League of Legends: Yorick Testing

Last night I stumbled across a build guide from Elementz (one of the top support players in the pro community) for support Yorick. In it he says that he uses armor penetration marks in his build solely because it impacts the damage done by ghouls. In fact, he says you do more damage with armor penetration marks instead of attack damage marks despite the initial damage from the summons doing magic damage (and therefore certainly being unaffected by armor penetration while one of them does scale with AD). I was under the impression neither of those things were true which, of course, means I need to do some testing and crunch some numbers.

Monoboob commented yesterday about how the trinity force proc stacks favourably with the passive damage boost from ghouls. That also completely slipped my mind. I can certainly imagine them stacking multiplicatively but figure I should see about testing it as well since I'll be in a game testing stuff anyway.

How should I run the test? My idea is to play a bot game and make a lot of money while trying to keep the game from ending one way or another. Then I'll empty my inventory and find a neutral monster with some armor (probably dragon but maybe Baron) and summon some ghouls at it. I'll watch to make note of the damage done by the ghouls and how frequently they attacked. (I can also replay the game later with LoLreplay if I have to.) Without killing dragon I'll go back to base and fill my inventory with attack speed items. I'll go back and look at the new damage numbers. Then I'll fill up with crit chance and repeat. Then I'll buy a pickaxe (25 damage) and repeat. Finally I'll buy a brutalizer (25 damage and 15 armor penetration) and repeat. I need the last two steps as there are no items with just armor penetration alone on them. After the main testing is done I'll get a sheen or a trinity force and see what numbers come up. I'm also thinking I should try a black cleaver to see if lowering the monster's armor from other sources will impact the ghouls.

I ended up keeping my fully stacked manamune, warmog's, and a set of speed 5 boots. None of the stats provided by those items would impact the tests in any way. (Manamune does add AD but it adds the same amount of AD the whole time.) I was also level 18 for all tests.

Nothing (well, doran's shield because I was too lazy to go back and sell it first).


damage per ghoul swing - 57 (90)
number of swings per ghoul - 3
number of crits? - 0


3 recurve bows



damage per ghoul swing - 57 (90)
number of swings per ghoul - 3
number of crits? - 0

3 cloak of agility




damage per ghoul swing - 57 (90)
number of swings per ghoul - 3
number of crits? - 0


1 pickaxe


damage per ghoul swing - 64 (97)
number of swings per ghoul - 3
number of crits? - 0

1 brutalizer

damage per ghoul swing - 73 (111)
number of swings per ghoul - 3
number of crits? - 0

black cleaver (0 stacks) (on blue as dragon is immune)



damage per ghoul swing - 73 (106)
number of swings per ghoul - 3
number of crits? - 0



black cleaver (3 stacks) (on blue as dragon is immune)

damage per ghoul swing - 105 (153)
number of swings per ghoul - 3
number of crits? - 0


Interesting stuff here. Attack speed and crit are clearly worth nothing for the ghouls. (The Q ghoul does some bonus damage, his number is the bigger one in brackets.) Armor penetration, on the other hand, does transfer over. Brutalizer resulted in more damage done than just the pickaxe did. Which actually means brutalizer has three stats that Yorick really wants... I wonder if I should consider building it!


I built an atma's (by this point the other team was powerful enough to kill me 3 on 1 so I bought more items) and a trinity force and went to test if the proc gets better with ghouls out. Here's the data:

melee - 238
melee + 2 - 261
trinity - 380
trinity +2 - 404

The trinity proc added 142 damage when I had no ghouls out. It added 143 damage when I had 2 ghouls out. That's not 10% more at all. It feels more like that's a rounding error. Yorick really does spam spells though so the trinity proc will be on a lot of his autoattacks so it's still going to be good. Just not 20% better than for everyone else good.