Alright, here’s the play: Your support, Zyra is struggling to keep vision control around Baron. You as the mid laner move in to assist, dropping your own trinket ward like a good little laner and moving your ball into the nearest brush to offer more safety for your friendly Zyra. All of the sudden Talon appears on your minimap and before you could even move your ball to shield that poor innocent Zyra, she’s dead.

Duskblade of Draktharr is a pretty imbalanced item right now and while carries hate being flogged around the Rift, I can assure you they do not have it as bad as supports. But before we talk about the woes of the untouchable caste of League of Legends players, let’s break down the item itself.

Duckblade of Quacktharr

At 2900 gold, the Duskblade of Draktharr offers 55 flat AD, 10 percent cooldown reduction and 18 lethality. Without the two other passives taken into account, the gold value of these raw stats is 2596.67. This makes the item 89.54 percent cost efficient. These numbers are created using base items such as a Long Sword (plus 10 AD) valued at 350 gold, thereby making each point of Attack Damage valued at 35 gold. Without the next two passives, soon to be discussed, this is not a good item. This is simply based upon its gold efficiency. However, the Duskblade of Draktharr has so much more to offer.

Passive: Blackout

The first passive is Blackout, which on a 90 second cooldown passively spots enemy wards, causing a blackout for eight seconds, disabling all nearby enemy wards and revealing them. This passive is most comparable to the Oracle Alteration trinket, which becomes available to all champions at level nine. While the Blackout passive is two seconds shorter and has a shorter active range, it allows the user to keep their warding totem trinket, giving a vision advantage to the user.

Given that in Gold ranked games and higher, the average wards placed is 69.4, if a mid lane Talon has Duskblade by 20 minutes they will likely accrue eight to thirteen Blackout procs by the end of the game. If they destroy at least eight of these wards, that’s 240 gold from this passive alone. That is just the gold value of removing the vision. The objective control that can come from the removal of one ward alone could be enough to win the game off of a single pick or Baron bait.

Passive: Nightstalker

With the value of Blackout’s utility being immeasurable, it is time to discuss what truly makes the Duskblade of Draktharr so overpowered: the Nightstalker passive. Nightstalker works like this: “After being unseen for at least 1 second, your next basic attack against an enemy champion deals 55 – 360 (based on level) bonus on-hit physical damage and slows by 99% for 0.25 seconds. The enhanced attack lasts 5 seconds after being seen by an enemy champion (http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com).”

So what exactly does this passive mean when you actually apply it to an in game scenario? Well, the average Miss Fortune and Talon are going to be getting this item second, while Rengar and Kha’ Zix will be getting it second or third. At the point in time where solo laners are coming back with a completed Duskblade, they will likely be level nine about 15 minutes in the game, given that they have picked up one kill and farm like the average Gold player.

At this point in time, the average Zyra support will be level six or seven depending on how long said player has spent roaming and warding. In this scenario, Duskblade’s passive does 208 damage alone. Given that a Zyra has 941 health at level six (with a sightstone in inventory) and only 32 armor, the on hit passive of Duskblade alone will do almost one fifth of her current health. That’s only including the on hit passive. The actual auto attack and the follow-up burst damage coming from the champion’s abilities should easily do the remaining health, giving Zyra the grey screen in under a second.

The burst damage coming from this item cannot directly be given a gold value. While there is only a five second window for the burst to be dealt, this window can be easily abused in lane through brush control and with the invisibility found in kits of champions like Kha’Zix, Rengar and Talon.

That’s pretty rough for Zyra, and the unintended consequence for her and other squishy support champions like Sona, Soraka, Lulu and Nami is their win rates unsurprisingly falling this patch. So what should you take away from this article? Play a champion that can abuse this item. If you are playing a role like support, then I would only advise you to play a tanky champion that can stack some armor, as lethality’s weakness is armor stacking. Frankly, it is a disappointment that one unbalanced item that supports do not even build, can have such an impact upon champion diversity in the role. While Duskblade of Draktharr will be nerfed in the coming patch, and it has already been hot-fixed once, that patch may not be enough for an item that is literally defining the meta for all roles across the Rift.



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