Making crit more diverse - some ideas for new Infinity Edge alternative items.
I'm just going to start with listing the all the changes and new items here and go on to explain why I think they should be implemented afterwards.
Infinity Edge: Unique Passive now named Spectral Blade
Essence Reaver ( reworked version ): Recipe: B.F. Sword + Caulfield's Warhammer + Cloak of Agility + 400 gold = 3600 gold 70 AD 20% critical strike chance 10% cooldown reduction Unique Passive - Spectral Blade: Critical strikes no longer deal bonus damage. Instead, they reduce the cooldown of all abilities by 1 second and restore 3% of the wielder's maximum mana.
Archtraitor's Glaive: Recipe: Zeal + Recurve Bow + Dagger + 1000 gold = 3600 gold 70% attack speed 20% critical strike chance 40 physical on-hit damage 5% movement speed Unique Passive - Spectral Blade: Critical strikes no longer deal bonus damage. Instead, they trigger on-hit effects an additional time. Attack speed gained from this item ignores the cap for attack speed.
Blade of the Ruined King: Passive changed from "Lifesteal applies to damage dealt by this item's passive." to "Lifesteal applies to damage from all on-hit effect damage, unless that on-hit effect already applies life steal."
Guinsoo's Rageblade: Removed.
First of all I want to say that all the values here might not really be ideal. I did do some math to figure out what kind of stat and gold values these items should have but it's not nearly enough to be perfect.
So the goal of these changes is to make every marksman scale with crit equally well while at the same time not restriciting crit to "auto attacks deal more damage" to instead let it be a lot of different things depending on which champion builds it.
The first kind of marksman that doesn't really profit from crit as much as other champions is the ability caster spell-slinger kind of marksman. While auto-attack damage based marksmen like Twitch can make use of crit, attack speed and AD with all of his kit except for maybe his W, spellslingers like for example a Lucian doesn't scale with crit nearly as well. His abilities like his Q, W and ultimate only scale with AD, not with crit and attack speed. This sucks really hard for him because for a crit build to be viable, he needs to have at least one item that has critical strike chance and attack speed, so one of the Zeal upgrades, to be efficient.
Essence Reaver was introduced to deal with this kind of problem and to let ability caster marksmen scale much better with it and while it did kind of help it still had a lot of problems, for example while it let AD caster carries scale better with crit it did not let them scale better with attack speed since their AD scaling abilities would still be unaffected by it.
Before flat armor penetration got changed into lethality and the attack speed disappeared from Youmuu's passive, ability caster marksman dealt with the fact that crit isn't as good for them by building armor penetration in the early game instead. Now that most of them can't really do that either, they have to resort to crit again even though, as I already said, it's still not an ideal build for them. This explains why the win rate of for example Lucian dropped that much.
The point behind the reworked Essence Reaver is to tackle this problem and to solidify the spellslinger marksman identity compared to the more auto-attack damage based marksman. With it's new passive they not only scale much better with crit than they do right now but they also don't have to feel as bad about building attack speed anymore, since more attack speed and crit will mean more ability casts and spell-slinging.
At this point I also want to mention that all the unique crit passives from Essence Reaver, Infinity Edge and Archtraitor's Glaive share the same name so that they won't stack anymore. This means that you can only have one of these items at a time and you have to choose whether you want to let crit make your basic attacks stronger, let you cast your abilities more often or let it enhance your on-hit effect damage. You should decide what your central crit scaling item should be instead of having to buy Infinity Edge every game and only making crit let your basic attacks deal more damage. While on some champions it will be a no-brainer, for example Kog'Maw will always buy Archtraitor's Glaive, Jinx will always buy Infinity Edge and Lucian will always buy Essence reaver, on some other marksmen it would be more of an actual choice. On Vayne for example you can choose whether you want to have hard critting auto attacks and Tumble Q's with an Infinity Edge or if you want to sacrifice it for more silver bolt damage with an Archtraitor's Glaive.
The other kind of marksman that doesn't scale as good with a crit build as the classic auto-attack damage based marksman like Twitch, Vayne and Jinx is the on-hit based marksman. For example, half of Kog'Maws damage doesn't come from his basic attacks themselves but rather the on-hit effects that they proc and the rest of his abilities - all of which doesn't scale with AD or critical strike chance, the only thing they scale with currently is attack speed and more on-hit.
To also make these kind of marksmen scale better with crit Archtraitor's Glaive would be introduced. They would sacrifice the bonus damage from critical strikes that they don't really want anyway to let them focus on having more on-hit damage. This also makes on-hit effects scale with critical strike where it currently does not, the same way the reworked Essence Reaver lets spellslingers scale better with crit and attack speed to make them cast more abilities.
To go along with this change, the lifesteal from BotRK would now not only apply to it's own passive and all physical on-hits but also to all other kinds of on-hits, so magic and true damage. If Vayne's Q and Caitlyn's headshots are able to apply lifesteal, I don't see why Kog'Maw's W or Master Yi's E wouldn't.
On top of that, Guinsoo's Rageblade would have to be either removed or reworked because it would scale way to well with Archtraitor's Glaive. And the niche that it's supposed to fill right now and that Riot has said themselves is the point of this item, to be "the Infinity Edge of on-hit builds", would be filled better by Archtraitor's Glaive because you don't even really see it used as such that often right now. Either remove it or make it a hybrid item first and foremost instead of trying to make it something that it's not.
I know all these new ideas and changes are rather radical and that the chance that anything like this will be done is incredibly low but I had this on my mind for so long now and I could at times not think of anything else for a while that I had to share it, even though it'll probably receive a lot of negative backlash and criticism. As long as you keep your opinion civilized, go ahead and share your thoughts, even if you think what I'm talking about is bullshit.
