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Cost efficiency of items

Warmas·1/30/2020, 3:19:55 PM·7 votes·7,896 views

I have been looking at the items and noticed some of them standing out way too hard from the rest as far as gold efficiency goes. I tried to include only items without the more fancy passives/actives as with those efficiency is more complicated. For example is 100% cost efficient with one death avoidance, but can win a teamfight by itself.

These items are insanely cost efficient: , , , , , (pretty much all support items but they usually have fancy actives), : https://imgur.com/a/8suB3F5 Note that is built usually when is stacked, fully 10 minutes after it is finished.

Compared to some others: , , , , , , : https://imgur.com/a/mBwu7jx

Looking at this seems obviously unbalanced, but looking at the champions who use them you get a bigger picture: is used mainly by : and were nerfed lately still causing issues, is realised by a lot (especially at high elo) as a problem, they also build and .

is used mainly by : received several nerfs at the end of last season, was nerfed just now, has also a giant winrate, is an exception.

is used mainly by : is just getting nerfed, was dominating all last season and if ever became better than normal a lot of the playerbase would leave so they are careful about that one.

is used mainly by : needs no introduction, she is getting nerfed next patch, is one of the highest winrate with one of the highest pickrate.

The correlation between these items having over powered cost efficienty and their users being over powered is undeniable. So why aren't we nerfing the items if all of their users cause issues, rather than nerfing all their users one by one.

12 Comments

Mihalikb1/31/2020, 2:27:35 PM3 votes

AP items need to be either substantially nerfed or their costs substantially increased.

Pretty much everyone knows this, but it does matter as every time the issue is raised a bunch of AP abusers will flock in and scream how weak they are.

Posui Gart1/31/2020, 3:28:52 PM3 votes

Cost efficiency is (mostly) a useless stat. Zhonyas, as you noticed, isn't bought because it has good stats, its almost always picked for its active, and you can't really calculate its cost efficiency Even for a simple stats, how will you calculate it? Against 5 physical damage champions armor has more value than against a mixed damage team. AP is more valuable on some champions and not as much on others, and enemies buying mres also affects it. In mid-late game slot efficiency means more than cost efficiency The idea of "cost efficiency" comes from an idea of checking how efficient it is to buy an item, compared to base items with those stats. This doesn't make an item strong or weak by itself. In Dota, to compare, there is a 50 gold item that gives +1 to all stats, which would make 1 stat cost around 17 gold. So a finished item like Eye of Skadi, which gives around 35 of all stats for 5500 cost would be about 30% cost efficient without its passive effect. So, according to "cost efficiency", its extremely bad item, which is obviously wrong

Now, about every item you listed Seraph requires stacking. It gives more stats than Ludens at the cost of having those stats later. Right now its only used by champions that are weak early anyway and need all that mana provided by Seraph, sometimes also getting more mana items to fully use the passive. Every normal mage builds Ludens first, the early boost is much better in current meta. Also, by the time its finished, its mana is usually worthless. Rabadon is quite hard to build, but yes, its a really powerful AP item. Again, its disadvantage is that its usually better to get something cheaper that gives its effects earlier, like Oblivion orb ER is hard to use fully. Not a lot of champions can utilise both AD, Crit and CDR. Of course, for those who can, its a first/second item Gunblade is the same: most champions either don't need AD, AP or a short range slow+damage, and those who do need all of these its a powerful first item ROA, just like Seraph, requires time to stack and has quite a lot of its "cost efficiency" tied to mana, which stops being an actual resourse for most champions by the time its stacked. Unlike Seraphs, however, it also has to be finished to start stacking, and its stacking speed is constant. Cassiopeia can stack her Seraphs extremely fast so its a good item on her, but every champion needs 10 minutes to stack ROA Ardent is a support item, and supports have lower gold income. Also, a bit of its cost efficiency comes from the manaregen, so is basically wasted after lanephase. Nashors has same problem as ER/Gunblade: almost no champion can use well all of its stats

Now, about the connection to champion nerfs Seraph is also used by Anivia. ROA too. No nerfs for her. Mid Karthus also used those before switching to jungle DH-pen build and was fine. Can't comment about ER, as Im not an ADC main, but i believe Ashe, Jhin and Lucian use it too, and no nerfs for all of them Nashor is also used by Azir, and he is getting buffed now. Gunblade is also used by Jax, and he, again, is getting no nerfs for a while.

Whatever connection you see is either a coincidence(ER case) or a result of a different common feature(Cass and Kass ~~both having ass in their name~~ working well with Conqueror, Diana and Kayle being reworked, and Kata and Akali being assassins with ability to do well in continuous fights unlike other assassins)

Śhunpo1/31/2020, 4:57:39 AM3 votes

Remove item 3146 . Thank you for listening.

Your friendly neighbourhood Kat main.

Vonyalo1/31/2020, 7:49:56 PM2 votes

Wit's end before it's rework used to be one of the most cost effective items in the game. And no one built it. No one. I guess it's more about the items themselves, not about their cost efficiency.

Hazardus ducees1/30/2020, 4:01:57 PM2 votes

LMAO, that moment when only 1 item was listed for a support and gets called gold efficient for the wrong champs. You're not wrong though. Before it used to be crit marksmen items that were the most cost efficient mainly for them. Lately that has not been the case seeing how they're relatively weak later on in the game due to not having either MortalReminder/LastWhisper or B.O.R.K. While their DPS may be high, their positioning is beyond being infinitesimally crucial leaving them with 0 room to kite without being completely obliterated. Compared to others, the marksmen still takes the longest to output relative damage rather than the most damage being the latest and more or less gold inefficient later on.

HeresyHorus2/7/2020, 9:15:12 PM1 votes

Cost efficiency is not a good measure to compare between AP & AD items and champs.

AP item cost efficiency is messed up (misleadingly high) because amplifying tome is way overpriced compared to long sword (AD champs have 100% AD scaling autoes the devs didn’t consider when pricing long sword and BF).

AD champs and items >>>> AP champs and items, period.

ZackTheWaffleMan1/31/2020, 7:32:32 PM1 votes

the most cost-efficient items are typically balanced by one of two methods:

giving the items very clear drawbacks, or
making the stats not desirable for every champion of a given class.

item 3027 and item 3040 typically take a while to scale, and both of them are most effective on certain types of champion (tanky battlemages like RoA and spammy mana-hounds enjoy Seraph's)

item 3115 provides a very specific combination of stats (a bunch of AP and AS) combined with a lot of CDR, which is only useful in champions like Azir Diana Kaisa Kayle Kennen that enjoy 2/3 of those stats

item 3504 is dirt-cheap, and I don't have much to say about it. however, it does have an interesting abuse case on Orianna of all champions (source: my brother is a D1 Orianna main)

Pika Fox1/31/2020, 7:39:36 PM1 votes

Stacking items that take 10+ minutes to stack are gold efficient because they take so damn long to stack. If they werent efficient, then there would be literal 0 reason to grab them.

ER is efficient because it has to compete with IE, one of the best items for gold efficiency long term, as it gets better the more crit items you get.

Support items are gold efficient because supports have low income.

Hybrid items are efficient because theyre hybrid, and give mixed stats that often dont play well with each other.

Deathcap is the AP equivalent to IE, is pure damage (and contrary to popular belief, pure damage usually sucks), and has a terrible build path that commits a ton of gold to two high cost items as well as a high cost to combine.

Hell, this can be shortened in general to "Completed items are generally extremely cost efficient"

Done252/1/2020, 1:40:49 AM1 votes

Nashors has super high stats because very few champions can use both attack speed and AP to their full value.