How does cloth+4 pots compare to new Doran's shield?

Pretty sure like with most Dorans items, they win out in value early and over the course of the game but starting with cloth/sword gets you to your item spikes faster

What i've learned is that Dorans is good for poke, but cloth is a better choice against all ins.

Cloth against all-in champs, such as (and especially) Riven. Shield against champs with weak (but consistent) harass, such as, say...Nunu. Or Sona.

= broken/OP cloth are okay, but definitly weaker than doran shield

Dshield is better against people that poke constantly with low damage spells and mages. Armor 4 pots offer more safety against hard AD matchups.

I would say it depends on who you are and who you are laning against. I always start cloth and pots playing taric top because he does more damage with it. Anyone besides taric, rammus, or malphite, doran's is probably better.

great for midlaners who need to get bracer soon.

You can build Dorans against nearly any champion, while cloth armor is only good against champions/teams with a lot of physical damage

I say cloth is better against bursty poke (Jayce, Lethality Quinn), where you need potions or else it won't be safe to cs, while Dshield is better against sustained poke (DPS Quinn, Kennen)

Past level 2, Cloth Armor dominates.

d shield for sure. reasons:

1.) flat health is better than resistances in terms of not dying to them trying to all in you

2.) its sustain out weights the mitigated damage.

essentially you go cloth armor you reduce the damage up front by about what is it? 5% ish? not sure. but its a fair amount. but you get only sustain from your pots. once those are gone you are donezo. you also have no health so if they all in you while you are trying to sustain up with pots you are fucked.

dorans shield heals you on every single hit regardles of whether or not you use a potion. it has only two less potions. (300 less effective health) and 80 more all in health. so you only need to heal for 220 more health off the dshield for it be better. it gives you 6 health per 5. and 20 health per 10 on being. if you are hit you will heal 32 health over 10 seconds with the item. You only need to be hit 7 different instances where you get the full duration of the dshield passive to break EVEN and from there you hugely benefit.

the item is broken for sustain. its too good. build it if you are in a losing lane up top. and if you are an adc build it pretty much every game unless you are definitely going to all in early.

it doesn't

Doran's shield blow cloth out of the water atm

Personally, I'm a greedy fuck, so I tend to start Cloth+Refillable. I take TP as a Summoner, so if things go South I can make an early back, buy a D.Shield and get back to lane with my TP, with both D.Shield + a full Refillable + the Cloth I initially bought.

Getting ahead in gold through the use of Refillable is usually enough to compensate your TP disadvantage, as long as you keep it in mind and play carefully around it. And that's the worst case scenario. If the lane goes well and you're not forced to make an early back, you don't have any TP timer to compensate, you just get a free Potion every time you back, and you can sell the Refillable back when you actually need the slots. That can represents around 1 kill worth of gold over the course of a game, so it's not entirely negligible.

Now if you have a hard laning phase and you can't get away with a Refillable, Cloth+4 Pots is (probably) more powerful until your 1st back and lets you reach your power-spike faster, but D.Shield is better after your first back and until your first completed item. I say probably because if you're against a very poke-heavy lane that doesn't hurt a lot but is almost constantly proc'ing D.Shield passive, it may be better than Cloth even before your first back.