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Non-Standard Item Builds: Yes or No?

Zero Shingetsu·8/22/2018, 6:36:53 AM·20 votes·32,609 views

Interesting new way to discuss things, this board. Let's try it!

So my name is Shingetsu. Not really, but details. I play juke-heavy champions quite often, and I do so in unorthodox ways. Generally, I'll take champions like LeBlanc, Irelia, Akali, Nidalee, Shaco... and I'll build them as what I like to call Destroyer Tanks. Not "destroyer" as in "destroy all the things", but as in the naval ship class; small, fast and agile.

Destroyers are generally the first targets in naval warfare because they carry torpeedoes (Riot censors the actual word lol), which are arguably the most devastating ordnance faced by larger classes of ship. Likewise, agile assassins with small health bars are often the first target, especially down here in Bronze. Their low health makes them look juicy to kill-hunters, and their usual potential for obscene amounts of damage often makes them priority one for tanks.

I've learned that I can generally build tanky enough with pure resistances to allow my mechanics to cause disarray in interesting ways. I can get tanks to follow me out of position, clearing the way for my teammates. I can get carries to chase after me, drawing them into the open or away from teamfights where they're contributing a great deal of the enemy's damage. I can lead entire teams on spectacular chases that allow my entire team to respawn in the amount of time that they could have otherwise gotten a tower or two. I can pull them away from baron and dragon - just enough to make them hesitate and eventually have to pull away outright due to lost damage-to-progress ratio.

And I can do all this without dying overmuch.

I have pretty reasonable numbers to back up the validity of this strategy, as I play it Mid, Top and Support almost every game at those roles. This year, over 62 games played... Support: 58% win rate Mid: 82% win rate Top: 73% win rate

Yet every fifth game or so, my builds are trashed. Every time I get in a discussion on the forums, someone digs up my play history and dismisses my arguments because my builds are so "ridiculously bad". Every fiber of the community's being is pushing me to build "safe", along the lines of pro play, despite the fact that I lack the skills to play a straight assassin, and my play style doesn't suit a slow, lumbering tank.

The crux of my question is this: Is there a place for personalizing builds in League? Are the items there to play to your strengths as a player? To allow experimentation and find what gets you the most wins? Is there no room for experimentation at all anymore? Are item builds meant to be followed more or less to the letter? Is there some room, but only a little? Only in certain situations?

I'm interested to know what you all think, in this new format. Thanks for your ear (well, eyes).

75 Comments

the weeaboo8/22/2018, 6:15:27 PM8 votes

Off meta builds are okay. Nashors tooth Veigar? Ok. Full AP Janna? ok. Literally anything as long as you can successfully pull it off consistently and contribute something to the team? Ok.

Stormrazor Illaoi support with no flash and going 2/12/14 with 42% kill participation? Hell no. Which is what I found on your OP.GG.

It would be okay if you were actually successful at it but your KDAs are awful.

If you want to do I run in there and distract the enemy playstyle play Singed or Tryn. Hell you probably don’t even need to take flash on those champs. If I got you in my game I would report you for trolling.

DragonShea8/23/2018, 1:02:00 PM6 votes

It's utter hypocrisy. People look to Koreans for cheese builds but when someone in the west does it then people get triggered AF. What you have to understand is that some builds are super effective against ex comps and can utterly screw them over if you can pull it off with your teammates. I've used item 3146 on Yorick with Conqueror and you get a load of sustain back due to omnivamp working on true damage, allowing you to heal for even more and have a slow for when someone tries to get away.

People will blame because they want to follow the meta as if it's the law when it's just the guideline for the best strategy available. As long as you've theory crafted well and know your champs and the game then you can experiment as you will.

theChibiTina8/23/2018, 2:48:26 AM4 votes

Ah. Took me a moment to recognize you. You're the bronze Akali that got trash talked when you commented in a thread about akali not being ban worthy until high elo. They were going off on you about your "trash builds." I was really sad for you. If you want to build something that's not standard and experiment then don't let anyone tell you that you can't. You never know what could end up working for you. Just because it's not the "optimal build" doesn't mean it's not a viable build especial if the persons play style on the champion differs so much from the norm and yet it works for them. Clearly you play more as a distraction than a killer, so the tankier Akali build works better for you. It's highly unusual, but doesn't mean it won't work. A lot of people would rather stick to what they know works and won't trust anything else and that's where you get all the backlash from unfortunately.

