Mercury, slight tweak from the norm.

Just started playing Mercury, and working on a build. I've gotta generic build that I am working on crunching numbers on. Hoping for some feedback.

This build, like almost all Mercury builds, focuses on crits. With mercury's Made You Look ability; crits and on-attack debuffs seem like no brainers. Above is my usual final build, below is my play by play for build; as well as some reasoning behind each item.

Mercury's abilities lend themselves well to boosting his attack power and on-hit effects.



Fastest God Alive is mercury's passive, its a pretty ignorable passive, IMO. The travel distance adding damage only comes into repeatable effectiveness during chases. The real bonus IMO is the travel speed added to damage its a nice reliable damage buff.




Made You Look is Mercury's bread and butter move. This is his harassment and last hitter move. The real winner with this ability, is that rather than having its own damage mechanic it treats it like you just went up and punched everyone in the radius. This works beautifully because it allows you to pile of the crits and life steal, making this a truly scary ability. I always max this one out first, since its is your main damage dealing ability.




Maximum Velocity Movement speed + attack speed. pure and simple. The movement speed buff is minor, but passive. The real point of this ability is the active use; pop this and your attack speed goes bonkers. This is the second ability that should be maxed, since the attack speed is just the best. This ability late game is what makes Mercury scary.




Special Delivery is a pretty straight forward initiate/run away dash ability. the quasi stun is almost negligible since it is also a quasi stun for yourself. The throw at the end of the ability doesn't do much in allowing you to set up preferential positioning, best you can do is put yourself between the baddie and his/her easiest escape route. But the throw does buy you enough time to pop Maximum Velocity and allow you to prepare to start your pummel. This is the last ability to get maxed out, since you won't be using this for its damage. It is purely for the dash / quasi-stun / throw; which do not scale with level.




Sonic Boom IMO is one of the most functional final abilities, and one of the hardest to use correctly. It allows for near instantaneous traversal on a map if positioned correctly. It is an incredibly powerful stun / straggler pick off ability, and can be used as one hell of an initiator. But it is all too easy to over shoot your goal, and end up no closer to your intended hero than you were before; and now you are in enemy territory. walls and visibility are also huge hurdles for this ability, so in some maps, this can be damn near useless. In short this ability requires practice and near perfect position skills, but when it pays off it can seriously disrupt the map.

Relics on Mercury are his primary defensive items. So your first choices are:

Sanctuary
sanctuary

and

Purification
purification

For your second relic, in most case i would recommend the other of the 2 you didn't choose above; but if you are really kicking butt, and feeling a little cocky you can easily pull off:

Sprint
sprint

Death's Toll


I have heard it stated that you should rush boots with mercury, but I personally like starter items, so i throw in a death's toll for extra sustain. If you are jungling Bumba's Mask will do you more good.


Warrior Tabi


Immediately after your starter item; that is when i start building boots (saving money for wards and pots of course), specifically warrior tabi. These just give you a bit more pain to your punch. I would personally steer you away from Ninja Tabi because you are more than likely going to be exceeding the attack speed limit when you activate your maximum velocity buff without the added speed from ninja tabi.


Golden Bow


Golden bow is a no brainer early item, it ticks all the marks for Mercury in spades. Early crit + power + move speed thank you very much. The 50% splash damage is just the cherry on top. Pair that with Made You Look and you have an ability that is designed for jungle/minion clearing, and still top notch for enemy harassment. This will be the first item dropped after the starter item, because to be frank while its splash and stats are nice early game, the splash becomes useless late and the stats by themselves aren't enough to warrant keeping it when you have 3000 gold burning a hole in your pocket.

The order of the next three are fluid. If you are not getting those hero kills before the opponent's back up arrives or he makes it to the towers you probably want to Rage for extra pain. If you are having no trouble dropping the hero before he gets away or his back up arrives, but this is leaving you sad, lonely, and confused (aka low on health and in a bad spot) you might want to think about Bloodforge or Soul Eater for extra sustain. Lastly if the other guys are being a little cocky, putting just a little too much space between them and safety, Hastened Fatalis is the buddy you want.


Hastened Fatalis


This item makes a Mercury build possible. Previously I had this as more of a late game item, but i find myself getting this item before any of the major crit items more and more often. To sum up why this item is awesome: what is the point of being a mobile character if you can't punch and run at the same time? Mercury is already faster than pretty much every other character, and if you take away the attacking speed debuff, it allows you to attach yourself to the target and just wail on them mercilessly.


Soul Eater or Bloodforge or Asi
or or

These are your primary sustain items. Pick one (you could potentially lump Asi with one of the others but I don't know if I would recommend it).

