Why Building for the Situation is Important

Hey, guys. I just got out of my last promo game (we won, series victory) and I was against a pretty heavy sustain team. Vayne/Soraka bot lane, Vladimir mid, Tryndamere jungle, and Darius top. All of these champions have some way to heal themselves or other people, except for Vayne.

I was, of course, playing my Twitch. I saw how heavy sustain their team was and swapped my usual build. Ordinarily, I would go for Youmuu's into Runaan's right off the bat, getting nothing to delay my Youmuu's power spike. This game, however, I dropped 8 gold on an Executioner's calling first back, as I always do when against a Soraka. Fourth item, I completed it into Mortal Reminder. So, as Twitch, my autos are hitting everyone, and as such, applying the Grievous Wounds from this item to everyone. This renders Soraka's W and R much less useful than normal, since they're now 40% less effective for the same cost to her. This also renders the heal portion of Darius's Q, Tryndamere's Q, and Vladimir's Q much less useful than it normally is. Had I not bought that item, they probably would've had too much sustain to ever die and we likely would have lost because of it.

Our Teemo top lane and Xerath mid lane rushed Morellonomicon, also applying Grievous Wounds to make their opponents less useful, though that's only if they're under half health.

I also got BoRK for the % max current health damage to their tanks and for kiting the Darius, and I was working on Maw of Malmortius because Vladimir hurts when the game ended.

Pretty much, my point in this post is to adapt to your situation. You have your couple of core items, which you should ordinarily rush, but most champions don't have a specifically required 6 item build that, if they don't have, they can't function. Item diversity is one important thing in League of Legends that Riot has been trying to introduce a lot of with the class updates. All of them come with some amount of new items or changes to existing items to make the classes just have more choices in general of what to buy, when. And this is why. I can switch up my items based on what I need for each situation, because items are necessary, but situational. And that's their whole function in League of Legends is to provide different power spikes you could opt for based on what you need in that particular situation, as well as just champion synergies. So, you should never stick to one single strict 6 item build every game, because you have the options to do other things and you will need to use those options game-to-game.