New Meta: Triple Crit Cloak of Agility Stacking Marksmen...WORTH?

Doran Transitions to Cloak of Agility

Ever since the multi-Doran trend caught on, players are trying new builds to push the limits on what they can do to get an edge. The latest trend in Korea is to pick up three critical strike chance cloaks along with your first crit item. By upgrading your critical strike to 100% as their first move, players are granted guaranteed benefits for relatively little gold.

So far, players have chosen to pick up this build on some common crit stacking champions like Caitlyn, Jhin, and even Kai'Sa.

How It Works

Critical strikes deal 200% of normal damage as a default, 225% with Infinity Edge.

Players pick up Infinity Edge or Stormrazor as their first item, then spend the next 2400 gold on three Cloak of Agility.

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These cloaks later build into items such as Infinity Edge/Stormrazor, Essence Reaver, or any Zeal item. As of Patch 9.23 the change to build paths on Zeal and Stormrazor fully opened up the viability of this build.

As a two items comparison, most players generally pick up a Zeal item as their second purchase, which all cost 2600 gold.

For a base 800 gold, Cloak of Agility gives 25% crit strike chance.

By upgrading it with another 1800 gold, players could receive Zeal-upgrade bonuses most commonly:

• Phantom Dancer: 30% attack speed, 5% movement speed, Lifeline, and Spectral Waltz.
• Rapid Firecannon: 30% attack speed, 5% movement speed, Energized, and Sharpshooter.

In contrast, two additional Cloak of Agility for 1600 gold would bring you up to 100% guaranteed critical strike chance, 200% without IE and 225% with IE.

Quick Math

Just some quick math to compare below. Obviously sometimes you'll get luckier with critical strikes than others, but assuming that 50% truly indicates you'll get a crit half the time, we can say the average is 150% damage (one attack for 100% and next attack for 200%).

In the last column, I've also given the 50% crit column a 30% multiplier to account for the increase in attack speed you get from the additional attack speed on the upgraded Zeal items. As you can see, even with the attack speed bonus the 100% critical strike is still marginally better overall for damage purposes.

Attacks	Avg Dmg 50% Crit	Avg Dmg 100% Crit	30% Atk Speed
1	150%	200%	195%
2	300%	400%	390%
3	450%	600%	585%
4	600%	800%	780%
5	750%	1000%	975%
6	900%	1200%	1170%
7	1050%	1400%	1365%
8	1200%	1600%	1560%
9	1350%	1800%	1755%
10	1500%	2000%	1950%
11	1650%	2200%	2145%
12	1800%	2400%	2340%
13	1950%	2600%	2535%
14	2100%	2800%	2730%

Clear Choice

100% critical strike chance doubles your attack. While straight stacking four crit cloaks is likely not as good as getting a BF sword item first, the two additional cloaks on top of the one you'd already buy for your 2nd item is an extremely gold efficient choice from an offensive standpoint.

If you're having trouble staying alive then the defensive bonuses available from Phantom Dancer or even Rapid Firecannon (for kiting) may be more valuable. However, if you're snowballing then the cloaks appear to still be the better choice.

Thoughts on Cloak stacking on marksmen? Comment below!