Talk:The Bloodthirster/@comment-8468980-20140605175805/@comment-5955640-20140607082035

You have a lot of items to choose from. Raw AD is good. But after awhile you really should be building more intuitively. Again if you are dominating the match you can just buy whatever. If you are just buying one of the same items you aren't really optmizing against the enemy, just min-maxing their stats which for a strategy game is not on.

If you are a bruiser you should have a couple attack damage items. After that you should consider weapons with activates or different items that synergize with each other. One or two weapons two or three armor items (boots included) and if you bought a lot of health armor you can get an Atma or a Maw which is armor or magic resistance with bonus health that scales with total health or a loss of health. (Maw caps but Atma doesn't. Heavily Warmogs and Atma combo It's damage can rise to equality with a BF sword and it's evolutions.)

If you are an assassin you should buy self peel items after your main two weapons. One of which could be Blood Thirster but the other can be Blade of the Ruined King. After that, Banshie's veil, Guardian Angel, and Mercurial Scimitar can buy you out of a bind or let you win a last man standing fight with an opponent with CC.

Junglers always get their jungle items but if you want to scale really well into late game. Nothing beats the Feral Flare. Feral Flare and a Blade of the Ruined King or a Bloodthirster and you can do your fair share of carry. Take the tips from what an Assassin or Bruiser should do for the rest of the kit.

Marksmans are the most controversial. Because it's always one or two items. Infinity Edge or Bloodthirster. Everything else and you have to justify it and you shouldn't have to because you have plenty of options. Let me list them. You may find yourself building them on occasion and that's all right. Just know that these are the items you should try building instead of another blood thirster.

Frozen Mallet: Slippery enemies? You can easily give this a go. The slow on it for ranged champs is 30% BUT Ashe's slow on Q is only five percent more. For the loss of five percent you get to slow on hit a target for 1.5 seconds and it won't cost you mana like it does Ashe. The 700 health doesn't go to waste either (although apparantly the item has lost a lot of favor as of late although as far as I can tell it's just that no one uses. Not that's completely ineffective.)

Black Cleaver: This item does make a round or two and if you built a Last Whisper but on occassion this is the better choice. You leave a shred debuff for others to exploit. The ten percent cooldown reduction can be very useful for casters or champs who need their clutch escapes (which is very useful for a marksman.)

Last Whisper: You have to have this when their are tanks. I'm sure that goes without saying.

Youmuus Ghostblade: A couple of marksmen don't have AS steroids or don't have very intuitive ones (Twitch gets AS when exiting stealth but not during his ult and stealthing to get the bonus only can be a bit clunky.) you could get Youmuus for the activate. Very useful for a trade. Nice for chasing. It's almost exclusively on melee carries but there isn't a tiamat restriction to forbid you to use it.

Sword of the Divine: For the greatest of clutch and YOLO (whatever that is). Activate this and blow someone away. Phantom Dancer be dammned. If you deal true damage in auto attacks guess how much a 100% boost to your true damage like passives is going to do to the enemy? You lose it's passive AS when it's down so you gotta be pro. More pro than the pros.

Executioners: Sometimes the enemy will just win by having sustain. Ungodly sustain. Some marksman can apply grevious wound but for everyone else you should probably buy this. No really. If the enemy is winning fights by tanking and just popping an ability or letting their passives blast their health while they do great percantage damage based on their stacked health. This would keep the fight in your favor and make poking not as worthless. Morellonomicon is more commonly built but it doesn't kick in until the health is more than halfway down.

Sword of the Occult: Well not really. This pretty much is a mid to early game item but if you're looking for another reason to farm here it is and you can farm for more movement speed which is amusing and useful. Espescially if you have difficulties getting away because you lack a dash or jump.

Trinity Force: It's the perfect item. It does everything. It has almost everything (it's missing armor, magic resistance, tenacity, Life steal, and Spell Vamp). It's good on casters and it's nice on hybrids. Trinity force ladies and gentleman.

Ice Born Gauntlet: Remember when Ezreal would build this? He still can. Espescially if he needs armor (which remember. Trinity Force DOES NOT have) and CDR and mana. The passive still works and the ice field has varied use on you but of course it works on Ezreal perfectly well.

Manamune/Muramana: No really. As a marksman you'd want to auto attack to get the DPS because on most situations DPS wins fights but not all Marksmans will get the DPS to win a fight without casting spells. You could very easily run out of damage. This would fix it even more than Trinity Force or even Iceborn. Get it early enough and if the game goes late you get more bonus damage. Again. Another fragment of the long lost Blue Ezreal.

Runaans Hurricane: If you want to stack a passive onto a lot of opponents or just pump bonus damage more frequently this would do well. You just have to have a strong AD item to support this thing. Possibly Blood Thirster?

Stattik Shiv: If you have the range to do so or apply certain on hit abilities like Ezreal's Q. This is great. Damage jumps through the enemy line and hits people up. Stattik Shiv can critically strike as well. I mean. It has critical strike but the shock. That crtically strikes too.

Lets just briefly re-tread some bruiser items that could be useful to not being the person for whom focusing on will reap the easiest reward (you actually want to be as inexploitable as possible hence why Guardian Angel is so good).

Zephyr: Tenacity and movement speed. Hexdrinker/Maw: Anti nuke magic shield. Mercurial Scimitar: Cleanse and magic resistance. Blade of the Ruined King: Damage based on health with an activate that saps enemies movement speed and health.

And a Phantom Dancer. Just in general. You can buy a Phantom Dancer.

To more directly answer you question before. Riven can build raw damage. But filling in the bruiser role you should buy the rest of the bruiser kit to counter your lane opponent or the climate of upcoming teamfights. If you can face roll as a Riven is want to do, it doesn't matter what you build. Ideally. The enemy should be up to par and exploiting your very squishy self and focus you to win a teamfight by simply getting rid of you.

Varus gets a bonus of attack speed after a kill for a few brief seconds so for a one on one duel it's not very useful and can fade out a little too soon. You can supplment this with any of the given AS items but Hurricane has a great benefit if you can follow up with the use of Blighted Quiver. Blighted Quiver will deal health based damage with a magic damage output based on the stacks of blight you apply which must be detonated with a spell.

Not only does this mean that you need to cast a lot more in a duel to gain the advantage, you might also need the mana to cast it as Varus has really heavy mana costs. You could buy and build Trinity Force or Iceborn, Manamune would actually end the mana problems and give you free reign to harass (although getting to Muramana is another story).

Hilariously. You could try Wit's end. Yes I said Wit's end. Think about it. You can steal the magic resistance of your enemy by five for up to five stacks. Blighted Quiver will stack up to three times. This item gives you AS to let you apply blighted Quiver and make up for on demand AS (I wouldn't buy another non damage AS item though). When you have made all your Quiver stacks and sapped the magic resistance from the enemy you can then cast a spell to detonate the enemy based on their health with magic output that they are barely resisting (note your ult benefits from this as well)

Hm? You can give that a try as I've just thought of it right this second. So build AD or crit? How about you optimize the W passive proc damage? It's only what makes Varus special.

Seriously don't stack bloodthirsters.