If you have been following professional gamers climbing ranks in the Western server before the 2021 World Championship, you may have noticed that Talon is a frequently chosen champion. Instead of using items that provide Lethality, Bloodthirster has become the go-to item for this Shadow Assassin among top-tier players. This is theoretically very unreasonable since an assassin like Talon should not interact well with a Fighter item like Bloodthirster.
Not stopping there, Bloodthirster is currently the most popular Mythic item in League of Legends. According to statistics from LeagueofGraphs, Bloodthirster has a purchase rate of 11.4%, ranking number one among Mythic items in the current version. The explanation for this is that the League of Legends community has pointed out that Bloodthirster is the strongest Mythic item in both defense and offense.
Bloodthirster is the strongest item in both defense and offense.
This item provides:
400 health
45 Attack Damage plus 0-15% Attack Damage based on missing health. You can gain an additional 70 Attack Damage when at low health.
20 ability haste
150% base health regeneration.
The health and recovery this item provides make your champion’s durability comparable to items like Sunfire Aegis, Turbocharged Hexperiment, or Iceborn Gauntlet.
The Attack Damage it can provide is even higher than items like Duskblade of Draktharr, Night Harvester, or Midnight’s Claw. Moreover, the damage activation of Bloodthirster provides better damage, healing, and extremely short cooldowns. Therefore, several assassin champions have switched to using Bloodthirster instead of items originally designed for this character class.
In summary, if an item provides both offensive and defensive stats, it should not be as powerful as pure tank or damage items.
Indeed, compared to other Mythic tank items, Bloodthirster provides more health to champions. Moreover, its powerful healing activation makes the possessor very difficult to take down, even without additional armor or magic resistance stats. This inadvertently addresses the low health weakness that assassins like Talon and Kayn face, leading players to frequently abuse this item.
The question here is how Riot Games will need to adjust to bring Bloodthirster back to a balanced state? Previous adjustments to reduce healing from the activation have proven to be ineffective since Bloodthirster remains too strong. It is suggested that Riot needs to reduce the additional Attack Damage or health of this item in the future so that it no longer provides too much pure stats, causing the champions that possess it to be overly powerful and uncontrollable as they are now.