Monday 26 August 2013

On Blade of the Ruined King and its weaknesses

While I've been working on the item comparisons for Master Yi, I've gotten some concrete calculations on Blade of the Ruined King to back up some things I'd like to mention about Bork.
Disclaimer: I know that Bork is amazing, and as the active is difficult to model it's not included in calculations for sustained damage. I just wish people knew what they were giving up on when they buy it, rather than just crying OP.

Firstly, the good stuff. It might be the single most cost effective item late game. At level 16, for Yi, it was almost 30% more effective than the second most effective combination of two items, which by the way cost almost twice as much. And that's without even talking about the life steal or the active.

However, there's more to the story. First, I'd like to point out that Master Yi almost only auto attacks, so he'd be a good example of someone that can use all of Bork's stats.

Lets start at the start. The rushed Bork is very cost inefficient. It's less cost efficient than Ghostblade (even assuming the active is only relevant half the time), Infinity Edge, BF sword, Phantom Dancer, hell, even a rushed Last Whisper is more cost efficient, even at average no armor item values. It's only a petty 6% more efficient than ninja flippin' longswords.

Another thing it's been praised for is the build path. But again, it comes with sacrifice. (First and foremost, on AD casters the two daggers are almost entirely wasted, but back to Yi). The cutlass that's included in the build is extremely cost inefficient unless the active and life steal are absolutely amazing in your situation. It's beat out by all items in its cost range, and most below it. BF sword, brutalizer, zerker greaves, longswords and doran's blades, stingers and zeals, even daggers, spirit of the elder lizard and executioner's calling are more cost effective. And by quite a margin, the Cutlass is literally less than half as effective as a BF sword. The only item it beats? Avarice Blade.

But it's amazing super lategame when everyone has bunches of HP, right? Nope. In a classic IE PD LW build, adding a BT is better than adding a Bork - even if the target has a Warmog's and a Sunfire for extra hp. And that's even assuming only one Alpha Strike target.

Here's the thing. It doesn't scale. It doesn't scale well at all. It has such poor synergy with almost everything. It's very low AD makes it not help your abilities. A ton of its damage comes from the % current hp, which doesn't crit or do anything with your AD.
So most importantly for auto attackers, it doesn't crit well. And with that I don't just mean build critless, if you go critless you're missing out on a major multiplication axes, which even comes with its own scaling stat - crit damage.
Most important for AD casters, it doesn't scale your abilities well, and few AD casters get to auto attack a lot, so the ASPD and %dmg is mostly wasted.

With that result, returning to my first statement about its efficiency, looking at Yi, comparing over 50 different builds at various levels and price ranges, it was never a top contender. It was never even top 5, in any of the builds. In fact, most of the builds including Bork are sorted neatly at the bottom.

So, in conclusion, when is Bork good?
It's good starting sometime during the midgame (earlier if they build hp) when you're not using other items for damage, when you're auto attacking most of the time and when you don't have good AD ratios. So mostly bruisers, think Irelia.

It's good when the active is really good for your situation, and I don't just mean the damage as that is quickly outpaced. For a split pushing dueling Zed, it's amazing, having synergy with not only your ult damage amplification, allowing the damage to scale on another axis, but also your strong auto attacks that it lets you apply much more freely compared to its main contender, The Bloodthirster.

Another of it's strengths is that it contains both AD / on-hit physical damage and attack speed. Carries like Vayne desperately need both AD and ASPD due how her kit works.

Tuesday 20 August 2013

Next project: New Yi

The new Master Yi had me interested. Well, anything that can potentially scales better than Vayne in damage with a realistic item build is interesting to me. I'm making another sheet comparing items and builds and showing final DPS numbers.

It's looking fairly good so far, only really the aspect of resets might be left out of my models.

Will still try to answer questions and will consider requests for next project.

Friday 9 August 2013

More on Ezreal and CDR (and also Ryze somewhat)

In my earlier blog about CDR, I told you that 40% CDR translated to 2/3 more spells. But it gets better. Ezreal's Q Mystic Shot reduces all his cooldowns by 1 second whenever it hits. Which makes it interact very favorably with CDR. Lets look at numbers, supported by my Blue Ezreal spreadsheet from that earlier blog.

At 0% CDR, You get 0.33Qs per second, assuming you hit. Add 20% CDR, and you 0.45Qs per second. That's a 36% increase in Qs. At 40%, you get 0.71Qs per second. That's more than twice as many Qs compared to 0%. CDR. (Now consider how important CDR must be on Ryze, where all his spells interact with all his cooldowns.)
So the curve is really steep on this one. The last 5% CDR gives you almost 3.75 times more Qs per second than the first 5%. So when people started going BT instead of Spirit of the Elder Lizard, I was somewhat concerned.

Q/min along the X axis, CDR along the Y axis



In fact, if you compare a build of CDR boots, Manamune and BT at level 16 with the same build except Brutalizer instead of BT, with the average armor of a level 16 champion plus masteries and seals, despite the BT build costing 45% (1863g) more than the Brutalizer build, the build with Brutalizer is more cost efficient by 12%. And remember, that's ignoring that it stacks Ezreal's passive faster and lowers cooldown on his E for mobility.
And one might inquire as to what happens if your target has more armor than that. But you'd need atrocious amounts of armor to make the BT build more cost effective. About 60000 armor in fact. And if your target has even less armor than in the example above, the Brutalizer build just pulls further ahead.

