About our good friend Reaver...

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is going to be a somewhat long post, but there will be a bit of history first, as well as some stuff on the current state of the game, so if you so choose, you can skip both and go to the end where the actual point of the discussion is.

-- The humble Essence Reaver.

When it was introduced into the game in 2014, this item was, quite frankly, useless.

Recipe: + + 950G = 2650G +50 AD +10% life steal +10% cooldown reduction UNIQUE PASSIVE: Your basic attacks restore mana equal to between 2% and 8% of the physical damage dealt, based on your missing mana.

The item simply wasn't worth purchasing. Why give up the better lifesteal from or or AD from (old) just to get some mana-steal? ADCs back then hardly touched their abilities aside from a core few, and most of those had their own builds to get around mana issues () -_- Then was the Season 6 ADC rework. Among the new items and other cool buffs ADCs got, Riot also took the time to make Reaver a much more appealing item:

Recipe: + + + 2400G = 3600G +70 AD +20% critical strike chance UNIQUE: +10% cooldown reduction UNIQUE: Gain additional Cooldown Reduction depending on Critical Strike Chance from other sources: 10% critical: +3% CDR 20% critical: +10% CDR 30% critical: +20% CDR. UNIQUE: Critical strikes restore 3% of your maximum mana pool.

In addition to refitting some ADCs to work much better as spell slingers, this item existed for quite some time content in it's own niche, even if the meta came and went around it, there was always at least some relevant ADC building it. -_- Eventually, "ADC in 2k17 lul" came around, and Riot saw fit to buff, among other things, our friend the Reaver, decreasing it's overall cost to 3400G, hoping to bring the utility/spell slinging ADCs back into contention.

Unfortunately, this time it failed, which brings us to now:

Right now, the item has a 3.7% pick rate (according to League of Graphs), and despite champions that the item synergizes well with being cycling back in the meta, hardly anyone is building it (and forget about it in pro scene. Even a champion the item would go perfectly with, Sivir, isn't touching it). This is a combination of a couple different factors:

1. After the tank update in Mid-Season, a much greater importance was placed on ADCs to build Apen item in order to do their job of killing tanks.
2. Assassins, mages, and hypertanks all being strong in the current state of the game forces ADCs to build at least some manner of lifesteal (and usually a defensive item or two)
3. The strength of the double energized build is to great to forgo, as otherwise you're simply not doing enough.

So all of these things combined lead to your average full build ADC looking like this:

or a late game

The problem with this then is that in order to build Essence Reaver, you have to give up either: the APen (which means that Maokai is going to run over your team, unkillable), the Lifesteal (which means if you somehow manage to survive the initial outburst, you have to back, otherwise you're dead from a sneeze), or the Energized build (which means you fall behind on damage compared to the rest of the game). So then, what any ADC worth their salt is going to do is just ignore the item completely, and make due without the mana restore or CDR from it -- and this is exactly what happens. -_-

So then, now onto my idea to perhaps fix this issue, or at the least make an attempt to.

So to start off with the band-aid ripping part first:

• Take the current passive of Infinity Edge, "Critical strike bonus damage is increased by 50%", and apply it to Essence Reaver as well.

This means in addition to it's current stats, it would have that passive as well.

Now of course then Infinity Edge would be quite worthless, as Reaver would do everything it does, along with even more stuff. My idea then for Edge is to take the passive from old (Lord Van Damm's Pillager): "Critical strikes cause enemies to bleed for an additional 150% of bonus AD as magic damage over 3 seconds and reveal them for the duration", and have that on Infinity Edge.

The idea here is to create two separate categories of ADCs: those that use spells as well as auto attack, and those that couldn't care less about their QWER keys and just want to hit stuff with their bullets, arrows, and axes.

Of course, you couldn't simply apply that passive and be done with, some other balance changes would obviously be necessary (for starters, I have no idea what the correct numbers, duration, or damage type would be balanced on the new Infinity Edge), as well as some champions that would be circumventing weaknesses with the updated Essence Reaver (Jinx foremost in my mind, as she would be able to ignore managing her mana for rockets, and she wouldn't be giving up on her current damage profile). First and foremost this is, after all, just an idea.

So what are the Boards's thoughts? Do you think it's overpowered? Not enough? That ADCs are the worst thing in the game and should be deleted (please don't make that kind of comment, that's not the discussion for this thread)? I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.