[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Four Wards Podcast.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Hey, what's up? It's Eric Bra, voice of Draven Jerks and Velkoz.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: And you're listening to the Four Wards podcast here to help you move forward in league.
Hello and welcome to episode 536 of the Four Wards podcast. I'm your host as usual. I'm Jack Zoman and I've got with me two other wards to help you move forward in League of Legends. Of course, we have mic of many
[00:00:48] Speaker B: names and isn't that a surprise to everyone?
[00:00:51] Speaker A: And what might be a surprise to some people is Pillow Pet's back this week. Welcome back, Pillow Pet.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Hello. Yes, this is my week.
Jackson Mike have custody of me this week.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: We split it with the wife. It's okay.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: Oh my God.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: All right, guys, we are the Four Wards podcast. We have a Discord link is in the episode description. Come join the Discord. Come hang out, Come play games with us. We've been playing a bunch of Aram, mayhem, some norms. It's a great time. We look forward to seeing you there. We also do stream on Twitch. I can be found at Twitch tv. Jacksonman Mike can be found at Twitch TV mikeofmanynames and Pillow Pet can be found at Twitch TV Pillowpet. Hopefully all three of us later this week will be streaming together.
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Last but not least, listeners, we need more questions. We've gotten one this week. Thank you, thank you listener. But we need more. Write into the fourwards podcastmail.com so we can answer your questions on the show. All right, our topic for this week is we're gonna talk about some underrated items by Underrated we specifically mean items that are not seeing as much use as we would expect or are extremely powerful on champions that you might otherwise not think of those items on. And what we're gonna kick this off with is an item that I have been championing recently.
As in, like for the past week, week and a half. Imperial mandate got reworked two patches ago, I think.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: So for those who don't remember, this is originally intended. It is a support item. This is something that used to be like Nami rushed it. What it gives you, it gives you a bunch of ability power, a bunch of ability haste, some mana regen, and then your immobilizing abilities gain another 15 ability haste. And immobilizing an enemy champion makes them take 6% increased damage for 4 seconds.
So all of that is only 2400 gold. I have been building this item on Lissandra to great effect.
Like Lissandra is incredible with this item because her W is an immobilizing spell and her ultimate is an immobilizing spell.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: I think Jax and I agree heavily. The best champion in the game with this item by a mile is Maokai.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: I don't know about best in the game by a mile, but he's abusive with it.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: He's proud of his five abilities.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: His. His Q, his W and his R are all immobilizing spells and get the full amount of haste. And again, this item is only 2400 gold.
It's cheap.
Rocket belt is 2650. And it gives 5 more AP, 5 more basic ability haste. But it doesn't have the immobilizing haste.
And then it has health instead of the damage amp and the mana regen. That's the closest you can compare is Rocketbelt is another utility item that is pretty cheap. Mandates even cheaper.
And you can build both. No one's stopping you from building both.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: So there we can think about this. There are a couple of other champions who theoretically could benefit from this amazingly well. Galio is one of those people.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: Yes. Galio's W, E, and Ult are all immobilizing spells.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Gragas has two out of four with his ultimate and his dash. And those are frankly his most powerful abilities.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: Oh, it doesn't count. Terrain makeup. Even though that does it. Things that create terrain. Because those can create knockups.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: Yeah. But they don't count for whatever reason.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Another one that's kind of nuts with this that you might not think of. Alistar. Alistar has all of his basic abilities are immobilizing spells.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Yep. All three basics.
Leona is the weirdest one because she is a full tank who doesn't really use ap, but her stun power with this is almost perma. Stunning.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Yup, it's. This item is insane.
It is so underrated. Another one. Probably no one thinks of everything Zack does, except his W is an immobilizing effect.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Zack cares quite a lot about ap
[00:06:14] Speaker A: and he likes ap. I think this item is actually good on a lot of champions that people aren't building it on now. Am I saying you should rush out and play Imperial Mandate Zacchaeus? No.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Maybe.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: But there are going to be games where it is the correct choice.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: And these are things we didn't think about initially because.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Yes, that's why we didn't mention this.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: When the patch came out, neither Jax or I looked at Maokai and went, that's busted. Because it really is on people who have things that take effects off of ability casts. Zack and Maokai being the two most predominant of them. This is such a power spike because of the amount of extra casts you get. So both of them gain obscene amounts of healing from casting.
