Talk:Maokai/@comment-3486816-20120529023950/@comment-77.236.25.91-20120530081947

1) I really appreciate your input here, but that`s not our merit.

2) I admit that jungle Maokai can have some mana issues (not the severe ones, but still), especially when he gives second and further blue to mid as he should. But to solve this problem I found it enough to take early Catalyst (after gp5 items and boots) and benefit from its stats and leveling passive. In later game it can be build into Banshee for MR. RoA gives you a lot of health and mana, but it costs thousands of gold because it gives you a lot of AP as well. Thats why it is just cost-uneffective for Maokai imo.

3) I`ve been trying to include RoA into my build and came to conclusion that it is too expensive for the not-really-optimal set of stats it provides. Maybe I am just unexperienced or sth, but it really seems that to me.

4) Yeah, this is probably the main problem for late game Maokai in general: how to grab their focus ? You can try to do it via damage, but from my experience it is likely that you will be ignored anyway since 3 other members of your team will usually still hurt them much more. So, my idea of what to do is to improve your CC abilities and play straight utility-tank way. The item that I found particularly good here is Frozen Mallet, Randuin and Frozen Heart also works very well. With your typical W initiation they are all easy to land, which means that once you grab your target, you can CC him forever and at the same time debuff him seriously. This is what I usually try to do with their carry and it seems to work in most cases so far, but maybe I am just lucky and have bad opponents. Anyway, 80 AP bonus would give me no more than about 200 damage in combo (even less in practice since you rather wont build Mpen). I cant imagine enemy team being totally frightened of taking 200 damage more, but who knows.

5) I would never advise to replace RoA with Rylai. This would be hillarious indeed. Rylai is in my opinion a luxury item for Maokai (and so is FoN), which can be grabbed in 4-6th place if you have a lot of gold - but still it is the only strictly AP item that I can think of as good for him.