Item Preview – Dust Sweeping

Xypherous is back with another itemization post, this time focusing on what is being taken out in the S3 item update.
Continue reading for more information on what items are getting removed, including Meki Pendant, Rejuvenation Bead, Madred's Bloodrazor, Force of Nature, Ionic Spark, Elixer of Agility, and Heart of Gold, and what items you will be able to pick up to replace them. Additionally, you'll find several relevant red posts tacked on to the bottom of the post.

Here is his original announcement.

"Hey guys. Continuing from my initial discussion of preseason itemization changes, which you can read here, I wanted to talk about new alternatives to items that are getting removed as part of the overall rework.

As you know we have a lot of old items that exist in a weird twilight space between useful and confusing, and it’s traditionally been very hard to find a place for these items to exist and be satisfying to use in the current environment. In a lot of cases, we’ve decide to remove items that were either identified as having pretty negative consequences for the game or warped freedom of itemization around themselves. While making these items better or more satisfying to use might have been an option, if the core purpose of the item seemed flawed it was targeted for removal.

I’ll walk through some of the more sweeping changes and try to explain our thoughts behind them as well as what replacements achieve a similar functionality.


Meki Pendant & Rejuvenation Bead – Removed

These items have been removed because they were mostly superfluous item paths that constrained early game purchases and mid-game upgrades. Everything that builds out of Meki Pendant and Rejuvenation Bead has been modified to build out of Regrowth Pendant and Faerie Charm.

Alternative: Regrowth Pendant and Faerie Charm

These items will sit at a much smaller price-point but build into many more items overall, allowing players to have much greater flexibility when building items out of regeneration items.


Madred’s Bloodrazor - Removed

Madred’s Bloodrazor has traditionally been a weak pick overall. On the surface, it appears to counter high health targets. However, its odd build path and the fact that it does magical damage make the Bloodrazor awkward in many situations. It doesn’t do as much damage as other alternatives to high hit point targets, nor is the build path something lenient enough to let you quickly build it to counter high health targets. As a jungle control item it is surpassed by Wriggle’s Lantern in many ways, especially for sustains, invades and jungle vision.

Alternative: Blade of the Ruined King

This item first debuted in Twisted Treeline, and was meant to be the ‘high health counter’ for ranged attackers. Against moderate DPS / high health targets, Blade of the Ruined King attacks these characters where it hurts the most – the fact that their DPS is consistent over time. By draining a percentage of their current health on every strike, Blade of the Ruined King seeks to burn down high health targets by both outlasting and kiting them.

Blade of the Ruined King also works well for on-hit ranged attackers, providing them a form of combat sustain that is independent of the amount of damage done by their main attack. On-hit Teemo or On-hit Kog’maws have traditionally fared poorly in being able to output sustained damage in a fight because life steal was so anti-synergistic with their builds. Blade of the Ruined King not only fits the % damage profile that Madred’s Bloodrazor once occupied but also supplies life steal for these character builds.


Force of Nature - Removed

Force of Nature has been the go-to high MR item for tanks who want to counter magic damage. The item, however, is kind of confusing. Is it a movement speed option for fighters and tanks? Or is it meant to be a regeneration item in sieges? Force of Nature’s odd stat combination made it particularly difficult to make it feel like a quality purchase. One of its attributes was probably redundant or unnecessary on your character.

Alternative: Spirit Visage

Spirit Visage is getting a slight touch up for the preseason. It will now build out of Negatron Cloak instead of Null Magic Mantle, and Spirit Visage’s passive is getting a bump in power. Additionally, there are a lot more Tier 2.5 items that offer Magic Resistance, allowing you to more easily spec into Magic Resistance without wasting slot efficiency.


Ionic Spark – Removed

Ionic Spark is a bit of a confusing item right now. Ionic Spark only fully synergizes with one or two champions (Shen, Gangplank), but it’s good to have an effective wave clearing option for characters that lack an innate ability to quickly deal with waves of minions. For a proc-build, Ionic Spark is awkward because it grants a very inconsistent proc that does some damage but is inferior to Wit’s End in a lot of cases.

Alternative: Statikk Shiv, Tiamat, Wit’s End

Tiamat has been vastly upgraded as a passive wave clearing item, while Wit’s End has always been the traditionally stronger option for Attack Speed / On-hit builds.


Elixir of Agility – Removed

Right now Elixir of Agility serves a single purpose in the game – to make the winning hyper-carry exponentially more powerful than the losing one. This has some general negative effects: Due to the multiplicative factor of attack speed and critical strike, the raw DPS increase is always better for the winner than the loser in this case. It also strongly pigeonholes viable end-game carry builds to take advantage of critical strike, as it is the cheapest and most powerful form of DPS boost.

