Is it better to improve the offense or the defence of a champion? There’s no doubt that carries benefit more from improved attack damage than from buying better armour, but do they? If you are tougher to kill then you can deal damage for longer. A good defence can enable a mage to survive for a few critical seconds that allow another round of spells that win a team-fight.

The question is: which statistics are easier or cheaper to improve? All champions need offense but can defence be just as good for a carry or mage? Should tanks build only offense and rely on their innate sustainability? An analysis of the cost of improving each statistic can shed some light on these questions.

We’ll analyse statistics available at the basic tier of items: attack damage, ability power, armor, attack speed, critical strike, health, health regeneration, life steal, mana, mana regeneration, magic resistance and movement speed. Cooldown reduction, spell vamp and gold per ten seconds aren’t provided by any basic items so we’ll look at them another time.
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Life steal (LS) is a prime statistic for carries to stay sustainable and get an edge on opposing carries. It goes extremely well with carries’ need for attack damage (AD) as it scales from it as well as from attack speed (AS).

The table below has all items that provide bonus LS with their cost and cost per LS. The latter value indicates how much is paid for each unit of LS in that item. The lower the cost per LS unit the more cost effective the item is.
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The relationship between champions and manna is one of extremes. On one side of the fence there are manaless champions that may use health to power their abilities or simply be cool-down based. On the other side of we have champions whose intensive use of manna can deplete their mana pool in seconds.

The latter are the champions that will benefit the most from items that provide manna regeneration (Mp5). There truly aren’t that many champions that consume manna in vast quantities but Anivia, Swain, Karthus and Kassadin have ultimates that truly demand it.

The following table contains all items that provide a Mp5 bonus with their associated cost effectiveness: the cost of each unit of Mp5. The table can be sorted and by clicking on the last header we can see what cost effectiveness reveals.
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Health regeneration (Hp5) is one of the best ways champions have available to increase their sustainability. A good amount of health regeneration can allow a tank to stay in lane and continue taking damage for the team. Even when switching lanes, escaping or chasing, Hp5 is always active increasing the champion’s survivability.

Hp5 is a statistic that is best used by tanks, in no small part because items that raise it tend to favour defensive stats. Regardless, not only tanks can benefit from Hp5 and items that boost it. The following table shows those items and their cost effectiveness: gold cost per unit of Hp5. Let’s click on the last header to sort the table and analyse the items.
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