Essence Reaver Guide

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Stefan Stevanovic

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Essence Reaver is a legendary item ideal for physical damage carries. It also has a mana restore feature that helps your sustain during the game. You will commonly see it on champions such as Riven and Graves, but it works well on numerous other characters who want to quickly overwhelm their opponents.

To get the most out of Essence Reaver, you shouldn’t build other Spellblade items. Furthermore, champions are limited to having just one Essence Reaver in their inventory. While the item provides a nice offensive boost, it doesn’t do much for your defense.

Key Info Up Front

Essence Reaver is an item tailor-made for ADC who utilize mana and have short cooldowns. If you’re looking for something to increase a champion’s offensive capability, this item is very cost-efficient.

Essence Reaver Basics

The item provides 45 attack damage, 20 ability haste, and 20% critical strike. All of these stats have a nice synergy. This is especially true for ability haste, which works well with Essence Reaver’s passive, Spellblade. The combination of damage and critical chance scales nicely with Spellblade. It allows you to quickly rush and annihilate single opponents.

To make this item, you will need Cloak of Agility (600 gold), Sheen (700 gold), Caulfield’s Warhammer (1,100 gold in total, built from two Long Swords that cost 350 gold and 300 gold recipe), and Essence Reaver recipe (400 gold). All in all, you will need 2,800 gold.

Like many other offensive items, you don’t have to rush Essence Reaver. Instead, you can mix up a few minor offensive and defensive items, and when you’re ready, you can invest a bit more gold to finish the recipe. This magic object has some similarities with Infinity Edge, Phantom Dancer, Rapid Firecannon, Runaan’s Hurricane, and Stormrazor.

As mentioned, the item has a unique called Spellblade. Besides Essence Reaver, this effect is also present on Sheen, Lich Bane, Divine Sunderer, and Trinity Force. Whenever a champion uses a spell, the next auto-attack will deal 100% base AD bonus physical damage and +40% bonus AD.

Spellblade effect also restores mana, which can be redundant on certain characters. The mana restoration equates to 40% base AD and 16% bonus AD. You have 10 seconds to perform this empowered strike after using an ability. If 10 seconds pass, the buff will vanish. Spellblade has a 1.5-second cooldown, which prevents champions from spamming abilities to quickly nuke opponents.

The Most Common Essence Reaver Users

There are lots of champions who can benefit from the item. The list includes Xayah, Sivir, Lucian, Kindred, Miss Fortune, Riven, Master Yi, etc.

Although Essence Reaver is an idea for bottom lane physical damage carries, you can see it on numerous characters. In fact, only 44.9% of the time, the item is purchased by ADC. Jungle champions also like to buy Essence Reaver accounting for 24.8% of all purchases. You can also see it on mid champions (14.5% of all purchases) and top champions (15.5% of all purchases).

Given that the item has a critical strike and a unique that relies on your physical damage, it will work much better with champions who have high base damage. That being said, it can also be nice for champions with armor penetration, although the item itself doesn’t have any armor penetration on it.

Although this item provides ability haste, you don’t necessarily have to buy additional items with haste unless your cooldowns are very long. Ideally, you would make ability rotation so that you can trigger Spellblade every 1.5 seconds.

For example, someone like Miss Fortune won’t benefit too much from extra ability haste when running Essence Reaver. Her Double Up ability already has a 3-second cooldown, so the Spellblade effect will always be available.

The Most Popular Builds that Include Essence Reaver

In this particular patch, Essence Reaver is considered a mediocre item. For example, on a scale of 1 to 5, it would probably get a 3.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that some of its stats and effects can feel a bit redundant. Some heroes won’t be that dependent on mana or might not need it whatsoever. Perhaps you’re not that dependent on ability haste, and your skills already have a low cooldown as it is.

No matter the case, the item is not for every champion. Here are some of the best builds where you can maximize its potential:

• Miss Fortune (Essence Reaver, Infinity Edge, Mortal Reminder, The Collector, Berserker’s Greaves, Immortal Shieldbow)
• Lucian (Essence Reaver, Infinity Edge, Navori Quickblades, Berserker’s Greaves, Blade of the Ruined King, Kraken Slayer)
• Sivir (Essence Reaver, Kraken Slayer, Infinity Edge, The Collector, Berserker’s Greaves, Phantom Dancer)
• Samira (Essence Reaver, Infinity Edge, The Collector, Berserker’s Greaves, Immortal Shieldbow, Bloodthirster)
• Xayah (Essence Reaver, Infinity Edge, Immortal Shieldbow, Phantom Dancer, Berserker’s Greaves, Navori Quickblades)

Berserker’s Greaves are a common pickup on carries, so it isn’t particularly surprising that you’d seen them on all these champions. While they don’t give too much movement speed, compared to some alternatives, the attack speed increase is simply crucial for this role.

Essence Reaver and Infinity Edge a very common combination. Like with all other items that provide critical strike, Infinity Edge can improve the overall output of Essence Reaver. If a champion already has a 60% critical strike chance, this item will provide a bonus of 35% to critical strike damage. So, whenever you crit, the damage can be really devastating.

In order for Infinity Edge’s unique passive to work, you need an additional source of critical. Some of the champions will build into The Collector to gain the remaining 20% critical strike chance that would give that the 35% bonus to critical damage. The item also provides lethality, which can always come in handy on physical damage dealers.

Due to the fact that the item provides the Spellblade effect, you won’t have to build other items with this unique. Something like Trinity Force would be completely redundant on champions with Essence Reaver, even though it would give you a slightly better version of Spellblade passive.

Interesting Facts About Essence Reaver

Essence Reaver is a very old item that was introduced in 2014. Over time, it has gone through numerous changes and iterations. As such, there are lots of interesting tidbits about it:

• Given that Spellblade is categorized as a proc damage, it will not trigger spell effects. As long as the effect is caused by an auto-attack, you cannot block it with spell shield abilities. However, if it’s applied with an ability, an enemy champion can prevent the damage.
• If you block the attack that applies Spellblade, you will also block the Spellblade effect. Similarly, if you dodge the strike, you will also dodge the Spellblade effect.
• While blocking the strike will prevent the mana restoration feature of Essence Reaver, Divine Sunderer’s Spellblade will still heal you.
• Spellblade damage cannot be boosted with a critical strike. It does flat damage based on your basic physical output. However, you can get benefits from lifesteal, physical vamp, and omnivamp. You won’t get life restoration via spell vamp.
• You can only have one source of Spellblade damage. Although the damage cannot stack, the heal and mana restore can. When talking about the physical damage effect, the strongest item will take priority. In other words, if you have Divine Sunderer or Trinity Force, you will get the damage effect from one of these items. Here is how the Spellblade damage order is determined: Divine Sunderer or Trinity Force > Lich Bane > Essence Reaver > Sheen.
• As mentioned, the effect has a 1.5-second cooldown. The ability will go on cooldown once you consume the strike. If you cast several abilities in a row without auto-attacking between them, each next ability will refresh the duration of the buff. If you have several items with the Spellblade effect, each one of them will share the same global cooldown.
• The great thing about Spellblade is that it can also be utilized for structure.

FAQs

Essence Reaver Guide: Last Considerations

Essence Reaver is a great offensive item. It will basically give your champion everything it needs to quickly decimate opponents. Both critical strike and damage boosts are great, and haste can also come in handy. However, if you were to buy it, you would likely do so for its Spellblade effect.

Spellblade provides a major increase to your total physical damage. If you properly utilize cooldowns, you have a chance to trigger it several times during an engagement. With it, you can nuke even the tankiest targets.