We saw a support Maokai. This is the trigger that only had this item that lived for 20 seconds versus a 3v1.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Yep. This is why Maokai is probably the most abusive case of it. If you're playing jungle Maokai, the insane amount of haste massively ups your clear speed. I cleared faster with this than I did with Liandries because I got that many more cues and just did that much more damage to the camps. And I got the item 600 gold sooner.
[00:07:28] Speaker C: I mean, 30 abilities.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: This. This does increase Zack's ability to get his W up. Every blob he picks up is more honest. W. Oh my word. This actually affects literally everything Zach does.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: It's so good. And again, it's 65 AP, which is competitive for the amount it costs and 15 ability haste for your non immobilizing abilities.
And you get a damage amplify effect.
I've played games on Lissandra that go long where this has literally added thousands of damage over the course of the game.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: The literally last night I played a game with Lissandra. During this got to cast two ultimates in a single fight.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Started the fight off using ultimate.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: You had.
You had malignance, you had rocket belt and you had mandate.
By the way, if you go cooldown boots as well on mid lane Lissandra, that combo of items is enough to w ult w without the enemy being able to ever move. They cannot even flash out. That is with if they do not have. If they do not have tenacity.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: No, that's with tenacity. Without it you can do it. So it's a four second cooldown on her W with that only gives you
[00:08:43] Speaker C: 35 ability haste with your ultimate. Yep. Whereas that's crazy. This gives you 30.
It's cheaper.
So stacking those two, you're looking at 65 ability haste just on CC ultimates. That's insane.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: There are a lot of CC ultimate
[00:09:00] Speaker A: because malignance is pretty cheap too.
Yeah, it's actually nuts. Like seriously strongly consider Imperial Mandate on CC mages in general.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: I'm going to. I'm going to shout out something I think is a weird one. If you are playing support Ash, I kind of want to see it.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: It only works on her Ult, so I don't know. I want to advocate for it, but it's not terrible.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Don't rush it. Make it a third item.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: So yeah, Imperial Mandate, that's what prompted this discussion. So I don't think we're going to spend as much time on any of the other items in our list, but let's talk about some other items that we think are underrated or underutilized.
Mike, it's your turn. Pick one.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: I want to start with the one that we've started talking about it, but I don't think we've actually properly given it its due. In that Serpent's Fang is a bustedly strong item that no one builds until it's too late.
Yeah.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
So, okay, let's frame this discussion. What does Serpent's Fang do?
[00:10:10] Speaker B: First of all, baseline Serpent's Fang is one. It's a lethality ad item.
So it's 55 ad and 15 lethality. It is 2500 gold. This is one of the cheapest lethality full completed items you can get.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: I think it is the cheapest actually.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: That's just straight up, right? It is the cheapest.
It has the best build path. It has the serrated dirt and a pickaxe. So two easy to get items it has.
And here is where the really like the core of why Serpent's Fang is built is when you hit an enemy champion, they get shield reeve which does blank.
The shield Reeve percent shred of shields I think is based on lethality.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: It is based on whether you are ranged or melee.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: Okay, nevermind. That's based on ranged or by math.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: If you are a melee user. Dealing damage to an enemy champion cuts any shields that are currently on them by 50% and prevents following shields by 50% for three seconds.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Any damage?
Any damage.
So if you have a bleed, this is just permanently on there, stopping them from gaining more shields. Yep. If you have a fast auto attack champion, this is doing this consistently. If you have minions, like if you're Naafiri, the dogs will continuously proc Serpent's fang.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yup.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: The amount of shielding this can mitigate is literally disgusting.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Yep. And the biggest difference between this and like a heal cut item Shields are designed to save people in the moment. They are short term temporary health. Cutting that in half is frequently the difference between that set pulling his W killing someone and walking away and that set pulling his W probably still killing someone because set's a dumb champion and dropping dead.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: Yeah. A set shield is naturally like a thousand shields.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Way more than a thousand.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: But yes, like naturally without having to build on it. Just building set, not optimizing that is a thousand minimum. That's 500 damage from an item, essentially.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: So yeah. If there is a frequent shield or a powerful shield on the enemy team, 90% of the time, it is worth it for someone on your team to supplement a serpent's famyan.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: And here's the fun part. It's still 35% shield cut if a ranged user applies it. So if your marksman is the only ad champion on your team, it can still be worth it if it means you guys can actually kill the set or the blitzcrank or the whoever is shielding themselves for a gazillion health sion.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Any enemy top laner who took teleport.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it'll cut that teleport shield in half, make them real sad. Or in a third if you're ranged.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: If you're a marksman, you can.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: This item's cheap. Yeah, it's 2500 gold.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: If you're a marksman, you get that faster than anybody else. And you have an open slot because you don't have boots.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Absolutely. All right, pillow, your turn. Pick an item from our list.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: I'm going to talk about Zeke's convergence just because it is a common item that's actually built in the top lane. Believe it or not, it's very niche, but I have built it on like Renekton, so it synergizes really low key op.
