Best AP Items in League of Legends
Six items. One build path. Everything a mage needs to go from lane bully to late-game nuke.
Find your playstyle — click one to highlight the matching items below:
The Path to Power
Roughly the order most mages build these in — though your exact path always depends on the enemy team.
Luden's Echo
+100 AP · +600 Mana · 2750gYour first real power spike — the proc damage alone can shift an all-in before it even starts.
Liandry's Torment
+60 AP · +300 Health · 3000gThe higher the enemy's max HP, the harder this hits — built to solve the problem of unkillable tanks.
Riftmaker
+70 AP · +350 Health · 3100gOmnivamp turns your poke into sustain, and the true-damage passive only gets scarier the longer a fight drags on.
Shadowflame
+110 AP · 3200gPunishes low-HP targets specifically — the exact moment you're trying to secure a kill, this item is doing the most work.
Zhonya's Hourglass
+105 AP · +50 Armor · 3250gBuys you 2.5 seconds of literal invincibility — a get-out-of-jail-free card that also happens to hit hard.
Rabadon's Deathcap
+130 AP · 3500gThe finisher. +45% more AP on everything you already own — this is why mages save their last slot for it.
Stat Radar: Damage vs. Durability
The 4 defining items — see how each one trades pure damage for survivability.
Every stat line and price pulled directly from Riot's own item data for the current patch.
Why These Six, and Not Twenty
League of Legends has dozens of AP items, but only a handful actually define how a mage build feels to play. The six above cover the four real decisions you make every game: how you start (Luden's), how you deal with tanks (Liandry's), how you survive the fight you're not winning (Zhonya's), and how you close it out once you're ahead (Rabadon's).
Rabadon's isn't just "more AP" — it's a multiplier on every other item you own. That's why it's almost always last, never first.
Reading the Radar Chart
Notice the trade-off shape: Rabadon's is a spike straight up the Ability Power axis with nothing else — pure glass cannon. Zhonya's trades a chunk of that AP for the single highest Defense score on the chart. Riftmaker and Liandry's sit in between, trading some AP for real Health — they're the items that let you actually stand in a fight rather than poke from range and hope.
None of these are "always build." Against a full-AD team, Zhonya's climbs your priority list fast. Against five squishies, you can skip defensive items almost entirely and rush Rabadon's.
FAQ
Not always — if the enemy team is stacking magic resist hard, a penetration item like Void Staff can overtake it in priority. But as a default, yes: its multiplier is strongest once you already have AP to multiply.
Less so — its damage-over-time passive scales with the target's max HP, so it does the most work against tanks and bruisers, not already-fragile targets.
Because surviving a fight you'd otherwise lose is often worth more than the damage you'd have dealt — it turns a guaranteed death into a guaranteed follow-up play once it ends.
