Stacking Items

Inspired by the  double stack Garen build on Reddit I've decided to do a post on When people talk about stacking items we generally mean Sword of the Occult, Mejai's Soulstealer and Leviathan due to them getting stacks purely on champion kills (2 stacks for a kill, 1 for an assist) however we'll also include Warmog's Armor and Bloodthirster as they also incorporate stacking elements.

With all but Warmog's a proportion of the stacks are lost when you die, this is to create a risk vs reward mechanic with these items rewarding better play with snowballing and punishing weak play with items that are sub par to others of the same price. Due to this mechanic they are usually frowned upon in competitive games. With the Sword, Soulstealer and Leviathan 1/3rd of your stacks are lost upon death and with Bloodthirster 1/2 of them are. Due to the typically large amounts of champion kills on Dominion all these items are banned there. Okay now the basics are out of the way let's look at these items in a little more detail:

 Sword of the Occult, built from a Long Sword and a hefty 954gold for a measly +10 attack damage Sword of the Occult starts off in a pretty bad place, however a decent AD carry or tanky dps character who can get kills and hold onto them could use this item well as you get +5 damage per stack. Compared to other early game AD items it requires at least 5 stacks on it to just be cost effective however Sword of the Occult does have a fairly big perk, it generates more AD than any other flat AD item in the game, even more than a fully stacked Bloodthirster. Of course getting it to that level requires either a great team on your side or stupid plays by the enemy but anything can happen in games. Also upon reaching 20 champion kills or assists you get the benefit of a nice +15% move speed which helps you flee to hang onto your stacks.

 Mejai's Soulstealer is the stacking item for AP champions built from an Amplifying Tome and  800 gold, it grants you 20 ability power straight away (so no better than the Tome it was built from) it grants 8 Ability Power per stack and also requires about 5 stacks on it to just scrape by on cost-effectiveness but unlike Sword of the Occult it is not the best AP item in the game as even at 20 stacks (Deathcap and fully charged Archangel's both beat it AP wise) Though at 20 stacks you do gain a nice 15% cooldown reduction but on champions that need it you can easily hit the 40% cap without it. However on champions with global abilities, namely Karthus and Soraka, it can be very easy to get charges on it due to Karthus's ultimate damaging an entire team can easily finish off injured enemies, at the least could grant him 5 assists each victorious team fight you team has and Soraka can use her ultimate to heal and remember if you heal one person who takes part in a kill you get an assist. This allows them to get stacks from a safe distance without risk of losing them, however getting Mejai's on them is still seen as suboptimal as a lot of items can benefit the characters more.

 Last of the champion kill stacking items and the one that seems to be the least popular is Leviathan, built from a Ruby Crystal and 800 gold it gives you the ruby crystal's bonus health straight away and then grants you 32 health per stack you acquire. With 20 stacks you will gain 820 health from Leviathan which is 100 less than an unstacked Warmog's. However at 20 stacks you do take 15% less damage resulting in you being a fair bit tankier from it. The problem is that, apart from this % reduction at 20 stacks, Leviathan only gives health and generally flat health without something else is a poor choice unless you already have a large amount of MR and Armor and even then Warmogs gives a lot more health so is generally a better choice for an item slot than Leviathan.

Okay now let's move onto some of the items that actually see quite a lot of play:

 Excluding the rarely picked Sword of the Occult, The Bloodthirster is the highest Attack Damage item in the game. Costing a total of 3000gold Bloodthirster's base stats are +60 Attack Damage and +12% life steal and you gain +1 AD and 0.2% lifesteal for any minion or champion kill you get, to a maximum of 40 kills, fully stacked that's +100AD and +20% life steal which is pretty impressive on any AD character. You lose 1/2 your stacks upon death but they are easy to reclaim off minion waves and once you're fully stacked all that life steal makes it quite hard to die. Another note is that Bloodthirster's passive isn't unique so you can stack them for even more AD and Lifesteal but that makes you a big target and lose a lot of power when you die.

 Last but by certainly no means least you have Warmog's Armor. This pretty expensive, 3000 gold in total, item grants you a huge chunk of health straight off giving you 920 health and 30 health regen, however you gain +3.5 health and  +0.1 health regen per minion kill and +35 health and +1 health regen for each champion kill or assist. It takes a maximum of 100 minion kills or 10 champion kills/assists to reach it's full potential of +1270 Health and +40 health regen. You can't lose these stacks through death so ,despite the potentially large amount of time needed to charge it up in a game with few kills, so it's a solid defensive item for health. However health alone without other defenses is fairly useless stat though most characters who would buy this generally get a large amount of armor and mr, usually in the case of an atma's for armor and to let Warmog's also give you a large boost to your offense.

Well that about wraps it up for the stacking items in the game hopefully I'll have a less point out the obvious boring article next time, I just felt like I should spend a moment to talk about them.