Works 4 me tnx <3

You're falling into the trap of thinking that just because Tristana has AP ratios, you need to use them to get the most of her.

Tristana's ultimate is AP because she was one of the first champions, made at a time where Riot's logic was "autoattacks = AD, spells = AP". Nowadays you'll see AD champions with mostly physical damage spells and AD ratios, and AP champs with only magic damage spells and AP ratios, the only exception I can think of being Evelynn with physical damage on her E.

From season 1 all the way up to her rework, AP Tristana was actually completely viable since she had huge AP ratios on every single spell and was awesome to play as an AP assassin. But after her rework they toned down her ratios and reworked her E into a spell that does physical damage (which follows their more up to date logic on deciding damage types for champions), and that killed AP Tristana, the only other viable alternative to ADC Tristana.

Her W and R still do magic damage since they haven't been reworked like her E was, but that doesn't mean you have to account for that. E.G. looking at your cheat sheet, the build there is Black Cleaver -> Sorc Shoes -> Nashor's. Now it's all fine and dandy to say "she scales on AP, wake up sheeple!" if mixing AD, armor pen, magic pen, attack speed and AD is actually the highest damage build for her. But does Black Cleaver, Sorcerer's Shoes and Nashor's Tooth actually out-damage Infinity Edge, Berserker's Greaves and Statikk Shiv? No. Does it out-burst it? No. Does it provide more utility? Besides shredding team for your armor which may or may not be useful, no. So what's the point?

At every stage of the game your build does less damage than a normal ADC build, making it completely redundant, but you justify it with "but she scales with AP". Which is not wrong, but if building AP isn't the way to get the most damage out of her, then why would you build AP?

You also seem to justify not building attack speed with "her Q already gives attack speed". But so long as she isn't overcapping on attack speed that's completely irrelevant, and her Q giving so much attack speed is exactly what makes her so obviously suited for an ADC build, since 110% attack speed massively increases the effectiveness of all the AD and crit you would have.



Rageblade wasn't a traditional ADC item true, but overall she was still using an ADC build; a build that made her do the highest possible DPS through auto-attacks (at least earlier on, because Rageblade was so cheap, and then late-game you would sell it for a higher DPS item), even if it did also give 70 AP. It was still an ADC build, just one that incorporated Rageblade rush (also an item used by ADC Kog'Maw and which also became popular for ADC Varus and ADC Ashe at the same time as it did for Tristana), then moved onto more traditional ADC items. She's still a "full ADC" in the sense that her spells' damage/cooldowns aren't worth solely itemizing for but her Q and her auto-attack range make her a very strong champion to itemize DPS on, whatever be the most effective way of obtaining DPS. Pre-6.9 that was Rageblade rush into crit items, now it's just crit items since Rageblade is so much more expensive.

Both your builds itemise damage, while at the same time bizarrely sacrificing damage just to incorporate both AP and magic damage into the mix rather than just physical damage. The end result is that rather than having Tristana dealing 100% of her possible damage as physical damage (some of it being AP from Statikk Shiv, Buster Shot and Rocket Jump, but mostly physical), you're instead getting her dealing ~30% of her possible damage as physical damage and ~10% of her possible damage as magic damage. At the end of the day, you're going bot lane as an "ADC" (regardless of how you choose to build damage on her), but you're being much a much less effective ADC than Tristana can actually be because you're using an inefficient build.

Don't believe me? Play a custom game with me, we'll both farm up to 2-6 items, and we'll attack each other to death to compare who deals more damage at each point in time. I guarantee you the "ADC" Tristana build (AKA the one that builds AD, AS and crit, which isn't the only "ADC" build since you also have Kalista and Ezreal that build little to no crit while still being ADC's) out-damages your Tristana build at every possible stage of the game.

Possible arguments you might respond with:

"But Black Cleaver shreds armor for your team, a normal Tristana build doesn't". Sure, but you could just as easily build Black Cleaver on ADC Tristana, it's not an item option that's unique to your build. The reason people don't is it's really expensive and not worth building for the damage it gives when Last Whisper and its upgrades are so much cheaper and mostly out-damage it anyway.

"But my built deals damage both through auto-attacks and spells, an ADC build does almost all its damage through auto-attacks". Yeah but the problem is your build's auto-attack damage is soooo ridiculously lower than a normal build's, that even when you factor in the small damage boost you're giving your spells it's still dealing less damage overall even in the perfect scenario for your build, and whenever your E is down (which it so often is since it has a long CD even with CDR) you're extremely underwhelming, while still being underwhelming compared to a normal build even when it's up. And it doesn't matter whether your damage comes from both spells and auto-attacks or just auto-attacks, what matters is which does the most damage overall, which is the normal build. And having it all focused on auto-attacks is a great thing since your auto-attacks are always available, while your spells are not.

"My build shreds tanks with BotRK". Yeah, but this is an item you can just as easily build on a normal build Tristana, and I do whenever it's important to be able to shred tanks, it's a good item on Tristana, albeit very situationally. Most of the time though it's not necessary and the DPS advantage it gives is too small to want to pass up other items for.

"Rylai's helps me kite better than an ADC build." Slightly, yeah, but you could still just build rylai's on an otherwise normal build and be more effective, and in both builds it would just be more effective to use a Frozen Mallet since the amount of slows you'd get on Rylai's would be ridiculously low because of your long cooldowns. You'd also get more damage and more HP.

And I think that just about covers it.

tl;dr you're tunnelling too hard on her unused AP ratios and failing to compare the actual effectiveness of the two styles of builds. Focusing on AS/AD/crit is better because it does more damage.