Talk:Darius/@comment-5877442-20140903103308/@comment-6061249-20140903135508

At top lane, you remain in close range with the opponent as you both want to gain gold from lasthitting lane minions. Darius' range of effectiveness is limited to length of the pull. He just cannot do anything to any target that stays out of that range, unless he uses Flash.

In late game, both teams try to keep distance to have the control over incoming teamfight. The distance is too far to pull enemies most of the time. And for a top lane melee champion, being weak at initiating teamfights is a huge downside, which makes for Darius' late game fall off as much as nothing else.

The Guillotine in fact gets weaker over time too mostly because you can apply Hemorrhage fast only to one target at time. Most of stacks come from basic attacks, making it really hard to manage it against whole enemy team.

The problem is also that people like to buy reaaaaally too much defense items. I mean, of course, you must buy some defense, but the core of your build should be the damage. It's all because high base damage is just not working in late game as good as in early, and Darius' abilities are just screaming like MORE ATTACK DAMAGE PLEASE. In short, if you get the help from your team, build some high AD to make the late game weaknesses less noticable for cost of taking higher risk. But it's worth taking it.