Talk:Blade of the Ruined King/@comment-5889958-20130323235841/@comment-5426276-20130327173419

Your observations are correct. Against a squishy target, flat damage is better than %. And high armor counters any physical damage without penetration.

Anyway, BotRK is still a strong item by itself. Let's say you're attacking a 3500 HP target. A fully stacked Bloodthirster deals 100 damage (before armor). BotRK deals 25 flat damage. The passive deals 5% current health, so that's 175 bonus damage when they're at 3500 health, and 0 bonus at 0, so the average bonus is (175+0) / 2 = 87.5. Total is 25 + 87.5 = 112.5 average damage per attack (before armor). That's more on average than BT's 100 damage, and BotRK also has attack speed (even more DPS) and doesn't need stacks to reach full power. The active is also strong: use it for the slow, or to instakill a low health target with the 15% max health damage.

So it deals great damage and even has a bit of utility. Of course BotRK's disadvantage is that the damage it deals cannot crit and doesn't improve AD scaling abilities. But if it was good for that too, BT would be obsolete.