Building Fiora Tanky

Cia Is My Waifu·11/17/2014, 4:21:08 AM·1 votes·417 views

I usually have more success building top laners tankier. Example: Vlad despite having huge damage potential built full damage with zhonyas will deal more overrall damage with Spirit visage/Rylai taking up two of his usual damage slots, due to increased uptime and more chances to use your abilities.

So what about Fiora? given her lack of escapes I figure her damage will be worth more in a prolonged fight than just trying to instagib with a double Q+Ult. Because all though that may be attractive while ahead, and with your entire team ready to capitilize on the damage you've dealt. It leaves you pretty vulnerable once it ends. I figure with a couple of tank items she'll deal better prolonged damage than she would as pure burst. Not to mention it might make her laning a little safer.

Anyone care to weigh in their experiences?

3 Comments

Cia Is My Waifu11/17/2014, 5:44:28 AM1 votes

Fiora

NoMonku11/17/2014, 7:22:45 AM1 votes

Don't waste your time building her tanky. She needs damage and more damage. The only time you might even want to consider it is possibly a GA if you are REALLY far ahead or a QSS if they have suppresses (this also builds into dmg now too), but outside of these you probably won't need defensive items. Fiora's basic play style is to jump on someone and blow them up. While going tanky might allow you to do okay in 1v1 scenarios as you can actually take a few "hits", you won't be able to do anything in teamfights as you're just a fat champion who is slightly tanky, but does no damage. Fiora can easily 100-0 someone if she has a few damage items, so why make her even HARDER to play then she already is?

67chrome11/17/2014, 6:30:38 PM1 votes

So what about Fiora?

Most tanky champions have a lot of power in their kit that isn't reliant on damage itemization.

Tanks bring CC.

Most bruisers have such a hybridization of physical/magical/auto-attack/ability damage with the occasional %HP, %armor pen, and/or true damage they'll still deal meaningful damage without itemizing specifically for damage. Usually the base damage is pretty ridiculous on such champions as well, Nasus can get a potential 300 AD steroid from his ultimate, Mundo's AA steroid is 100 to 200. Anyways - a squish can't counter-build any of these with a targeted defensive item like Thornmail or Banshee's Veil. Neither can a lane opponent.

Some tanks and bruisers also scale damage with defensive stats, so building that armor/health/MR on champions like Shen, Olaf, Volibear, Rammus, Malphite, and a few others will also increase the damage.

Fiora is one of the select few champions in LoL with no CC at all. She also brings no utility to her allies in any form. All she does is damage - and it's almost entirely physical auto-attack damage, with a kit that's easier to counter-build than that of a decent number of safer champions with more range like Kog'Maw, Ryze, and Lucian. Basically - Fiora has no presence with defensive itemization. And pretty much every champion is going to win in a tank-off vs. her, for reasons listed above. Only time to run into defensive adventures with her is against pretty awful team-compositions (which can happen reasonably often in Dominion/Treelines/ARAM).

Flip side of damage being easy to counter-build is Fiora scales harder with things like AD, armor penetration, and critical strikes than a solid 99.99% of the roster - as all those multipliers hit basically her entire kit's damage output in one go.

Most top-lane champions have such spread out damage they're better off ignoring AD and AP entirely and get their damage in things like Wit's End, Sunfire Cape, Trinity Force, Iceborne Gauntlet, Blade of the Ruined King, Feral Flare, or other such items focusing more on cheap-early, no late-game damage scaling things.

Where a tanky top-lane champion will often see better results with tanky itemization to bring presence, Fiora brings much more with a lot of offense.