Stats
| Damage | 44.5 | (+3 / per level) |
| Health | 415 | (+82 / per level) |
| Mana | 193 | (+32 / per level) |
| Move Speed | 300 | |
| Armor | 15 | (+3 / per level) |
| Spell Block | 30 | (+0 / per level) |
| Health Regen | 1.02 | (+0.13 / per level) |
| Mana Regen | 1.29 | (+0.09 / per level) |
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Abilities
 | Rapid Fire - Tristana fires her weapon rapidly, increasing her attack speed for a short time. Increases Tristana's attack speed by 30/45/60/75/90% for 7 seconds.
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 | Rocket Jump - Tristana fires at the ground to propel herself to a distant location, dealing damage and slowing surrounding units for 3 seconds where she lands. Tristana fires at the ground to propel herself to target location, dealing 70/115/160/205/250 (+0.8) magic damage and slowing surrounding units by 60% for 2.5 seconds when she lands. On a champion kill or assist, Rocket Jump's cooldown resets.
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 | Explosive Shot - When Tristana kills a unit, her cannonballs burst into shrapnel, dealing damage to surrounding enemies. Can be activated to deal damage to target unit over time, and reduce healing received. Passive: Enemies explode when slain by Tristana's attacks, dealing 50/75/100/125/150 magic damage to nearby enemies. Active: Explosive Shot rends target enemy, reducing healing and health regeneration by 50% and dealing 110/140/170/200/230 (+1) Magic Damage over 5 seconds.
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 | Buster Shot - Tristana loads a massive cannonball into her weapon and fires it at an enemy unit. This deals magic damage and knocks the target back. Tristana fires a massive cannonball at an enemy unit. This deals 300/400/500 (+1.5) magic damage and knocks surrounding units back 600/800/1000 distance.
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 | Draw a Bead - Increases Tristana's attack range as she levels. |
Convention has it that Tristana is an auto-attack AD champion, and for good reason. Her passive alone is excellent for this purpose, and her abilities (especially Explosive Shot's passive) enhance her role as an AD carry. However, one day I was looking at Tristana's stats and noticed something: the damage type of her skills, and their multipliers. They are all magic, and the multipliers are all large (.8 for the smallest, and that's area of effect). However, common Tristana builds have no AP items, and as such her skills are doing just base damage. My thoughts: can we construct an AP build for Tristana that will allow her to put out burst damage like a true AP nuker?
Comparison to other AP nukers indicates that this is a distinct possibility. I'll compare Tristana to Annie, one of my favorite champions and one hell of an AP nuker. The main thing AP Tristana has over Annie is raw damage: Tristana's abilities do comparable base damage to Annie's, and Tristana's AP multipliers are better (Annie's damaging abilities deal .75, .8 and .8 ability power in damage). Also, while this isn't an advantage, Tristana has a built-in escape, allowing her to be a little squishier without dooming her to horrible death (if you're careful). Lastly, the positioning ability of Buster Shot is amazing, both for team ganking and escaping.
What Annie has over Tristana is that two of her abilities are AoE, and her passive gives her a glorious stun (and the ever-dreaded stun-bear). Another difference between the two is that Tristana's main damage ability, Explosive Shot, is DoT. I think that the reduced healing more than makes up for this, but nevertheless Explosive Shot cannot be used as a nuker's ability. The last thing Annie has over Tristana is cooldowns: the base cooldowns on Annie's main abilities (Disintegrate and Incinerate) are 4 and 8 seconds respectively. Conversely, Tristana's Rocket Jump has a cooldown scaling from 22 seconds to 14 seconds, and her Explosive Shot has a 16 second cooldown. While Annie (and other AP casters) can call forth their abilities frequently, Tristana cannot.
Based on my last point, any AP build for Tristana will need ALL the cooldown reduction you can get. This is not that hard: 9/0/21 mastery can get you 9%, runes can bring you to 15%, and Nashor's Tooth (one item I've looked at for this build) adds the remaining 25% towards the cap. If you're at lower levels and lack the runes and masteries, simply pick up Ionian Boots of Lucidity.
Another thing that may give Tristana problems is mana and mana regen. In my feeble attempts at this build so far I have not run into great difficulty in these areas, but by the stats she is much weaker in these areas than a dedicated caster. Nashor's Tooth helps with the mana regen, and picking up a Lich Bane will add some mana to her pool (the special on Lich Bane is enough to want it anyway).
My explorations here are nowhere near complete. So far, the item build I've come up with is this: assuming you can mastery/rune for cooldown get Sorceror's Shoes, Nashor's Tooth, Lich Bane, Rabadon's Deathcap, Rylai's Crystal Scepter, and Hextech Gunblade. Other items I've looked at are Rod of Ages (stats it adds are covered in some form by other, more desireable items), Zhonya's Hourglass (great defensive item, but not sure what to switch out of the main build), Malady (good special, but weak late game), Abyssal Scepter (for magic penatration), and Void Staff (for different, potentially more magic penetration). An item I have also considered including is Guinsoo's Rageblade.
