Lets Talk Efficiency #2 - Zeke's Herald

Hello and welcome to my second installment in my Lets Talk Efficiency series. In my previous article, I talked about Aegis of the Legion and how cost effective it really is. I will do the same in this article, but for Zeke’s Herald. Like I always do to start things off, let's go ahead and talk about what the item gives stat wise.

As we can see, from buying the Zeke’s Herald, we get +250 HP and +15% cooldown reduction. This alone doesn't make Zeke’s look great, but we must not forget we also gain the unique passive, which is the main reason it is bought at all really. This aura grants the buyer and nearby allies in a 1200 range, +12% lifesteal and +20% attack speed. This makes Zeke’s an amazing support item to pick up in order to help out your AD carry for example.

Now onto the math behind it. If you are curious to know how I am finding the efficiency of the item, I have explained it in my previous article, however, I will do a quick rundown here. I am taking the cost, on average, of 1 unit of any said stat (HP, crit, lifesteal etc) from the base tier items. Since there is no base tier item for CDR, I have decided to base my calculations for this off the item Kindlegem. Below, you can see the relevant base tier items for this article as well as the relevant averages.

- Average cost of 1 HP is 2.6 gold.
- Average cost of 1% CDR is 85 gold.
- Average cost of 1% lifesteal is 37.5 gold.
- Average cost of 1% attack speed is 26.7 gold.

To start off with, I would like to forget about the aura we get from Zeke’s and just look at the base stats of the item, let’s even forget that the aura even affects the buyer at this point. Using the averages above, we can calculate that we are getting 1925 goldsworth of stats. In terms of efficiency, this equals 89.7%. Not amazing by any means, but lets not forget we still need to add on that aura.

Now, lets calculate how much in terms of gold the aura’s bonus is giving to any one person. Using the averages above, we can calculate that the aura is giving 984 goldsworth. Now that is done, lets add that to the base stats goldsworth and see what kind of efficiency we are looking at without the aura affecting anyone but the buyer. We can now calculate that the buyer is effectively getting 2909 goldsworth of stats, this means the minimum efficiency of Zeke’s is 135.6%

If we now calculate how much the aura is giving the team assuming it is affecting the 4 other members of our team and we forget the aura affects ourselves, we get a total of 3936 goldsworth of stats being given to the team from a single item. This total alone equals 204.5% efficiency and we aren't finished yet.

So, lets sum all of this up. If we take all this info at face value and do some math, we can effectively get 6845 goldsworth of stats while only paying 2145 gold for the item. This has a huge efficiency value at 319.1%. But.. will we actually be making the most of Zeke’s? Well, let’s assume we use the standard meta right now and that we have a team comp of an AD/support bottom, AP mid, bruiser top and tank/bruiser jungler, only 3 people on this team would really benefit from having a Zeke’s on the team, maybe only 2 people if the top lanes runs, for example, Vladimir. Just make sure you think about how much you will actually be helping your team when thinking about buying a Zeke’s opposed to another item.