Talk:Darius/@comment-24896347-20140813050642/@comment-6061249-20140824012231

I'm platinum at solo queue, playing mostly Darius - at the moment, 39 won, 19 lost. Just to clarify, i did not grind that, i advanced from silver III to platinum V in about 80-90 matches. Didn't advance further yet because i'm unable to play for 3 months already, except occassional matches to prevent LP decay.

The point is - yes. You are right. Enemies will most likely destroy you if you proceed to move onto them as a melee champion without some nasty mobility. That's why i never said not to build defense there. My main rule about Darius is - you must build about 2/3 or 1/2 damage, or else you won't be able to show the power of your kit. Even if it means taking risk sometimes. And that's great, Darius was never meant to be safe pick.

Especially considering how Darius, besides of his high base defense stats, doesn't really have any built-in defense, this would be just silly not to consider some defense items. It's simple, full damage build will fail as much as full tankiness build, since as Darius, the goal of your build is to make you able to survive the initial moves of the fight, and then pump as much as possible from his kit which just screams "MORE AD MORE AD".

Having a spammable true damage ult is never a reason to build full tank. No, no, it would be, but it also has an up to 150% AD ratio. To some point, even if it's a single target ability, Noxian Guillotine is a multiple target ability, just in some casts instead of one. And why ever wouldn't you want to get more damage on such thing? I mean, look also at the other abilities! Crippling Strike, 200% total AD at max rank, it's just all about damage, it doesn't scale itself, the free armor penetration, how much does it matter for a full tank build? It does, but definitely not as much as offtank build that has damage in its core.

And of course Darius is capable of dueling! Just no matter what, the build shouldn't be focused mostly on that because that is not what Darius does best. The one of important thing is, Darius goes well on bullying the lane opponent with Decimate, but, if the opponent decides to break the oppression and begins a duel, Darius remains strong, and that's very important. And in late game, those two - the zoning and dueling - become noticably weaker. And this is the point where you want to build damage, to keep the power up. If almost all your damage comes from ulting low health targets, you are simply failing to play properly. No one needs a guy that just finishes off some enemies without barely doing anything else. But you also cannot just go ham, because who needs a guy that dies after a while in every fight?

And this is why you must consider building damage and tankiness together. When you are ahead, each point of your build will increase in power. When you are neither ahead of behind, 1/2 damage and 1/2 defense works good enough simply because you get both of things you need, good enough to go for getting fed without taking insane risk. If you are ahead, 1/3 defense will work good enough, while 2/3 damage will amplify your power to the point where you become impossible to ignore, and even do more than half of the work in mid-game teamfights.

When you are behind - take the goddamn risk. Build 2/3 damage. Your team doesn't want you to be a tanky chunk running into teamfights. Sure, you can build full tank, enter a fight, steal as much kills as possible, and then you will have the gold to process ahead, but you will also destroy the gold income for rest of your team. When you build damage, you can do a lot in fights and then decide to either give the kills and spread the gold around or take them. But even if you take them, you still did a lot to the fight, instead of just killing the low health ones.

I know how players are afraid of risk. And there we come to a point that is almost never known to players. 'Darius cannot begin a teamfight at any moment. He's not an usual initiator.'

To some point, Darius is just bad at initiating fights. You really want to just walk up to enemies?

Unless you manage to come close enough for a pull, or your Flash is up, how are you really going to just step in? Darius can initiate a fight, but only when it's really in his favor. If you are searching for a teamfight initiator, switch to playing Malphite, Jarvan or Nocturne. They are meant to do this much more than Darr Darr.

As Darius, you can also try baiting enemies or setting up an ambush. In some cases, you can pull enemies over the walls, which in case of some important targets, may set up a fight. However, always consider how Apprehend's range isn't really long, so that's going to happen only sometimes.

Simply, it's way, way more efficient to see anyone else beginning the fight, and then coming into it. In this way, the focus on defense also gets less important, but never to the point to completely ignore it.

I can tell you guys my usual build. That's Hydra, [Frozen Heart or Randuin's Omen, pick one], Maw of Malmortius, Frozen Mallet, some damage focused item [oftenly contains any form of armor penetration], and some boots that depend on the match. Not in this order, but boots, Hydra and FH/RO are almost every time first to be built.

Yeah yeah, i know, Mallet is not really gold efficient, but it just suits Darius really well.

tl;dr version:

Never forget to build defense as Darius, but also never forget to get proper damage items.

You're not really good at initiating teamfights, but you still can do it.

If all you do is dunking low health targets in teamfights, you're playing wrong.