Talk:Kassadin/@comment-26459891-20160616052020

Here's my 2 cents regarding 6.9 changes:

First of all, I've been building Tear again since the changes, in place of Rod of Ages. Here's my reasoning behind:

Historically, Rod of Ages has been the perfect rush item for Kassadin, as Catalyst provided a useful tool for early laning (Kassadin's so-called weakness), while also granting a fair amount of AP and Mana. Since the changes, however Catalyst has lost its appeal to me: its new passive is good, like, VERY good on spammers or champs with toggle abilities, like Karthus, Aurelion Sol, Anivia, Lissandra... but Kassadin is not spammy enough early on to benefit THAT much from it, and the damage-taken-into-mana conversion is not very useful either, because Kassadin doesn't really have mana problems to begin with thanks to his W.

On the other hand, in the past few seasons Tear's been considered kind of a noob trap, slowing down Kassadin from reaching his power spikes while providing a large mana pool, which was not really needed since RoA granted 800 (!) mana on its own, nearly as much as a fully stacked Seraph's Embrace. However,  new RoA only gives 400 mana. Mana is the main reason Kassadin wanted RoA in the first place: health is nice but you can definitely work without it. In addition to that,  Tear's new passive is a godsend. When upgraded to a Seraph's Embrace, a fully-stacked 800 mana Riftwalk will grant you back 200 mana, effectively allowing you to perform a whole spell rotation. Since stacked Riftwalks are actually a big part of playing Kassadin, I find it to be very useful.

Also, new Morellonomicon is like the dream item. 100 AP, 20% CDR for dem Riftwalks, 400 flat mana which Kassadin loves, and the flippin mana refund passive which was like, the only reason people considered building Athene's back then. Its AP value is boosted even more by Seraph's as 400 mana translates into 12 AP.

What has been your experience on Kassadin so far?