Is BoRK Too Weak Now?

LaughingStapler·Nov 17, 2015·5 votes·799 views

I've seen Vaynes, Twitches, Jaxs? and Ezreals all switch away from BoRK (especially watching imaqtpie or other Challenger players stream). 1/3 of its passive damage was removed and the price was increased by 200 (which seems common for many items). Is it really too weak or do people just hate buying heavily nerfed items?

In any case, I'd prefer it to cost more but have a stronger passive. For example, I'd like it to be 3500 but with 7% current HP shred. With LW no longer applying on base armor, even the old passive is much weaker in most scenarios (non-tank champions).

13 Comments

SaltyKrackaNov 17, 20153 votes

Sheep'll switch away from nerfed items when there's a whole new playground to experiment with.

If they nerf Cannon and Shiv's retarded interaction, it'll make a comeback.

KONO RUBICK DANov 17, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Sheep'll switch away from nerfed items when there's a whole new playground to experiment with.

If they nerf Cannon and Shiv's retarded interaction, it'll make a comeback.

cannon and shiv won't do shit against the enemy 5k hp mundo, BRK on the other hand, will give you something like 250 bonus damage on his and heals you

peachplumpearNov 17, 20152 votes

The problem with it last season was that it didn't scale better than crit in most cases and the BT passive shield effect was way too good for surviving against assassins. The active is also really short range and was bugged for half the season. It works really well on champions who already have % health damage (Vayne and Kindred) or need to auto-attack a lot anyways to do damage (Kalista).

They nerfed it by making it deal less damage AND making it cost more, which means you're paying more for less than it did last season. The passive was way too strong though; it gave you more physical damage (not counting ability scaling or crit) than a Bloodthirster if they had more than 700 current HP. But it greatly delayed building a crit item so unless you could really make use of the on-hit damage and attack speed, an IE + Crit build would outscale it way harder since you would just get three shot before you can get enough auto-attacks off to make up the difference in damage between 250% damage crits.

This season it's even worse since it costs almost as much as an Infinity Edge or Essence Reaver but still doesn't scale nearly as well as crit, especially since it's now much easier to get more than 50% crit chance. It's not going to scale better than an IE/ER build unless the enemy has a ton of HP, but at that point you'd be better of just building a Lord Dominik's Regards and getting the 40% Bonus Armor Pen + 15% extra damage against them than you would be building a BotRK.

Sythriel DrakenNov 17, 20151 votes

Considering champions like Jax whom I used to always go sated, bork, steraks as my order of items in the jungle have shyed away from it for rageblade (yes it's a bit too strong atm) and the gunblade, it needs some tweaking.

8% was a little too strong when you combined it with passive shred from champs like Vayne and kindred, but 6% seems very weak in this meta. I would love to see it go up to 7% or have it have either more AD or more lifesteal (although we have enough of this already) to justify taking it over something like Deaths dance.

LaughingStaplerNov 17, 20151 votes

[{quoted}](name=Sythriel Draken,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=gE6Zth9P,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2015-11-17T09:18:55.579+0000)

Considering champions like whom I used to always go sated, bork, steraks as my order of items in the jungle have shyed away from it for rageblade (yes it's a bit too strong atm) and the gunblade, it needs some tweaking.

8% was a little too strong when you combined it with passive shred from champs like Vayne and kindred, but 6% seems very weak in this meta. I would love to see it go up to 7% or have it have either more AD or more lifesteal (although we have enough of this already) to justify taking it over something like Deaths dance.

Yeah, I actually thought BoRK was really underrated last season and extremely strong. It was still a common item for many champions but I didn't see Sivirs or Jinxs get it even vs tanky teams. Since BoRK scales with armor penetration and that's much harder to get now, I think it would have been fine. Part of the reason they didn't do that might be due to Kog's new W but it seems weird if that's the main motivation.

DraqoneNov 17, 20151 votes

The problem with it was that it allowed an easy build (you could back at any time and always get something that builds into BotRK) . This provided an early advantage in lane while also scaling very well into lategame.

This resulted in many Twitches and Vaynes having too easy a time surviving in lane while being late game hypercarries and why BotRK had to be nerfed.

Making it cost more won't change it's build path unless you make it require a BF sword just like for IE and ER.

MarthianNov 17, 20151 votes

Not sure how they feel about it, but it also worked too well as a single damage item for some fighters as well.

DraqoneNov 17, 20152 votes

{quoted}

Not sure how they feel about it, but it also worked too well as a single damage item for some fighters as well.

If a fighter gets close enough to you to hit you enough for BotRK dmg to be a problem you position wrong...

MarthianNov 17, 20151 votes

There's quite a few fighters that have easy gap closers

Yordle XayahNov 17, 20151 votes

Thing is... why would you build item 3153 when Warlord's Bloodlust provides way better sustain on any of the item 3086 items?

LaughingStaplerNov 17, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Thing is... why would you build when Warlord's Bloodlust provides way better sustain on any of the items?

It only works off champions now but I agree some of the sustain issues are less severe than before and BT fits that bill too while offering greater synergy with crit.