Frozen Heart
It can be said that Frozen Heart is one of the most “overlooked” items in Teamfight Tactics, regardless of the season. It only provides a slowing effect (reducing attack speed by 25%) within 2 tiles and requires 2 useful component items, namely Tear of the Goddess and Chain Vest, to combine with other items. Frozen Heart is not prioritized much, of course, until the Warrior – Dragon meta emerged.
However, Frozen Heart is now considered one of the quite useful items for champions that prioritize sturdiness or are tasked with diving in and disabling the enemy’s backline. Moreover, since the component items only consist of a Tear and the other item is a Chain Vest—which is not highly contested—completing Frozen Heart is relatively simple.
Another factor that makes Frozen Heart more useful is the current gameplay trend focusing on both attack speed and damage, so having Frozen Heart will make it somewhat difficult for the opponent’s main damage dealers, providing enough time to take them down or at least render them unable to use their abilities due to hard crowd control.
Shojin Spear
This item, only rated at Tier B, is one of the best items for Katarina in the new Assassin – Dark Enchantress meta or Vel’Koz the Mage, even though it only provides an energy regeneration of 8. There are two reasons for this: the component items are not too hard to find, and Shojin Spear, besides mana regeneration, also provides a certain amount of damage.
For some champions with low basic attack damage like Katarina or Vel’Koz or other AP champions, Shojin Spear is a great item to complement this aspect. Katarina’s best items should still be Hextech Gunblade/Guardian Angel/Revenge Hand – Infinity Edge – Blue Buff, but Shojin Spear is definitely worth considering when there aren’t enough components to build standard items.
Specifically for Vel’Koz, this champion interacts incredibly well with Shojin Spear as this item will help Vel’Koz unleash abilities continuously, and his basic attacks will be more effective in both dealing damage and regenerating energy. What Vel’Koz needs is to cast Void Rift as quickly as possible, so Shojin Spear is a great support in case you can’t combine Blue Buff or want to utilize both items.
Trap Claw
The item with the most “unfortunate fate” on this list is undoubtedly Trap Claw as it was once the strongest item to counter the “chain god” LeBlanc, but since this unit has been nerfed too heavily, leading to its near disappearance from high-rank matches, Trap Claw has also “faded into the past”.
The reason is that if you build Trap Claw, you must aim for the right target; otherwise, it becomes useless. However, with formations where the main damage dealers are always carefully protected, building Trap Claw may sometimes be ineffective and also takes up an item slot.
The common point of these items is that they are mostly situational items, lacking flexibility in various team compositions compared to other damage or defense items. But it cannot be denied that they are quite good for compositions that require sturdiness or need additional hard crowd control capabilities.