Talk:Braum/@comment-8506165-20140830004555/@comment-6281696-20140908082147

Not really, technicly damage wins by a landslide. However, there are several reasons why full-damage won't ever get a properly high win-rate.

First, most of these are increadibly item dependent, and once behind have nothing to fall back on because if they lack the damage to kill something they are basicly useless. This means that if you ever fall behind you've basicly lost the match unless your opponent refuses to push and allows you to farm for some reason.

Second, with the values currently present, full damage builds effectivly reduce the game to a game of chance. Whoever hits first wins. Which basicly pushes all winrates to ~50%, and champions with longer animations get screwed a bit more. To be honest, even a lot of more "defensive" champions are going that way due to the obsession with burst & "plays", at least versus the squishier targets.

Third, most champions in this game can easily get sufficient damage. You don't need a glass cannon zed to blow up a squishy, a decent renekton with one or two damage items can get the job done too. There's no reason to pick more damage instead of utility or survivability if all that damage is just going to be overkill anyway.

Now the reason as to why full utility won't ever get popular is quite simple. Because of the obsession with damage utility barely matters. Stuff dies too quickly for utility to shine. Take for example Annie support, now utility wise she completly loses out to say Leona. But since Annie can just melt the ADC in the time it takes for leona's stun to come of CD leona's advantage in terms of utility ends up being kind of irrelevant (in a 2v2 lane situation at least).

Supports are allowed to remain mostly utility focussed only because the ADC already brings a stupid amount of damage. If you have a leona and say a Lucian, if leona ever catches you lucian will most likely be able to kill you by the time her stun ends. Leona's actual utility again doesn't shine because the fight's over long before it becomes all that impressive. Same with the other 3 you mentioned. It's why the whole support meta came into existance, the ADC is simply already enough damage in most situations, there's no need for massive overkill so get something that is "relevant" without relying on damage to support.