Mathcraft: Dissecting Wickd's Trinity Force Malphite

In the European LCS, the “Superteam” known as Alliance has not been performing particularly well. Wickd’s Malphite in particular has come under some pretty severe criticism – not due to his play, but rather his unorthodox builds. In Week 1 Day 2 of the European LCS, Wickd first brought out his TF Malphite against the Supa Hot Crew. Wickd has repeatedly defended his Trinity Force Malphite, but sections of the community have argued against it. In this Mathcraft series, we will mathematically analyze Wickd’s Trinity Force Malphite.

As we can see from Wickd’s masteries, he prefers to run 9 in offense and 21 in defense. Wickd takes standard masteries on his Malphite.

Wickd prefers a very unique rune set up for his Malphite, taking AD marks and HP/5 Quints. The AD marks help with last-hitting and trading, and synergize with Brutal Strikes. The HP/5 Quints give Malphite the sustain he needs to deal with the top-tier supertanks in lane.

Let’s also review the stats that Trinity Force gives: 30 AP, 30 AD, 30% attack speed, 10% critical strike chance, 250 hp, 200 mana, and 8% movement speed. Most importantly, Trinity Force has two unique passives: Rage grants 20 movement speed on basic attack, or 60 movement speed on kill, while Spellblade causes your next basic attack to deal 200% base of your AD as bonus damage. As we can clearly see, Trinity Force is an extremely cost-effective item, giving 4292g worth of stats for 3703g, not including the passives. However, is it the optimal choice on Malphite?

Wickd had a good time in lane, and was able to purchase his Trinity Force at 15 minutes. At this point in the game, Wickd is farmed well – he has almost 10 cs/min and has a kill to his name. Furthermore, he is level 11 – this gives him 2 points in R, 5 points in E, 3 points in W, and 1 point in Q. Let’s analyze his damage at this point in the game: assuming an optimal spell rotation and TF procs after each ability, Wickd is dealing a whopping 1,851 damage, with approximately 56% of the damage being physical. With a single critical strike, this damage is amplified to 1993. Against a squishy ADC with 35 Armor and MR, Wickd deals about 1370 damage over the course of 8 seconds. However, this immense damage comes with a few significant drawbacks – Trinity Force makes Malphite into a sustained damage beast, but with only +250 health, this build makes Malphite extremely squishy. In a teamfight situation, a Malphite with this build will likely not survive long enough to deal the full amount of damage. For a more realistic amount of burst damage (over 2 seconds), we will assume a REWQ combo with two autoattacks and one TF proc, for a total burst damage of 1295, or 960 after damage mitigation against the same squishy ADC.

It should be evident that this is a massive amount of damage output. However, League of Legends is a game of opportunity costs – every single decision made has a set of alternate decisions that could be made. For the same price as Trinity Force, what other itemization options are there? The most common build would be to get a Sunfire Cape and, if more damage is needed, Sorcerer Shoes. With the same assumptions as before, this gives Malphite 1517 damage over 8 seconds, which leads to 1215 damage after resistances against the same squishy ADC. With this itemization, Malphite deals 1058 burst damage over two seconds, 77% of which is magic damage. This yields 856 damage after mitigation.

From this analysis, Trinity Force yields an extra 100 burst damage and an extra 150 sustained damage over the Sunfire Cape + Sorc Shoes combination against squishy targets. So, should you buy Trinity Force? In most cases, the extra tankiness granted by the Sunfire Cape will make it a significantly stronger itemization choice on Malphite, allowing you to deal similar amounts of damage while lasting significantly longer and being able to offer more peel for your carries in fights. However, there are certain situations in which Trinity Force is a strong choice – TF Malphite is extremely hard to itemize against because of the large amount of mixed damage. If your team has a low amount of damage and lacks threats, or skews heavily towards magic damage, or if you get ahead and want to crush your lane, Trinity Force is not a bad purchase. Otherwise, stick with the tried and true tank.