Fegone8/22/2018, 5:58:30 PM4 votes

ok well, it all sounds fine the way you describe it, and he numbers look okay, but here's the problem. I just checked your match history, and of the last 20 games, you have one game where your K/D was positive. in all other games you had more deaths than kills, and presumably got carried.

So be careful, winrate doesn't mean your build is working. It means you won this game, whether you had anything to do with that, or whether you got carried, is a completely different question.

Try stuff out, sure. But if you notice something doesn't work, don't try to force this build and get 1 out of 15 games where it works. Leave it be, try something different, or build conventional items.

FixHealsRemoveGW8/22/2018, 11:16:09 AM4 votes

I recently played Demolish Tristana top with Grasp and demolish and a focus on attack speed, ad, bonus health.

I think it was pretty decent doing like 16k damage to turrets in one game even though my KDA was bad and my kill participation low.

HOWEVER

I'd have to learn a lot of match ups and improve my item build to make it less awkward, get used to the limits to do more calculated plays. And that's like the important part,no matter how good your idea is in theory, you have to look for ways to improve it and then you can either come to the conclusion that it's bad or only good in some situations ( in which case you need to remember them so you can repeat it) or just overall strong.

So you need to know why you lost or won. The biggest traps are when you get carried and you think that you carried yourself or when you lose and you think it's just your team. Not saying that these scenarios can't happen, they absolutely can, but if you are not honestly judging yourself, you will never tell the difference.

So you need to

  • analyze your games objectively
  • and judge yourself honestly

That's all you need to do.

You are in the best position to judge yourself, but players who dig up your match history they were just trying to find anything that looks bad so they can say "AHA I knew it".

I think we all know these ingame situation where you disagree on something in your team and some dude somehow has the time to dig up your match history in an attempt to discredit you. Well this player just lost because he had no good arguments. And it's something that the moderators in gameplay+ should not allow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Jerry SeinfeId8/22/2018, 2:22:05 PM4 votes

I still get flamed for taking Dark harvest on Ezreal. I don't care for Klepto and it gives ezreal somewhat of a lategame.

Even when AP trynd became his best build for a while i got told "this isn't aram" or my items would be spammed.

On pyke i've been flamed for having a Duskblade and GA while doing better than my adc because i should've been building tank and die for the lil headass. I was already working on deadmans as i do go tank afterwards.

DeathBurst9/18/2018, 4:06:32 PM3 votes

There are a lot of things to unpack here.

I'll start with the mean part, but don't worry, I have kinder words after that.

Your winrates say nothing about your builds, and winrates are never the good metrics to judge the quality of a build. What matters is the peak rank you managed to reach. To illustrate: I'm currently Gold 2. I could probably play all your weird build in Bronze and get a 55+% winrate with all of them. Does that mean your builds are good? No, it means that I, as a player, am better than Bronze. If I played that in Gold 2, I'd be trashed.

So same for you, your winrates don't prove your builds are good, they just prove that you, as a player using those builds, are better than the level you're currently playing at. The problem is you only played 60 games. If you consistently win 60+% of your games, you don't stay in Bronze for long, you climb up, and your winrates decrease, until the point where they reach 50% because you reached your peak.

And that's what you should use as a good metric, not winrates. If you can play at a higher level with Tank Leblanc than Assassin Leblanc, sure, go for it. But having even a 65% winrate means nothing if it's in Bronze.

So now, if your winrates aren't a good argument, does that mean your builds are bad? Not necessarily! Maybe they're actually good, or suit your playstyle well, and experimenting with off-meta builds is definitely a good thing (but maybe not in Ranked?). It's also important to NOT blindly follow the meta, because players at super high MMR and especially pros essentially play a different game. They have different priorities, different circumstances, and you need to understand WHY they do things, and certain things they do simply don't make sense in a lower MMR context. For instance, having 2 or 3 red trinket in a team in Bronze is useless, because the enemy won't ward that much anyway. It makes sense for pros, not for bronze. So, off-meta builds? Definitely try them.

