Talk:Vel'Koz/@comment-9048637-20151108223258/@comment-9048637-20151119042350

When I talked about "free" stats, I meant "free" purely in the sense of "free in terms of gold". Yes, everything in League (as in life) comes with an opportunity cost. But since we were talking about playing from behind as opposed to playing from ahead, gold is the relevant metric: my point was that the stats you're getting from runes and masteries are relatively weightier when you don't have gold for items than when you do.

As for whether CDR is better when ahead or when behind... eh. I won't pretend to have some kind of absolutely certain answer for this. My own instinct is honestly that it's more important when behind because you've got less luxury to pick your own fights, and because you're behind you're less likely to finish the enemy off in that one rotation. Is having a bit more CDR necessarily going to let you turn a game? No, but then neither is having 10 more AP necessarily. I'd honestly rather trust the CDR. But maybe I'm wrong.

As for what you trade out to get max CDR: completely with you that on Vel'Koz, trading out a significant amount of pen is not good. I would be very reluctant to trade out Sorcs for Lucidity, for instance. One Mpen quint, maybe a different story. But not the Sorcs. AP, on the other hand, that I'm much more willing to trade. While Vel's ratios on his basic abilities might not be quite as abysmal as his reputation would suggest, they're still not extraordinary, considered individually. They're more respectable when you consider the cooldowns they're on... but that seems like a strange way of arguing against CDR. If we were talking about trading out Rabadon's for Athene's, that might be questionable. But my suggestion is trading out three scaling AP blues. I find that well worth, personally.

Mana gating is usually something to be wary of, yes, but if we're talking past laning phase (which, seeing as we're discussing scaling runes and full build, we are per force), I've never found Vel'Koz to have significant mana problems, even without blue. Yes, it's possible to OOM yourself if you've gone Morello's over Athene's and you're in a very extended siege (though that said, Meditation might change that now). But that's a very edge case, in my experience.

Finally, bear in mind that CDR scales cumulatively: the last point of CDR is worth more than the first. To see why this is the case, consider that if you have an ability with 10s base cooldown, the first 10% CDR will shave 10% (1s) off its current cooldown. But the next 10% will shave off 11% - since 1s is a ninth of 9s, not a tenth. And so on. Yes, the flat numbers may not look that impressive. But they're the same flat numbers as when you made the consideration to get your first 10% CDR, and relatively they're actually more impressive.

Anyway, I'm not saying you need max CDR on Vel'Koz to do well. I'm sure it's perfectly possible to carry with him with a lesser amount. But I do think that it's hard to argue that max CDR isn't optimal on him.