Speaking of maths, how do you personally feel about haunting guise's new path and options and magic pen in general? I haven't seen a lot of people building much being Liandry's and pen boots so is Void Staff going the way of the dinosaur?*




*please don't crucify me for asking questions, forum

summary of feelings:
-magic penetration is still extremely strong.
-flat penetration is too easy to get for how strong it is, and doesn't require you to give much (if anything) up.
-liandry's is really good as a late-game upgrade and plays into the 'not giving anything up' bit above.
-void staff is probably too strong right now… it might not be, that's my gut feeling.

it's almost 5 in the morning, so i'm not going to go all 'crazy details and math' right now, but basically things got pretty awesome for mages that care about dealing magic damage.

best core damage build (for 'skill gatling') is something like:
dfg, haunting guise, void staff, sorc shoes
7880g for +195 ability power, +30 | +32% magic penetration, +15% cdr, +200 health, +45 movement speed, and the dfg active.

this varies a little bit based on a few factors, but that's basically what you want if your job is to make people dead. there isn't really a lot of room for substitutions unless you're willing to pay for it one way or another. if you really don't need the dfg active, then you can sub it out for morellonomicon (plus a start on another ap item) or deathcap, but then you'd be giving up the dfg active.

the only reasons you wouldn't see void staff on someone (that i can think of offhand) would be because they're snowballing really hard early game and opt for more flat penetration first, or they can't afford to prioritize damage over something else. otherwise they should be getting it sometime before late-game (assuming the enemy team is building responsibly). again, this is all generalized and is assuming the mage's core responsibility on the team is dealing magic damage.

Nonsense, nobody builds magic resistance anymore, except maybe the support if they get a Runic. Thus, Void staff that gives only AP and %Pen just doesn't compare to flat Pen with other goodies.

Because it's too damn expensive.

Fight fire with fire imo.

runic is more than enough reason, tbh. chances are that a couple of the enemy champions have scaling base magic resist, and magic resist glyphs aren't entirely uncommon.
besides, i think that chalice, abyssal, guardian angel, hexdrinker, merc treads, and aegis are all still fairly common.

How do you feel stacking liandries and rylais on certain characters (chogath for example) works out? Is it effective? (Cho E applies both ^.^)

The problem I have with magic pen right now is that you can dump 2250 into a guise and the Sorc upgrade, and then they buy a Negatron for 800 and marginalize 75% of the gold you spent. 30 pen is okay and all, but it's really only a solution against targets that don't have *any* MR in their build path (uhh..... yeah, can't think of anyone offhand).

IMO what should really happen is that arpen and mpen should go on stats roughly orthogonal to moar damage but we get more, so champions with %s or strong bases can itemize for penetration instead of AP as a build option.

i like it a lot on champions that already enjoy rylai's—singed is a really good example, imo.

I can't believe it, how clueless can you reds can be?

You do NOT penetrate more MR than in s2. Mages are immensely weaker for many reasons:

-Early game they do less damage thanks to sorc shoes and mpen runes nerfs. MR runes unnerfed (And the increased cost of MR does nothing, it's effing early game).

-Deathcap nerfed.

-The rise of the AD assassins.

-With sorc shoes alone you do less damage than in s2, you NEED void staff to get the same values like in s2. And you also need haunting guise to actually penetrate more than in s2. Three different pen items to finally do more damage (But you only have 100 ap lol!). Don't forget that void penetrates 35% and mastery 8% (40% together, down from 46%)

-Haunting guise is situational (not every champ needs 20 AP for 1450 gold, some champs actually have more advantageous ratios) and its upgrade is so bad it's unreal. Extremely situational, terrible on burst champs, and it's even subpar on DPS champs like vlad or rumble.

Yes the slow proc doubling the damage really cuts into their hp