User blog comment:StrategicMagic/Vayne - Carry? Yes. AD? No./@comment-86.8.9.144-20120818231429

I didn't survive the whole wall of text, but I did get as far as the actual build description.

And here's the problem, buying purely attack speed is inefficient - even if you have both a) a huge AD steroid on your ultimate and b) health scaled true damage.

Attack damage, attack speed, crit chance, crit damage, armor penetration, all feed off of one another. There's plenty of complex maths involved, but the idea being that buying any one element increases the effectiveness of all the rest. Having 2.5 attack speed is meaningless if each hit is doing ten damage, though on the other hand the 100 AD from a bloodthirster is worth much, much more on top of 2.5 AS than 1.0 AS.

Because of this, each element is faced with comparitive diminishing returns - in the sense that stacking one thing achieves far, far less than maintaining an effective balance. The strongest AD carry builds in terms of unaugmented autoattacks will always create a balance between every element for maximum effect.

So yes, vayne has two significant pieces of kit that emphasize attack speed. Yet, a vayne that buys almost pure attack speed will always deal markedly less damage than a vayne that goes traditional carry with the same price, unless the enemy is stacking health to an extreme degree - and even then, those people are the tanks - the people who our hypercarry vayne touches last and only last. Having the raw damage from a conventional build that lets you take out non-tanks with a couple of shots gives you a much better chance than being able to reliably kill tanks, as you'll be killing the important targets just as slowly too.

And while Vayne's ult and silver bolts emphasize attack speed, you missed the important part of tumble - not only does it *massively* emphasize AD with its 50% bonus ratio, it also resets vayne's attack timer, and actually, the animation is incredibly fast. You're only missing attacks if you, guess what, build lots of AS. The ability to reset your timer every 2 seconds with 50% bonus damage is massive, and it's what allows vayne to be the massive burst carry that she is. Building AS under the belief that tumbling decreases vayne's dps would be to throw away the most powerful part of her kit. Granted, you have to play her properly - you have to time your tumbles, make sure you don't delay the cd by being out of range, etc - but nobody said it should be easy. Indeed, explicitly because of tumble's reset, a vayne who stacks AD with very little AS will do massively more damage to priority targets than a vayne relying purely on AS.

Try it, play the two off against one another. The AS vayne will be dead before she barely puts a scratch on AD vayne.

Also, I didn't mention lifesteal. Silver bolts and AS stacking means no incoming lifesteal, which makes this even more of a onesided argument. In a fight between two carries, lifesteal makes a massive difference.