Blade of the Ruined King

Stats

• Attack Damage - C
• Attack Speed - A
• Life Steal - B
• Activation - A+
• Passive - D -> A
• Build Path - A

TLDR;

• Justifiable at all stages of the games.
• Insanely good active.
• Active dealing damage is not cohesive with the item.
• Other stats only justified by strength of Active.
• Overall a Good Item, in a Good place with clear strengths and less clear (but present) weaknesses.
• Provides good counterplay options via the shop and not team comps.
  

AD
Attack Damage on Blade of the Ruined King (BOTRK) feels extremely underwhelming. Tossing AD on this item felt like an afterthought; a bouncy ball after a dentist visit and should be treated as such. No one and no champion buys this item for the AD stat and the only conceivable advantage in this bloggers mind that the AD could give someone would be the ability to clean up those CS last hits that you should really be getting anyway, but aren't quite good enough at the game yet.

In comparison with other items of equal gold values (The BF Crowd) it provides 55 less AD than every one of them, which makes you wonder why it provides any AD at all*. Granted AD and Attack Speed go hand in hand in terms of which champions this item would be good on, still it seems like 25 AD is a rather pitiful excuse to try and compensate those champs that need more AD, but also want the BOTRK active. That being said, Cutlass has to build out of something, and since it builds out of long swords, the AD is kind of just along for the build.
*The reason AD is better than Attack Speed on champions (generally) is that champions have abilities that scale with AD. Champions with higher scaling abilities (Graves, Draven) benefit more than champions with worse scaling or less abilities that deal damage (Kalista, Vayne).

Attack Speed
Attack Speed (and the active) are really the only reason(s) that anyone would buy BOTRK*, half because the active/passive is so good that champions that really don't care about its stats pick it up and half because champions that DO benefit from attack speed benefit both from the active/passive awesomeness AND the attack speed so win/win.

The combination of Attack Speed and AD is unique in League of Legends because only this item and TriForce offer both (yes I know I just said the AD doesn't matter at all, but it matters a little intsy weency bit.) Because of this combination of stats (and low cost components in its item build) AD carries that are more Attack Speed reliant can pick this item up early than they otherwise could have, despite its decrease in effectiveness early game.** When BOTRK is rushed it is generally for the active ability, but ADC's can rush this item for the active only because of the AD and Attack Speed (and lifesteal sort of) that you get on top of the active. Overall the Attack Speed feels much better than the AD, however they're both parts of a complex recipe for success in the bot lane.
*The reasons champions want to build Attack Speed over AD is that they have abilities or passives that proc on every auto attack. Sometimes this is a healing effect(Aatrox, Irelia) sometimes its bonus damage (Aatrox, Vayne) or sometimes it's something unique (Kalista, Tahm)
**Think about it. BOTRK passive deals %hp per auto which increases in damage the more HP the enemies have. The longer the game goes, the tankier the tanks get and the more damage this passive does yet you still see Kalistas and Vaynes get BOTRK first where it does the LEASE amount of damage per auto.

LifeSteal
Like I said before, Cutlass has to build out of something. It makes sense that an item whose active steals life has some sort of life steal stat attached to it, however this isn't the bread and butter of this item. If you look at Bloodthirster, it would be nothing without lifesteal and no one would buy it. However if you examine BOTRK, the lifesteal is sort of the cherry on top. It helps most in the early game because while you're building BOTRK, you won't be able to win all-ins with your opponent who is not going BOTRK so what you can do is buy the cheap lifesteal early (almost every champ will get cutlass before recurve bow), trade a bit and sustain back up by autoing the creeps. Like the Attack Speed/AD combo, the lifesteal stat creates a valid argument for getting BOTRK before the passive is actually doing real damage. The lifesteal by itself isn't very good, but given the context that this item is purchased in the Lifesteal is acceptable.

