Physical builds kinda meh?

[Cha0zb0rn]

Hey, is it just me or are physical builds rather lackluster compared to magic builds? To get your numbers up you need too many stats to become effecitve. Attack damage, Attack speed, crit chance and crit damage. for casters its usually just magic attack and manareg.
I might do something terribly wrong but i have yet to get any crit comp to work effectively. I always either lack sustain or damage. casters have quite some great healing options while physical builds seem to rely on lifesteal...another stat that needs to be stacked or a dedicated healer that usually has little synergy with the rest of the teamcomp.
The only physical dds i frequently pick are arya and james and i usually build them manareg for their ults. Ralf is another powerhouse but he's pretty unique among physical heroes because of his AoE.

A lot of power is in the items but which ones are must buy? which stats do you prefer if you go for crit builds? And how do you guys survive burstdamage or mobs that shoot projectiles into the crowd?

Bleed seems to be the most underwhelming debuff as well.....

Nay suggestions? What am I doing wrong?

[AncientSpark]

AD is good. They ARE considered less good than mage builds, but there are people who do 100% winrate streaks with AD. Here's a couple interactions to look for.

1) Omnicrit. The way Omnicrit works is that if your spell does not directly do damage, the unique effect is considered multiplied by your crit damage. You can do stuff like hit several thousand % attack speed with Ripley or Vinrak if you have the right combination, for example.

2) Mixed AD/SP. A lot of AD auto-attackers actually scale well with SP (Vinrak, XZ, etc.), and there are some mixed items to make them work.

3) % AD. The way % AD works is that ALL flat AD (not just base AD) is multiplied by % AD. This means that rather than combining Attack Speed with Attack Damage, it's often just as efficient or more so to find sources of % AD and combine them with flat AD. An example is Sovas AD spam with Ripley or Leuko spam casting with a % AD Origin like Corrupted.

In general, Attack Speed from base items is a semi-trap for AD; it's not always useless, but it's often a mixed spell and auto-attack stat, so you need to check if you have good reason to go for it (or if you can go for it more efficiently with stuff like Nightfury). In early game, AD items are usually superior and then you can decide whether you have attack speed scaling later, as a lot of the recipes are where you can get attack speed efficiently. Crit is context dependent; Omnicrit is very powerful, and some characters have crit synergy innately. But you don't always need it. Sometimes, it just comes down to whether you have an Origin for it or not (Warmonger, Dragonsmith, Dimensioneer, etc.)

Bleed is actually quite good, but a lot of the Bleed heroes are either underpowered currently (Khero) or are for mixed AD/mage comps (although sometimes have good synergy for them; see Alexei + Corrupted origin for example). Nox is probably the most straightforward AD Bleed character, but he's usually not primary carry due to how his spell works and is usually something of a support AD character. Using Bleed to support AD usually means building one of the bleed characters as support for a debuffless carry, or just using items to get Bleed out of (although there are some good ones for this, like Maxim's).

Surviving with AD comps is usually about just having good tanks. You don't absolutely need healers, although it's sometimes useful. Layley, Dagon, XZ, etc. are all extremely good tanks with AD and a good build with them can often be sufficient even without a healer. You just need to balance out AD with tank stats and lifesteal. Often times, you can either pick up a relic or just mix in 1 mage/support character that has good synergy with your comp (Jalen scales AD and shield for example). There's also a lot of sustain passives running around.

[CryonicSuspension]

How does mana regen help James? Wouldn't you want attack damage as high as possible?

I usually try and take spell power characters because all you have to do is dump max power into them. I have to put three times as much thought into attack damage / ethereal characters.

[gogis_]

Originally posted by CryonicSuspension:

How does mana regen help James? Wouldn't you want attack damage as high as possible?

Channeling spells overlap, so you can have multiple James effects running on top of each other. Since he gains crit and heal through it, it's feeds in itself. He is one of heroes who benefits more from cast overlapping

[gogis_]

Originally posted by AncientSpark:

Nox is probably the most straightforward AD Bleed character, but he's usually not primary carry due to how his spell works and is usually something of a support AD character.

