Item Preview – It’s Tuesday

Edit: I just added SO many posts to the bottom ; Xypherous sure is thorough.

It's Tiamat Tuesday and here is Xypherous with another batch of item previews!
Continue reading to see what changes are in store for Tiamat and peep it's new upgrade path, Ravenous Hydra. As always, I'll be adding relevant red posts to the bottom of the post.

Here is the announcement from Xypherous himself:

"Hello again Summoners. Continuing from my initial discussion here of upcoming itemization changes for the preseason, I’d like to talk about a current item to which we’re making changes, as well as its new and exciting upgrade.

It’s Tuesday. You know what’s coming.

Quote:

Tiamat (Melee Only) +50 Attack Damage +15 Health Regen per 5 seconds UNIQUE Passive – Cleave: Your attacks deal up to 60% of your Attack Damage to units around your target – decaying down to 20% near the edge. UNIQUE Active – Crescent: Deals up to 100% of your Attack Damage to units around you – decaying down to 60% near the edge – 10 second cooldown.

For a very long time, Tiamat has been sitting in this quasi-state of ‘Is this a good item? Is this a terrible item?’ No longer. We’ve cleaned up Tiamat to be far more streamlined in the new item set, giving it a larger cleave range (at the cost of reduced damage near the edge) and greater synergy with other items by removing the restriction of dealing damage based on the damage of the original attack.

So what’s different?

1. It has a Unique Passive. Tiamats no longer stack to form odd cases where you deal more damage to a secondary target than the primary target.
2. Tiamat no longer cares about the damage you deal with your main attack; thus, Tiamat procs don’t need you to itemize heavy critical strike in order to take advantage of dealing crazy damage. You will always deal a set amount of splash damage based on your Attack Damage.
3. It has a short-cooldown active that allows you to perform a stronger version of the passive Cleave at any time.
4. It is Melee Only, meaning it is no longer a trap item on ranged characters. The active and passive components will literally turn off and be unusable for ranged characters, with the same effect kicking in for dual form characters such as Jayce or Nidalee when they’re in ranged form.
5. It has a much larger cleave radius, at the expense of damage falloff.
6. It no longer has mana regeneration.
7. It has an upgrade.

Let’s examine how this might affect your use of Tiamat:

1. It lets you clear minion waves more quickly

Having a larger passive cleave and an active cleave allows melee fighters or carries who pick up Tiamat to farm waves more efficiently, granting decent wave-clear ability to characters who lack it. Characters like Poppy, for example, can now clear a wave with Tiamat in a relatively short amount of time through a combination of passive and active procs.

2. It makes your burst combo more flexible

Having the active Crescent ability means an additional AoE physical spell that you can weave in to your burst combos. A Riven, for example, might take the time to use the Crescent active in between her dashes – while a Fiora would want to use Crescent as soon as she descends upon a target with Lunge.

3. It can be used effectively by a wider variety of characters and be useful in more situations

Being built out of high Health Regeneration and Attack Damage gives Tiamat a very smooth build up path for the early game. With the ability to itemize both heavy regeneration and attack damage early in the game you can gain a very strong staying presence in lane.

The Upgrade

Quote:

Ravenous Hydra (Melee Only) +75 Attack Damage +15 Health Regen per 5 seconds +10% Life Steal Passive: Damage dealt by this item works with Life Steal. UNIQUE Passive – Cleave: Your attacks deal up to 60% of your Attack Damage to units around your target – decaying down to 20% near the edge. UNIQUE Active – Crescent: Deals up to 100% of your Attack Damage to units around you – decaying down to 60% near the edge – 10 second cooldown.

Introducing Ravenous Hydra, a life steal upgrade for Tiamat. While it doesn’t enhance any of the damaging aspects of Tiamat, Ravenous Hydra allows you to drain from surrounding enemies via your life steal statistic. This can grant melee fighters incredible staying power when outnumbered or assaulting the front lines. While Hydra won’t decimate teams on its own without a huge amount of Attack Damage, the combination of the active ability and life steal will allow experienced players to gain a burst of healing by using Crescent to attack and drain multiple enemy champions.

But wait! I’m a Ranged Carry type of player. What do I get in order to do AoE damage?

Stay Tuned.

-Xypherous"

Here is some follow up discussion; all answers come from Xypherous.

General:

[ How big is the splash range? ]: "It's roughly 2x to 2.5x as big - but suffers damage fall-off the farther out you are from the epicenter.

Essentially, around the old Tiamat splash range, you get full damage - but the farther out you go the less damage you take."

[ Can you still stack Tiamats and use the actives multiple times? ]: "Nope - notice that it's a unique active and notice that the unique active is named 'Crescent' - this means that these actives are uniquely shared across both Hydra and Tiamat and that multiple items share the same cooldown.'


[ Why remove the old Tiamat? Why not just make a new item with a similar effect so we can enjoy the trolly old Tiamat? ]: "Items that have similar effects with different outcomes can't be easily made in multiplies - because you have to balance them to the stacked case.

Which basically means that if you introduce a competitive version of Tiamat - both tiamats have to be nerfed to accommodate for their stacked potential being too strong.

In addition, the existence of non-serious items in a competitive mode doesn't exactly hold. While some people may enjoy having a non-serious items in their mode - I would strongly argue that it doesn't make a lot of sense for it to stand along-side other competitive items because the 'fun' it generates also creates a lot of trap-builds and a lot of frustrations for learning what is a good item, what isn't a good item. It inhibits learning of what items are for - when they should be bought and generally being able to master the mechanics of the game.

