S7 Loki Basics

Am I a joke to you?

If that's true, that's sad.

In all honesty, the crit pathway that Prof Loki promoted is probably the best way to try to keep him relevant right now. As we know, he's been nerfed hard, especially to his first basic attack...it was changed from 1 to 0.75 (a 25% damage nerf in effect). Hydra's has also seen some nerfs, and that didn't help any.

The standard build for the longest time has been pretty basic... Transcendence -> Warrior Tabi -> Hydra's Lament + Jotunn's Wrath and any of Heartseeker, Titan's Bane, Brawler's Beat Stick, The Crusher, Bloodforge, Magi's Cloak, etc. But that base damage nerf is just a straight nerf to his upfront damage in a build like this, even if it still hits relatively hard.

And that's where Loki has switched things up, and it's due to the Rage and Malice buffs and some price reductions bringing crit builds into viability (in a general sense).

What you're seeing here is that Rage and Malice are honestly two potentially great items for Loki right now. Malice provides extra CDR (which is basically like a partial Jotunn's in a sense), and even better (3 second CD reduction) when you actually crit, which makes that Aimed Strike available again almost immediately. But it and Deathbringer aren't really quite enough right now, because that's only 50%, and that's not reliable enough when Loki really wants to burst (which he always does). And that's where the stupid Rage buff (now 45% at max stacks) makes this a much more legitimate build. 95% chance at that point is basically an assured crit every single time, and I'm thinking that's very key to consistent damage. Even though crit builds also see a hard nerf with that damage progression, what it's doing is it's still giving him a significant boost to his base damage output that before mitigations is 75% higher than a non-crit build, before you add the DB passive. Then you consider the bonus damage from Hydra's (which also gives bonus damage on crits), and you've got something that's probably outworking the standard pen builds.

In any case, Parzival's alternate build foregoes an early Transcendence to rush Hydra's Lament. Although Trans is always appreciated, especially for Loki's great ability scaling and so he never has to worry about mana, Hydra's is ~500 gold cheaper, and at least carries some MP5. If you're playing a patient game, then you may not need much more mana as long as you're always securing the mana buff, and probably getting the totem.

I would still probably default to Trans myself, but I get this. Also, by not going Trans throughout the main build, it does allow you to get other things (crit, pen) online more quickly. Very interesting, and I hadn't been following this, but yeah, without trying anything out, it sounds viable.