League of Legends: Blue Ezreal

A new and strange build has cropped up recently in League of Legends. It's termed the 'blue' build for Ezreal as all the items in the build are blue coloured. Most of the items are atypical items for an AD carry champion, but the ADC from Taiwan who won the world championship last year has been using it which immediately gives it credibility in the eyes of the gaming masses. When someone good does something it opens the door for other people to try it without automatically getting yelled at by their teammates. Now, Ezreal is probably my favourite champion. I used to use a similar build on the old 3s map and liked it (maxing cooldown reduction first being the key, though I was AP at the time). And this build uses my favourite item, Manamune! So I had to try this build out.

I've played it a few times, and it was pretty neat. It plays very differently than a normal ADC build. Typically people try to end up with lots of damage with the idea of hitting people with their auto attacks. So you build attack speed, and crit chance, and you try to find a safe spot to attack in fights. Having a team that can help you out and pull people off of you or get great engages helps a lot. If the enemy team gets to jump on you instead it's bad news. That's something with which I've always struggled. This build, however, is all about casting Q. Hitting an enemy with Q lowers the cooldown on all your abilities by one second. If you have max cooldown reduction the base cooldown on Q is 2.5 seconds. Knock one off of that and you can cast the spell every second and a half as long as you keep hitting things. Ezreal's Q also applies on hit effects, so buying items that do things when you auto attack helps him out. Attack speed and crit not so much, but life steal and other on hit items work well.

Possibly the best part is you don't lose much, if anything, by running around like a maniac. The goal isn't to stand in one spot and pound out the damage. Instead it's to stay very mobile and spam abilities. One of the items you buy makes it so your auto attacks leave a big slowing patch after you cast a spell. Q counts as a spell and an auto attack, so hitting someone with your Q leaves a slow patch behind. Couple this with Ezreal's blink ability (and the low cooldown it has thanks to spamming Q) and kiting is something blue Ezreal does better than anyone else.

I really like it. Maybe it just fits my style of play more than a standard build. I think the fact it can stand on its own and defend itself with lots of kiting when I don't have sufficient support from my team really pushes it over the top. But is it actually better? Does it do more damage? Less damage, but enough added control to make up the difference? I'm not sure how to quantify it. Should I be building out a damage simulator spreadsheet like I used to in World of Warcraft? Preliminary testing has me really liking it, so now it's about quantifying it.