League of Legends: Patch 4.12 and a Brief Follow-up on Essence Reaver Analysis

Nearly a week ago, the 4.12 patch notes for League of Legends got posted with the changes listed implemented the following day. While I don't normally review patch notes for League of Legends because the more recent ones do a decent job explaining the design intent behind changes and numerous players also giving their two cents on the changes up to the implementation on live servers, given my recent analysis on Essence Reaver, I thought I would address a couple of the changes in this patch, starting with the major change to Essence Reaver:

The Essence Reaver had its damage increased by 20 (from 60 to 80), with the item building out of a B.F. Sword and Vampiric Scepter and costing a total of 3400 Gold from 2650.

While the item has lost 30 Gold in net efficiency (the item gained 20 Attack Damage, which is 720 Gold's worth of stats against the 750 Gold increase in price), it is now a lot more slot efficient and may be a solid item on Marksman champions, which was the design goal stated in the 4.11 patch notes. While this change seems to go in the opposite direction of creating an item that provides mana sustain for AD-scaling champions in lane, it could also potentially provide an opportunity to add a smaller item that can build into the more expensive Essence Reaver that provides a lesser version of the mana sustain passive on Essence Reaver. In addition, Essence Reaver's Attack Damage bump makes it a very strong item in the niche of providing a large amount of Attack Damage coupled with Cooldown Reduction, which could benefit a number of champions that may need to consider options like Black Cleaver and Youmuu's Ghostblade otherwise.

With that said, let us move on the smaller Manamune change:

Manamune has had its attack damage increased to 25 from 20 and now builds from a Pickaxe instead of a Longsword. Manamune's cost has been increased by 100 Gold.

While this change doesn't particularly do much in the way of helping AD-scaling champions in the way of mana sustain, I do approve of this change because it gives champions that benefit from having Mana access to the more powerful Pickaxe for some extra damage as opposed to building a Longsword and then pooling over 1000 Gold to build Manamune. The small extra bump in Gold Price increase compared to the 5 Attack damage increase also results in 80 Gold of net efficiency stat-wise.

In the future, if some part of the patch notes is relevant to an analysis I have done, I may do this again, though it may not always happen.