It deals more damage per hit than Liandrys deals in its entire 3 second active period. It's built by champions that are the most likely to proc the effect quickly. It provides Lifesteal in addition to its immense damage. It also comes with built-in CC.
To get the AP equivalent of this item, you would need to buy 3 items, one for the % damage, one for the slow, one for the Lifesteal/Spellvamp.
Why is this considered balanced?
Blade of the ruined king is not OP at all the lifesteal it gives is less than Bloodthirster, the most common AD lifesteal item out there. The 5% of current HP physical damage on hit decreases as your opponent weakens because their current health decreases and the active is very powerful but the effects don't last very long.
"To get the AP equivalent of this item, you would need to buy 3 items, one for the % damage, one for the slow, one for the Lifesteal/Spellvamp.
Why is this considered balanced?"
Why would an AP champ need to get the equivalent of the B.O.R.K?
Why is this considered balanced?
The auto-attackers that use it have to, well, auto-attack to make use of that damage. Which means sticking within 500~650 range of an opponent, well within the range of, well, anything that actually has range. Skillshots, point-click nukes, gap-closers. You're putting yourself in a lot of danger to deliver that damage, and you have to constantly be exposed to those dangers to unleash a solid chunk of on-hit damage.
Compare that to burst damage. With massive AD or AP scaling skills, you spend mana for the privilege of front-loading ~6 seconds of damage in the span of 1 second. While the auto-attackers have to stick to a target and remain in a dangerous zone, you only need to expose yourself to danger for a single second before backing off to a safer location. Or not expose yourself to danger at all, in the case of champions like Lux and Ziggs. Which means CC has to lock you down for the entire journey of 100% to 0% if it's actually going to impact your 6 seconds of damage at all, where stunning an auto-attacker for, say, 2 seconds will cut their 6 seconds of damage down to exactly 4 seconds of damage.
Also - auto-attack damage is very late game in most cases. 1 major item in it's still kind of weak, especially if it's just The Bloodthirster for auto-attacking. Infinity Edge offers a reasonable power spike, but ususally you need to be 2 major items in to really cause some damage with auto-attacks and be a big factor as a dedicated auto-attacker. Alternativly, with 1 major item like Rabadon's, Lich Bane, or, well, Bloothrister for the bursty AD champions - you do hit a pretty solid power spike from 1 item alone.
Anyways - caster-heavy marksman have been the meta marksman for 3 seasons running, and Lucian was making a very strong case for caster-heavy marksman being the name of the game for a 4th season. Corki was the #2 marksman for seasons 1, 2, and 3, with Graves making a solid showing in 2 and Ezreal a dominant showing in 2 and 3. Which, reading what I wrote about the pros of burst and cons of sustained damage, makes a lot of sense. They're low-risk play style, strong early game, and solid early game power make them pretty difficult to compete with as a dedicated auto-attacker. Dedicated auto-attackers just didn't have a lot of compelling reasons to be chosen - prior to Kingblade's current shift, Kingblade itself was used better by bursty champions through it's active (like Zed), then dedicated auto-attackers with it's on-hit.
So, Kingblade's current state is fairly balanced for a few reaons:
I don't think Botrk is overpowered and i just think that the other items like BloodThirster, TriForce, IE are just too expensive to buy. Triforce is kind of an exception because it can easily be build from small pieces unlike the other two taking lots of time to get the BF sword.
