Trinity Force and The Black Cleaver

I notice that Darius and Garen are building Trinity Force lately (or at least I've been told Garen does), which made me wonder why this is. So I thought about it, moreso for Darius in particular:

• Rage passive helps for sticking to enemies. Both Tri and BC have it, and in fact BC has a stronger version that triggers on any physical damage rather than just autos. However, Trinity has +5% Movement Speed on it too. Darius with boots basically gets Rage's MS passively from Trinity, and that's before Trinity's OWN Rage passive. Which is fairly easy to maintain for Darius because of how his skills work.

• Cooldown reduction for more ability usage. Both Tri and BC have 20% CDR, but Tri also gives +250 Mana so Darius can use more abilities.

• Damage, obviously. BC gives 40 AD to Tri's 25, but Tri backs that up by adding 200% Base AD to your next auto after using an ability. This pairs nicely with Darius' W being a fairly low-CD auto reset. BC provides up to 24% armor shred, but only after landing six physical hits, which is a moot point when Darius gains 25% unconditional armor penetration from his E at rank 3 (and 35% at max rank).

• Some extra Health. BC gives 150 more HP than Tri does, which is an entire Ruby Crystal's worth of HP, so yay?

This just tells me something's not right here, considering Darius' rework was literally made with Black Cleaver in mind.

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At first glance, I'd say that Trinity just needs its damage spread out a bit rather than getting huge chunks of it via frequent Spellblade triggers. Also dial back on its CDR a bit (20% is honestly excessive on an item with a large Spellblade effect, considering this is an item that used to get by while having no CDR at all back in the day).

Trinity Force

_Recurve Bow (1000) + Sheen (1050) + Phage (1250) + 333 = 3633 _

+25 Attack Damage +40% Attack Speed +10% Cooldown Reduction +250 Health +250 Mana +5% Movement Speed

Unique: Your basic attacks deal 5 (+15% Base AD) bonus Physical Damage on-hit.

Unique - Spellblade: After using an ability, your next basic attack within 10 seconds deals an additional (140% Base AD) bonus Physical Damage on-hit (2 second cooldown).

Unique - Rage: Basic attacks (on-hit) grant +20 Movement Speed for 2 seconds. Killing a unit grants +60 Movement Speed instead. These bonuses are halved for ranged champions.

Essentially the Spellblade trigger is 155% Base AD total when including the other passive, which means you'd need three more non-Spellblade autos to match the current version's damage. It's just a concept, though, you could fiddle with the numbers to whatever feels best. Strong sustained damage, but more spread out across a series of attacks to favor duelists, the people that Trinity is designed for.

The only potential problem here is Guinsoo's, maybe, but I figure you deserve to have good DPS if you're sinking that much gold into two items, one of which has a rather meh build-path.

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As for Black Cleaver, maybe increase the movement speed on its Rage passive from 20/60 to 30/90 (note that it still gets halved on ranged champions). Having the same Rage numbers as Trinity while not having Trinity's % movement speed feels kinda bad when Cleaver's designed for champions who tend to have less sticking power as it is. I'm sure Urgot would appreciate a BC Rage buff too, for those people annoyed at Urgot's itemization holes.

I know, it'd probably make Gnar ever so slightly more obnoxious. Gnar's just a difficult design to work with in general, though, because he swings between two extremes.