Bruisers: The Science of One Damage Item

In solo queue, tanks can be rare. Most people want to play characters that do damage and more visibly carry a team. But damage is not all you need in a team composition. If you regularly play top or jungle, being willing to play a tank character can drastically improve your chances of winning games.

The Bruiser

“Bruisers” are tanky DPS characters. They usually rely on only one, main damage item to make them into a threat that cannot be ignored even though everything else they build is pure tank. These are characters like Irelia and Jax that, last season, would rush a Trinity Force and turn into massive threats from mid-game onwards.

In this instance, I am not talking about the subset of characters like Lee Sin, Riven, Wukong and others, even though they are a form of bruiser. These characters, especially in the new season, will commonly get at least two damage items (usually some combination of Bloodthirster, Black Cleaver and Last Whisper). While you can build many of these characters as tanks, I’m not considering their damage-focused builds because they work best with multiple damage items instead of just one.

When you make an item build, you are not necessarily looking for the absolute best six item combination. Instead, you are looking for a core build of just a few main items that give you everything you need. Why? Because you want to reach critical mass as fast as possible. Solo queue games usually don’t last very long. So you want to make sure that you can get to your core build as soon as possible. This is why it’s important that a bruiser can build just one damage item and then move on to tank items quickly: they need to fulfill that role for their team for as much of the game as they can.

Prospective Items

With the new season, there are now three main items that can provide significant damage for bruisers throughout the entire game: Trinity Force (Triforce), Iceborn Gauntlet (IG) and Blade of the Ruined King (BotRK). These items all provide unique passives with damage that scales throughout the game, allowing bruisers to stay a threat.

Iceborn Gauntlet and Trinity Force

 

Because of their shared Spellblade effect, IG and Triforce are used on many of the same champions. The Spellblade effect on these items amplifies damage based only on a character’s base attack damage, so there is no direct benefit towards buying other damage items. This passive gives tons of damage to bruisers who can consistently use relatively low cooldown abilitites to proc the effect.

With IG’s introduction, characters that focus more on pure tank stats can switch from Triforce. The added cooldown reduction and extra mana make it a prime pick for characters that would like to spam abilities to increase their damage. You can also get other tank items faster with this item because it is only 3,400 gold -- 800 gold cheaper than Triforce.

Triforce is more expensive this patch: 4,200 gold. This is largely because of the increased recipe cost of Phage, making the item harder (and less attractive) to assemble. For characters that want to snowball, like attack speed or just want to eke out all they can from one item, Triforce is still a good buy; it’s just harder to justify.

Edit: This article was written before the newest patch (3.01). Triforce is now 3,903 gold instead of 4,200 (297 gold cheaper). This is a nice buff to the item. While most of my points still stand, Triforce is more of a contender. The 1,465 gold cost of Phage, however, is still a significant stumbling block.

The Dark Horse: Blade of the Ruined King

BotRK is not very popular even though it is a stellar item in the right situations. With this item, you can do decent damage to enemy tanks even without any extra damage items. As Old Man Eyebrows at Reign of Gaming explained, BotRK does more damage than a fully stacked Bloodthirster to targets that have more than 1,500 health.

Aside from the excellent scaling damage on its passive, BotRK has two massive benefits: its price and build path. At only 2,900 gold, BotRK is 500 gold cheaper than IG and 1,300 gold cheaper than a Triforce. This means that you can get tank items faster than with the other options. It also is the only one of the items to give life steal (10%) and gives 10 more attack damage than Triforce.

BotRK’s active is very powerful for chasing and dueling. Even better, since it builds from Bilgewater Cutlass, you get the damage and slow components of the active very quickly (and at only 1,925 gold!). All said, the build path for this item allows arguably the best linear increases in power of the three items in question.

What to Choose

As I described in my first article, I think some of the best users of IG are tanks like Hecarim that spam low cooldown abilities. While almost any Triforce user can easily switch to IG for a tankier alternative, I believe some of the characters with the most reason to swap are Nidalee, Nasus and Yorick.

Triforce will still see use, and the best users of it from last season still benefit from it greatly. In other words, Irelia and Jax still work perfectly with it. Other than the extra damage, the main thing that separates a good Triforce user from someone who would probably just work better with IG is efficient use of the attack speed that Triforce gives.

BotRK is a trickier item to recommend. I’ve seen many characters successfully build this item, including Nidalee and Jax. Overall, if you have to get to your tank items as quickly as possible or lack in chasing potential, BotRK is a good buy. The added sustain and attack damage are also great stats to have. This item works best on characters that can reliably autoattack in order to get the most use out of its passive. With those caveats in place, I think this item can be used well with tankier builds of characters like Jax (remember Gunblade?) and Xin Zhao, who can also use the active exceedingly well.

Season 3 has added a wealth of options for bruisers; it’s not all about Triforce any more. BotRK is the most radically different of the new items, but don't be afraid to pick it up.

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