Does Nox spell will make 600% crit damage with omnicrit? If it does, it will scale like crazy with his bleed crit% passive. I never had/gave omnicrit to him and now I am interested

Also I do not consider Vinrak AD carry. He is ethereal, which is another universe. And he is probably most broken carry in game, I've seen him doing 10-13k dps by late game

[AncientSpark]

I personally haven't tried Nox with Omnicrit either and I'm not 100% sure of Omnicrit's interaction with spells that says "performs an attack".

Vinrak CAN be AD carry without Ethereal interactions. It's not his strongest build, but you can swing with AD and have it work. Stuff like Bone Knife, etc.

[jjnujhyu]

Physical build is good. Aleast you can finish the difficulty impossible with physical build.
But you need Leuko for the attack damage to boost the whole team.
Simply just mix Leuko with different melee character.

[jpm0511]

Originally posted by jjnujhyu:

Physical build is good. Aleast you can finish the difficulty impossible with physical build.
But you need Leuko for the attack damage to boost the whole team.
Simply just mix Leuko with different melee character.

just click on leuko when you see him it doesnt matter who your team is
just stack crit chance on him and roll for items/origin that trigger on crits
he is the engine that powers the strongest teams

[Mokkun]

Originally posted by gogis_:

Does Nox spell will make 600% crit damage with omnicrit? If it does, it will scale like crazy with his bleed crit% passive. I never had/gave omnicrit to him and now I am interested

Also I do not consider Vinrak AD carry. He is ethereal, which is another universe. And he is probably most broken carry in game, I've seen him doing 10-13k dps by late game

I don't think he needs omnicrit. His ability autocrits. You can give him 900% crit damage and he will hit like a truck.

[DearSaintMary]

There are just much more useful relics to build mag team than there are relics to build AD team. Keeping in mind you need some good stats scaling.
Aside from bleed focused runs, I'm having difficult time to gather pure AD scaling builds.

I mostly dislike relics that scale every 4 or even 6 seconds. 6 seconds in fight is A LOT. In other words, those relics have 5 tics cap as normally you wouldn't fight longer than 30 seconds.
Heck even shiled based builds scale AD better than pure AD scaling builds :D Probably becasue you can scale shileding based on SP and scaling SP is easy.

[AncientSpark]

There's a lot of methods to scale AD. I've done 70k AD builds, several thousand % crit damage builds, max attack speed within a few second builds, etc. They're just not as obvious (the big ones being Omnicrit pathings, what benefits SP or mana regen splashes bring into AD builds, Ethereal conversions, and what heroes work as AD support heroes such as Leuko or Savos).

Honestly, scaling is easy in this game. A lot of what you have to learn in this game is how to snowball up which means learning early game. This is a big part of the AD vs AP balance, because AD is really really good early, while SP/mana regen tends to require some more specific heroes to be good early (although when you get those heroes, SP/mana regen catches up on early power).

Also, the idea that AD and SP are mutually exclusive is not really accurate. A ton of Origins encourage you interplaying them, and a lot of SP based heroes synergize into AD comps (Jalen, some Leuko setups, healers in Forest Warrior, anything reasonable with Dragonsmith, tanky Origins, etc.). Just did a 15.6 sec clear on hands with half AD/AP Ravenlord setup, for example, using SP healers + AD lifestealers to blast through everything (also relevant; my top healer in that comp was AD Ripley, just to put into context of AD vs SP).

[Nylk]

Here, I just add a pretty good phys summon build. Basically Savos gave a ton of flat AD to the whole team while Ripley scaled AD% and add items that gave all of the summons % of his AD. All the summons ended up hitting for a ton and lifestealing like crazy (check the healing stats on dagon).

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2380783739938553296/2F796FFDCE973A0E7BF00D92CB93E95B08DD82C3/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2380783739938552513/49289C9685C34E65D646147131D088D29C7D97AB/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

[DearSaintMary]

Scaling the whole team's AD with Leuko and Savos gets borring pretty quikcly.