My thoughts on these items were this: maximize AP while keeping a little of Tristana's auto-attack flavor. The main disadvantage of this item set is that it's very expensive, and not going AD hamper's Tristana's farming ability. Also, the build is very offensive, and doesn't help much with Tristana's squishiness. Let me know what you think! (and if the thought is "You're crazy", yeah, I know :-P)
AP Tristana. An interesting idea. The concept of AP Tristana goes against how I've always played her. Granted her W, E, and R all have very nice AP ratios, however I think that her primary strength comes from her auto-attack, as it has crazy range and crazy speed by the end of the game. I personally like to use her abilities to facilitate that (Q to boost attack speed, Rocket Jump as an escape tactic, Explosive Shot to help farm and put a DoT on the tank or Offtank, and Buster Shot as a safety net "get off me Jax!"). I guess that I always looked at her as an autoattack champion (build Infinity Edge and Phantom Dancer) with some really nice support and utility abilities.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, if one wanted to use her abilities offensively, you'd want to build really tanky and make her an anti-carry. Your primary teamfight usefulness would come from Rocket Jump onto enemy carry, flash behind them (if you aren't already there) and then buster shot them back into the battle. After that, your usefulness is pretty much gone, and you are a tiny little person lost behind the enemy lines, so defensive items like Banshee's Veil and Randuin's Omen would be very nice. A benefit to this strategy is that it also causes the enemy team to split up, so even if one person turns around to come kill you, you have succeeded - as you essentially melted a carry and split off another person so your team can overwhelm the other team.
The big problem with AP Tristana is maximizing her abilities and still surviving. Rocket Jump simply cannot be used offensively and safely. Buster Shot only helps the enemy team unless you can direct the target back into your team (this is not discounting it's obvious defensive merits), so therefore you'd want to consistently put yourself behind the enemy team.
Explosive Shot is always nice, but not really truly effective and it really isn't even that much damage for the amount of cooldown it is on. The passive is great for farming and the active is great for harassing early game, but its effectiveness steeply drops off after Level 6-7.
TL;DR
1. AP Tristana is possible.
2. AP Tristana would have entirely different gameplay than AD Tristana.
3. AP Tristana is risky in playstyle and doesn't maximize her strengths - long range, high AS, and extremely sneaky and hard to kill via her abilities.
4. AP Tristana would probably have to be played as an anti-carry rather than a carry - requiring a strong knowledge of metagame (maybe a counterpick in draft?).
To Sum Up:
AP Tristana is possible, but not recommended.
Looking at your build, I'd probably say that your best bet is to proc as many effects as you can.
ReplyDeleteI'd probably build Frozen Mallet instead of Rylai's Crystal Scepter. You're far more likely to get the slow off of it on a more consistent basis, it is cheaper, and it grants more health.
Rabadon's Deathcap is mandatory if you're trying to deal lots of AP dmg.
Sorcerer's Shoes or Mercury's Treads (move fast and damage or move fast and less dying)
Rabadon's Deathcap (primary damage)
Frozen Mallet (utility for team and less dying)
Rod of Ages (more of everything you need, damage and less dying)
Frozen Heart (instead of Nashor's Tooth - 20% CDR, huge armor, huge debuff - AS is really unnecessary on this build)
Lich Bane (by far the best item on this build and the only thing keeping it viable, imo)
I'd probably not even build the Frozen Mallet and instead put on a Banshee's Veil. As soon as your team initiates and you jump into the middle like a bat out of hell, you need to live through the initial heavy CC or burst coming down on your head. Banshee's Veil is the best item for that.
I'd probably build like this, in this order:
Boots of Speed + Potions to start, Sheen, Catalyst the Protector, Mercury's Treads, Rod of Ages, Glacial Heart, Lich Bane, Needlessly Large Rod, Rabadon's Deathcap, Frozen Heart, Banshee's Veil
This is extremely expensive and will require TONS of farm. Never miss an opportunity to farm and only go bananas-rambo-Tristana in a team fight or gank.
What do you think?
On Second thought, I'd build the end like this:
ReplyDelete...Rod of Ages, Lich Bane, Glacial Shroud, Frozen Heart and Banshee's Veil (in either order, depending on enemy team being primarily AP or AD), and then finish with the Deathcap.
I'm beginning to wonder a bit about what a hybrid build for her might be like. You could get pretty large burst damage as AP Tristana but, as Sisyphus says, you may run into the problem of losing usefulness early on into a battle. Doing a hybrid build would give you the benefit of being hard to itemize against, but would overall give you less damage output. I suppose that your burst damage would be higher, though.
ReplyDeleteThe only champion that I own that I really play as a hybrid AP/AD champion is Twisted Fate. For him, my build is usually Sorceror's Shoes, Triforce, Guinsoo's Rageblade, Hextech Gunblade, and Nashor's Tooth, with the final item usually being Banshee's Veil.
I'm sure that's not a completely optimal build for Tristana, but I don't see why a hybrid build in that vein couldn't work.
Update: I have been working on AD Tristana, and I'm getting the hang of her. Soon I'll begin experimenting with AP Tristana (and/or hybrid Tristana), and will report back when I've got something.
ReplyDelete