I have corrected some errors to the value of the IE builds. Also, when it says “LS per Hit,” I meant “LS per Sec”

I. Introduction

Recently, Riot has patched the Blade of the Ruined King in Patch 3.03 to the following stats:

+30 AD

+15% LS

+40% AS

Unique Passive: 5% current health physical damage on-hit, max 90 vs. non-champions

Unique Active: Drain 15% maximum health physical damage and steal 30% movement speed (60s CD)

Many players have determined this item to be overpowered. The pros have called it overpowered, with Cruzer saying he’ll build it on everyone. Reign of Gaming has called it overpowered through their mathcraft. I’ve decided to also take a look at this item and see if it is up the hype.

II. Empirical Evidence

The first thing to note is that according to LoLKing, the win rate of Blade of the Ruined King has not increased despite the supposed buffs. Granted, this is only one day of sample size, but the implication is that the item has not had any overall change in effectiveness.

III. Mathcraft

To start, we will be using the “average” AD carry. I’ve averaged the attacking stats of all of the standard carries and a couple of the non-standard AD carries to get the following average numbers.

Base Attack Speed: .658 AS

Level 18 AS with all Steroids: 1.21 AS

Level 18 AD with all Steroids: 109.8 AD

With this in mind, we will begin an analysis at level 9, a feasibly time for an AD carry to get enough gold for a Bloodthirster or a Blade of the Ruined King.

At level 9, we will assume the enemy target has 1500 max HP, just as Reign of Gaming did.

Do note that BotRK is slightly cheaper than BT and significantly less expensive than the IE.

At level 13 with the second major item purchase, we will assume the enemy target has 2000 max HP.



Once again, all BotRK builds are most cost effective than the IE builds, but similar to the BT builds.

Finally, we will look at level 18 with three major items.



The major thing to note is that, given a standard average AD carry, their raw auto-attacking DPS is NOT significantly higher using a BotRK based build. It is greater when the enemy has full HP but typically lower by the time they have 50% HP. Furthermore, the more major items that you get, the closer the standard AD carry build comes to totally overtaking the BotRK build across ALL HPs.

Furthermore, ALL Bloodthirster based builds have GREATER life steal than BotRK builds. I believe that Gentleman Gustaf forgot that lifesteal no longer applies to the 5% current HP passive on BotRK when he did his calculations.

III. Conclusion

I believe that BotRK is a SITUATIONAL item. The standard AD carry build for the average AD carry will typically do as much damage as a BotRK build, but with more lifesteal. The only situation where a BotRK build would be significantly more effective is if the enemy was at 100% HP all of the time (impossible). Furthermore, if the AD carry has any AD ratios, the difference will be even more striking.

Finally, your damage to towers will also be lower. Furthermore, there are inherent issues with higher AS AD carry builds. It is harder to orb walk and you spend more time in auto-attack animation, meaning your mobility decreases. This is part of the reason why Kog’maw didn’t build a pure AS build using Bloodrazor in S1 and S2.

From the numbers and empirical evidence, I believe that BotRK is a balanced item. It is strong on champions like Tristana that do not have any AD ratios and have large AS steroids. It is overtaken by the standard build on the more AD caster AD carries such as Miss Fortune or Graves.

The part we will have to wait and see on is if the champions that become stronger as a result of having a more suitable item to build are now overpowered as a result.

IV. Responses

I think you need to account for the active. Its really the big flaw with the items balance as 10% of your max HP is just going to rip anything apart. The thinking of it is “oh only melee can abuse this” but unless its nothing but a range on range game something melee is going to bashing on a carry who has a botrk active to burn. Or your trist who has 0 issue jumping into a team…

TL;DR: Acitve OP.

Response:

This is true. The main crux of the balance with BotRK is that we’re leveraging the AD scaling vs. the BotRK active.

Consider a champion like Graves — in a 10 second fight, he could pull off arouhnd 280% of his AD in bonus damage from abilities. A 70 damage delta turns into around 200 extra damage, assuming Graves doesn’t use any AD scaling ability twice.

We’re comparing that against 225 physical damage (1500HP target, roughly the point when BT and BotRK are first built) against a target and healing for the same amount of damage post-mitigation.

When you consider the BT-based build will scale harder into the late game while also giving greater sustain, and leverage that against the slow that you get, and that it comes up roughly even when comparing into the early and mid game, and probably behind into the late game.

I probably should revise the post to say balanced to SLIGHTLY overpowered, but I don’t believe that the item is as overtly overpowered as the League of Black Cleaver status.