Talk:Tristana/@comment-9048637-20131122130209/@comment-9048637-20131122230204

Odaswifteye: Well, assuming you're going BotRK on the basis that Tristana doesn't have any AD scalings and the enemy front line are, eventually, going to have enough health to make it superior to the Bloodthirster, that's already a 40% AS item right there, equal to Shiv in those terms. Given that Tristana has the second-highest natural AS at level 18 in the game and something like the third-highest AS steroid in the game (behind Fiora and Evelynn joint first, if memory serves), that could well be enough. Still, more to the point, it's not the AS that makes the Zeal upgrade so core on most carries, but the mobility it grants. Which is why barely anyone gets Runaan's instead.

Unevent: Your point about her base MS is well-taken. As for what would replace it, well, this is why I tried to emphasize situaiontality in my question. Clearly, in a standard build path, a Zeal item is probably optimal for damage as well as utility, but there may be situations where another item looks really nice instead; say, I don't know, they've got a bunch of health-stackers so applying BotRK's on-hit effect to three of them at once with Runaan's sounds real sweet right now, or they're so healing-dependent that Explosive Shot doesn't quite cut it and Executioner's Calling is actually, well, called for (for the sake of the thought experiment, we could even pretend it gave vaguely worthwhile stats!). My point was to wonder if she had that flexibility.