heading into our third patch since 6.9 and rageblade STILL sucks.

A core item on our beloved attack speed fighters, rageblade was reworked in 6.9 because it was deemed unhealthy. However, the current iteration is also a failure. Rageblade is pretty much a solid waste of 3600 gold. Nobody builds it, and here's why:

1. 3600 gold. I cannot stress how awful this is for fighters especially. First off it means if youre playing top the power spike is going to come SO LATE. 3600 gold while sunfire cape costs 2900, and black cleaver costs 3100. Not to mention that those items have much needed defensive stats tacked onto the amazing damage output they bring, but they also have straight up better build paths.

2. Recurve bow part of the recipe, but rageblade innately gives 0% attack speed. You have to get 3 autos in before you even get a hold of the 25% attack speed that you paid for. Getting hits in is higher risk for a melee champion, so this just makes rageblade an even more punishing purchase for melees.

3. 6 hits to get the maximus stat bonus and phantom hits. This is 2 more hits than before for melee champions, and 2 less hits than before for ranged champions. So to get this straight: rageblade was strictly better for melee champs before (it stacked faster) and yet it was still being bought by both ranged and melee champions. THATS GOOD. Why take that away? Now this item is in every way better for ranged champions. What this means is that if this item is ever a viable purchase for melees, it will be absolutely overbearing on ranged champions. You need to bring back the double stack speed handicap for melees if you want this item to be a viable option for fighters.

4. Phantom hits. Riot took a mechanic that they couldn't properly gate in the past and stuck it onto a different item and surprise! It still doesn't work. This time instead of gating phantom hits by having to kill 30 camps and only proccing half as much for ranged champs, they made the item cost 3600 gold and made you have to get 6 attacks in before the phantom hits start up.

I'm not entirely sure why Riot decided to make rageblade terrible for melee and even still sub par on ranged this time around but a lot of the problem is just the fact that they didn't do anything to incentivize a melee champion to spend the 3600 gold to buy it. I'd say they did it for clarity reasons (item works the exact same for melees as ranged), but really not much was unclear about the iteration we had before. And either way, clarity for the casual player isn't worth it at the expense of the viability of an interesting item.

So now we have this 3600 gold once-core item lying around in the shop that functions only as a gimmicky noob trap for some bronze-gold vayne players. About to be 3 patches now of this being the case. Still nothing from riot on the subject of rageblade. The as fighter buffs are slowly trickling in, but rageblade is left in the dust.