Soul Eater gives EVERYTHING. Stacks shouldn't be too difficult to come by with this item, and with it fully stacked out it nets you 10% movement speed (YAY) 30% life steal (WOOHOO) and 30% attack speed to boot (HELL YESH). AKA we have a really scary item on our hands. Throw in the passive with max health floating between 1500 and low 2000's you could get ~350 health at full stacks (20%). But its a win lose, because it wipes out your stacks which seriously hurts this items effectiveness. And this stack wipe happens at 50% health so its going to proc in almost every fight your in (remember Mercury is the epitome of squishy). I love the potential of this item, but unless someone tells me otherwise the practicality might not be all there for this god.

Bloodforge is nice for the potential of high power and reasonable to high life steal. It shouldn't be hard to gain stacks on this with Made You Look and Mercury's insane attack speed. Overall hits all the high points, with a reliable stack mechanic.

Lastly Asi, An item that again has almost everything you want in an item for Mercury; and one that doesn't rely on stacks. Where it lacks is the numbers. Only 15% life steal (compared to 20% and 15%-24% on the other items). The attack speed buff is nice, can't knock that one. The penetration may be on the lower side, but Mercury will take as much penetration as you can hand him. The real saving grace for this item is the passive, bumping the life steal up to 40% when your dying is AMAZING, pop a crit in that moment and BOOM back in fighting territory. This item requires a little getting used to, it does you no good if your first instinct when in a hairy situation is to run. Asi assumes your fight or flight needle is stuck on fight, and it will serve you well if that is the case.

some of you are saying, "but what about Devourer's Gauntlet"? And I will tell you, "don't be a sheeple man." Though in all reality the gauntlets do work really well with Mercury, the problem is that in most cases you will not be getting them until much later in a match. and by then it might be too late for these to really shine. If you are just the bees knees with mercury (if that is so, what are you doing reading this you should be making a guide of your own so I can mooch off of you) then you can totally justify the gauntlets.

My choice - is usually Bloodforge, sometimes I might decide Asi looks more promising.


Rage


This item is what makes this a crit build. Damage + crit chance but with the added bonus of a stacking crit chance buff, for a more reliable pain game. I'm lovin' it.


So far I've spelled out the early and mid match build for mercury:

Death's Toll

Warrior Tabi

Golden Bow

Hastened Fatalis

Rage

Bloodforge

Titan's Bane


Penetration penetration penetration. Really that's all that there is to it. Alternatively The Executioner could do the trick, it theoretically is a more team friendly item. But the way i see it why are you paying more for less penetration/reduction, it is not like you will be getting much use out of the attack speed (it should be well past maxed out when popping Maximum Velocity). Not to mention that titan's bane is working at 100% at the first hit, whereas the executioner takes 4 hits to get close to the same effectiveness.


Deathbringer


Damage + crit chance + crit dmg = drop them baddies fast. need i say more? but i will, again point to Made You Look; pop a crit on this and you can make a squishy character wish they were wearing his/her brown pants.


Jotunn's Wrath


Everyone loves a good Jotunn's Wrath. What isn't there to love? damage? penetration? CDR? I could care less about the mana but since its there I'm not gonna complain. The reason this isn't a core item like it is on pretty much every other physical damage character, is that cool downs are not really an issue for mercury. But less cool down is always better.


Stone Cutting Sword


This is probably one of my favorite late game items. 3 consecutive hits, and you just accomplished a 60 point swing in defensive capabilities. I Rarely pass this item up.


Qin's Sais


I would not get this item, unless you are "tank hunting". By that I mean, you are fighting a lot of high defense high health characters. That is the only time you will really notice the extra pain of this item.


Malice


Crit + damage + extra damage. Short sweet and to the point. Nothing fancy. Just remember this will also proc from Made You Look.


Frostbound Hammer


The extra life and damage is nice, but the slow is where it's at with this item. Honestly I have never run this item with Mercury, and have seen little need for it, but I can't shake the feeling that it fits very well. As always the slow will proc on use of Made You Look.


Shifter's Shield


A nice solid item that gives you some solid defense when you need it, and lets you hit harder when you don't. This item could be of great use if you are being dropped in a couple hits and just need to live a little longer.


Spirit Robe


This is a staple defensive item. Tons of protection, CCR, CDR, its just a great well rounded item. The passive only makes it better, damage mitigation when you do get caught in an errant stun is really going to help. Grab this if the other team is going a little CC happy.


Mantle of Discord


Another item I have never used on Mercury (actually I have never used it at all) but it seems like this might be the best of the best when it comes to OH **** moments with mercury.