But! You have to understand that with the millions of players that LoL has, it's highly unlikely you'll find a cool build that is actually good but no one else thought to try before. So if others tried that build before, but it didn't become meta, there usually is a good reason for that. And same way you need to understand WHY the pros do their stuff in order to not do some absurd stuff in your own context, you also need to understand why they do NOT do your off-meta builds to make sure they are not absurd either.

So, a few examples:

  • Master Yi isn't meta in pros, because coordinated teams don't let him snowball, stay grouped and don't let him make picks, and are able to properly CC him in team-fights. None of that applies in Bronze, so playing Master Yi in Bronze is perfectly fine.
  • Pros don't play AP Caitlyn because Caitlyn biggest strength is her aa range and she has no AP ratio except her net which is on a 10 s CD. So an AP build doesn't make use of her kit's strengths, and her kit doesn't make use of an AP build's strengths. All of that is still true in Bronze, and playing AP Cait in Bronze is just as trollish as in Pro.

And a very very common reason that high-level players don't do something is usually because there is a better way to do the same thing. Why play Ahri ADC, when you can play Vayne ADC? Sure, it works, but Vayne does the same thing except better.

So now, the last point: you don't have a playstyle/skill that works well with straight Assassins, but you still want to play mobile champions and create disorder in the enemy team. Well, instead of playing Tank Akali, Leblanc or Shaco, have you tried playing Divers like Jarvan, Vi, or Jax? It's less original, but it does what you want, and probably better.

DW Diana8/24/2018, 8:22:14 AM3 votes

Ok so I'm gunna hit this one up with a reference to a champion I'm learning at the moment: Yorick.

Loads of people play him, and he always seems to go for pretty core items: Triforce, steraks, tank.

HOWEVER, theres a guy called Balori who does things differently: BC, Iceborn, Gunblade, Tank.

I've tried both. Balori's works better. Moral of the story, just because it is most popular doesn't mean it's best. Build what you like dude, it's whatever works for you. Hell I went electrocute gunblade Malzahar into a Diamond Akali 1trick and kicked his ass. My team called me a troll at the start, shut up after the level 3 first blood, and all honoured me by the end. A guy on the Malzahar reddit went conqueror by accident and carried his team. Where do you think "meta" comes from? It's not just pro's and streamers that experiment and find gold. Haters will hate. that's why Riot invented /mute all

Disulfiram8/22/2018, 2:35:43 PM3 votes

Sadly, you can't change people's heads, and they will keep flaming/pinging/etc whatever they feel is even slightly out of meta... but what about going around the problem instead?

Let's say someone made and publicized a club for players who would like to see and/or use these non-standard builds. Would it be useful? You'd be somewhat guaranteed to at least not be flamed, because if people didn't want to see non-standard builds then they simply wouldn't have joined the club in the first place.

If it proved successful it could also be made into an in-game toggleable options, to be considered by the matchmaking algorithm: for example if you set that you aren't bothered by someone using a non-standard build then it matches you with whatever it finds, and if you set that you might want to use those builds then it only matches you with people who are ok with that. (Enemy players' choices don't matter on this: it makes no sense to allow people to choose the playstyle of their opponents)

Dweeebles8/23/2018, 1:24:27 AM3 votes

I love non-standard builds and runes. The key is though you are doing this to try and find something more optimal or something that can give you an advantage, so that you can win lane, win a duel, win a group fight, but most importantly take objectives. If you are not finding an advantage in some way, even if the build plays to your play style it is probably not a great build for that particular game.

Yes I did look at your match history. I don't think a lot of your item choices are translating into advantages. I would say 60 games isn't enough to get a good sample size of win rates. So these higher % win rates are just randomish. Also your ranked win rates are very low. Even in games that you won, that you had a high KDA, I see a few things that are red flags that have nothing to do with your build. Too many deaths, CS is very low, 3.2 per minute, you need to at least double this. You are down in gold early on in your matchups. Your gold is the lowest on your team, sometimes one of the lowest in the game. Damage output is low. Most importantly sometimes your damage to objectives and turrets is very low, you have some games where you have dealt zero damage to turrets and objectives in a victory, I am not sure how that is even possible.... And in many of your victories there are 1 or 2 other players that are hard carrying the game. All this points to random win rates.

