League of Legends (LoL) Question: I'm new

Posted in Items | Tags: Riven 3,508

I'm new

Asked by Odinskee on April 9, 2020

So, this is probably a dumb question but this is the first time I've played a game of this type and whenever I try to google my questions, I get answers that make zero sense to me lol
So basically, I'm starting on Riven and I want to get good at her, but I'm having a hard time understanding how the items work. I looked up a build for her, and the items all cost so much gold that if I get the long sword and then wait to get enough gold for the Black Cleaver I end up lacking dmg early on which just screws me later. I realize that there's obviously stuff I'm supposed to get in between those two items but I don't know what to get and when to get it.
Sorry for the dumb question but everywhere I look for an answer it's basically in a whole other language to me since I don't know anything about MOBAs.
Thanks!

Answers (1)

(101) |

Hi there!

Every (finished) item consists of what I like to call major components, items that cost around 1000 gold that offer special passives besides raw stats. For example, consists of and . The former gives movement speed when you hit/kill champions and minions and the latter gives cooldown reduction. When you want to build a certain item you almost always get one of these major components first.

is a special case though, I am not a player but looking at item builds she tends to build first. This is likely because likes AD (since she is an AD bruiser) and since she is quite reliant on her spells to do damage, she also needs cooldown reduction.

Then after building , she builds by first purchasing (again, more cooldown reduction!), then buying and then finishing .
Her second item is (usually) , where is build first, then into finishing the item.

I'm quite sure the rest of the items are a bit situational, as I said, I am not a player so I have no clue in what case you'd get which item. The order in which to get most of the components is not so hard to understand though. For example, you want to get because the enemy team has lots of healing. The important stat here is the healing reduction, which is also on one of the components: , so you get that one first!
Here is an overview of which components you should look to get first for an item though:

:

This one is a bit of a mystery for me, Stopwatch is a very strong component item because of the stasis. Chain Vest and B. F. Sword simply give raw stats.