[Graphical Chart] Most and Least Satisfying AP Items

Building items should be satisfying. It's supposed to make the game enjoyable to play - being able to make your character stronger and shape them into the champion you want to become. I firmly believe that the satisfaction in completing an item can be encapsulated in 2 questions: (1) How strong is it? and (2) Does it offer fantasy fulfillment?

(1) is pretty straightforward; you feel happier completing an item that gives more power to your character. (2) is a bit more sutble.** In essense, it asks, does the item allow you to become who you want to be?** Once you get a hold of the item, are you empowered to do the things you wanted to do, but couldn't before? For example, lets you fulfill the fantasy of being a relentless, destructive juggernaut by giving you damage, durability, speed, and damage increase over time. increase your dueling potential and lets you fight with both tanks and glass cannons. lets you rain bullets all over the battlefield. makes you a huge meat shield. allows you to charge into the enemy ranks and engage for your team. These items are all satisfying to build, not only because they make champions strong, but because they define what a champion becomes.

With that in mind, I drew a chart of AP items and how they rank in terms of power and fantasy fulfillment. Items that rank high on both are the most satisfying to build. Of course, feel free to disagree with my ratings. Below I'll explain some of my reasoning for the fantasy fulfillment rankings. As a general trend, most items are either strong or cool, but not both at the same time.

Protobelt: I used to like this item a lot pre-nerf. It completely changes what you can do with low-mobiltity champions. It allows you to play aggressive, engage for your teammates, ambush, and all sorts of fun stuff. Too bad it kinda sucks now.

Zhongya's Hourglass: A lot of play potential. This item alone enables many AP assassins to go in hard, then come out alive thanks to their team bailing them out.

Luden's Echo: Supposedly a huge enabler for both long-range poke mages and burst mages. The splash damage and movement speed are quite enjoyable. The numbers are underwhelming though.

Lichbane Spellblade: It's a great item on champions that can use it. Enables more agressive mages to burst, seige, and DPS.

Rylai's Crystal Scepter: This item can completely renovate the playstyle of a champion, and empowers suitable users to kite and chase. Unfortunately, suitable users are few and far in between.

Banshee's Veil: OK I guess. I don't find the shield very exciting, but it's still nifty.

Morellonomicon: The CRD and MP lets mages spam skills more, which is cool. Otherwise, one of the strongest AP items.

Hextech GLP: Interesting item, but it does a whole bunch of things at once. It seems to have a bit of an identity crisis. It's cool for mid-range mages, I guess.

Rod of Ages: Tanky, slow ramp-up item. Slow ramp-ups aren't really that fun in the current meta, though.

Liandry's Torment: I feel stronger for buying this, but in some sort of nondescript way...it's a bit too well-rounded.

AaS/ SE: Like RoA but even slower ramp-up. You basically feel useless early game in exchange for feeling somewhat useful late gate (but still get outscaled hard by hyper-carries). I dislike building this item.

Rabadon's DeathCap: Lets me deal more damage, I guess. But for its price I'd expect something more dramatic.

Void Staff: Lets me shred through tanks, except it doesn't. The %Mpen is not nearly enough for most mages to really hurt tanks. It's basically stats on a stick.