The late game has a similar argument, simply reversed. Late game if you buy BOTRK, you are going to be buying it for the passive, because of the amount of HP the enemy has. The lifesteal again is the cherry on top to keep you up in those extended team fights. The point here is that you're not buying it for the lifesteal, you would still buy it if the life steal was gone (for the passive) but it does have lifesteal so you shrug your shoulders and say "eh, alright." and double click BOTRK in the shop at 45 minutes.

Activation
This is the Grand-Daddy end all be all of items' actives. Is there any active (apart from MAYBE zhoyna's) that is more versatile and powerful than BOTRK? I think not. Why is this active so powerful? Because it does so much for the person who has it. It's a slow, it's a move speed boost, its a heal, it deals damage, its CD is... well it has a cool sound effect even! For real though, it's extremely versatile and the sole reason you see this item built on champs that aren't ADC's. If a champion can justify using almost any of the stats in provided by BOTRK than the active is enough to get them to buy it. Irelia - W heals with attack speed, pick up BOTRK to chase, stick to targets, finish kills. Jax - Attack speed makes ulti proc more often? Grab BOTRK for the same purpose as irelia, maybe he uses it to escape the 3 man gank as he split pushes etc. Even champs like Warwick can justify getting BOTRK - passive heals him more often with Attack Speed so grab BOTRK to chase harder with blood scent and finish kills after ulting them. (not to mention the on hit passive with Infinite Duress

One of the best things about this item is that it gives an aggressive item that has a self peeling active to ADC's. ADC is (especially in this meta, doubley especially in solo queue) one of the most finicky roles so the fact that League provides them with an item which deals damage to tanky champs and helps peel anyone (most the tanky champs it's designed to deal damage to) off of themselves is the real blessing of BOTRK.

The only problem that I have with the activation is the damage aspect. To some extent I have "why not?" mentality when it comes to this because it does so many other things that why not just make it do a little damage. It's not that big of deal. But I have to ask myself then "Why?" Why make it do damage at all if it already does so many other things? This kind of goes back to the "Why put AD on this item?" issue I raised earlier but with a less definite answer. If you buy BOTRK because you just want to deal more damage then 1 of 3 situations has occurred.

1) It's incredibly late in the game and everyone is really tanky so you need the on hit passive to cut through their HP. Of course since this item deals Physical Damage, you'll already need to have purchased Last Whisper or the damage from BOTRK won't even dent their healthy armored skulls. In this situation. the 10% HP stolen on the Active isn't going to matter much because it's going to take another 15+ autos to kill those tanky champs anyway.

2) You're a skirmishy champion and as a player you have terrible luck so you know you'll never crit if you had picked up IE instead. You have almost no abilities that scale off of max AD so you don't want BT and you split push till you get in a 1v1 situation that you can dominate with the active ability of BOTRK. So you're Vayne. And this is fine if you ARE Vayne, but pretty much her and Zed* are the only champs that this is true about. The problem with the active dealing damage is that it DOES DAMAGE but the point of BOTRK isn't precisely to deal damage, but to keep you mobile with the movespeed and dent the tanks with the % hp damage. The active's goal is to peel diver's off of someone or help a diver dive. You then have to weigh this complex equation (and IDK the answer) to whether or not the damage+slow+autos_you_get_off_while_the_target_is_slowed is more damage than you would be doing if you didn't buy BOTRK, but instead bought Bloodthirster which makes every auto do more flat damage than BOTRK would (depending on HP of enemy of course, but generally) AND it makes every damaging ability hit 55 damage harder (or whatever ratio you have) than BOTRK. So is the Damage from all that more or less than a different item? IDK, but the fact that it deals damage makes the whole equation really confusing.

Again, there is an aspect of "Why not?" where you say "Well if it's healing me, it should probably be doing damage." But the "Why?" needs to be justified more than the "Why not?" (Note: Consistency in league is important so It's certainly understandable that they keep constant lifesteally things STEAL LIFE, but it would not be incredibly bizarre had BOTRK been released as just a Randiuns style slow/heal without the damage. Either way it's not incredibly important, just interesting).
*The reasons Zed benefits so much from BOTRK is that the damage amplification on his ultimate 'proc' is enhanced by the bonus damage of the BOTRK active. The slow is also nice to catch up and land those few autos that make the ulti deal more damage. Attack Speed is kind of irrelevant.

