Death's Dance passive vs. Graves AA

The Ecdysiast·Jul 20, 2017·3 votes·663 views

Healing is reduced to 33% for AoE damage.

Grave's AA, which is an AoE attack, not single target, heals for the entire 15% against a single target.

The heal reduction is supposed to apply regardless of whether or not you hit multiple targets with your attack, and so is intended to be 1/3 as effective if you only hit one enemy with an AoE attack (because you get more healing by hitting more than one enemy).

His autos are not single-target. While they can only apply on-hit effects to the same enemy once per shell, other enemies hit by pellets will take the full force of any on-hit effects as well. There's no argument to be had. It's an AoE attack and should have its healing cut down to 1/3 for Death's Dance as intended.

5 Comments

420 gramsJul 20, 20173 votes

This is isn't magic or yugioh, their tool tips aren't to be taken literally. They're more of what you'd call guidelines

The EcdysiastJul 21, 20171 votes

They are supposed to be taken literally. When a tooltip isn't correct, it needs to be fixed.

Of course some morons who don't know that Riot regularly fixes incorrect tooltops are gonna upvote you and downvote this reply for some reason.

The5lackerJul 21, 20172 votes

If it applies on-hit effects, the game treats it as a single-target source.

The EcdysiastJul 21, 20171 votes

That doesn't fit as an explanation for why it would be intentionally like this. But that is a good explanation of why this bug exists.

There aren't any other basic attacks in the game that are AoE like his, so there's no baseline to go by.

And it does apply on-hit effects, but it applies them to all enemies hit. The exception is that the same target is only effected once by shell.

So there's a lot of different interactions going on with his autos, and that leads to easy bugs.

The5lackerJul 24, 20172 votes

It's intentionally like this because Riot doesn't want a character's autoattacks to grant poor sustain with Lifesteal, even gimmicky strange Lifesteal like from Death's Dance. Same with Runaan's Hurricane. Each attack fires three bolts and is now, by the technical definition of the game, "Area of Effect." Yet it still benefits fully from Lifesteal of all types.

The moral of this story is the "Reduced healing from AoE damage" thing that's been stuck to the game like a suspect back mole is, has always been, and will always be a terrible idea because it's counter-intuitive and composed almost entirely of asterisks and edge cases. If the concern is people healing up too much from minion waves in the middle of fights, maybe the solution is having Lifesteal effects be 33% effective against minions. Just saying, Riot.