Talk:Elise/@comment-3524971-20140505120044/@comment-24915478-20140507235014

Liandry's isn't important on her. The item is mediocre. The item it builds from, haunting guise, however, gives her a lot of the stats she wants the most and at the right time. Flat magic penetration makes you do a ton of damage to targets with low magic resist, so if you rush items with magic pen you start spiking hard early game. Elise already has an early game spike through sheer utility and dueling ability. Her AP ratios are also terrible, but her base damage is high. Perfect for a magic penetration build.

You should only really build liandry's as a last item when you're out of item slots. As for the other item suggestions, the ones you listed cost upwards of 3,000 gold. Haunting guise costs ~1,500, and if you get that, with magic pen runes and magic pen boots, then if your enemy target has yet to build magic resist, your spell damage is basically true damage. This is slightly less effective in the top lane since your opponent usually itemizes against you and will rush negatron cloak. Not so in the jungle.

The items you listed are fine for a top lane Elise. Generally you are more farmed on top lane and have a lot more gold to work with and you don't have to focus on exploiting your early game map pressure since you're on the top lane island. The biggest problem is that the AP scaling on Q isn't very good against the targets you'd want to be jumping on, but it's not a huge problem.