So what Zeke is I'll just read it verbatim. It's upon casting your ultimate ability and once an enemy champion is within the Frostfire Tempest's radius, or after five seconds, whichever comes first, you summon a storm of flame and ice around you for an additional five seconds. The storm deals magic damage every quarter second. And it says here it's 150. I think it scales over the duration to enemy champions. This is the strong part. Within a 350 radius, they're slowed by 30%.
And this starts. And it's a 45 second cooldown. And it starts on Ultimate Cast.
So Renekton already creates a massive storm around him with his Ultimate. And this is very good for those lanes where you're a bruiser and you have to stick to an opponent like a ranged laner. It's very good into ranged matchups. It gives you 10 ability haste 300 health 25 armor 25 magic resistance. It's just a generally good tanky item.
It's just the power power. And it's in a slow. It's very easy to build.
It's a Kindle gem cloth armor and a null Magic mantle. It's very cheap.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Outside of Mejai's. Soulstealer.
[00:15:10] Speaker C: 100 gold.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Outside of Mejai's. This is the cheapest full item in the game. It's tied with a bunch of others. But it's 2200 gold. That is less than 2 needlessly larges.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a bunch of champions that this sounds like it would be good on. Except for how their Ult works. Most of them are special cased. So for example, if you're playing Shen and you want to use this item, it won't activate the Zeke's effect until you arrive.
It's special cased. That means you can Ult someone. And then you have five seconds to get in range before it goes off.
After you arrive.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: When this item has changed.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Yeah. This used to trigger the 5 second duration immediately because it just triggered the storm on Castle. So they special cased a bunch of champions. Shen's not the only one. I'm looking at the list. Like Briar, Fiddlesticks, Galio, Kled, Nocturne, Pantheon, Poppy, Rek', Sai, Rengar, Shen, Sion, Tahm, Kench vi and Warwick are all special cased on this list.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: These are people who have movement within their Ultimate. It doesn't count when they start. It counts when they end. But also if you have an ultimate where you throw it out, let's say your Nautilus or Leona.
That storm doesn't take effect for five seconds. You can get in range of an enemy as Nautilus or Leona within five seconds of your Ultimate.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:16:35] Speaker C: And then they're just slow for 30 seconds. And you're doing AoE damage. It does not.
Does not proc your spell effects. So it won't work if you have like a Liandry's or I'd say even like a grievous or anything like that.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: And to be fair, the damage is very low. If they literally sit in the storm for all five seconds, it's 150 damage.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it's 30 damage a second. The.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: The power of it is that it slows them by 30% as long as you're near them.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Yes. This is an AOE slow. This is a walking in the ult.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yup.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: It's probably the best way to describe it.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: And it's health and it's.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Maybe you don't build it on udyr since his are literally does the same thing.
It's probably not optimal on udyr.
Alright. You know what can sometimes be optimal on udyr though? I want to talk about a pair of tank items that make you go fast.
That's right. I'm talking about Force of Nature and Dead Man's Plate because they are the AD and AP counterparts of each other. Both of these items build out of Winged Moonblade. They are tank items so they've got health and their respective resistance stat. And both of them give you a way to stick to people better. Not just because they give you movement speed.
They do. They do give you movement speed as tank items. But then Force of Nature gives you extra movement speed if you've been hit with magic damage enough times. And Dead Man's Plate gives you a slow on hit that also builds up movement speed while you're building it up.
It is. These items are really good at making sure you can actually close that gap. If you are playing a tank who doesn't inherently have a way to dive into people.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Karen.
Yeah.
