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That's a great question. Personally, I've never built Liandry first in this iteration of the game. I think on a champion like Velkoz, I'd feel a lot more comfortable doing that since his mana costs are so low. But on a champion like Xerath I really do like that 600 mana buffer. Also, the other thing about Ludens is that while it won't out damage Liandry on a tank over the course of a prolonged engagement, the initial hit should still deal more damage than Liandry in most cases, assuming the target is relatively isolated. And many times, I find that a lot of skirmishes in the mid game only give you an opportunity to land 1-2 good shots on a target before they either die or escape. So in those situations Ludens is also still doing great damage. A lot of times your damage will be that 'bit of extra damage that allows the target to be killed' so Ludens is still stronger than any other item in those single shot situations.

Thanks mate, I like the way you explain things and think. Do you do any Xerath support guides or game play commentary?

@@0djc123 Those are good suggestions! I'll definitely do a full on Xerath support guide soon! And yeah maybe we could do some game play commentary as well!

That would be awesome!! Just FYI I had a game yesterday with Nada's, Sejuani, Galio, ezreal, Leona. I went liandrys first. Mana was an issue, I could feel the difference. I managed to get a kill which gave me enough funds to get Liandrys and a mana crystal so it was manageable in the end but something I will play around with.

Your personal win rate honestly doesn't really mean much in terms of measuring the strength of a given rune setup/build, especially if the games are played on the same account. There's a couple of reasons: 1.) The game is always trying to get you back to 50 something % winrate. So if you play like 20 games on Malignance and have a 65% winrate for those games, you can be sure your next 20 on Ludens is going to balance you out a bit so you'll almost certainly have a lower WR on Ludens. 2.) The circumstances within the games differ too greatly to be able to compare one game to another. You could have 5 close games with Malignance that you won, that could have easily went the other way where maybe you only went 3/5 on Ludens but with much more consistent games. You could have have a 5-10 game stomp with any given item where you just have team gap every game. In general, the actual performance of the players in the game and the champions in the game are going to dictate things way more than the item you buy, etc. As for the reasoning behind using Malignance: >the reason why i like malignance is because the ult cooldown allows me to roam towards mid and help them get a better lead. diamond elo My argument would be you can roam mid with any build. Remember the difference in ULT CD in the worst case scenario at level 6 is 13 seconds. Realistically, for most players based on their runes it will probably be more like 11 seconds. So what you're basically saying when you say what you just said is that every game, or most games, you're finding a particular roam timing that would only work in that 8-13 second window you created for yourself by buying Malignance. I just don't see this as being very likely at all. As for blackfire, it really doesn't do damage than something like HF unless you're consistently hitting multiple people with it, or you're unable to get use out of hypershot, etc. It's certainly not an awful item, but it not really *better* than other items in long, drawn out fights, unless you're hitting multiple people at once consistently, or have a very high amount of AP. And in any combat situation that's *not* a prolonged engagement, like poke, it just loses incredibly hard to Ludens.

@@XerathDiff-js4mf ludens has a cd, blackfire dont, I also have an average of 97% hit chance with spells across 1k games on xerath. I do math on every game i play him instead of vs bots. I have multiple seasons with again an average of s tier performance over minimum 400 games on xerath alone. Yes ludens are stronger on first hit, but not on second or third compared to blackfire torch. I was also the Guy who made him a support pick few sesons ago becausr my math told People he really only have 2 counters in botlane if you know your matchups. And since Diamond Elo is top 5% of the world in a game where millions play i would like to know what your Elo is. Beside that, there is a huge difference in what gives most dmg and what gives most effective dmg. Again the strongest build right now is Blackfiretorch liandry shadowflame because shadowflame makes your Dots able to critt, and as soon people have more than 1800hp the liandry with critt makes it the strongest ap item in the game. They do it in europe, asia and america. Because all the high Elo players math says the same brother. Thay blackfire liandry shadowflame is the top tier dmg build for "most" mages. I have played the game since beta release and made the math behind multiple seasons Meta pick before they became the Meta. I was the one in the older days who wrote out to people that armor penetration builds was better at some adc, that Lucian was better at mid than adc, that cassio was the toplane Queen and more. I know my math is correct. But there is a huge difference in what makes the strongest 1 punch, and what makes the most effectice dmg in a fight on more than 18 seconds witch is the average lenght of team fights in higher Elo where people know what they are doing

@@OliverJacobsen777 A couple things. 1.) You don't. "Do the math every game". 2.) You don't have a 97% hit rate on Xerath. 3.) Your dots can only 'crit' on targets below 35% HP and 'critting' in this case entails a 1.2-1.3 damage multiplier. 4.) Diamond, presumably like D4 if you're saying only top 5%, is not a very high rank and if you have 400 games per season you should be well beyond diamond by now. Also, if you're d4 you're ABSOLUTELY not hitting 97% of your shots. If you were, you'd be higher. LOL Also, people have been playing Xerath support since the champion launched. LOL You also didn't reply to anything I said in my post where I was specifically replying to the claims you made. "Ludens has a CD" is not a reply to me saying that Ludens crushes any other first item rush on intermittent poke, which is the bread/butter of your gameplay.

@@XerathDiff-js4mf i do math every game and analyze my gameplay, I am top dmg in 95% of games I play on xerath and just because you make most dmg doesnt mean you win every game. And if multiple people who play for Even lcs teams are abusing this build it means it is stronger than any other build. Try the build out yourself and see your dmg go through the roof.

