Lux Build Guide by

14.5 Mid (APC): Light 'Em Up (I'm on fiyaa): Luxeøn Style!

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(1495) |

I'll try to keep my review as brief as I can, since Katasandra already covered a lot of the more specific details.

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Build

It's unclear to me why you have Magical Footwear as one of your secondary setups and Biscuit Delivery as another secondary. You should be able to stick to two runes per secondary path, at least for the cheatsheet.
Your notes on Summoner Spells are a bit disappointing. I'd recommend changing them to a brief suggestion on what kind of matchups to take each in. Even something as simple as naming a couple mid laners with hard CC that you'd want to take Cleanse into would be more helpful than just saying to read the guide. Some people who look at your cheatsheet will be in champ select or in game and won't have time to scroll through your guide for explanations, so a quick summary is best here.
Your item build could be broken up a bit. Right now, a new player could look at this and think they're supposed to rush Sorcerer's Shoes instead of Lost Chapter.
Admittedly I haven't used Spellbinder on Lux, but I feel like Mejai's Soulstealer makes way more sense as a greed build option than Spellbinder. You can stack an early Dark Seal and upgrade it for only 1050g instead of committing 2900g to an item that you have to slowly stack and only get to use the active once in a while. Lux is a pretty safe champion, so replacing your Spellbinder with more emphasis on Mejai's seems like a better option.
In your "Don't Forget" purchase order, you list the other trinkets but not Stealth Ward. Maybe you should add the totem to your starting item sets or something. The Dark Harvest item build also lacks this section.

Presentation

Pretty good formatting and visuals overall. I like the colorful theme as it suits Lux's character.
Some of your subheaders (like "Introduction" and "Examples from my experience") are a little cramped with text immediately beneath them.
Pros and Cons section could probably use a little love. It's pretty basic.
There's no visual distinction between the summoner spells you recommend and the ones you don't. As Kat said, I'd recommend either removing the unviable ones or at least lumping them together with a quick note saying not to run them.
The gifs in your abilities section are really ugly for some reason. You might want to rerecord these since they're blurry and don't look good. I recommend taking clips using the Highlights tool in the client, then uploading the video files to gfycat for crisp-looking gifs.
Though it would obviously take a ton of effort since you have so many matchups, I think you could find a more appealing format for your matchups. It's better than nothing, but there's definitely room for improvement here.
Your Laning Phase chapter would greatly benefit from some visuals (edited images, gifs, videos) demonstrating some of the concepts you're talking about.
This might be personal preference, but if you're going to include a change log, I'd put it in a spoiler.

Content

The number one thing I'd like to see here is for you to cut down on some of the superfluous explanations so your more useful content is highlighted better. Right now you have so many runes & summoners with long explanations that those sections become difficult to get through. I know you have this triple column setup right now, but you could reformat it to still look nice with fewer runes. As a reader, I'm much more interested in which runes and summoners you recommend (and why) than which ones you don't.
On a similar note, some of your explanations for sub-par runes still praise the option a lot, even though you ultimately don't recommend it. Builds in League of Legends always have opportunity costs, so you need to show your readers what the best options are so they can get the most out of their runes, summoners and items. Over half of your description for Nimbus Cloak, for example, sounds really positive, but you still tell people to always take Manaflow Band so what was the point of having to read it? I'd much rather read your description for Nullifying Orb since you at least specify a niche case where it's useful.
For the options you do recommend, I think you can make a lot of your explanations more concise. Your guide is very detailed, which is good, but it also means your reader's attention span is tested more the longer the guide goes. Keeping it short and sweet helps ensure your readers are constantly learning and don't have to trudge through any more words than they need to. For example, your descriptions for Gathering Storm and Scorch basically boil down to:
"Gathering Storm is preferred since it scales better, and it's good in most matchups since you'll often use spells for waveclear. Against melee or other short range matchups you want to bully out of lane, you can take Scorch along with Cheap Shot and Arcane Comet for more early dominance."
That description is 1/3 the size of your current descriptions of those runes, and I don't think any important information was lost. A lot of your descriptions could use this treatment. I tend to be overly wordy in my own guides as well, so I know it can be tough to cut content you've written, but it'll be worth it.
I feel like there must be a better solution to the overlap in runes in your setups than to just repeat the content. Presence of Mind, for example, is explained twice, and the explanation is pretty long. Maybe you could reorganize this section to talk about keystones and minor runes separately, instead of breaking it up by full pages.
As Kat said, the Offense shard description is way too long for this format. If you need a longer description to discuss this rune, reformat this part so you don't have one huge column and two fairly empty ones.
Comboes section is pretty nice. I'm personally more of a fan of gifs in guides rather than videos, but this works.
For Corrupting Potion, you need to either specify when to take it or just don't recommend it at all. The people reading your guide are not going to know when they need sustain for a given matchup.
If the enemy doesn't have healing, you shouldn't finish Morellonomicon. Get Void Staff instead. You can probably skip Oblivion Orb entirely, since it's a quick power spike item that isn't terribly gold efficient, whereas Void is pretty much a core item on every mage. If you don't skip the orb, you should at least sit on it while you buy your other items, since Morello isn't an efficient item outside its passive.
Your other builds also seem to overvalue Morellonomicon compared to Void Staff. If you aren't buying it early, you can probably get a better item for this slot. Delaying Void Staff till your 6th item is usually a bad idea as well, since competent teams will buy MR and incompetent ones will be dying to your combo without Oblivion Orb / Morellonomicon anyway.
Cleanse is actually a much better defense for CC on carries. You should get Mercury's Treads for the MR against burst mages like LeBlanc, Syndra and Veigar. If you get hit by one of their CCs, the tenacity won't save you, but the MR can help you live through their full combo. A lot of times you'll see pro / high elo players by Merc's as a first item against these kinds of champs, but if the enemy team has lower damage CC champs like Thresh and Sejuani, they'll just have Cleanse and will buy Sorcerer's Shoes.
A fully stacked Mejai's Soulstealer provides 3829 gold worth of stats. You should NOT sell this item if you have a lot of stacks. Selling it for a full item late game is fine if you've died several times and run low on stacks.
Some sort of difficulty rating would be really useful for your matchups section. It's not possible to evaluate matchups at a glance currently. You'd have to read the whole matchup and try and guess from the content whether the matchup is good or bad.

