Board Thread:League of Legends discussion/@comment-26236254-20170129115835/@comment-1330314-20170130073226

Moyon wrote: Can anyone justify why picking the small items is better than picking the larger items ? Both seems as arbitrary to me.

Because those are the items players start with, and the ones most likely to build into component items that serve as the base for further stats, e.g. or. Not only are the more expensive items expressly designed to be more gold efficient (you're "paying" for them in terms of time spent not using that gold elsewhere), a great deal many of them have been turned into non-basic items over time, namely, and , so it makes little sense to pick those as the bases for measuring gold efficiency.

It's also worth noting that the M.O. for gold value and efficiency calculations is to pick the most basic and least gold-efficient item, not necessarily the smallest, since that is what makes for the clearest gold efficiency calculations thereafter (you don't end up with as many items with deceptively crappy-looking gold efficiency when they're clearly more efficient than just filling up on or ). The fact that the least expensive components end up also being the least gold efficient is essentially just a product of that.