League of Legends XXXI: I'll Start My Own Team! With TF! And Janna!

[PEACH]

The reason I pick up Wriggle's on skarner when jungling is twofold:

A: It makes buffsteals take literally less than 10 seconds. I play a very aggressive jungle skarner, so wriggles is useful for getting big camps out of the way so fast that even if they warded red, I could kill it and start running towards the nearest sidelane before the enemy mid could even reach me.

B: Skarner has *ridiculous* multiplicative scaling with resists already, and lifesteal and spell vamp (Wriggle's only brings lifesteal, but it brings a good amount; before the Gunblade nerfs, it was almost worth it as a last item if you were already tanky enough to survive burst and wanted to just pile on the damage) both help that out even further. In sustained fights where he can AA a lot, shield+E can get near warwick levels of free health back; combine that with Wriggle's for a fairly cheap source of armor, lifesteal (which helps the multiplicative aspect) and damage, and Skarner gets hugely multiplicative. The wriggles isn't so much for jungle sustain, though it does help out with that (it saves mana because you don't have to shield and/or E, which are your big mana hogs, in order to not take damage) but for the in fight utility of getting increased HP gains per second. Skarner truly does work as a lifesteal+resists tank if he can manage to isolate the enemy burst damage or carry, which he is very good at.

Philo just doesn't give me the feeling of getting control of the enemy buffs and allowing early dragons and early barons, which is the primary reason, and the lifesteal tanking is a nice side effect. Philo into speed+CDR+HP is a fine option as well, but it isn't my cup of tea. I'll grant my cup of tea is violent and sometimes a little bit reckless, though.

As for RoA: Skarner does not have a health problem. The only problem Skarner has with effective health is not having enough resists. At 1.0 attack speed (arbitrary and probably lower than his level 18 base, but for ease of use), no stats of any kind, and only hitting one target with E, his effective in fight healing with W and E is 54 per second. With 40% CDR, it's 90 health per second (as a comparison, 40% CDR WW with 1.0 aspd is only bringing 109 HP per second, and Q healing is, I believe, negated somewhat by MR).

At that point, any form of flat health boost tends to be dwarfed by the benefits of flat resistances; as a tanky DPS champ, Skarner can easily survive for the few seconds it would take to shoot his effective "base" health through the roof. In lane, it's no less useful (though mana can be an issue) because shield+resists can negate a lot of harass instead of having it slowly eat into your permanent health pool.

That's also why I don't recommend Sunfire on Skarner. If you want an armor item for Skarner, I greatly prefer (besides Wriggles and the obvious FH), a Randuins. Minor CC to patch you up to near 40 with a FH and some from masteries/runes, plus AoE slows (well, more of them) and reducing attack speed of your enemies, which is nice. For MR, I tend to like Banshee's more, because although it's expensive, Skarner tends to do poorly if he gets CC'd before he can get in the thick of things and start hitting with empowered Qs.