All that being said, you will find as you improve these things and play better opponents non-standard builds are harder to use because your opponent can take advantage of something if you are not building in a way that gets you some sort of advantage. Remember the pros and streamers have played hundreds of games with these champs, they don't know everything and there are definitely cool advantages to find, but they certainly know a lot.

Good luck!

Beached Manatee8/23/2018, 3:36:17 PM3 votes

I build all sorts of nonmeta builds because that's kinda my hook. For example, I play large amounts of AP Miss Fortune Support because nothing thrills me more than bursting unsuspecting people with mixed damage who would never expect a support MF, an AP one at that, to deal damage. I also only play Sona DH because the satisfaction of terrifying your enemies with surprise one shots and what not is sublime. I build Thresh as an Enchanter to protect more fully and completely once in the middle of everything. I generally build enchanters as Tanks (primarily Janna) to take advantage of built-in cc while making use of Guardian to gain extra shields.

On less completely off-meta builds, I generally still build ADCs for full crit. I go Runaan's IE first items on Ashe (her meta build being AS instead) I don't build extra ms as Jhin, preferring to stack traps and landing ws.

My point being that, yes. There is a lot of room for personalization, even with such a powerful damage meta currently going on.

Fondling Gems8/22/2018, 7:43:12 AM2 votes

People can be dumb, play around your strengths rather than trying to offset your weaknesses. If you struggle to play a squishy burst champion then don't stack pure damage. If you find success on other builds though then do that.

Also note that pro players aren't always right. I don't know if you were here for it but players found that building the old AP jg item, Runeglaive, on mid lane Ezreal was super effective. Pro players picked it up and it became super popular, to the point where the item ended up getting reworked. However it is worth noting that the build technically existed quite a long time before anyone, pro players included, realized it.

Pro players are definitely worth listening to, they are good for a reason, but they are not all knowing, and their advice is not always applicable. Different elo's follow different rules, and pros will actually end up stuck well below their elo for a long time on season changes because they don't understand that.

Do what works for you, as you climb and get better you may find that it stops being as effective, so you will adapt your build more. That is part of the game. Items exist to be choices.

MasterDClone8/22/2018, 7:44:47 AM2 votes

You can build whatever you choose too, everything the community says down to you doesn't matter if you manage to beat most of em down anyway. PLaying different builds and strategy's are what keep the game new and refreshing, but the board community looks for every little thing to use against u to win the argument. All in all as long as riot doesn't personally tell you that it is wrong you can continue to build whatever you like if it works for you, and if you play in bronze it matters even less because half of thos players dont know what they're doing or are trolling.

ps i love the fact that riot sensored the tor-%%%%-e because of that.

Ok sure but why8/22/2018, 11:51:12 PM2 votes

Sometimes there usually will be one dominant build on certain champions, solely because Riot forgets to give actual ratios to champions to scale off of. Ornn is a prime example of this. You can't build him anything other than Tanky, because he has such poor scaling that he's forced to rely mostly on his base stats/damages anyways. When Sejuani got that buff that gave her better AP ratios, I was genuinely excited! I really wanted to see how she could fare as a burst-cc-diver monstrosity. I should really play her one of these days.

TeCoolMage8/23/2018, 9:19:08 AM2 votes

I'm trying out experimental builds as 20-15th highest mastery points Anivia and Xerath in OCE and still get people lecturing me on how to build my champion. It takes a really long time to explain to everyone that as long as you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your build and how it relates to your ability as a player, non-standard builds can be much better than meta builds that assume an even strength in everything or a skill set you'd find in a pro player.

Right now my experimental build on Xerath is a heavily utility based build to stop allies from getting caught out with lots of vision, GLP -> Twin Shadows, lucidity for boots, ingenious hunter and transcendence being the core runes of the build. Use Ingenious hunter item CDR to get more vision with trinkets and twin shadows, and use the vision/slow to be able to poke with ult before a fight even starts. GLP to set up picks in teamfights with E, and to add to a full burst combo vs a misstepped squishy champion.

But even when I do well I get people annoying me and telling me to just go on champion.gg or something.