But what about later down the line, after Last Whisper and Iceborn Gauntlet? Well, even there the Brutalizer build pulls ahead by 8% cost efficiency, again with the same uncalculated benefits of more CDR.

I showed you the effect of CDR on Ezreal's Q, but I'd also like to show you its effect on his E.
At 0% CDR, the CD of E is 11 seconds and you can get in 3 Qs, for ~8 seconds between Es.
At 20% CDR, the CD of E is 8.8 seconds, and you can get in 3Qs, for ~6 seconds between Es.
At 40% CDR, the CD of E is 6.6 seconds, and you can get in 3Qs, for ~4 seconds between Es.
Air time and Q hitting while there's less than 1 full second CD accounts for the squiggly line. 20% is closer to 5.5ish seconds and 40% is pretty close to 4 seconds.
The effect on his R is the same. The CD assuming constant Q spam is 44 seconds at 20% CDR, and 28 seconds at 40% CDR.
 



E/min along the X axis, CDR along the Y axis


So why aren't the pros building their Blue Ezreal with Brutalizer these days? Either they want the lifesteal and ult damage from BT, or their managers aren't paying enough attention to my blog. And given how squishy and mobile Blue Ezreal is, I assert that it is the latter that is the case.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

Blue Ezreal Crunch

I've crunched a whole lot of numbers on Ezreal to examine his blue build. Now that the jungler item is nerfed to its current not-cost-effective state, we need a substitute for those 10% CDR.
I found Brutalizer to be very effective in filling that spot. It spikes your early game compared to what the Spirit did, as well as costing about a Tear less, which is very important. It finishes your core earlier, and it lets you start stacking Tear earlier.
It does have the substantial downside of not being blue though.

Other things of note that I found while crunching:
CDR on Ezreal is very good, even without factoring in his increased mobility and map control.
Brutalizer is very cost effective early.
Last Whisper is as important as everyone says it is.
Iceborn Gauntlet is very cost ineffective for straight damage.

The spreadsheet can be found here. The conversion from Excel to Google Docs was not perfect.

Download
Google Docs

Thursday 1 August 2013

Katarina, level 6 all-in, AD masteries and ap runes

I had a brief interest in Katarina, and the general consensus is that she snowballs well. So I figured I'd crunch a few numbers for masteries, runes and first item pick up. On forehand, sorry about the alignment. Haven't figured out how to make tables yet.

Level 6 all-in


The assumptions are:
Enemy has 46 mr (30 base + 12 runes + 4 from 21/6/3 masteries),
You're maxing Q first,
You're using ignite first thing
You manage to get your full combo off
You're 21 in offense with all the ap masteries
You're using mpen marks and non-ap seals and glyphs

I'll be calculating with both ap and mpen quints, and sorc shoes vs blasting wand.

AP quints + Sorc Shoes
All-in damage: 629
QEW:               243
Direct Q hit:     125

AP quints + Blasting Wand
All-in damage: 648
QEW:               255
Direct Q hit:     144

MPen quints + Sorc Shoes
All-in damage: 599
QEW:               227
Direct Q hit:     118

MPen quints + Blasting Wand
All-in damage: 678
QEW:               271
Direct Q hit:     137

Top hitters:
All-in damage: 672 - MPen quints + Blasting Wand
QEW:               271 - MPen quints + Blasting Wand
Direct Q hit:     144 - AP quints + Blasting Wand

Level 6 all-in with 26 offense, scaling ap glyphs and seals:
AP quints + Sorc Shoes:               690
AP quints + Blasting Wand:         703
MPen quints + Sorc Shoes:          661
MPen quints + Blasting Wand:    740

And the absolute winner of the maddest-all-in using:
26 offense, MPen quints, scalingAP seals, MPen glyphs + Blasting Wand
Maddest-All-In:  753
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AD Masteries

 

I compared skipping Archmage to get Deadliness, and it didn't look so good. First and foremost, if you don't use your ult, it's absolutely dreadful. Assuming full QEWR combo:
At level 18 Deadliness is better than Archmage if you have less than 266 AP
At level 11 Deadliness is better than Archmage if you have less than 162 AP
At level 6 Deadliness is better than Archmage if you have less than 87 AP

So I guess it's technically better than Archmage for the level 6 all-in. But it's a quite steep trade-off by being considerably worse at pretty much anything but that.

Of course you could sacrifice defensive stats and go 26 points in offense, taking Deadliness and Brute Force. Enjoying 25 more damage on the level 6 all-in, 37 at level 11 and 54 at level 18 (numbers pre-mitigation).

_______________________________________

Other AP Runes

These are the numbers for what extra pre-mitigation damage you can dish out with different AP runes instead of defensive runes on a standard QEWR pre-mitigation. (w/ Archmage)

Flat glyphs give 37 damage
Flat seals give 18 damage
Scaling glyphs give 31 damage at level 6, 57 damage at level 11 and 94 damage at level 18
Scaling Seals give 18 damage at level 6, 34 damage at level 11 and 55 damage at level 18

As always numbers are rounded for aesthetic reasons.