So yeah, Garen has probably got to see this. He's very good with Garen actually.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: Darius loves these items because he has no way to gap close. But if he can just run faster than you, he'll always get in range to pull you.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: So here's one of the champions. I like this. Force of Nature has an underrated aspect to it that no one thinks about. This is categorically the best Mr. Item in the game.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: If it procs 125 Mr. Once the proc is up it gives you 70
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Mr. On proc more Mr. Than any item can give you.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: If you're against magic damage Champions and you're like let's say a k' sante where armor and Mr. Are also your offense.
This Item's amazing. If you're playing Galio. This item's amazing because you scale with the Mr. And Deadman's play it again has a 50% slow when you consume the proc on melee champions. Admittedly, if you build Deadman's Plate on a ranged champion. I'm sorry, you just don't get that. Sucks to be you.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: And it just gives you slow resist. Yep, it's great.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: If you're dealing with an Ashe, you kind of have to build Deadman's plate as a tank or else you just never reach her. You also probably also want Swifties because
[00:19:55] Speaker B: Ash is and they stack.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: All right, so that's the run speed items. They're good. What else do you guys want to talk about?
[00:20:03] Speaker B: I will talk about. Let's go with the. The most niche item I think on this list by a mile because it is rarely used. And when it is used, it is almost never used properly. I'm talking Frozen Heart. Frozen Heart is one of the strongest armor items in the game when built correctly. But it's a problem for most people because it lacks something that almost every other tank item gives you, which is health.
So inherently Frozen Heart should never be a rush item because Frozen Heart, you don't benefit as much from raw armor if you don't have health straight up. So not getting any health with it really hurts. Even though it gives you 75 armor. Which as I was talking about with the other one, that is some of the most armor you can get in the game. I believe it is the highest tied
[00:20:58] Speaker A: with Randuins Thornmail, I believe is the one Thornmail lady.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: No, Thornmail is also 75. Okay, so there's three random.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Isn't that high random 75 is it? I'm going to check now. Keep going. I'm going to check your work. Yeah, it is 75. Holy shit. I didn't know Rands had that much armor. Yeah, all three of them have 75.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Not only does it have that massive chunk of Armor gives you 20 ability haste. It's a good chunk of that. And if you utilize spells frequently, 400 mana, which is really where this. This shines.
Also 2500 gold. It's 100 gold. More expensive than mandate. That's. That's a crap ton. But the key here, the reason why Frozen Heart is powerful, its passive is a static 20% attack speed reduction to all enemies within its radius that just sits there slowing enemy attacks. What else does that now basically the only thing left that does attack speed slow. You have Nasus and you have exhaust.
[00:22:06] Speaker A: I don't even think exhaust does.
[00:22:08] Speaker C: I think it just reduces damage.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Is exhaust damage. Okay. So you have NASA exhaust is damage
[00:22:13] Speaker A: and a movement speed slowly slow.
[00:22:18] Speaker C: Or is it only movement speed?
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Zillion is only movement speed.
[00:22:21] Speaker C: Is it only. Okay.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Because it's 90.
He gets disgusting. See? It's low.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: There's got to be other cripples still in the game. There's not very many.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Yeah. We could. We could check that. But as it sounds right now, Frozen Heart is one of the only ways to get attack speed slow in the game.
But you need to not build this first.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: Here's the list. Malphite's Ground Slam has a cripple.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Forgot about that.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Fiora's Riposte has a cripple. Nasus is wither. And then it's not a cripple. But Mordekaiser's Realm of Death does steal a percent of attack speed.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: That's it. That's the entire list. Other than Frozen Heart of effects that reduce attack speed.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Want to know one of those three champions is probably wanting to build this item.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: It is the only item that cripples.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Yes. It is the only item that cripples.
And it is a rare enough thing that if there is attack speed on the enemy team, it is powerful.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Stacking that with the 75 armor. They're just not gonna hurt you.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Here's the other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize. Cripple effects stack multiplicatively with attack speed increases.
So this is not saying, oh, they have 200% increased attack speed. Cool. Let's drop them down to 180% increased attack speed. This is saying they attack two times a second. We are reducing that to 1.6 times a second.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
Extremely powerful attack speed slows are.
This is pretty much the only way to reduce Vayne's damage.
[00:23:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Also, if you've ever wondered why Nasus Wither makes it feel like you're not a champion. His Wither is a 71% cripple. It's Max power.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: It's. It's disgusting. It's. It's so powerful. But yeah. Frozen Heart 2500 Gold. Never build it first.
