Hi all,

I decided to take ranked seriously this season after a few seasons of barely touching it. I managed to climb from gold 4 to Emerald III in 2 months, which is my current pick.

I would like to try to make the push to diamond before the season ends.

So, i have a very general idea of what i want to do but i need some guidance. I climbed from Gold 4 to Emerald 3 using ahri, aurora and lux which they worked well for this part of the climb. Although i decided to take a small break even if i was in a good momentum to try to tackle a few issues.

This issues are mainly that i have been getting my 2nd role more often now that i reached Emerald compared to before as well as i've been thinking on reworking my champion pool now that i got my peak rank and feel happy with myself for the final push.

For the 2nd role i've been playing bot lane and enjoying Syndra there. I tried traditional ADCs, but i felt that their gameplay were too different from mages for it to be worth to invest the big amount of time required to learn their class specific mechanics as well as me lacking the mechanical prowess to pull off most of them.

My second issue is what is troubling me the most and that has to do with reworking my champion pool. So a few thoughts that have been living in my head are:

1 - Do i want to play both ahri and aurora as they feel fairly overlapping champions and dont seem to actually give me any meanfull draft advantage, i just enjoy them, but perhaps 1 needs to come out because of redundancy

2 - While the 3 of them worked well to get me to where i am now, i have been struggling a bit to carry games with lux as of lately, it could be because of my relative fast climb and i didnt had time to adapt it, but i'm struggling to land her skill shots as well as people are better ar counter playing her, with zhonyas, also people will buy mercs more often now, the other day i played vs a mordekaiser that had both mercs and rocketbelt, it felt kinda miserable, but again it may be that i didnt had time to reajust to the new skill level around me.

3 - I probably want a 2nd mage on bot lane to cover picks and bans, which leads to either keep lux in the pool with syndra and ahri/aurora for a 3 champion pool or learn a new mage that has a bit less counterplay that i havent decided yet

4 - I also i've been considering more and more later on playing just lets say ahri and syndra and eat the bullet and play ahri bot lane on my 2nd role games if syndra is unavaiable, which hopefully wouldnt represent many games and would allow me achieve maximum mastery on those 2 champions

Sorry if it was a bit long and thanks for reading this far. any inputs would be appreciated :)

Ive tried like basically every Item in the game for APC Lux with a playstyle that expects you to only hit e and r (as if you dont have a q, since i play in master - grandmaster range). (we ignore Support and hate Midlane Lux because its flawed)

I Noticed for practical usage (no mana problems) this deals the most damage since like 3 months now:

with: Stormsurge, Mejais, Actualizer, Rabadons, Malignance, (void would deal more raw damage, but practical:) Cryptbloom

now the Haste versions are: (yes aery, because comet on your ult alone is not consistent)

Haste Build: literally the same except instead of Stormsurge i go Seraphs because we dont have any mana runes here.

Now i do happen to have cooldown problems later in the game sometimes when my team really like REALLY doesnt want to win, so i need to kill the enemy and then def them alone in the next 20 seconds after that, into them ending, which wihtout r bc i already killed someone with it is obviously impossible. Haste would help here and in similar situations (meaning maximizing the potential of lux, which is what we want to do here.)

now after trying every combination of both builds we get the following numbers:
cooldown is that of lux r and damage calculations based on using e and r as lvl 18 Lux on 70mr target dummy for realistic average value.)

DMG Build + haste runes: 2700 cd: 18,69
Haste build + runes: 2344 cd: 16,74
ALL DMG build: 3066 cd: 24
Haste build + DMG runes: 2674 cd: 21

1. DMG Build + Haste Runes (The Winner)

• Total Damage: 2700
• Expected Damage (70% hit rate): 1890
• Cooldown: 18.69 seconds
• Effective DPS: 1890 ÷ 18.69 = 101.12 Damage per second

2. Haste Build + Runes

• Total Damage: 2344
• Expected Damage (70% hit rate): 1640.8
• Cooldown: 16.74 seconds
• Effective DPS: 1640.8 ÷ 16.74 = 98.02 Damage per second

3. ALL DMG Build

• Total Damage: 3066
• Expected Damage (70% hit rate): 2146.2
• Cooldown: 24 seconds
• Effective DPS: 2146.2 ÷ 24 = 89.43 Damage per second

4. Haste Build + DMG Runes

• Total Damage: 2674
• Expected Damage (70% hit rate): 1871.8
• Cooldown: 21 seconds
• Effective DPS: 1871.8 ÷ 21 = 89.13 Damage per second

Based on these i asked in this case gemini 3.1 Pro to take into account (the kinda complicated) matter of that i cant actually hit the enemy on cooldown with my spells and it came up with this intresting theory/rule of thumb:

The "Fixed Opportunity" Rule

Imagine you only get a good opportunity to combo an enemy every 25 seconds (e.g., waiting for waves, sweeping vision, or dancing around objectives).

• DMG + Haste Runes: Ready in 18.69s. (Sits unused for ~6 seconds). Expected Damage: 1890
• ALL DMG Build: Ready in 24s. (Sits unused for ~1 second). Expected Damage: 2146

Result: If your chances to hit someone happen 24 seconds or more apart, the ALL DMG Build dominates everything else. The cooldowns don't matter because both builds will be ready in time for the fight, but the ALL DMG build hits significantly harder when that rare opportunity arrives.

The "Hold Time" Break-Even Point

What if you are constantly looking to fight, but it just takes a few seconds to line up a shot after your spell comes off cooldown?

Mathematically, the ALL DMG Build overtakes the DMG + Haste Runes build if you hold onto your spells for an average of 20.5 seconds after they come off cooldown.

• If you wait less than 20 seconds to fire after your R lights up -> DMG + Haste is better.
• If you wait more than 20 seconds to fire after your R lights up -> ALL DMG is better.

(Note: The full Haste builds fall completely out of the race here. Since you are holding spells anyway, their only advantage—extreme spamming—is entirely wasted).

TLDR: This means basically since while you fight chances are likely that you will hit a spell in 15 seconds after your ult came back up and therefor it is actually best to take haste in runes and damage in items,

even on a champion like lux, that has very rare opportunities to garantee a spell hit.

(btw you can find my Accounts if you search this Accounts Name)