@@OliverJacobsen777 Also, as for this: >Beside that, there is a huge difference in what gives most dmg and what gives most effective dmg That is absolutely correct, and ludens does much more 'effective' damage than blackfire.

Sorry bro, but that's not a very good summary of the video at all. First of all, I give my conclusion very early on with the explicit purpose of allowing people who only want the answer to tune out of the video early. So for most people this is a short video. But honestly, the 'respecting people's time' aspect is laughable since it's your choice if you want to watch/continue to watch the video. Second, what you're doing here is pretty close to looking at the item in a vacuum. It's very easy to calculate burn damage, anyone can do that and find pretty quickly (or via testing) that this item isn't providing you any insane value at it's base. It's not an 'out of band' item by any stretch on a champion like Xerath. What does that mean? Well right away it means that it needs to be compared explicitly to both Liandry and Voidstaff. Why? Because how you should really be thinking about this item, given it's not baseline OP on Xerath, is if I were to build this, which core item would I replace? The testing done in the video is important, because it shows that, even on a squishy target with a relatively high amount of AP, you're not really getting more damage from this than Liandry, and if you're not doing at least more damage on squishes, it means there's absolutely no reason to build this item as one of your first 3, which is mainly what we're concerned about since most games will effectively be over at that point. Especially because Liandry's 300 more HP is *WAY* more useful then 600 extra mana. You don't need mana at all outside of your first mana item. You run into the same issue trying to build it third instead of voidstaff. It just doesn't give the damage increase you're looking for (even in the best case scenario) and building it over either of those items puts you at risk for succumbing to either HP or MR stacking. It also needs to be tested directly against Ludens because that would be the only other item you might replace with it, but as you can see from the video giving up ludens is just far too much damage. Third, the point about blowing flashes is not a real thing. The amount of flashes you're going to burn having an extra burn item vs not having one is completely negligible on a champion like Xerath. This comes more into play on champions like Brand/Teemo where their own dot retriggers the item DoT application. Forth, you have to talk about the passive, and how impactful you're estimating it to be in a combat scenario. Finally, it's worth talking about the ultra late, because that's the case where, since the item has an AP scaler, it can really begin to overperform for it's gold value. All of these things are necessary to cover if you want to eval the item properly.

100% man. That's great advice for them, people get &way* too caught up in items.

I mean, I provide the short answer very quickly in the video. I just wanted to show all of the scenarios with tests for completeness sake. It also doesn't really benefit me to make longer videos since most people prefer 10-15 minute videos. 20 mins at max.

Future asmongold

Deahtcap against squishy targets can definitely be strong as a second item so long as you have a stacked dark seal. But again even reasonably tanky teams usually liandry is equiv/more damage for cheaper.

Yeah, I would just say the midlane build is a bit more flexible because you have more gold. So for example, if you want to build another item second that excels a bit better in killing squishier targets, you're more able to get away with that because you will most likely have the gold to build Liandry/Penetration later anyways.

Haha! If the background sound is annoying I could turn his voice lines off.

@@XerathDiff-js4mf Nah bro, that is just my favourite Xerath voice line. Really love it. Video was good and I like the info. Do you think it will be worth to run Blackfire and Liandry's next patch? Maybe it is worth more to be constantly pining Champs with damage throughout a fight with constant burn dps. I know you made a point in the video to focus more on hitting one really big hit rather than many progressively higher damage hits. I just thought that being able to always have things ticking keeps your damage relevant all the time.

@@Ricky-re9lz I gotcha! Totally agree! As for Blackfire, I might make a video on that specifically, but my guess would be probably not. The issue is, in terms of mana items, Ludens is going to be better for us. Then compared to Liandry, Liandry should be better, and then if you build it in place of Void Staff we'd have no magic penetration. I'm also not really sure we'd make great use out of the secondary effect to be able to stack the bonus AP well.

That used to be the case, but Liandries no longer gives more damage to bonus HP. It's just causes them to take damage that's based off a % of their max HP per second. The secondary effect now simply increases damage you deal in combat by 2/4/6% based on the stacks.

Thats what he meant. You also said it urself "It's just causes them to take damage that's based off a % of their max HP per second." Which means if the dummy has more, HP Liandry will do 2% of the max HP. 2% from 3000 HP, differs from 2% of 2000 HP.

@@Metaknight136 That isn't the problem and isn't what he's saying. What he's saying is that the *old* Liandry's used to have a line where it did extra damage based off of an opponents "Bonus HP" Bonus HP is anything from items/runes/etc and not the champions base HP. That was a problem to simulate in the practice tool at the time because all combat Dummy's have a *base* HP of 1000. That 'base HP' cannot be changed. Any additional HP you add counts as 'Bonus HP'. So if I'm trying to simulate a Kayn having 2500 Total HP, the only thing I can do is make a Dummy with 2500 HP. The problem is, in the real game, that Kayn probably had 1800 HP Base and 700 Bonus HP from Runes/Items. But in the practice tool, the Dummy we're using to represent him would have 1000 Base HP and 1500 "Bonus HP". That means that since part of the old Liandry made your damage scale off an enemies Bonus HP, the damage you deal to the dummies would be more than what you'd expect in a real game. The new Liandry does not have that problem. It just burns based off the targets Max HP. So if I set the Dummy to 2500 HP to replicate a 2500 HP Kayn it doesn't matter what portion is the Dummy's base HP or what portion is the Dummy's "Bonus".