Talk:Darius/@comment-4499945-20141011225501/@comment-6061249-20141014090214

Considering Darius' playstyle, which is commonly misunderstood.

I have went into different way than most of Darius players and it works. I essentially reached 67% ranked win rate as Darius just by not playing exactly same as others.

Health is not needed as much as long as you can take enemies down quickly and got armor and MR (and my usual build grants both).

Why is Cleaver not as good?

Yeah, it grants health. Two hundred. Not much. Always something, but well...

Cleaver has the 10 flat penetration thing, which is wasted with Youmuu already equipped.

10% CDR is nice... Just not on that item.

Cleaver's armor reduction is better than LW's penetration only at one point - the target becomes more vulnerable for whole team rather than just the item holder. But besides of that - LW just gives higher penetration and doesn't have to be stacked.

Once again, stacking.

Hydra's active + Decimate + AA + W refresh grants quick four stacks. On one target, unless opponents sticked to themselves really close. Then you need to wait for cooldowns (quite short cooldowns anyway, but still) and the only way to do anything is continuous AA-ing. Just by the way, pulling enemies does not apply any stacks.

Last Whisper combined with Apprehend's penetration and Youmuu essentially lets you ignore about 55-75% of target's armor depending on how much armor it has, even with the reduced value of multiple penetration sources. Plus true damage ult.

Last Whisper also costs less than Cleaver.

Coming back to health - it's better just to get armor and MR. In current meta, health tanks can't stand anything. Lots of popular champions utilize an ability that deals damage based on target's health, or just hold a BotRK in their equipment.