This week brings the champion Xin Zhao to the free slate in League of Legends and he's a hero I've been meaning to try for awhile. He's another hero that works well in the jungle to start. He has more burst damage than Amumu so he's better earlier with ganks but his ultimate isn't as game changing. Still, it's a change of pace and often Amumu gets banned and I need to play someone else anyway.
I've been reading a few guides for Xin recently and they've been split on if you should start with a cloth armor or a vampiric scepter. No one has yet suggested starting with a dagger but they all use some attack speed runes so I thought it might be worth looking into.
Xin's passive is an ability which heals him every 3 times he attacks. It's this ability which really lends itself to jungling and it would seem that attacking more often would proc the heal more often and that should be good. At level 1 with no attack speed buff he attacks .658 times per second. So he'll attack three times in 4.56 seconds. The heal is for 25, so he'd have passive healing of 5.48 per second. Dagger increases attack speed by 15%, so instead he'd be attacking .757 times per second, which is three times in 3.96 seconds. 6.31 healing per second, so the boost would be .83 healing per second. I also get to pick up a healing potion with the dagger, so I get 200 extra healing.
Vampiric Scepter is a flat 12% lifesteal. After accounting for talents and enemy armor I was attacking for 57 per swing at first level. That's 6.84 healing per swing, or 4.5 healing per second. That's substantially more than the dagger! (To be fair, the dagger does kill the monsters faster too, but not nearly enough faster to make up this gap.) Dagger really should be thrown out I guess.
How about cloth armor? It's sheer mitigation so we'd need to know how much damage was coming in to figure out exactly what it does. The monsters I fight at level 1 are golems which attack for 65 damage with .613 swings per second. Cloth armor adds on 18 armor, taking me from 41 to 59 armor. Without the cloth armor the golem swings for 65*(100/141)*.613=28.26 damage per second. With the cloth armor it swings for 65*(100/159)*.613=25.06 damage per second, which is a reduction of 3.2 damage per second.
So, the cloth armor prevents less damage than the vampiric scepter heals, assuming we're just fighting one golem forever. This isn't accurate though. There are two golems at a spawn point (though I kill the first one in a few seconds thanks to smite) so it is pretty accurate for level 1. But at level 2 I go off and fight some wraiths. This adds 2.5% to my attack speed and 3.1 to my damage which brings the scepter up to leeching 4.85 per second. Big wraith attacks for 60 every .638 seconds. (26.4 dps or 23.5 dps, so a savings of 2.9 dps.) Little wraith attacks for 35 every .638 seconds. (15.4 dps or 13.7 dps, so a savings of 1.7 dps.)
The wraith camp has the big wraith and 3 little wraiths. The scepter is better with 2 little wraiths up and the armor is better with 3 or more alive.
Of course, this has ignored two very important factors. I can buy 5 potions with the cloth armor for an extra 1000 health, while I can buy 0 with the scepter. It also ignores the fact that I have 2 abilities at this point. One increases the damage I do for 3 swings, stuns a mob, and gives me essentially a free swing with proper timing. The other passively increases my attack speed by a whopping 20% and can be activated for another 20% attack speed and cooldown reduction on my first ability. Both of these increase the power of the scepter. The first actually decreases the power of the armor by preventing the monster from attacking!
Looking at the numbers I'm thinking that the armor is generally better (I certainly won't switch to using a scepter on Amumu, for example) but for Xin Zhao in particular I think it's a lot closer. The healing potions probably put the armor a little ahead but the fact is drinking those 5 potions will throw 175 bucks down the drain while going with the scepter will bank that cash. (The first item I build actually uses both as raw materials so I'm going to buy both a scepter and an armor pretty quickly.) So, I think the scepter is the way to go.
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