Worst part was when Zz'rot anivia was a real build used by high elo players and I agreed with it. Got told to stop trolling, okay I respond by saying it's built by pros. Then I get told to stop copying pros in low elo. Most hypocritical thing I had ever heard from a meta slave...

glava2228/23/2018, 5:32:48 PM2 votes

i would say it is a yes, but with a big caveat: you have to pinpoint what is the power curve of your champion using that build? is he strong early,mid,late? what are the weaknesses of the build compared to the regular build? what does that champion bring to the table that you really want in a team? is there someone else that does the same thing but better? let me give two examples:playing battlemage nasus vs playing ap lucian.

ap nasus mid build: luden,rylai,liandry,morello,situational shoes,void staff. what do you want to do: bully lane early with spirit fire, then constantly shove and poke late game while dealing a lot of %health damage and being fairly beefy.

when is this build strong? your earlygame poke with maxing e is frankly disgusting, allowing you to win a lot of lanes early, your midgame fighting is really bad due to bad flat ap scaling and not finishing your items, your late game is pretty decent with a lot of % health shred from liandry and your ult, and the ability to push and siege really easily.

what is this build good at compared to regular nasus? it is a much stronger early laning build, it shoves much faster and does more aoe while being less susceptible to kiting than regular nasus.

what is this build bad at compared to regular nasus? it stacks much slower, its a worse duelist, its mid game damage is much lower and while being better at sieging actually kills turrets much slower

is there someone that does the same thing but better? i dont think that there is a single champion that has the same combination of waveclear, early game lane strength and poke and beefines as him (lets compare another battlemage, swain: while i think swain has better cc and is a better teamfighter with more damage,battlemage nasus has better poke and wave control). this doesnt mean that battlemage nasus is good for every game or that he will outperform regular nasus in every game, but there are certain situations and team comps where battlemage nasus is the man for the job.

now lets look at ap lucian build: nashors tooth,lichbane,deathcap,void staff,luden, situational boots

what do you want to do? poke lane early with w, then use your nashors and lichbane combined with your passive mid and late game to do damage in skirmishes and ult in teamfights

when is this build strong? early in lane you want to poke with your w and your w does respectable damage, but its very hard to hit through a minion wave and the shape is awkward, mid game your damage is decentish but nothing special and you dont really bring anything besides damage and mediocre waveclear to the table, and late game your damage starts falling off.

what is this build good at compared to regular lucian? it has a little bit better burst, and a little bit better waveclear, your ult does more damage(but it scales from ad too and is physical so nut much more)

what is this build good at compared to regular lucian? regular lucian build will be beefier and do more damage at all stages of the game (your w does a little bit more in the lane but its harder to hit than his q) while retaining most of what makes your build strong

is there someone who does the same thing but better? yes. regular lucian will outperform you in vast majority of games, and you can take kayle for example, who will outdamage you while having much better utility for the cost of lower mobility which wont be of much use to you since you cant actually do anything with said mobility

so in conclusion if you have a plan, a reason to play that specific champion that way, and a well developed power curve it would be ok to play that champion. also the important thing to note here is that even in the nasus example, battlemage nasus isnt better than regular nasus at EVERYTHING, just enough things to give him a niche. i feel that is a trap that many people fall into, believing that the new build must be better than the standard in every concievable way, while it only has to have enough strengths to give it a reason to be played in a game

GreatWhiteNorth8/23/2018, 8:59:25 PM2 votes

Enemy goes full AD.

You build full meta, including magic resistance.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

[slayer-jinx-wink]

oortoomeebreesuu8/23/2018, 9:48:56 PM2 votes

People would make fun of me doing trinity force Sion mid. Coincidentally, it's the same reason I reached honor 5 in like two weeks. Trashed in champ select, wtf troll sion mid omg, and then after game 4 honors. I would use Phage proc (60 ms on killing a target) with Approach Velocity rune and with the slow from my E, I would go from moving like 320 towards a person who moves 320 to moving 410 towards a person who moves 250. They can't escape the Q, literally at all, it's not physically possible. With Tri force into Warmogs, I have hit super fed games of 3k hp at like 18 minutes. We've seen a few damage nerfs to Q and E, but the W hp scaling buff was nice.

Tundra Hunter8/24/2018, 1:48:32 AM2 votes

I like the idea of your topic!! to begin with, I'll present myself. I'm a Warwick OTP since season 4, platinum since season 4. I played on both EUW and OCE servers. http://oce.op.gg/summoner/userName=tundra+hunter note that I demoted to gold 1 after a loss streak from tilting off the pool party music..........