Almost never build it second. This should be a third or a fourth item minimum.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: The only champions who can get away with building this second are Sion and Cho'. Gath. Because they both get massive amounts of free max HP from their kit where resistance stats are much more valuable on them.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: I would say you could theoretically also drop Malphite in there because of what his kit requires, giving the damage and the mana to him. From that, this becomes a damage item raw for him.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: If they're full ad, sure it's a second item on Malphite, but.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: But it should be a third.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Even then, usually third.
That's why the the two exceptions are specifically the champions that are getting literally thousands of HP from their kit.
When a typical item has 350 to 500 HP.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: I guess if you build warmogs first. If you build warmogs, I guess you can build this next.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Except it won't activate your warmogs if you do that. So you still need another item in between.
[00:25:14] Speaker C: I'm going to jump in here. While we're on the topic of tank items. I want to talk about Randuin's Omen. I think it's another underutilized item.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: It's so underutilized I didn't know it had 75 armor.
[00:25:27] Speaker C: And say it's in the same wheelhouse I would say as Frozen Heart. This one gives you 75 armor and 350 health. So it gives you both the tank stats that you want. You're just missing the ability haze and the Mana. It's 2700 gold.
It's a warden's mail and a Giant's belt. The big thing on this one is it reduces critical strike damage by 30%.
It's also multiplicative. So if it's a 200 crit damage it's 16 or 140 of the attacker's AD instead of 200 on credit. So it's. It's. It's pretty good. It also reduces like Shadow Flame damage. But Shadow Flames damage is usually so small it doesn't even matter all crits unless it's bonus damage.
It has a active humility. It sends out a shock wave that slows nearby enemies by 70% for two seconds. It's on a 90 second cooldown. So pretty long cooldown. But you usually have it every team fight and its range is pretty respectable. It's 500 range.
This item is great into your crit ADCs. It's great into.
I think Spellblade effects. Don't they count as a crit?
[00:26:38] Speaker A: No, no.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Spellblade is Spellblood.
[00:26:41] Speaker C: Maybe. I'm just.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: There's a couple of champion abilities that are Auto Crits and it's. This is amazing against them. Shaco for example, or Fiora. One of her E attacks I think is an Auto.
Second one's an Autocrat Gin fourth Shot abilities.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: Like I don't know if. Wait. No, no. Not. Not fair. Never mind. I'm thinking of Camille. Never mind. Camille's double Q is true damage, not a critical.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:06] Speaker C: So something ridiculous about this.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Items are not reduced.
[00:27:10] Speaker C: Something ridiculous about this item that I bet not many people know because I didn't know it. So I just read it. It breaks spell shields and still applies
[00:27:18] Speaker A: the slow, which is just wild.
[00:27:21] Speaker C: It'll break Malzahar spell shield, Sivir spell shield and still apply all the slow to it, which I don't understand.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: I don't know if it will work on Malzahar because his shield works differently
[00:27:33] Speaker C: than the others for sure.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: On Sivir and on. Well, no, it'll break the shield because receiving a negative spell effect still breaks it. But his. His lasts a quarter second. Whereas Sivir and Nocturnes Block one spell. Banshees and Edge of Night Block one spell.
[00:27:51] Speaker C: Be worth testing out to see if you still get slowed on Malzahar or not.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Yeah, but the other core.
[00:27:56] Speaker C: You're in Malzahar's face like that. You don't really need to slow him anyway.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Most of the time.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: The other core between both of these things. Oh yeah.
[00:28:04] Speaker C: This is a very strong item.
Especially into those crit builders with the slow and the armor and the health. Just not a lot of people use it because it's not the flashy item and they don't probably understand fully how it works.
There's better items.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:22] Speaker C: This is just. Yeah. Raw tank stats.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: So the other. Yeah, the other core thing about both of these items that is important.
Warden's mail. It's build piece just reduces incoming attack damage.
So sitting on the Warden's mail is really good for just.
[00:28:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Build path point and Warden's mail is a grand total of a thousand gold for double cloth and a combine.
[00:28:46] Speaker C: I mean. And you also might argue in some instance just Warden's mail is sometimes stronger than just Randolins because random ones only works on crit.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: I don't know about stronger.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: The raw armor is usually better.
[00:28:57] Speaker C: But yeah, I mean I'm talking just by passive alone. Just reducing all damage of basic.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: It can be extremely strong against champions like Ash or Na Fury who deal damage through lots of little hits.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: Yeah.
