League of legends - Feral Flare Analysis

Introduction

After a slight reworking and buff to Wriggle's Lantern on Patch 4.4, Riot finally realized that still no one cared about the item. So as typical riot's fashion, after ignoring something being underpowered for months, they decided to make it incredibly overpowered and the Flavor of the Patch. Introducing Feral Flare; an item that upgrades from Wriggle's Lantern after 25 Large Monsters, including those that were killed with Hunter's Machete and Mazred's Razor.

According to Riot, “Picking up after our 4.4 changes to Wriggle's Lantern, we wanted to introduce a new jungle item that 'rounds out' the pool. Feral Flare specifically focuses on late-game farming in the jungle at the expense of meaningful early to mid game power” By expense to meaningful early game, they mean nonstop farming to reach the huge power-spike that arrives when your Wriggle's transforms into Feral Flare.

The implications of Riot adding this item are actually far reaching, although “carry-junglers” have been nerfed at the beginning of season 3 and 4, this item has enabled junglers that actually can carry to now be relevant. Master Yi, Nocturne, Shyvana, Xin Zhao, Warwick, and Jax have all seen huge surges in popularity since the patch, in both Solo Queue and Competitive. As a testament to the strength of the item, Master Yi has been played in 20% of all Ranked Games in all regions, and is winning a massive 54% of those games. In addition, Xin Zhao has been in 16% of all ranked games, winning 53.6% of those games (stats taken from Lolking.net).

Competitively

9 different junglers were played in both series, but for the LCS, 3 of the champion picks were unique. We see slightly more variation with the Challenger series that was played on 4.5. More importantly though, the different types of champions that were picked are very important. Champions such as Master Yi, Shyvanna, Nocturne, and Xin Zhao are contested picks now when they saw almost no play in all of season 4 competitively. Junglers that fell behind to early pressure due to lack of ganking and needing to farm now have a power-spike to look forward to that incentives heavy farming early.

However we see that junglers that focus on early game power such as Elise and Lee Sin are still heavily favored, and Xin Zhao, while a Feral Flare jungler, still focuses on early ganks and power and is the most popular of all of the Feral Flare junglers. In addition, Kha'Zix has seen just as much action, but runs Spirit of the Elder Lizard and doesn't rely on early game snowballing, but going for picks and teamfighting. So we see that while Feral Flare has had an impact on the meta picks, it hasn't had the impact that we've seen in solo queue with the huge pick rates and win rates.

Math!

Feral Flare has largely replaced Spirit of the Elder Lizard as the main damage item for carry junglers. So we're going to analyze the damage between Feral Flare and Spirit of the Elder Lizard as best we can. First, it's important to note that while Spirit of the Elder Lizard has a 2000 gold cost, Wriggle's Lantern costs 1650, but with the ramp up time for Feral Flame, Spirit of the Elder Lizard will actually be finished first. Doing nothing but farming for the entire game, the earliest I got Feral Flame on Master Yi was 11:30, and 11:40 on Jax. However you could probably manage to get Spirit of the Elder Lizard around 11 minutes, or earlier with gold from kills, and in any real game being able to do nothing but just farm jungle camps is unrealistic, and you probably won't actually finish your Feral Flare until past 15 minutes. In the challenger series games, the average time of transformation was between 17 and 22 minutes. Though while Spirit of the Elder Lizard falls off late game, Feral Flame can scale indefinitely, as you gain an extra 3 damage with every kill, assist, or large monster slain. Because of this, Feral Flame is actual much more useful in the late game when compared to Spirit of the Elder Lizard.

As for straight damage, we have to find the point where Feral Flame passes Spirit of the Elder Lizard in terms of damage. First off, Spirit of the Elder Lizard gives an additional 15 AD, and we'll assume that 15% attack speed and 10% CDR cancel out each other. First off, let it be clear that before Wriggle's upgrades, Spirit of the Elder Lizard is a much better item. However, it is after the Feral Flame transformation that we see why Feral Flame is currently so strong. Assuming that you'll be around level 11 or 12 during the transformation, we can find the damage that Feral Flame and Spirit of the Elder Lizard will be doing, depending on how many stacks you can get for your feral flame.

As you can see, Feral Flame actually begins outscaling SotLE a fair bit after its transformation, for one big reason, it deals magic damage. The table was calculated against 30 MR (and since you'll probably be diving the AD carry most fights they'll have around 30 MR until Banshee's Veil) and you can see that you actually need a fair number of stacks to make up for this. In addition, SotLE proccing off of spells means that it will be dealing more damage, though Feral giving you health back should more than make up for this. However, the point remains that Feral Flare does need some time to ramp up before its more cost effective than Spirit of the Elder Lizard.

Dimitar Alourdas