Talk:Kassadin/@comment-26539937-20160201010955/@comment-1920550-20160202193942

And what would you trade for Seraph's? As an all in assassin, he needs Hourglass to go in, kill a target, go golden then go out. Lich Bane already complements his hefty scaling by quite a bit. ROA is always core due to it's stats and sustain. Void and Raba are core in almost every AP champion.

With the mana you gain from ROA/Lich Bane, you'll already gain a decent amount of extra damage on the mana scaling of your ult, plus the AP scaling complements that. Kassa is a melee assassin with some of the lowest base damages on the game, who already needs to build a scaling item and a high cost deffensive one in order to hit his first powerspike, while most mids get that same powerspike on the first item, which will be a CDR item, thus a cheaper one. If you try to stack another scaling item, your lack of combat stats will be suicidal since in order to stack the ROA/Seraph's combo as soon as possible you need to bum-rush Tear/Catalyst, two no combat stat items.

The thing is with Kass your laning phase pre-11/pre two completed items will be a lane of attrition, where you'll try to poke and trade with Q due to it's shield and your passive if you are against AP mids, while you try to farm every minion you get your hands on. Most of then won't be able to break past your shield/passive for the first 6 levels provided you don't eat every single skillshot they throw at you. Once you have ROA online, you try to roam to either help get kills or clean-up bad teamfights.