Hates this.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Zeri hates it. Warden's mail is a really good component item.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: Okay. We got one more item on our list that I want to talk about that is underrated and it is another tank item because unfortunately half the frickin roster of tank items just don't get built even when they should.
Knight's Vow is cheap. It's 2300 gold.
The reason it doesn't get built is it gives less personal tankiness for the gold than pretty much any other tank Item. It's only 40 armor and 200 health and 10 ability haste.
But the secret sauce that makes Knight's Vow overpowered is you just make whoever is the strongest most fed person on your team your tether. And then you take damage for them. So it's harder for them to get burst out and killed. And you heal when they hurt people, which is so strong, quite literally you heal for 12% of the damage they deal to people. It's like having a lifesteal item. A complete full lifesteal item, except it's from your ally and you're life stealing off of your ally hurting people. It is incredible. It does not matter what champion they are.
Just anyone who deals damage. Anyone who's fed.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: There are three champions who I think if you are playing them, you should be building a Night's Vow.
If you are playing as a support, I will quantify this. If you are playing Rell, if you are playing Taric, or if you are playing Leona, you should be buying a Knight's Vow.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: I would argue Alistair is also in that list.
[00:30:57] Speaker B: Alistar should probably also be within that list, especially because of his damage reduction. But these are. These are really tanky. These are people who synergize, especially, especially Relanteric who synergize with their ally already wanting them to stick near the one person. So giving a nice vow is even more multiplicative on them. But then on top of that, with Leona and with Alistair, the CC you
[00:31:22] Speaker A: bring like lets your teammate apply the damage to heal you.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: 4700 Gold Knight's Vow Plus AAL Mandate I this is a combo that most support tanks just should have. I think it's such a powerful twist.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Now that being said, don't build Knight's Vow first. This item sucks for personal tankiness and you need your ally to be a threat before the tether effect is useful. If your ally doesn't deal damage yet, you're not healing for shit and you're not keeping them alive because they're not dealing damage. So you're going to die.
So you should not be rushing this. You want to be rushing for those champions items like Locket of the Iron, Solari Bandle pipes or just traditional regular tank items. But when you're getting to that third item, you should be building a Night's Knight's Vow should be in almost every game where there is a tank put onto whoever the Fed carries the other
[00:32:23] Speaker B: the reason we don't see this, especially like if we've talked about programs plenty of times here, the reason we don't see this item in programs is because supports never make it to three items.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: They never have the gold economy in real games especially. Especially from the iron up to gold era. 40 minute games are a reality where supports, generally speaking, are able to build three to four items.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: So speaking of pro games, I have a quick announcement before we go to our listener question.
Guys, MSI is starting this weekend. It's in Korea, I think.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: I believe so.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Which means for those of us in North America, these games happen in the middle of the frickin night.
So every day that MSI is on that I can. I'm gonna try to do it every day but I don't know what life's gonna throw at me.
We're going to be doing watch parties in the Discord. If you join the Discord, we have a Watch Parties channel. I will put up a watch party in the VOD and we'll watch the VODS of the games spoiler free and watch MSI together.
So come join the Discord. Come watch MSI with us. It's going to be a blast. Some of the teams look explosive.
[00:33:36] Speaker B: Three to four weeks.
[00:33:37] Speaker A: I think it's three weeks.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: It's very long three weeks.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: The finals are on the 12th at 1:00am My time.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: Yeah, this is very long.
So even if you want to check out some of the games, just talk about msi. Do not spoil games that you've already seen, please. Yes, but we are very happy to sit, to talk, to discuss, to watch.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: We want to see these games in general. We have an esports chat channel in the Discord. You can talk about the games while they're live in there. Those of us who can't watch live will not go into that channel until we've watched the games.
Do not ping people spoilers. I will actually ban people from the Discord if you ping spoilers at people. But that channel is for discussing it. I'll have a a live discussion channel for discussing it while we go and the esports chat for like coordinating when the watch party is going to be because it's not going to be exactly the same time every day because life gets in the way. But we'll try to have it be consistent and watch MSI together. It's going to be fun.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: It's probably Going to be at some point in time between 6 and 10 Central.
So between like 4 if he gets home early and what, 8.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: 4 to 8 Pacific. Somewhere in that range.
[00:34:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:34:58] Speaker B: Is when we start watching. Start watching, yes.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: And then depending on the day and its schedule, that's going to be anywhere from four to six games.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: Most of the days there could be some serious.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Some of them might be six to ten when we get into the two. Best of five days.
