AP Bruiser Item

AHarmlessTaco··3 votes·3,150 views

Alright, so I'm working on coming up with an item for AP bruisers.

The champions I am looking at: Diana Gragas Nautilus Maokai Sejuani TahmKench Zac Nunu ChogathAmumuGalio Malphite Mordekaiser Rammus Udyr Rumble Singed Champions that are ideally more mages than bruisers that have a high potential of abusing an AP Bruiser item: Ekko Fizz Lissandra Swain Sylas Vladimir Kassadin Veigar AurelionSol

Making the item melee only would remove Lissandra Swain Vladimir Veigar AurelionSol, which I think would be a very wise move.

Then, most of these champions lead with a hard CC and have kit-oriented reasons to auto attack frequently. Those who do not: TahmKench Mordekaiser Kassadin Rumble Singed

That leaves Ekko Fizz, whose hard CC are both difficult to land and cannot be used more than once in a fight usually. This also would include: Malphite If we use Hextech Revolver, Fizz and Ekko lose out on Hextech Protobelt

We also have no armor AP items, so that said, I am thinking something along the lines of item 3191 item 3067 item 3145

From these items, we get a baseline (2950g) :

45 armor 75 AP 200 health 10% CDR UNIQUE PASSIVE – MAGIC BOLT: Damaging an enemy champion with a basic attack shocks them for 50 − 125 (based on level) bonus magic damage. (40 second cooldown, shared with other Hextech items.)

Now we just change up the passive to include the hard CC part and complement on-hits and ultimately we end up with something like:

3100(g) 45 armor 75 AP 200 health 10% CDR UNIQUE PASSIVE - WIND BOLT: Hitting an enemy champion with a stun, taunt, snare, or knock up marks them for 5 seconds. Your basic attacks against marked enemies gain 40% bonus attack speed and deal bonus magic damage on-hit. (40 second cooldown, shared with other Hextech items.)

Thoughts? Concerns? Champions I missed that would break this? Things I didn't think about? Stats suck? Throw it out there.

4 Comments

Jerry SeinfeId1 votes

imagine counting nautilus, rammus and sej as ap bruisers but not rumble and singed. the only 2 ap bruisers that currently function.

AHarmlessTaco1 votes

Uh good calls, definitely missed them.

Rathar Dashing1 votes

Usually you'd want to avoid an item having a dead unique passive on a champion. Champs without hard CC in their kit can't take Aftershock, but it's much harder to limit an item to "champs with hard CC only" Sure, manaless champions can pick up Seraphs and Muramana as really weak AP and AD items, but they have no reason to as the statlines are very bad for them. However, for this item, the statlines of AP+Armor+Health+CDR are too valuable for many champions to avoid, meaning even champions like Vladimir, Mordekaiser, Kassadin, etc. want to pick it up anyway, even though they won't be able to use the passive effect.

Another problem comes with the fact that this "passive" has a cooldown, and you can't control when you activate it. If you want to save it for a duel coming up, but need to peel yourself with a quick Singed fling or similar, then you don't have that passive for 40 seconds. This would also work oddly for abilities that apply hard CC to multiple enemies (Malph R, from your example). Would it mark all of them, or just one of them? If just one, which one? What about abilities that CC champions at different times, like Maokai R? Would the first hit proc it, even if that's not the intended target?

Also problematic is the fact that this is a hextech item, and therefore competing greatly with Protobelt, which many AP bruisers use to stick to their targets and burst them down, and Gunblade, which performs a similar function on a different set of champions. Even if you bought two because you wanted both actives, you would never be able to use Gunblade or Protobelt because your own hard CC would constantly be putting them both on cooldown. A solution to this would either be to remove the revolver from the recipe and make this a non-hextech item (have it build from item 3191item 3067 only, maybe) or change the item to something that is activated. A new active could include dealing damage in a circular AoE and briefly silencing nearby enemies, similar to Blitzcrank ult, or providing yourself with a decaying shield.

Finally, it seems weird that you'd get NO stats from finishing this item. You could probably give the item an end value of 50 armor, 85 AP, and 300 HP, in exchange for a much higher price (it does have a lot of stuff in one item, after all).

AHarmlessTaco1 votes

Hey, thanks for the reply, well thought out.

SO, without access to an alternative armor + AP item aside from Zhonyas, I do agree that the item would be very appealing to a large portion of the roster and I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing, but I agree it wouldn't seem great considering the dead passive. When I looked at things that made an AP bruiser stand out from an AP assassin, 3 things became visible: hard CC, healing and shielding. Unfortunately, adding anything healing related would make Maokai, Vladimir and Swain a nightmare, so I opted for the hard CC portion.

Adding Hextech to the line was my way of dissuading champions like Fizz and Ekko from having Protobelt too, but maybe it wouldn't be so bad. I originally thought about using Kircheis Shard, the whole idea being to encourage auto attacking since a lot of AP bruisers have either an empowered auto or on-hit effects. On the other point though, I didn't really think it would be too difficult to control when you proc the effect since a lot of champions have no issue using Aftershock when they want to. With only a 40 second cooldown, it would probably be back up by the time a fight broke out. It would be a lot cleaner if the effect didn't have a cooldown and you could just mark anyone you wanted, so I'll probably go that way with it. That would also help with the whole multiple CC thing.

I did realize it was a lot of stats and I had a hard time with that. CDR is the most important stat to most AP bruisers and to forego it would be pretty bad IMO. Adding a Fiendish Codex to the mix instead of the Kindlegem didn't seem right though. I don't really think anyone up there wants Fiendish Codex, but I could be totally wrong. As for not getting more stats from the finished item, I will admit I didn't really get that far. I hit 3000g and realized thats pretty much the threshold for this kind of itemization. Zhonyas costs 2900g, Rylais 2600g, Liandry's 3100g, Abyssal Mask 3000g..... I really didn't there was much room left.

All in all I kinda think my idea was a flop but I was hoping for feedback so many thanks for pointing out things that seemed off. Always interesting and good to see how others feel about stuff. :)

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