Talk:The Black Cleaver/@comment-6015339-20130222045401/@comment-4068613-20130222133329

I just did some testing of my own and came to at least one different conclusion.

First of all, it's worth noting that I was Garen, and I was checking Soraka for stacks

Garen's Q, when used on Soraka, applied only one stack. A spellblade attack on soraka still only applied one stack. Garen's Q and and sheen's Spellblade both used at the same time still only left Soraka with one stack afterwards.

An Iceborn Gauntlet spellbladed attack still left the primary target (soraka) with exactly one stack, though it also applied a stack when a nearby minion was the primary target, and Soraka was within the Iceborn AOE range.

It should be noted I only test Ravenous Hydra, and not Tiamat. Barring some sort of obscuring coding glitch, though, they should function identically. When a minion was attacked with Ravenous Hydra using a normal attack, Soraka took one stack. Using the RH active also applied one stack. Using a basic RH attack on Soraka directly also only applied one stack, Even if both Garen's Q and Iceborn Gauntlet were also applied on that attack.

The only way I saw to apply more than one Cleaver stack to Soraka with a single attack (as Garen, remember) was to hit a nearby minion with an Iceborn Gauntlet spellbladed attack with her in the radius while I had Ravenous Hydra equipped. This applied, presumably, one stack for the Iceborn AOE damage, and one stack for the RH AOE damage, and clearly left her with exactly two stacks.

It's possible that Talon's Q and Garen's Q proc Black Cleaver differently (not in the least because Talon's also bleeds), but my experiments show that in at least one case, an empowered autoattack can apply only one stack of Cleaver to a target.

Though this wasn't explicitly asked, I also checked interaction between Iceborn Gauntlet, Black Cleaver, and structures. The slow and damage of Iceborn were applied to nearby targets, including champions, when a tower or inhibitor were struck with a Gauntlet-spellbladed attack. This damage did apply a stack of Black Cleaver.

Pardon the wall of text. Just trying to word things as unambiguously as possible.