It's going to be interesting.
Alright, we do have a listener question though, so let's answer Toast's question. Thank you for writing in Toast. Toast writes, when you play just a couple champions in one role for a while and you get really good at them, is there a point where it clicks and there's this big payoff where you actually start to understand things? I've always bounced around different champions, never getting to the point of being very proficient at them. And I've been wondering if it's worth to lock in on a couple of champions. It might not be the most fun at the start, but I'm wondering if there's a point where the work pays off.
[00:35:51] Speaker C: Oh yeah, I'd say absolutely. There's multiple points where you get the aha moments.
Like for instance, like when I started playing Renekton, I was just like, okay, I can dash in, I can stun, I can dash in with an empowered stun and press R. And it breaks me out of the CC when that was still a thing. There's just a bunch of like moments when you're playing these champions. You're like, oh, that's how that works. And you just start getting better and better and better with it. Same thing with Akali. When I started playing Akali and I was like, I press R and I would press R and then E while I was in the R animation. It's just there's a lot of fun, satisfying moments when you start playing these champions and you can increase the skill ceiling and do really flashy plays that are complicated at first, but once you get them down, it feels really good. Especially like when you're watching it on the map and then you get people question mark pinging you like, oh my gosh. How, how do you do that? That's awesome.
It just feels really good and it's satisfying in all the moments that you reach like a different tier of that champion.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: So there's a couple things here. One of them is the lane you are playing also has that click.
So you're going to have the lane click. The like I Figured out laning. I finally figured out how I'm supposed to be generally playing top lane, mid lane, etc. Then you're going to have a champion click baseline, which is to say you finally get a feel and you go, oh, this is fun. That's the first click. The next click is, oh, I can do some seriously cool things. And then you start bouncing things around. And then if you play them a lot, then you get to things like the bombas.
The.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Okay, explain what bomba is. For the listeners who aren't familiar with this term.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Bumba is for Gragas, specifically, where people started figuring out that you can throw his Q out, which is his static bomb, and then you throw his ultimate, which knocks somebody into a location. And you would knock them towards his bomb. And as he's flying there, you charge, which is E, and you hit all three abilities on a person, exploding them instantly.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: Yes, these are.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Yeah, these are the kind of insane things that you can start getting when you have serious amounts of play in a champion. There are multiple tiers of this because multiple champions have very different interesting things that they can do.
Some of them take very little time. Some of them take hundreds upon hundreds of games.
Things like the bomba take hundreds of games.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Yes. But the key is, like, every champion has these.
Where you hit them is gonna vary depending on you and depending on the champion. There have been champions that released where I felt like that first click of, oh, this champion's fun and I get it. And I'm like starting to figure out how to do the cool shit in like a couple games. And there's champions where I've played 50 games with this champion. It's just now starting to really set in how to do the crazy stuff. And I'm not playing the super high skill cap champions. I'm not playing the Rivens and that shit. I don't. I don't touch that garbage.
I'm old. I don't got those kinds of hands.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Probably the three champions that I have felt that click with the most, the. Oh, that was really fucking fun to be able to do some cool shit. Have been my. My beautiful little gothiro vex, who can do some really crazy things when you start getting into some of the late fights.
Recently it has been Lissandra who you can do some really fun things with Lissandra based on shenanigans with her E, her Q, flash Q, then E, snap places.
You can get some seriously interesting things. And then my old favorite, the one who took me a long time to get but I really love to play is Zach, who has a very basic kit that when utilized in interesting ways can do some really fun things that you don't expect, like Q flash backwards, smack your other head for the cue and pull people together from other half of the world.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Of course, if you don't want to deal with any of this, just play Lucian Top, where he clicks on the very first game and you immediately kill the enemy. Nexus.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: I guess we've always forgotten about our Lord and Savior Lucian.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: There you go, guys. This has been episode 536 of the Four Wards podcast. I've been Jack Soman for Mike of Many Names and for Pillow Pet. Have a great night.
[00:40:45] Speaker C: Good night.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Good night everybody.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the four Wards Podcast. If you want to support the show directly, consider checking out our
[email protected] the Four Wards Podcast.
And of course, send your questions to the Four Wards podcastmail.com so we can
[00:41:05] Speaker B: answer them live on the show.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: That's the Four Wards podcastmail.com.
