Ashe Build Guide by jhoijhoi

The real reason to rush an IE over, say, a BT is because, although with stacks the BT grants more raw AD, the IE benefits Ashe's DPS more - and of course, even among carries, DPS is what Ashe excels at. Let's look at the numbers: at their base, both grant 70 AD; however, the BT builds stacks, eventually reaching a total of 100 AD. However, the IE has something else, or more precisely two somethings else: crit chance and the crit damage passive. I think people tend to overlook this because crits aren't pre-determined (save for the rare occasions when you can contrive to get 100% crit chance); while we may not be able to predict the exact amount of crit damage we'll be dealing, we can still calculate an expected value.

IE gives you 25% crit chance; in other words, one crit every four attacks, on average. Base crit damage is 200% of AD; IE's passive improves that to 250% (discounting runes and masteries for the time being), yielding a bonus of 150% AD on normal attacks for every crit. So, the expected bonus per attack is this value divided by four: 37.5% of AD.

This means that, even if you were to buy an IE on a level 1 Ashe with no AD bonuses from runes or masteries, the IE alone would yield roughly an extra 141 damage on average per attack, before armour calculations. (141 = (46.3 + 70) x 137.5% - 46.3, rounded to the nearest whole number.) That alone is 41 more damage than a fully stacked BT. And the IE's bonuses will scale with anything else that improves crit damage or crit chance, including the Lethality masteries and the Phantom Dancer. Simply put, this makes IE the best physical DPS item in the game, which is the real reason, in my humble opinion, why it should be rushed on Ashe before other big AD items as standard.

Of course, this isn't to say that the other big AD item, the BT, doesn't have its own benefits. Firstly, what AD improves that crit-based considerations don't is the power of AD-based abilities. Ashe, of course, only has one, and one that has rather good base damage at that. Other carries tend to have more, particularly ultimates, which makes the raw AD a more attractive option on them. But this is about Ashe, so screw them ( XD ). Then of course there's the life steal. The reason I'd value the IE's DPS over this is that the Vampiric Sceptre, of course, gives over half the total possible life steal from the BT, and in accordance with this guide, I build it early, usually first back. However, between this and the scaling on Volley from the raw AD, I could see an argument for rushing the BT first on Ashe if you were up against a poke-heavy lane shy about extended engagements, where every little bit of sustain and counter-poke counts, whilst extended DPS doesn't.