Talk:Zeal/@comment-24971427-20180630144802/@comment-7765731-20180726030937

This is a bit late, which I appoligize for. I will first discuss crit related items, and near the bottom I'll bring up something that you should probably pay more attention to - armor-stacking and tankbusting.

It's either finished Zeal item>IE or unupgraded Zeal>IE. It's a bit hard to say which is more efficient since the former is massively more common so the sample sizes are different, but from what I've gathered based on stats (both before and after the 8.14 crit item change) is that the latter is more effective (unupgraded Zeal>IE). I suspect they're roughly equal though, since the latter is likely skewed because it's less likely when behind and more likely when ahead because it's harder to get another BF back earlier in the game unless you're snowballing. Make the decision based more on what you need - is the upgraded Zeal item uniques going to make enough of a difference in the current state of the game? If yes, then build it, otherwise just go straight for IE. If you're forced into awkward back timings that also have urgency for power spikes you may also want to skip rushing straight for IE.

First item Stormrazor works on most crit adcs, but statistical numbers are skewed and unlikely to be fair compared to other alternatives due a lot of different factors. My view is that it's mostly a matter of game state and preference. Regardless, if you're behind in a game where the enemy team has strong picks that can force the game towards ending early if you delay getting powerspikes (and they're not primarily a tanky team) then I'd build Stormrazor, as the one-item powerspike is going to scale worse than a straight crit build, but will help keep the game from ending. Being slightly stronger at 30 minutes doesn't matter if the game is already over. There's an exception though which I briefly mentioned - If the enemy team either has multiple armor stacking frontliners or a single one but you're likely to be almost the only person taking him down, you still want to go straight for a crit build because the tankbusting is more important. This only applies if the single tank have major investments in armor though, having their first two items both providing armor or a high HP (Mallet, Cinderhulk, Warmogs etc) item combined with either a 60+ armor item or any armor item+Tabis. It's hard to give you hard cases of "Build this then" as it is very adaptive, but as a rule of thumb you should always consider tankbusting earlier in any game where your team is mostly AD and the enemy team has atleast one dedicated tank or two+ bruiser champions. In any other game with more mixed damage, even if the enemy team has a tank or two+ bruisers then you should be fine going Stormrazor either way simply because they'll be required to itemize for multiple forms of resistances. Everything varies a lot depending on factors that differ from game to game.

The TL;DR of that last paragraph is basically that you're free to itemize Stormrazor as you please, but I'd avoid it if your team is mostly/full AD and the enemy team isn't all squishies. Squishies can still itemize armor to be more effectively itemizing than your team, but you generally won't see more than one armor item on them at most stages of the game (not including potential Tabis) and they'll rarely be fully defensive, while tanks and bruisers can opt into two or more fully commited armor items.

For the topic of armor stacking and tankbusting, have a look at what I posted at this url; https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/91ylrd/psamy_thoughts_regarding_the_current_relation/

If you don't feel like reading all of it, just read until I mention that you can skip ahead, then just scroll towards the bottom. The TL;DR is that you don't have the same urgency to build LW items to counteract armor stacking anymore, especially not against the extremely armor heavy targets. IE already does that job for you, and it does it a lot better against the more extreme cases. Instead, you should just view the LW item-line as another damage multiplier (and a source of healing reduction in the case of Mortal Reminder). If you for some reason have both IE and Conqueror then don't even bother. The effective damage increase from an LW item at that point against any target with 300+ armor just isn't relevant. In fact, it's going to be a lot more relevant against anything in the 100-200 armor range.. however controversial that may sound.