with 35% penetrations offers a piddling increase of ~8% damage. Where penetrating 300 MR with 35% penetrations offers an increase of ~36% damage Penetrating 300 armor consisting of 75 base and 225 bonus with 45% bonus armor penetration offers an increase of ~34% damage.

Annnnd to make a long post even longer, average game length is ~33 minutes and sees ~11,000 gold per player almost exactly: which works out to roughly 1k in boots, 3 major 3k items, and 1k in the bank when someone's Nexus explodes.

As such - while it's possible for armor values to get high enough where both Whisper upgrade's 45% vs. Bonus armor eventually exceeds the tank-busting potential of Void Stave's 35% total, it's unrealistic for that level of defense to be achieved at any point in an average game, where such levels of defense only occur once every ~5 games for the last ~10% of that game, making Void Staff better ~98%ish of the time.

With this in mind: it's also worth considering maximum penetrations available by sticking to a 3 major item build+boots, and considering the trade-offs involved in actually running a max-pen build. item 3135 item 3020 are a good or mostly good idea on every AP carry regardless of the situation. Due to runes/masteries/aura-items like item 3105 item 3190 existing, and the massive amount of AP needed to simply double magical DPS vs. the base and AP ratio multiplaction factor Void provides, you want to get Void Staff as 3rd major AP item on essentially every AP carry.

TLDR:

AP having higher flat-penetration levels available, for less gold, vs. with opponents that have lower MR, means AP has better itemization in regards to penetration. Void Staff's 35% vs. total MR also beats both of the Whisper upgrade's 45% vs. bonus armor in any realistic game.

For the purposes of itemization for penetrations for the purposes of increasing DPS by penetrating, AP itemization is better than AD itemization.

rushingRabbit3 votes

Okay, you are right. I read your whole post and you defenetly convinced me with the detailed description, and i did not know last whispers upgrades only work off bonus armor. Now i finally understand why it's being said that those items are weaker. The only thing i can say against that is that The base magic pen items are very situational with abyssal being a lot weaker against ad teams and haunting guise being an item i actually never considered buying on anything besides rumble (which might be my own fault, but it never really felt like a good purchase.) But otherwise i defenetly gotta concede that my point on the pen items of my original post is wrong

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