if u hit barrel dey go ‘boom!’

Nerfs in general are annoying since they're geared towards hurting a champions efficiency. The nerfs to base health and Cannon Barrage don't really worry me too much since they're small, an the nerfs to Remove Scurvy for the most part will just make it so that you actually have to use your potions in lane and can't just spam it to keep your health up 100% of the time. Other than that I'm not too worried. Gangplank's strengths lie in his Parrrley and Powder Kegs, so as long as they don't touch those he's going to be as effective a damage dealer as ever. The only changes these nerfs look like they will bring is forcing you to be even more conservative with your mana and precise with your ult.

I just talked about my thoughts on Duskblade, which can be found directly below. To sum it up nicely, if you're going to build duskblade you're probably going to be building it last so it's going to be a toss up between that and getting an item to specialize against the enemy team comp. If you want to build duskblade, build duskblade.

Hope this helped :)
~link491

It's important to realize that the build proposed here is just a recommendation, and you're not obligated to build any of the items that I have there if you don't want to. Bearing that in mind Duskblade is perfectly fine. I normally tend to use my last item slot to build for the situation but if you want to specifically build one thing duskblade is as good as any. I've found that in the few times that I've built it that it works well. I personally find that the item is more geared towards champions like Yasuo and Zed who all in you and will be able to reliably proc the passive but if you want to build it on gp he will certainly benefit well from the stats that it gives. Keep in mind that Parrrley can crit, so having at least a bit of crit chance will in many cases increase your damage output by quite a bit, even if it is only once every 5 hits.

Hope this helped :)
~link491

Ok so Sterak's Gage on paper doesn't look that good until you see that it increases base AD, so it's going to increase the damage you get from Trinity Force by 25%, which is super nice. The health and passive are also both really nice for a bit of protection since more often than not you won't be building a lot of tank stats.

Statikk Shiv isn't really that good on gp anymore I find. Like, it's a fine item but you have better options early on. Normally you'd want more damage for your third item, which is why I recommend Youmuu's Ghostblade third instead. The only other real problem with Statikk Shiv is that it only gives crit chance and no damage, and since gp benefits more from damage now than he does from crit you sort of have to either build even more crit or waste the stats. The one exception with this is Infinity Edge since it still gives tons of damage. The waveclear it gives is actually about the same as it would be if you were to just build a damage item and use a barrel so the only real difference is that you're losing stats by buying Statikk Shiv.

Ok, wow that went into a bit of a rant, so tl;dr is that I'm not a fan of Statikk Shiv unless you plan to go full crit which is generally obselete compared to damage/utility.

Hope this helped :)
~link491

With Gangplank I find that you can really get away with any runes you want and they will be for the most part effective, and I actually used to use armor penetration reds and quints but I've found that I tend to gravitate more towards damage so that is what I recommend. That's not to say that armor penetration is inferior in any way, I feel they're both really good and that it's really just a matter of preference.

On a side note farming was never a problem even when I did use armor penetration reds and quints, since at early levels they go through most of the minion's armor so there's not much difference.

Regarding cooldown reduction and how you build it I've actually tried many different ways of hitting 40% cdr. Up until Trinity Force got changed I was running 10% flat from runes and getting the other 30 from items. When the change hit I started running different boots but after a while I found that I really missed the summoner spell cooldown reduction, and as small as that seems it does affect Flash enough that I'd rather have it than not. Granted you can easily run cdr runes and have an equally effective build but again I feel that it's a matter of preference more than anything else. As for a specific setup to hit that 10% cdr if you're getting it from runes, 6/3 works well but I prefer having the 10 as early as I can so I would run 9 flat blues and one flat quint to hit the full 10. The small damage increase from the one rune tends to be negligible when compared to the flat 10 at level 1.

As for lane matchups that was just an error from the last time I updated the guide. Irelia should be higher than Jax. That's been fixed.