3) You don't really understand the game and just follow the recommended builds. Last time you got Tear of the Goddess on Ashe and went 5/10/1 vs Bots so you should probably get BOTRK on Sorakka because it's really hard to land those starfalls. In this case, build BOTRK on whoever you want. If you think it's fun, who cares what other people think. Play your heart out newbie and hold onto that "WOW This is op!" feeling.

Passive
By now I've talked a lot about the passive because you can't talk about why this item is built without discussing it's passive. Basically it's a pretty good passive late game and an okayish passive early game. I rated this passive with two different letters because of its varied effectiveness. The passive brings this item to a neat close by enveloping all aspects of the game. the active for all stages of the game. The AD/Lifesteal to supplement this items passive which is late game focused. The Attack Speed which pairs nicely with the passive to output more damage and provide an option for Attack Speed based champions to benefit from the fabulous active. And finally the passive which gives this item good late game presence and an answer to super tanks.

It is one of the few items in the game whose effectiveness scales directly off of what your opponents have built which is unique. This also lets players respond to the opposing teams champions and builds. The more items like this in the game the more viable team comps there will be. This is because the burden of versatility i.e. response to threats will be placed more on the item system and less on the champions themselves. BOTRK enhances League of Legends chess-like gameplay (which it needs more of) where player A does X so player B does Y to counter and so on et cetera.

Build Path
This is actually one of the items greatest strengths. The build path for BOTRK provides something that none of the other early AD items provide - early game presence. Because of the cheap costs of BOTRK's components, there is almost no gold value you can back with that you won't be able to pick up a piece of this item. Every single aspect of the this is less than 901 gold.

One of the problems with the BF Crowd is that all of them require you to farm up 1550g until you can pick up that 50 ad increase in stats. Yes, that is a huge increase in stats, however until you get that 1550 gold, you have to buy nothing on the recalls where your opponent (who is build BOTRK) can be picking up a Longsword, a Vampiric Scepter a Bligewater Cutlass and then a ward or two and press their early advantage making it harder for you to farm up the BF sword.

The build path for BOTRK is quite versatile up until you get the T2 upgrades. Unfortunately once you pick up Cutlass or Recurve Bow, the only thing you'll really be building is BOTRK because Gunblade isn't very good and neither is Hurricane/Wits End. I'm not sure this is a flaw however, because the components of these T2 items are very versatile. Long Sword has many paths, so does Vamp-Scepter and Daggers. There is a problem with those other items being completely irrelevant in today's meta, which I will discuss when I get to those items.

Note: There is some discontinuity here with the effectiveness of BOTRK's early game build and the effectiveness of it's early game passive. It's much easier to farm up 1550 gold mid to late game than it is early game, so it would make sense that the late game centric item (BOTRK and it's passive) would have more expensive base values because you won't need it until later. However that is not the case. It seems (give the item build) that one would want to get BOTRK early, when they don't have many locked in item slots and can afford the abundant cheap components of the item.

Changes:

• Turn the active from a lifesteal damage ability to a galio-esque move speed trail for you. This would allow ADC's to effectively kite back (point it away from the people running at them) but would also make them commit to a direction. Same with Divers; if the're going in, they're going in.
• Give it more lifesteal and less AD or more AD and less life steal.
• Put the Slow/Movespeed Part of the active on a different item (Like Frozen Mallet or Phage) And buff the AD and Attack Speed up to compensate.
• Make the Active like rend, where you need to establish a combat setting before you can slow someone. (I.E. auto 3 times then activate to slow whoever you auto'd.
• Make the Active a skill shot where you shoot the slow at someone and it speeds you up if you hit something (maybe also have it speed you up if you hit an ally or creep so you can fire it into your team to chase harder) This forces divers to be more careful with their dives as well as some outplay ability when it comes to dueling people with BOTRK.