Overall, there's obviously a ton of useful info in your guide, which is one of the reasons it's stood the test of time. I think the best improvements you could make to this guide are visual & content changes to help your most useful information shine through. Still great as-is though, well done.

Hope you found this review useful. Good luck with your updates!

(64) |

Hey Psi,

I really appreciate this full review a lot. My guide has been around quite a bit and I think it's so easy to get stuck on how the guide is (and how much time you put into it) that you don't want to make any major changes, but you are definitely right, a lot of those things did need to change. I always thought putting a bunch of information was more beneficial since the person would be able to read my guide and know what stuff to take, but also what stuff not to take and WHY, but it was very cluttered and so I went ahead and did a lot of drastic changes, so I hope they look a lot better!! Feels really good to see the end result and I again, appreciate yours and Kat's reviews a lot since it helped me realize that these changes kinda needed to happen!

-Luxeøn

(101) |

Hey there,

Here's a review you didn't ask for, but was given since your guide got featured ;)

Spoiler: Click to view

Cheat sheet

You made a typo in the notes of the inspiration secondary page of sorcery Lux. You say Cosmic Insight increases the mana cap to 45% instead of the CDR cap. You also mention Minion Dematerializer in this note whereas the page shows Magical Footwear.
The note on PoM of the dark harvest Lux build is outdated, PoM doesn’t refund ult cooldown anymore.
You only list generic item builds & build components and do not explain when to get what in the cheat sheet. I believe it is possible to give a bit more information regarding build order & items here.

Guide content

Runes

In the description of Scorch at the sorcery page, you say “I like GS better due to the reasons above”, technically this should be “to the reasons to the left”…
In the description of Cosmic Insight at the secondary runes of the sorcery page you talk a lot about… Minion Dematerializer? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to simply add that rune? Also note that the first sentence of this description is insanely long, which makes it almost impossible to read.
Overall in the secondary runes of the Sorcery page (that aren’t Inspiration) you keep mentioning that Inspiration is just better. If you really want to comment on that it might be better to put that beneath the title of the secondary rune (e.g. beneath “Domination:”) instead of in the descriptions of individual runes.
The description of the offense rune in the bonus runes description of the Sorcery page is insanely long. What doesn’t help is that the most important bit of information (e.g. when to take the adaptive shard…) is at the bottom of the description, perhaps you could look to rewrite it to make it more readable.
At the Dark Harvest description I feel like you repeat yourself after “However, the problem is a lot of mid…” since you already implied that the rune can be hard to stack (thus making Arcane Comet a better choice).
Rather than rambling about Electrocute not synergizing well with poke/trading in lane you might as well say that Electrocute simply isn’t a laning focused rune. It does more damage than Arcane Comet in full rotations though (e.g. giving you a lot of oneshot potential later on, compared to comet), why don't you mention that?
Why does Magical Footwear not appear in the secondary runes of the Domination page and why does Perfect Timing not appear in the secondary runes of the Sorcery page?
Your description of Presence of Mind at the secondary domination page does not match the one at the secondary sorcery page. I dont really see the difference the primary page makes, so why are the descriptions different?
At the Coup de Grace description at the secondary runes of the Domination page you talk about the runes in this row in general. Since you already talk about Cut Down in another description you could limit the talk of this description to Coup de Grace.