Hope this helped you see the methods to my madness :)
~link491

I hope you don't mind me putting your quote in a spoiler, it is kinda long :)
You make some very valid points with Stormraider's Surge , and while I personally do like it for a lot of the reasons you give, I prefer Thunderlord's Decree specifically because it can be used to upgrade Cannon Barrage's damage before you get your Death's Daughter. This will let you contribute more to early skirmishes and since your ult hits multiple times to the same target with each wave you will always proc it in lane even if you don't during dueling. True, thunderlord's is less useful when we get to using barrels since you're normally going to only hit them twice, but I find that when I'm dueling somebody I end up hitting them with a barrel, then auto-attacking them to proc Trial By Fire and then hitting them with Parrrley as they (or I) run away to proc Thunderlord's from a distance.

Regarding the scaling of Thunderlord's, you can probably see from the way I build GP that I prefer to lean more towards damage than crit chance for for me I find that Thunderlord's normally procs to deal around 100 to 260 damage based on what point I'm at in the game and that boost is really nice for sniping with ult or dueling my enemy laner.

You're right that you will most likely always proc Stormraider's when you trade, kite or help in teamfights, but I feel you minimize the impact of thunderlord's hitting off of your ult only to be up again around 15 to 20 seconds later for you to proc it again when you're killing off stragglers. The cooldowns between the two masteries are only really super different in the early portions of the game and they sort of even out by the time you hit late.

Overall, I think that choosing between the two is just a matter of preference. I prefer to have that extra burst in early game skirmishes and when I ult other lanes, and I personally feel that the movement speed from Trial By Fire coupled with the Phage passive is more than enough for me to get out of most situations. I do feel that Stormraider's Surge is a perfectly viable option but I think that with the way the game currently goes you can't really hit that 30% sweet spot as easily as you'd want in the times when you can't get to the enemy champs that you can deal that amount to easily.

I will say that I haven't had as much success with Stormraider's Surge as I'd like to, simply because I find that I can't hit the guys in the backline when I'm fighting if I don't catch them out and end up not being able to shred the enemy tean's tanks enough to proc it then.

Glad you took the time to comment and don't worry about the wall of text, if you look at my previous posts you'll see that I build them all the time :)
Hope I wasn't too jumbled or unorganized with my points, I haven't taken the time to edit this and will probably be doing so after I post it.

Thanks again for the comment and I look forward to discussing this more :)
~link491

CDR is perfectly viable! If you still want to use CDR runes be my guest! They're really efficient and gp gets a lot of mileage from them. I just prefer to build my CDR in my items rather than runes since many of gp's best items come packaged with CDR. The Trinity Force changes made this kind of a hassle since you can hit 40% with just Youmuu's Ghostblade and Trinity Force if you run CDR runes, but then you lose out on the summoner spell CDR from Ionian Boots of Lucidity. Of course this is no problem if you wanted to build different boots. It's really a personal preference for me though and I tend to alternate between CDR runes and MR runes. Simply put though, CDR runes are still great but they make it harder to fit everything you want to have into your build so if you use them be ready to build slightly different.

Hope this helped :)
~link491

Funnily enough, I have actually tried something similar to what you propose. It doesn't really work. It looks fine on paper because it gives you a lot of sustain and cdr, but it will make you lose out on a lot of utility and damage. This setup will make you lose out on a lot of early game presence and in my experience the moment the enemy sees you started Ancient Coin he'll instantly begin to bully you out of lane since you don't really have the sustain to fight it out. Even if you make it to mid game and buy Trinity Force, you're still losing out on a lot since you can't get Youmuu's Ghostblade or Ionian Boots of Lucidity without wasting stats. You're going to be limited to building full damage with no utility and maybe a bit of tank stats. Trust me after a few games you'll begin to miss ghostblade's passive.

If you really want to play around with alternative builds and getting early cooldown reduction to spam Parrrley with, I would recommend flat damage reds, 2 ad quints and a cdr quint, armor yellows, flat cdr blues and the 5% cdr mastery. You'll start with 15% cdr then and will be able to build Trinity Force and Youmuu's Ghostblade and will still be able to spam. Then you can also build more situational boots.

Ok wow that's a wall of text. Since this is unedited it might be a bit scatterbrained, so if you need anymore explanations please feel free to ask. Otherwise I hope this helped :)
~link491

I've talked about my thoughts on this at least twice now and they can both be found farther down on the page. Since the comments section is a mess right now and kind of hard to navigate though, I'll just repost my most recent tangent about this:


Hope this helped :)
~link491