Reign of Gaming

ahahahhahaha Gustaf is stealing OME's eyebrows of the day trend! :P

As for the lifesteal and GA, while it's true, the thing is that as an ADC you're a primary focus target and being unburstable is imo more important than having better sustain.
Also while you can attack up to ~2times per second you rarely get to because either your target's dead or you have to kite and lose attacks to time spent moving...

Personally I life warmog's mallet and randy's omen the most for my defensive item of choice for ADCs...

Btw has anyone run the numbers for Runic Bulwark? It soulds like a nice niche defensive item to me(against teams with lots of magic dmg including some magic assassin it provides quite a bit of burst tankyness while also maximising sustain value), though it "feels" to  me  worse than warmog's or GA in either case plus you'll have one on the team and so the aura stats go wasted on others...

What about late-game though? I find that mana is easy to get by in the early-mid game with usually 1 mana item and perhaps mana regen runes if needed, but when you reach the point of 6 items mana regen always comes at the cost of one slot... I've recently started starting philo on some AP mids and upgrading it to miracle by lvl ~12-13 and if I see the game drag on too late compliment it with either morello's or athene's, but that's 1100 gold dumped that costs me a lot in aggressiveness(and sometimes deaths due to lack of combat stats)...
I'm eagerly waiting to see where the changes in items go in the PBE cause this seems quite itnerresting...

Great, great article, Diff!

Also, be a man and build them both! Scale that locket shield off the bulwark aura for maximum team tankyness! :P

Also saying that this is his opinion is neither redundant nor silly, it's required to state that this is an opinioin-based article. It's purpose is NOT to answer anything, it's there cause the writer has an opinion he wants to share and happens to be a writer for RoG which allows him to post it here, it's quite simple no need to be aggressive with your comments...You arriving at a different conclusion is also not proof that you are right about your conclusion. There are parts of the skill-knowledge curve where theoretical knowledge will benefit you more than actual execution and certain parts where the reverse is true. A top player learning that changing a build a little bit will make his champion more efficient in terms of stats( is much more beneficial than watching another top player stream cause they're probably at a similar lvl anyway.

I'm also of the same opinion: if you want to improve watch videos and play the game. Theorycrafting only helps if you are actually competent with the game and want to fine-tune specific things. I mean there's no point in knowing why getting items A,B,C in that order is better than getting them in the B,A,C order and how much tankyness/dps/utility/gold worth each gives, if you've just heared by someone good that the correct order is this in most cases just follow it and play the game and become good it works up to a really really high lvl.

Theorycrafting on the other hand is something I find 100 times more interresting than a good stream unless the good streamer plays specific champions i like and want to improve on(which I still find less interresting than a drawn-out discussion on mathcrafting but I will watch it anyway cause I can learn more stuff that I can use from it).

In the end you don't get better by just knowing stuff but by putting knowledge you have into use. And knowledge isn't only the theoretical knowledge one might have but also the practical part. A surgeon doesn't nessessarily have to know exactly what each thing that he cuts and saws does so long as he does it right. Same for an engineer, they don't need to know the mathematics or theortetical physics/insert_science behind what they're doing to the best extend, so long as they have the nessessary knowledge needed to make things work. Although theory makes things work better next time you try them.

Being good at lol is engineering, you don't have to know stuff you just have to do them, but having in depth knowledge and sharing it about lol will make you and someone you've shared your knowledge with become better at it. It's the backbone needed for good players to become better.

This has been a topic of discussion i've been having with a friend of mine for the past couple of months or so and we've been considering starting a blog of our own and putting up some theorycrafting articles on topics we have in-depth knowledge about. Another problem I see with people being reluctant to write is the ability to write a well structured text. Cause it takes a considerable amount of time and skill to present your ideas in a way that's easy and fun to read and well formatted. And some people just don't have this kind of skill(like me) and the will to go through the learning process via a series of badly written articles in order to train this kind of skill...For me for example most of the theorycrafting posts i'm reading are either stuff i've already done the theorycrafting for or have just thought about and estimated rough values without having done the specific calculations(I spend about twice the time playing in theorycrafting and at least half of my time played is trying out stuff like funny/unusual builds or trying to maximise a build's potential for certain heroes rather than actually play the competitive part of the game)...

Maybe if we end up starting that blog I'll make posts in these forums linking possible articles for review by a greater part of the community. We'll probably end up translating them to our own language too if we get to start that project cause I hear there's some interrest for such content in my language which isn't covered by many(if any) people atm...

Good post though I agree with most parts of it and thanks for giving people incentive to move on with such ideas for such projects....

This has happened to me a few times too. I believe that you just played more focused because you knew that game would be more challenging than the ones you usually play and without knowing it you kinda pushed yourself further and gave your best...

Outrageous guide, really looking forward to more anti-guides!:)

There's no ideal 0-21-0 page just in general, it depends on the champion, matchup and even enemy team comp.

I think that you're neglecting an important thing when discussing the defensive masteries, which is sustain. Mitigation increases the value of your heal, regen and lifesteal which is something that flat health does not do.

What you are comparing here is not actual tankyness in the wider meaning rather the resistance to being bursted down. In the current assassin-heavy meta it happens to be the roughly the same, but once you get past surviving an assassin's burst resistances and regen/lifesteal/heal/pots help you regen so that you can possibly survive a second cycle of attacks.

With warmog's being a trend as a first item you get to have not only good hp but also good regen with most champions that get it and there I think mitigation plays an important role. I also believe that riot has shown that they're generally good with balancing numbers(not being a fanboy, but they've generally kept a better balance in the game than others similar-or-not games have had), if the mitigation/sustain masteries were so clearly inferior I'm pretty sure they'd have toned them up a bit before releasing them.

You are also not mentioning 1 other thing that I think is important: Max health only matters when you're at 100% hp(at which point regen is useless) and when counting passive's(warmog's passive, shen's and sejuani's damage, garen's passive etc) positive and negative (it also increases dmg taken from %max health things like malz's W, vayne's silver bolt's liandry's torment{first tick at least} etc) whereas mitigation is never a stat that can scale positively with anything the opponent can get, they can counter it with % and flat penetration but it can never scale in their favour.
 Which brings us to regen(or sustain to include pots/heals/lifesteal): it starts taking value the moment your health drops below 100%(which is pretty much all of the laning phase and most of the late-game though it's weak against assassin comps while strong against poke comps). It scales with mitigation and also can never scale positively for the opponent either.

My point is that such an article is useful only in showing some things, but if you really want to make an analysis on defensive masteries the correct question to answer would be "which of them are useful in which cases" and not "which of them are stronger" and my example is again this: If your enemy runs a poke comp then mitigation/sustain is king since they can't poke you down and they waste resources faster than you waste yours. Against an assassin comp all the sustain in the world won't save you if you are dead within a cycle and your main concern is to survive first deal damage on their downtime later(or just catch them off guard).