Summoners & Items

The descriptions of Heal, Ghost, Ignite and Smite are all obsolete, it might be a good idea to merge them and note in the description that they’re either not effective on Lux or that other choices are simply better.
The description of Refillable Potion is way too long for a simple refillable potion. If you keep it like this I would increase the distance between this description and the Control Ward description since it looks a bit cramped now.
I don’t think buying two control wards as a mid every base is good. If you need that much you must be putting them into **** places which means that you are simply wasting your money. Yes, control wards are important. No, you shouldn’t buy them THAT often. I also do not like the analogy with pro games since everyone knows that pro players are playing an entirely different game. In particular, vision is extremely important in that game, hence why they buy so many control wards.
I think your personal fav build is flawed, if you are going Rabadon's Deathcap you shouldn’t get Oblivion Orb after that. It is only effective against targets with low MR and the later the game goes (e.g. it will be pretty late once you finish dcap) the less effective it will be. Getting a void third is probably better overall.
Your con on the supportive Lux build is not coherent with the items listed. If you reach full build you will do as much damage as with the personal fav/healing build since the supportive build has 14 less AP. If you mean EARLY damage you should definitely add that.
You need a great deal of text to explain that Spellbinder doesn’t synergize that well with Lux. Once you use the overkill argument the item actually becomes obsolete, so I’m unsure whether it should actually be featured. Yes, it gives a **** ton of AP and MS, but I think passing up a defensive /utility item for this is simply not worth it.

Matchups

The Akali matchup is outdated, her R1 cannot be used to dash away anymore (now it’s targeted).
I am very confused by what you mean with the “new” Cassiopeia E and Miasma.
It might be worthwhile to mention that Zhonya's Hourglass can be a good buy against Diana since you can completely negate her ult with it.
You mention Presence of Mind giving mana upon leveling up at the Kassadin matchup. This was removed a long time ago.
At the Katarina matchup you try to mention sinister steel, do you mean Preparation?
At LeBlanc you mention “the clone looking very similar”, I am pretty sure the clone looks identical to LeBlanc so I’m not sure how people are supposed to hit the real one.
Unless I missed something, Lux autoattack range is only 550 so trying to autoattack Lissandra even when approaching outside the minions isn’t going to work since Ice Shard has a range of 725.
Morgana’s Tormented Shadow was renamed to Tormented Shadow.

Presentation

Your guide really has this unique style, I love it. Nonetheless there are some small nitpicks from me. I’ll start with spelling and stuff like that:

In your pros and cons section the “she is easy to pick up”, “She’s squishy” and “she has some really hard counters” are out of line with the rest of the notes since none of those say “she”. It does add some variety, so curious to hear if that was your intend.
In secondary runes of the sorcery page at Cosmic Insight. You say “personally normally
Typo at Nullifying Orb in the secondary domination page decription: “This is actually astrong rune”
Typo at Barrier: “activate it when they are bursting you, not after their done”
Typo at QE combo: “If you use this combo on someone like Ahri, be WEARY!”
Typo at Aurelion Sol matchup; “Be weary when he buys a..”
Something went wrong with the layout at the Ryze matchup.

Onto the general presentation & coding: 95% of the content is solid, it looks bright, it looks . The other 5%, is ahm… Your runes section. Here are of my concerns:

You list the stat shards twice, but the information is exactly the same. No need to double, one is enough.
You list some runes in the primary pages and then say they are really bad. Considering the space you need for that it might be better to leave these out altogether (why would one ever think of taking Sudden Impact on Lux…)
Overall the layout of your rune section isn’t ideal. Some descriptions are way longer than others (the stat shards are the worst offender of this…) and it is hard to compare different choices since you have to scroll so much.

Its a solid guide that covers all the necessary information on one could need. Looking at the changelog & old guide template, it's not the newest guide on the site. Despite this, it still looks pretty good.

Have a nice day & good luck updating your guide!

(64) |

Hi Katasandra,

I really do appreciate this "review" a lot, since my guide has been out for a bit and it's a HUGE chunk of information that's hard to look over every patch. I definitely miss a lot of stuff I need to edit or change, especially when it comes to swapping out or changing the descriptions for runes or updating the matchup section when champions do get changed/reworked! I've thoroughly read through your review and changed most of the things you said, as they were definitely needed! :)

There were a couple things I didn't change because I personally thought they were fine, but I do appreciate a different perspective on it. Again, I do appreciate not only the review, but the review being neat and coded, which I know takes a lot more time than just typing!

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