Does sunfire need a buff or rework?

Linna Excel·Sep 28, 2017·1 votes·255 views

Compared to items like and , when you look at it seems both a bit weak in terms of the passive as well as not picked up that often. It's winrate seems to be a little lower than the other two items as well. It seems like it needs a small tweak in the current environment. Lots of items give health and armor and the other ones have better passives. Riot could buff the item's stats, but I don't feel like that's going to help much unless riot goes overboard.

What if riot changed the passive so that the damage scaled with your bonus health instead of your level? That'd give it more synergy with other tanky items. The only other thing I can think of to help it would be have it deal 2% of the foes max health per second as magic damage. That'd have it scale as the game goes late in a way that is more fair to squishy champs.

5 Comments

PopcornBunniSep 28, 20172 votes

It doesn't "need" a buff, but either it or its users deserve compensation for the loss of effective HP it now grants against phyiscal damage compared to its old version.

500 HP x 1.5 from its armor = effectively 750 HP against physical 425 HP x 1.6 = effectively 680 HP, a loss of 70.

Sunfire would either need to grant 469 HP or 77 armor to grant approximately the same effective resistance against its stated damage type.

Or, its users would need those numbers added to their base stats by level 6 when the item would be bought.

That would be a flat additional 44 health at level 1 for Poppy Shen and other sunfire users, down to something like 2 extra health at level 1 and +7 per level. Or a middle ground of +20 health at level 1, and +4 per level.

item 3065 is in a similar spot, but its healing bonus and closer-to-pre-update stats make it more tolerable. For Visage to grant the same effective health against magic, it would need either 484 health or 67 magic resist. That extra 34 health could easily be reached with the +7 health per level though, reaching and extra 35 health at level 11 when visage would be bought normally.

If "normal tank item" buyers got the +44 health frontloaded at level 1, that would be +3.1 health per level to get 34.1 at level 11.

For reference, that would change Poppy from 540 health + 90 per level to 584 health + 93.1 per level. This would put her above Gragas's starting health and below Rumble's, and at 2166.7 at level 18, placing her above Xin Zhao and below Sejauni.

Shen would move to the same position with Poppy at level 1, and with his new 88.1 HP/lv would end up at 2081.7 health at level 18, above Urgot and below Nasus.

ForFoxSakesSep 28, 20172 votes

It used to be one of the only things tanks picked up to help with waveclear in lane, but since item 3748 was introduced which does more damage scaling off getting even tankier with HP, that's the go to item starting with item 3077 to provide the early waveclear. Back then the AoE effect didnt even take place until the finished item since item 3751 didnt even exist and was still picked up for the added damage

Since the rework to the tank items I havent even picked up item 3742 as item 3075 does so much more for tankiness + GR.

Linna ExcelSep 28, 20171 votes

After watching shen build item 3748 in several pro games last night, I think this is a great point. It was a tanky wave-clear item but as you pointed out there are better options for waveclear and as Bunni pointed out it's not as tanky as it once was.

Basically it's lost usefulness in 2 fronts.