Talk:Kalista/@comment-25562166-20150312012600/@comment-6281696-20150323183337

There are a couple of possibilities for "weird" builds:

First, builds that don't make an inherent sense statwise, for example bruisers with 250+AD, 200+ armor, 150+MR and 3.5k+ hp. Full on defensive builds have trouble reaching those kind of defensive levels, and the AD is an amount even ADC's like. As a bruiser is normally someone who's supposed to be some combination of offensive and defensive he shouldn't have stats rivaling both roles. Examples of this are bruisers with a Black clear, Hydra's and the rest in defensive items. Another example would be the Wu-kung I faced yesterday who was using a Last whisper, Black cleaver & the rest just high AD items. The guy had 350+ AD & combined with his Q and masteries he has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 70% armor penetration. And those kind of excessive amounts of penetration aren't even that rare What's the point of defenses if these kind of builds are possible?

Second, builds that are extremely focussed on offense/defense, yet somehow end up with considerable use in the other catagory. The best example of this is a udyr with a trinity and the rest defense. He'l still rip half your team to shreds while barely being hurt himself.

Third, just the fact that you can essentially walk around with 6 giant claymores, or 6 shields, or 6 pair of boots, or 3 shields and 3 clamores. Now obviously I'm not refering to the fact that the picture is a claymore, because that's essentially meaningless. However, there's nothing stopping you from building multiple high-end items for a given catagory (of for multiple catagories) in most games this would be limited by for example saying you only have 2 hands so you can't wear a claymore and a shield. However, in lol (moba's in general really) there's nothing stopping you.

Now these builds don't become popular so much because they make sense on a given champion, they become popular because they're very effective in the meta and champion X just happens to be able to abuse obscenly offensive item Y the most effectivly.

As for offense being more popular, no they don't make more sense to win, being able to just shrug of everything the opponent throws at you is just as effective if you want to win. It is however a less popular power fantasy. Plus, in between towers and the obscene amounts of damage flying around the amount of defenses you need to be able to just strol into your opponents base not caring at all is impossible to get.. Also not "flashy" enough for "e-sports".....

Of course a modicum of skill is involved, it's not like completly random shots are going to be particularly effective. However, that doesn't mean that aiming is all that impressive. The joke is mostly people saying they have "mad skillz" for aiming/dodging when past a certain level it's pretty much solely luck if you actually succeed or not. And by this I don't mean that it didn't require him any skill to hit his skillshot, however he didn't hit because of his skill, he hit because he was lucky enough that his opponent didn't happen to idunno, change his mind and go left, or a creep got in the way so he moved 2 pixels to the right, or someone stunned the opponent and thus he stood stil lfor a moment causing the ability to overshoot, or the opponent happened to use a dash, or any number of a milion reasons that could've caused him to miss which he had essentially no change in hell of predicting if they would happen or not. The combat engine is nowhere near sophisticated enough to really have much going in this respect. There's definitly a skill floor, but the ceiling isn't much higher than the floor... The skill at high levels seem to mostly revolve around who can click the fastest, something which always confused me about the games that are heralded as e-sports, past a certain level the only thing that appears to truly matter is how well you can abuse the meta and how quickly you can click, which really as far as impressive skills go.. meh..