Items Quagmire: Slot Efficiency vs. Gold Efficiency

This is a topic that I've been trying to quantify for a long time now. I hope this post doesn't lend itself to rambling, but I'm sure it will at some point. Basically, I've noticed something strange about the way items are purchased, particularly the order in which they are purchased, especially for offensive items. We tend to complete "major items" as quickly as we can. This is because these items tend to come with major power spikes that completely trump their components. I believe this directly contributes to the snowball effect that Riot has been trying to combat for a while now. And that makes sense if you think about it. If you are ahead of your lane opponent by only 400 gold, you may be extremely far ahead in terms of your characters power if that lead has caused you to cross a power point before your opponent. And while I think on a small scale that is a good practice, I dont' believe it is very healthy as an overarching principle which permeates through the entire game. I believe this is because some items have both high slot efficiency and high gold efficiency. Now, there are two problems that can cause this. One example is an item like the Trinity Force, which has 3 really good components, but the item shines so much more when finally completed (for a very minor cost in comprasion). The other problem I see is with the Needlessly Large Rod and BF Sword item paths. More on them in a moment though...

First of all, I wanted to talk about all the combined items which themselves are subcomponents. This would be the items like Sheen, Bilgewater Cutlace, Stinger, Warden's Mail, and several others. I believe that each of these items should carry more of the gold efficiency weight in comparison to the items that they make up. I'm going to use Trinity Force and its three components as my example, because I think it really hits home my point in this case. If you take the difference between the stat bonuses and passives for all of the components vs. a Trinity Force, you end up with this:

+12% Attack Speed, +3% Movement Speed, +5 Ability Power, +10 Attack Damage, +50 HP, +50% base AD on the Spellblade Passive

All of these stats cost you 3 gold. That is without a doubt the most gold efficient purchase in the entire game. Should that be the case? In my opinion, Trinity Force should be a slot efficient based item, not a gold efficient one. In other words, I think the main driving force behind upgrading a Trinity Force should be that you want to buy more items than you can currently fit in your item space, not for the power behind the Trinity Force upgrade. This is the systemic problem that I see with our items across the board. The more items you have completed, the more efficient your build has become which means the gap between you and someone who hasn't reached those peaks yet is much higher than it may seem. Add into that the multiplicative scaling of items (ie. the more crit, AD, and AS you have as an AD Carry, the more each one of those stats is worth individually) and you can start to see why I think this is such a problem.

My solution to this problem is really pretty simple: make these components much more efficient than they currently are gold wise. In the end, a Trinity Force could still be as powerful as it is right now, but it wouldn't be grossly more powerful than the components that make up the item. This is a hard problem to look at if you're still thinking in the mindset that you want to complete X large item before you build anything else. Ideally, you would want to complete X, Y, and Z small items, all of which build into other items that you will eventually want.

I believe our defensive items are in a much better place in this category. If you think about Randuin's Omen, Giant's Belt, and Warden's Mail, you can kinda get what I'm talking about. Each of those component items is gold efficient, that's even before you count the passive on Warden's Mail. Randuin's Omen, however, is not gold efficient without its passive (although I suspect it is still gold efficient, but I don't have a value for the passive/active unfortunately). This means that once you complete Warden's Mail you are free to diversify unless your next actual item point is going to be a Randuin's (and because that is usually the case, I do believe that Randuin's is ultimately more gold efficient than the sum of its parts). This works similarly to items in the Spectral Cowl line.

The problem though is that some items really just aren't more slot efficient than their components because the other components that make them up are base items which are, in general, the benchmark for gold efficiency vs. slot efficiency. A ruby crystal, for example, is a versatile item which builds into many other components, but those components are almost always more efficient than the ruby crystal itself, so you tend not to see it sitting in inventories. You'll see things like a Spectral Cowl or a Brutalizer, but rarely things like a long sword or a ruby crystal.

There's a few other problems I see, like how mid game final items (think Guinsoo's Rageblade-esque) are not particularly powerful and how Needlessly Large Rod and BF Sword are very restrictive of build paths, but this post is getting too long so I'll leave that for another day.