Alternative: None

We don’t want an item in the game whose sole purpose is to pigeonhole end-game carry builds and provide exponential damage increase to a single class. While there should be purchasable buffs that help close out the game, a 250 Gold item that typically only benefits a single player on the winning team seemed a bit superfluous.


Heart of Gold – Removed

Heart of Gold is a deeply conflicted item. Gold over Time items are designed to be a tradeoff of early game power versus reliable scaling further on in the game. However, Heart of Gold is a Health item, a statistic that is primarily dominant early game rather than late game. It helps create a lot to passivity, but worst of all it contributes to passive snowballing. While the intent of the item was to help out gold-starved characters that were traditionally weak, there are much better ways to solve this than an item that also makes their direct competitors stronger.

Alternative: The other Gold per 10 items

We don’t want to see an item in the game that lets you passively win your lane and close off options for your opponent. The other 3 Gold per 10 items have all been upgraded with either much more flexible build paths in terms of what they can build into or additional ways to generate real and imagined incomes. From Gold per 10 upgrades that let you keep the Gold per 10 when fully upgraded to alternate gold gain passives, the other 3 Gold per 10 items have become much more flexible in their final builds.

-Xypherous"

In the ensuing discussion, Xypherous dropped off many more tantalizing posts, including the reveal a new ward centric item.

"Just going to leave this here.. sneakily.. :3

Sightstone (650 Gold)
+125 Health
Unique Passive - Refresh (Ward) : Starts with 4 charges and refills each time you stop by your shop.
Unique Active - Ghost Ward: Consumes a charge to place an invisible ward that reveals the surrounding area for 3 minutes. You may have a maximum of 2 wards from this item at once.

Upgrades to...

*is dragged away by internal Riot teams*"

He then elaborated on the difference between HoG and Sightstone, an item that looks incredibly strong as a replacement.

"Here's the core difference - Sightstone doesn't net you advantage if you are passive. Having wards provides safety - but Heart of Gold actually nets you advantage by passive play due to your passive GP/10 will override the value of active play.

You're not going to win the lane any harder by being safe - whereas HoG causes you to win the lane harder by being hard to burst.' "

He also fielded a few questions:

[ With the elixer gone, will be have any more "full build" ( consumable ) items to buy? ]: "We're combatting this in a couple of ways - but in general, the gold value of a 'full build' is higher than before."

[ Why did you remove MBR and Ionic Spark??]: "On MBR - If you were getting it hoping to counter tanky bruisers - you were doing it wrong. Almost every item combination involving PD / BT / IE would let you deal more damage to high health bruisers.

Why is that? Mostly because Carries aren't expected to have a linear damage curve whereas MBR is a linear effect. Secondly, the primary statistic for determining whether you were tanky or not was resistances not health. The difference between a carry's health and a tanky bruiser's health ranges less than 50% porportionally a lot of the time - thus attacking % health doesn't really help out all that much.

Ionic Spark

Ionic Spark was a niche item made odd by the fact that much better options exist and it seems to fill an odd triple-niche: Survivability, On-hit, Wave clear. Who is this item supposed to be good on? It requires a very specific sub-set of characters (Tanky characters with zero wave clear that scales off attack speed) in order to be good - at which point it really starts to conflict with Wit's End for the same case.

Ionic Spark turns out to be a trap for most characters if you ever picked it up. It requires you to be ahead to be effective as the effect is highly conditional (every 4 hits.) It requires you to pick it up early as there's no scaling effect on the item (fixed magic damage). It requires you to be a specific sub-set of characters in order to be good in the first place.

A niche item with a huge set of conditionals, both champion-specific *and* context specific is an item that will never sit in a good place for very long as the thing that'll make it viable is most likely an abuse case that'll have to be nerfed in the future which makes all the other problems worse."

[ Will FoN's passive show up on another item? ]: "To speak to your concern - FoN's passive will be on another item. It's an awesome passive, it just has nothing to do with why you want MR/MS a lot of the time"

[ Ionic Spark is a cheap attack speed item, will we see anything to replace that? ] : "I spoke to this before in the first introduction post to Season 3 - but yes. Attack Speed has been undercosted for a long time now and characters that have scaled really well with Attack Speed (like Irelia) has been hit by continuous nerfs because of how cheap their itemization is.

It's also one of the reasons why Ranged Carries seem to explode late game. They're limited by Attack Damage and Critical Strike statistics to gain access to damage - but then Attack Speed is so cheap that they can then explode through item based AS, as Attack Speed is one of the statistics you get the least of through level scaling."

