Cleaver overrated? - A small study on Illaoi's damage with different items
Hello, Riftmakers biggest defender here, with the results of hours in the practice tool.
I'm a diamond/master Illaoi Main with 1.4m mastery and wanted to share some of my research on itembuilds. I spent a few hours in practice tool and then a few analyzing and curating the data, but i wanna preface, this is not professional work. Just a dedicated main.
I keep reading build discussions and some of it honestly felt like misinformation, likely accidental. Illaoi is a weird champ and not everything is intuitive, especially the way the E damage works.
My main finding was stacked Spear of Shojin outperforming Black Cleaver until very high armor values (180, in trades without ultimate, or somewhere between 100-180 with ult)
I do want to respond to possible comments so there's no confusion:
- About the setup, i just picked situations that feel common enough in most illaoi games and are easy to replicate by my own.
- The more elaborate the combat situation, the harder to replicate. Especially on Illaoi with things like where you spawn ult tentacles, are you able to hit both soul and champion, which tentacles proc the damage reduction because of hits in a short timeframe, etc. Thats why the second setup is both a lot less accurate and thorough, i was mainly curious and wanted to get an approximation.
- I am aware that damage is not everything. Something like Iceborn gives pitiful damage but has utility, same for items like Steraks, Death's Dance or Sundered Sky. They might give AD but thats not why we buy them. BC and Shojin are primarily for damage purposes and give nice stats. Yes Shojin gives no ultimate haste unlike BC, thats a tradeoff you have to make yourself. Same for if you want Steraks Shield against burst or Riftmakers Omnivamp for sustained fights. I'm just here to tell you, you won't lose much damage
- It's a bit of an unfortunate timing with the patch coming up, but i don't think it matters. Steraks is great and will be even better, i doubt 5 ad will push BC damage above Shojin.
- About the whole pre-stacked thing: it's really hard to depict accurate game situations, so i decided on worst and best case. It is true that one of the upsides of BC is, being able to stack it very fast with Illaoi E. But on the flipside, you should be able to keep up your Shojin stacks in lane before fighting and since Riftmaker works even if you get attacked, it will be often be fully stacked before your whole animation rotation is done.
Everything else is in the images, feel free to critique or ask questions.