The fun here comes at the expense of Clarity and the quality of a lot of lower level games as people try to learn the items."

[ Building on that last point, why not make this community adored item available only in custom games? ]: "Local tournaments frequently use Custom Games as their basis so that they can do pre-arranged scrimmages in Matchmaking. Custom games aren't always just a hotbed of people goofing around - although a great many of them can be.

Joke items that exist in the shop only serve to muddle clarity of learning the items - thus adding a negative net experience to everyone as they have to filter out 'intentional' jokes in order to learn what items are relevant

In order for joke items to maximize total fun with absolutely minimal side effects, you'd need an entirely separate game mode dedicated to being completely non-serious - which actually might be an option for Murderbridge, for example, but if you went down that path, there's a lot better things you could do than add Tiamat to it to "maximize fun" - mostly because the existence of one fun item among other fun items doesn't maximize fun if you simply have 200 joke items. If you had 200 joke items, you would still want to filter and prune some of these for maximum fun, mostly because more joke items doesn't mean more fun - it simply means that the effect of each potential fun item is lessened."

 [ So is the active targetable or what? ]: "It's an instant-cast cleave, allowing you to cleave without having a target."

[ How will this interact with critical strikes? ]: "It currently does not work with critical strikes - it only inherits your base attack damage.

Essentially Hydra --> BT is a very powerful combination while Hydra --> IE is far less so."

[ What is new Tiamat built from? ]: "Tiamat is currently double regen items + long sword + pickaxe - but we've been pondering whether it should be a Health + AD item rather than a HP Regen + AD item and seeing what would be better."

[ Will Tiamat proc the new Black Cleaver passive? ]: "Yes"

[ Does RH factor in all of your lifesteal? ]: "Does it factor in all your life steal - Currently, no. We're tweaking the ratio of this - but right now it uses 50% of your life steal for the AoE portion of it - but we're still tuning."

[ Does the passive cleave work with spell vamp at all? ]: "It doesn't work with Spell Vamp at all, being item-based damage (like Wit's End). LS is applied off post-mitigation damage."

[ How does this interact with Sheen/Trinity force? ]: " It doesn't interact with Sheen or Trinity Force. Its effects are unrelated"

[ What does RH build out of? ]: "It's Tiamat + Vamp Sceptre + Some Gold."

Champion Specific inquiries:

[ Will this still work with Gangplank's Q?]: "Yes, this will still be true."

[ Why does it work with GP's Q?]: "Although Parley is a ranged spell, Gangplank himself is Melee, so Parley will trigger Tiamat."

[ Will this stack with Malphite's passive and make the secondary targets take even more damage? ]: "Yes. Malphite and Tiamat would still stack in the way you've described."

[ How is it going to work with Shyvana's dragon form Q? ]: "Tiamat has an internal proc limiter against different targets of 0.05 seconds - so Shyvana's Dragon form isn't going to Tiamat Proc 6 billion times any more and we might be able to add AoE on-hit abilities now. :P"

[ Wait, wait, explain the internal proc limiter more! ]: "It has a short internal cooldown of 0.05 seconds on different targets.

Meaning that you cannot trigger Tiamat procs on different enemies more than once every 1 / 20 seconds.

You are free to trigger them as quickly as possible on the same target.

It just means that there won't be a cascading ripple effect if you apply on-hits to twenty units clustered"

[ Still a little confused, could you explain it again? ]: "If you use your normal Q, you get 2 cleaves, as you applied 2 on-hit effects.

If you use your Dragon Q, you get 2 cleaves, as you applied 2 on-hit effects to your primary target, then attacked a different target within 0.05 seconds - which Tiamat says 'wait, no, I'm not firing here. You've cleaved recently before on a different target.'

It's basically just a limiter to make sure that you don't cleave from multiple people at the same time - but you can cleave from the same person multiple times - for these simultaneously on-hit effect cases."

[ What about Jayce since he is ranged and melee? ]: "If you're in cannon mode, you're ranged. No Tiamat procs for you. "

[ So it does work if Jayce is in hammer stance? ]: "Oh yes, if he's in hammer form, he will rapidly attack them three times, cleaving each time."

[ Will this proc multiple times with Renekton's W? ]: "Yes.

It will also proc three times in the rage-empowered form."

[ Will Garen's Judgement proc this effect over and over like it does with the new Black Cleaver? ]: "No, Tiamat is still an on-hit effect. The new BC is an 'on physical' damage trigger - so there's no overlap here."

[ How does this work with Shaco's clone? ]: "We'll need to go back and tune Shaco's clone a bit - Right now, I have no idea, mostly because yeah. Shaco's clone is weird. I'd have to dig around his internals a bit."

[ How does this work with Morde's ghost? ]: "Ghosts apply Mordekaiser's on-hit effects and the target's unique passives - So if Mordekaiser has Tiamat, the Ghost will proc it."

Non Tiamat related stuff:

[ Does this mean philosopher's stone and Kage's lucky pick will have unique passive names? ]:"Yes - but mostly because Kage's has an upgrade that keeps the GP/10 component of it."

[ This item has lifesteal but I thought you said it would be harder to get lifesteal in S3 ]: "In general, it's harder to get lots of lifesteal from a single item now. While there are more items with lifesteal - each one gives out less total lifesteal."

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. 
• 11/9 - Dust Sweeping - Removed items, Sightstone, and more.