Offensive Physical Itemization

Offensive Physical Itemization

We've got some major itemization changes this patch with a specific focus on the marksman role as a whole. As we mentioned in the foreword, our goal is to open up the landscape of attack damage and attack speed item choices. In terms of specific challenges, we saw that in the 2014 season, lifesteal was quickly becoming a 'must have' stat for marksmen with Bloodthirster leading the pack. What ends up happening with BT being a dominant buy is that it both heavily favors burst-AD champions and also snowballs lanes toward who can get their BT first. Bloodthirster being the best first purchase also has a secondary effect of reducing a lot of mid to late game marksman power as they're not going for the multiplicative damage stats (crit and attack speed) to punch through the tanky dudes. We also took the opportunity to make other adjustments to items like Warden's Mail / Randuin's Omen so that they're not so straight up mean to auto-attack reliant champions.xpeke

What these changes should do is give all marksmen equal build paths forward without one being much, much better than the other. This also allows us to do two neat things:

1.) With the Doran's Blade change, marksmen can tailor their lifesteal needs by picking up multiple DBlades to sustain through the laning phase without having to always commit to an early BT or Blade of the Ruined King.

2.) We can set all end-game marksmen items to build out of a B.F. Sword with 80 attack damage as the baseline. This means when you pick up a B.F. Sword, youknow it'll build into a strong end-game item - it's just a matter of deciding which sort of defensive or offensive utility you want to get out of it.