Anyway, it seems to me that using "standard build" and "standard runes" is a bit of a new thing. It was less like so in previous seasons. Also, it seems to me that there is an "intermediate elo" where players think you have to (around low platinum, and in silver). In gold or high plat / low diamond, players are more open to alternate build. Correct me if you think I am wrong, just an impression I have from experience.

As an OTP, I prefer to think a little more about my playstyle, my macro, my runes and my build, rather than braindead copying the google standard, that some player think is "smart" when it is actually a sign of the "easy way", don't think... just copy...

Optimum build should adapt to your team, enemy team, and your playstyle (need penetration? need tank shred? need tankiness? playing macro? playing 1v1? playing split-push? playing team-fight?) especially on a champion like Warwick who can build efficiently different things.

Warwick can be a good tank, he can be a good tank shredder, he can be a good assassin. He can be a good macro with bloodrazor / BoRK / guinsoo to melt drakes / nashor / towers (also good as tank shredding). He can be a decent tank (good resistance with E and durability with AA heals, Q heals, R heal, and CC on E and R). He can be a decent assassin.

I personally adapt my build: If I am low elo (relative to my average elo) that is, gold to me is low, I will build DPS to snowball and carry. If I am high elo (mid plat to me), I will adapt: full tank if my team need a tank OR if my team is behind, I will build bruiser if we need tankiness but also DPS, I will build full DPS if we are ahead.

I am now at 55% winrate over 320 games this season, I was 60% not long ago but dropped with loss streak during pool party event with that tilting music. I was 61% over 300 games in season 6 (playing mid plat). I never climbed more because sometime I have to play other roles / champions....... and then I suck and I have lower than 40% winrate ahaha OTP life.

Anyway, when I get flamed for my build, it's annoying. Usually the person who starts to flame me is 0/5/0 while I am 3/0/2 with 2 drakes and 1 rift herald secured, but the toxic player NEED to blame someone, and what's easier than blaming the teammate who didn't build standard... And when that happen, we often lose because of the players focusing on typing curses in the chat instead of focusing on playing the game.

TDLR: YES for non-standard item build!!! It is a smart adaptive choice IMO =)

PhearBunny8/25/2018, 6:36:46 PM2 votes

As a guy with a Nocturne 1trick account, my builds are different almost every game. The most common item being Black Cleaver. Shouldn't frown upon non-standard builds, sometimes they are the best option.

chipndip18/29/2018, 9:15:33 PM1 votes

I'm gonna say nay. A HARD nay.

This is the same shit I see in the Pokemon community, where someone has this super neat idea or gimmick and they want to see it pan out. When it does, it feels great...but the question is "Is it worth it?" Does it work often enough? Do you have a back-up if it doesn't work? How screwed are you if it doesn't work? These are the types of things people don't think about when "meta-breaking", and that's three-fold for this game. People don't think about the 25 minute mark when they're 6/0/3 with AP Malphite.

Looking at your match history after you romanticized the topic, I'm gonna have to say that if you want to play off-meta stuff without being a burden, you need to sincerely expand on your knowledge and skill in the game.

SH Azykan8/31/2018, 2:21:36 PM1 votes

Fizz item 3025 item 3001 item 3068 item 3151 item 3146 item 1001 is a pretty fun build (not 100% in that order, but the goal final build) and ofc boots of choice depending on the game.

usually get item 3145 into item 3057 like most fizz players, then go into either item 3001 or item 3025 completion based on the lane opponent and jg damage type. you can use your ult for engage for a teamfight pretty well. You also have super good backline access and damage for how tanky you are. (and are a fizz, so you can escape or stick in fights better than most champs) If I get really fed I'll just start going for the normal AP build with item 3145 item 3100 item 3157 item 3102 item 3135 item 3020 but the tanky build is really nice for just being a nuisance to deal with.

