A post came up yesterday about GP feeling awkward. I won’t say he’s as glorious as he once was, but there’s no changing that. I left a super lengthy comment underneath the post that I’m going to just copy and paste here. It seems a lot of the GP community is still feeling a bit blah after sheen’s removal from ER. I hope this post sheds some light on the current state of GP’s builds. I won’t claim to be the best player by any means, but I love math and I love refining things through testing over and over again. There will be some mention about playstyle in this post, but that isn’t necessarily the point I’m trying to get across. This is much more to do with builds and pure numbers discussing optimal items/build paths. Feel free to argue or provide inputs in the comments, I’ll be replying to most of them as I can. Here’s the comment I left under the original post:

Lengthy post ahead, but TLDR, not entirely sure I agree. Having played over 200 games between mid and top this split alone (not a massive amount but still a decent sample size) I feel like I can give a decently educated opinion. I also really love math and have been looking into the most mathematically correct way to play new GP after playing LOTS of GP before patch 14.10.

Not having Sheen on Essence Reaver really sucked initially, but I’ve adapted my playstyle around it early. I’ve relied on my passive more than ever to make plays in the early levels. If you’re a new/mid-tier GP player, I think Tri force gives you a larger window to make mistakes (not a huge window, just larger). If you’re a more experienced player, this change probably feels not as good. However, Tri force gives every stat GP wants aside from crit.

Before getting into the giga-nerdy stuff. Let’s address the passive. GP is squishy if you go crit. There’s no way around that. I’ve never seen my passive as a team fight tool. That’s what barrels and ult are for. Look for flanks, catch opponents who are trying to sideline. If you can’t catch a flank in a team fight, hit a 3 barrel combo to reach the squishy back line. Use passive when split pushing and one opponent from the enemy team is coming to match you or when ending a team fight and you’re finishing off opponents who have a harder time fighting back. If you’re in a 5v5 team fight relying on your passive to do a lot of the heavy lifting, it likely won’t end well.

I’m going to address crit later on in the post, but bruiser GP still hasn’t felt super great to me. If I’m going bruiser, I’d honestly rather go more tank with Unending Despair and Spirit Visage and frontline/perma slow the enemy with barrels (thanks riot for reverting crit barrel scalings) while my team pummels them. This is obviously dependent on team comp and state of match, but I’ve had good success with it when being smart about when I build it. Your Orange also gives you time in between Unending Despair procs so you aren’t relying solely on that item to keep you alive. If you get lucky and pull a few Ocean Dragons or Chem Dragons, your team fight sustain should feel great. If you’re afraid to test it in a real match, hit a norms or try it next time you get an ARAM GP match.

As far as the crit builds go. I have yet, after HOURS of testing in both norms, ranked, and practice tool, found a better build than Tri > Opp > LDR with Jack. I think there are matchups where you could exchange Jack for Cosmic Insight and ignite and fighting to the death every time ignite is up, but I tend to stick to Jack for the consistency. My typical gameplay rotation revolves around farming up to Tri > Opp as fast as possible, sometimes only grabbing base boots, and then gauging whether I should go after squishies at that point or farm up to LDR first before looking to make an impact on the map.

I’m curious to know if you’ve tried messing around with your builds in practice tool. Or REALLY analyzed your gameplay to check damage numbers. With the Tri > Opp > LDR build, you are essentially doing true damage barrels.

Let’s play with some numbers and use Akali as our example.

First, armor pen is applied in this order: Percentage > flat

Barrels provide 40%, LDR 35%, and Opportunity would apply next with its passive giving you 25 lethality at level 13 (around the level many champs will hit their 3 item core).

Akali has a base armor value of 23 with a growth value of about 3.4. This means an Akali building standard AP (not including Zhonya’s here for sake of simplicity) will have have 74 armor at level 13. Now we apply our armor pen values.

Barrels reduce the 74 to 44.4

LDR reduces the now 44.4 to 33.3 (pre LDR nerf would have dropped this to 26.64)

Opportunity with its passive at level 13 (25 lethality) reduces 33.3 to 8.3.

(Crazy to think pre nerf LDR and Opportunity would have reduced the 74 armor Akali to 0 armor entirely)

8.3 armor at level 13 is absurd. That’s 8 percent damage reduction. Mitigation is calculated as: armor value/(armor value 100) So, 8.3/(8.3 100)

If we apply Akali-ish stats (sadly we can’t do values of 5 on dummies, so we’ll give the dummy 80 armor instead of 74.4 to be generous) to a dummy and compare both 3 item core builds, we will get the following numbers:

Tri > Opp > LDR:

736 barrel non crit

1000 barrel crit

Tri > Collector > IE:

617 barrel non crit

1021 barrel crit

(I’m in a practice tool doing this as I’m typing out my post).

This is when we’re looking to make an impact on the map. Once you hit three items, be the menace. Even better if you’re ahead and your enemy laner has to farm in side lanes to catch up.

This partially negates the “if you don’t crit you aren’t a champion” issue. ESPECIALLY now that barrels no longer need crit to slow opponents. There’s an argument to be made about crit procs more often with collector into I.E., but I will take consistency over coin flip any day. I can recount PLENTY of fights where my 50 percent crit chance felt like a 0 percent chance and the coin flip wasn’t going my way. I really dislike relying on RNG, so I’ll take the boost to my non crits at 25 percent rather than 50 percent and 21 extra crit damage with the IE core build.

Let’s also keep in mind gold values:

Opportunity LDR is 2700 3000=5700

Collector IE is 3200 3400=6600

That is a 900 gold difference. It’s incredible how economically efficient the Opportunity LDR build is. This means we hit 4th item significantly faster than most other champs in our match if we’re playing smart. Or, if you happen to fall behind, it will take significantly less longer to catch up to the rest of the game.

I was also initially upset about delaying crit to item 3, but once I started running numbers, it made perfect sense and my distaste really went away. Couple that with the fact Opportunity gives you move speed as a stat AND a burst of MS on kill, you’re even better at kiting and getting out of bad situations than with Tri > Collector > IE.

At the end of the day, run what feels best, if you’re winning games with collector into IE, have at it. But I hope my math has shed a bit of light into why i disagree with your post rather than just telling you to get good, or you’re bad, or [insert generic unhelpful comment here]

Happy to help or answer questions with the math side of things. Best of luck in your games brother.