[ What items will tanks be building to increase their DPS? ]: "Assuming you're running into a team that's purely physical damage - Thornmail/Sunfire Cape becomes the highest source of DPS for a tank. If you're a mana based tank, there's always the possibility of getting a Sheen and upgrading it to the Tank version of Sheen."

[ What's changing with Phantom Dancer? ]: "Yeah, Phantom Dancer has had its' statistics extensively readjusted. It lost a *lot* of movement speed and a little bit of attack speed. It's also slightly cheaper and thus less slot-efficient.

It's been known for a while that Phantom Dancer was just too good but nerfing it would've caused a drastic effect on AD carry mobility / balance for a while. We've shifted some statistics around into other items that AD carries can easily fit into their builds and now PD doesn't have to be the king of both AS, Crit and MS.

On the plus side, it now has Ignore Unit Collision on it though. How useful that passive is, I'm not sure - but it is something that people have been asking for quite a while on their carries."

[ While your messing with items, can you make QSS not remove suppression? ]: "We're doing a change (or a bugfix, depending on your point of view) on both Warwick and Malzahar. Their ultimates will be treated like leashes... because they kind of are. (You can't QSS leashes. You can only break them via distance.)

What this means is that QSS will break the stunning effect on you but until you get out of range of them, it won't cancel the damage and other effects these characters will be doing. Malzahar will get his full Nether Grasp until they break the leash and Warwick typically gets 2 (maybe 3) more swipes before the target walks away."


[ What are the HP/Armor items? ]: "The items that currently service Armor/HP are:

Locket of the Glorious Parrot err.. Solari.
Aegis of the Legion
Sunfire Cape
Randuin's Omen

Locket of the Iron Solari is getting slightly better in Season 3 - while it loses a bit from the Heart of Gold removal, it has gained CDR and a lot more health than before at roughly the same cost as before.

It's also not saddled to Emblem of Valor, otherwise known as: "Why do you hate me and force me to build an irrelevant item to me - You are so hard to build because whenever I build you, it is the wrong time.""

[ Explain again why HoG is advantageous and Sightstone isn't ]: "Same problem - Health and GP/10 aren't statistics that mix well to create interesting gameplay. You incur advantage by not doing anything and you simultaneously make every course of action harder for the opponent.

Contrast, Philosopher's stone - which helps you gain advantage passively but exposes a weakness in your build - the lack of any health or Sightstone, which gives you a temporary advantage (vision) and permanent utility (more vision) but you're not getting stronger versus the opponent."


[ What is replacing HoG in the Randuin's Omen build path? ]: "A simple ruby crystal. You'll probably get the other components first."

[ I really love Madred's Bloodrazors, don't remove them they are useful/good/etc ]: "The problem with MBR is that it looks like a counter-item to tanks - but in all actuality, IE + PD is a far far better counter to tanks than MBR's % maximum health damage ever will.

Why is this true?

This is due to the fact that if you look at an end-game build for say.. Fortune, you might get to 1900 health. Why if you look at an end-game build for say.. Shen, you might see him at 50% more health.

However, the key fault here is that tank/bruisers are defined by resistances - not health. Thus a high health-shredder is actually pretty poor at doing so. While MBR will do more raw damage to Shen than Fortune, the reality of the matter is that, after magic resistance, you'd need like 80% magic penetration to make it deal more actual damage to Shen than Miss Fortune.

Secondly, think about the item's build path. A counter item that sits at 3800 gold isn't really a counter-item. Nor does it help you anywhere along the way up to that counter-item in terms of what you need or want to do.

Thirdly, let's say we buffed MBR, who does this actually benefit? Well, in all actuality, it buffs tanky fighters and lets them kill squishy targetsfaster. At its core, MBR is a fighter item - not a ranged carry item - and while it being a fighter item *might* be fine - its real sin is that it's a anti-squishy item for bruisers that pretends to be an anti-bruiser item for squishies.

So the "conditional" here is that MBR will never actually do what on-hit proc characters want it to do - be an avenue to help them versus high health men - because MBR is most effective *on* high-health men trying to kill you - which means that it's just not a good 'niche' item. It blatantly does the opposite of what it appears to be for."

[ GG, champion X is going to be useless without item Y ]: "Champion balance will be in flux after these changes and some champions might need help. We're redoing itemization to get a better system to balance champions around."

Miss out on some of Xypherous' earlier posts about the S3 updates to itemization? Check 'em out:

• 11/7 - Overview and Brutilzer + Black Cleaver.
• 11/8 - Eleisa's Miracle 
• 11/8 - Tons of Mana, Just On Tear - Updates to ToG, AaS, and a new item.