Sire Hippington9/3/2018, 10:33:56 AM1 votes

As long as the built makes sense and serves a purpose, it's totally fine to go off-meta. However, the higher you're mmr gets, the harder it gets to succesfully stray from the meta, both in picks and builts. Tanky builts on supposdly squishy champs work well in low elos, people there don't look at builts, they look at you're champ and base their focus on that. In higher elos, most people sooner or later notice that you're building tanky and start to switch their focus, which turns you're builts to trash as it no longer has a purpose. Back in the day, i used to do well with tank-adc, their team would hard dive me and waste everthing to eventually kill me while they get aced by the rest of my team. But eventually, i reached an MMR where people would do that in one fight, and then they learn from it and wipe my team while they ignore me.

So as long as it works out for you, it's totally fine, but it's also not supprising if people call it trash when they have expereience in higher mmrs where such builts don't work that well.

Terozu9/4/2018, 5:56:04 AM1 votes

I play Zoe as an ADC.

I play Kat as a support.

I play Xayah as a jungler.

I played Lethality Leona.(that was so fucking fun)

Spoofghoul9/4/2018, 5:46:21 PM1 votes

Yes you are just a bit smarter then most of the meta following sheep

They trash it because they do not comprehend the strategy behind it and so they project what they would do with a champion on to you and see your build does not match that play style so its ''trash''

If it works it works !

Personally i play(ed) all kinds of weirdass builds and playstyles ever since i started

Some of which became a regular thing because it worked funny thing is those same people who trash you will do the same thing you did a year from now and still call you trash when you are already inventing the future meta

some people create and lead and some people are sheeple

5050BS9/4/2018, 10:10:59 PM1 votes

I wish we could use non-standard build but the game is so out of wack that unless you build like the pros you are hurting your team.

You can get away with some odd items (one item MAYBE two) in low ELO because games have a lot of wiggle room. But for the most part pro builds is it.

You also draw a lot of hate from your team.

Eleshakai9/6/2018, 9:14:21 PM1 votes

I am of the opinion that if the build you make logically highlights both your strengths as a player AND the strengths of the champion, it doesn't necessarily have to be a meta build to work. However, that's a fairly complex standard to set, as most people lack the experience to identify both sets of strengths.

When I was first learning the game, I used to go swiftness boots on Kennen every game midlane(this was shortly after he was introduced as a champ, so boots were a bit different back then but not much) and people got upset at it. But my playstyle at that time involved a lot of chasing people, as I often had leads, and a lot of aggressive dodging, so it worked for me. At the time I had like a 70~% winrate on Kennen.

If you're going to do an off-meta build though, you'd better be able to make a logical case for why it works on THAT CHAMPION though, and you need to be able to advise your team of what this playstyle means for the team as a whole...

Fisherman Fizz8/22/2018, 6:51:19 PM1 votes

The issue is that standard builds tend to be standard for a reason: they're the most optimal set of items/runes for a particular champion. When you build non-standard, you're hoping that you can successfully pull off a cheese by understanding what your build does better than the other team who might not have seen it before.

League items tend to be very heavy on passive stats, and for item passives/actives, most champions tend to have one or two that work better on them than any other ones. This generally makes it difficult to deviate too far from the optimal build paths on a lot of champions outside of standard item deviations to suit the enemy team comp. Newer changes to items also tend to encourage building in a specific order (Stormrazor is designed to be the standard rush item for crit now, Luden's/Seraph's are specifically designed to be first purchases for mages, etc.) and this also makes it harder to go non-standard things successfully.

OmegaNITRO9/21/2018, 1:45:44 PM1 votes

The important thing about off meta builds is to do them for an actual good tactical reason. Not just to be different or to bank on catching people off guard, because while the element of surprise is great, it's not worth trading your reliable strengths for.

If you're building that way to counter what the enemy team is doing, or to work a strategy that your champ isn't the best at, but your team desperately needs it to win - these are good reasons to do different builds. In general, even most meta builds have 2-3 core items and then more situational choices.

But if you're trying something wildly different and looking to use it as your new standard, regardless of game situation, it needs to do what the meta build does as well or better. AP Tryndamere from a few patches ago is a good example of this.

If it doesn't it's usually not a good idea, and high winrates at low elo from a small amount of games isn't a good supporting case.

gabetheguy11/4/2018, 12:56:23 AM1 votes

any half decent player will look at your build and not go after you. your builds are pointless and exist solely to fuck over your teammates with your insane amount of deaths.