Original Post — Direct link
almost 3 years ago - /u/PhreakRiot - Direct link

I think there are a few oversights worth mentioning:

  1. Serrated Dirk is a very overpowered item and early game power spikes matter. So the difference between Kraken + Dirk and Kraken + 2 Long Swords is a pretty big deal. Or even just Serrated Dirk vs. the components of a Noonquiver, since a LDR player will not combine much of anything in the early game.

  2. The execute is relevant. Agreed that against squishies LDR does similar single-target damage and we'd expect to deal more against more durable targets. However, a 5% execute is more akin to a 5% damage amp to every champion on your team, because the last 100 health on the 2k hp Volibear is going to disappear regardless of who removed that first 1900. Considering these calculations are +/- 8 damage in the squishy case, I'll take +100 against melee champions every time. Even using enemy marksmen as the primary case, 5% of 1600 hp is 80. If your ability loop is dealing ~850 +/- 10, then it looks like the execute is a dominating factor here. This has the added benefit of focusing the gold onto a primary carry, which is much harder to quantify, but also relevant.

  3. It's a minor effect, but Collector has 25 more raw AD, which impacts the W and R, with both scale off of AD. Does W dealing 32.5 damage matter? Sometimes. Does the ult shield being increased by 25-50 matter? Sometimes. Of course, so does single-target tank-busting, but it's worth mentioning regardless. When suggesting Q-Crit is +8 damage is relevant, then so are these other factors.

The Varus case wasn't quite handled properly, especially considering LDR looks at health differences because Kai'Sa has among the highest health totals for an ADC (600-2096; Varus is 530-2077, so always lower at all levels). So in most games Kai'Sa gets no rewards from health differences against squishies, despite them being represented here because of target dummy setup.

Still, these are pretty small numbers we're quibbling over, so it shouldn't be a super huge deal in a 2-item scenario in just measuring DPS.

But the execute matters, the Serrated Dirk power spike matters, and ultimately Collector 2nd is ~9% higher win rate than LDR 2nd. There are biases there that makes me believe this wouldn't be the true wr% disparity if the item was assigned randomly, but I'm still not confident that LDR second is actually correct.