Dat Malphite

I played a game the other night with my favorite top laner, Malphite. Despite their Nidalee being not too bad (note the CS and gold count), I pretty much dominated the game along with our jungler who was ganking like a fiend. What makes Malphite good is that:

A) He scales off of armor and health
B) His abilities don't require him to purchase AP
C) His initiate is freaking ridiculous

My general plan is to rush Spirit Fire cape as I find that it makes everything easier. Your damage goes up by a fair clip. You get health (making your shield better) and armor (making you tankier and your ground slam hurt more). I also max Q because, with it, you can generally out trade all but the most dedicated ranged Bruiser because your shield will give you "free" health to trade with. It has a surprisingly good range and, it's great for ganks and escapes because it has a speed siphon to it (4 seconds of +20% movement speed from your opponent given to you). If you're careful, you can use it AFTER an opponent uses a speed burst ability and make yourself go REALLY fast. I've had upwards of 500 movement speed if I hit the right target.

Late game, the real fun begins. With high armor and sunfire cape, your initiate is going to hit for the following:
~500-600 damage burst
Reduce their MR by 20 (which, I THINK, will get applied before the charge damage)
Ground Slam for ~350 (reducing attack speed by 45-50% + 20% if you have Frozen Heart)
40 damage per second (which you get at least 1.5 seconds on)

So you're initiating, significantly debuffing and dishing out ~1000 damage. They can't just IGNORE you but trying to DPS you is going to be a full burn from two AP Carries.

At a nearly full build (Abyssal, Ninja Tabi, Frozen Heart, Sunfire Cape) you have a a stupidly high 10,800 effective Hit Points against physical attacks and 8800 against mixed damage (penetration obviously lowers this but armor penetration specifically won't do very much because of the way mitigation stacks).

The trick is to choose your initiates. It's ALWAYS worth it if you can initiate on the ADC. He's the MOST dangerous to your team and the LEAST dangerous to you. If you can grab another squishy at the same time (support or APC) then all the better. Initiating on the bruiser and/or jungler is a little less certain. If you can catch them out of position and exposed, while your team is there, go ahead and do it. But, against better opposition, that's usually not possible. Better to push to their inhibitor towers and then wait for a minion wave. Late game, you have no reason to fear the towers so I wouldn't even let them worry you. In fact, you want the towers hitting you because it means they're NOT hitting your ADC/APC.

So go have fun with Malphite. He's basically perma-banned in most draft right now (along with Amumu and Blitzcrank it seems) but that will change and when it does, you want to be the guy there punishing people for moving on to other toys.