Unbalanced Basic Mechanics within League (Crit, Spellvamp)

ArnoldSchwarzens··3 votes·1,038 views

To make it short, I want to talk about two basic mechanics in the game that I belive to be flawed in design, and my personal take on fixing them. These 2 would be Spellvamp and Critical Strike Chance. Enjoy!

Critical Strike Chance: Most of you will probably already know the controversy around this stat being totally random. Riot champion designers themselves have stated at some point that randomness is a toxic mechanic, yet most marksmen are reliant on it and there are even champions that are based around this stat. It makes your damage completely unreliable but undeniably stronger. Usually you should be able to know just how much damage you will deal with your abilities and how much you can take once you learned how to play against and with champions. Critical strike chance ruins this aspect of the game completely by making your damage random instead of having set values. Instead of knowing how much damage you will take in a skirmish, fight or a trade you are unable to actually know how much damage it will be so you always have to take a gamble. With most marksmen buying Infinity Edge as first item you are even more reliant on critical strike chance because it enhances their damage yet the 20% chance makes it really unlikely that it actually happens. You have to count on one of 5 autohits dealing more damage - if this doesn't happen you are at an unexpected disadvantage which can lose you an early botlane fight which will indicate how the rest of the lane or even the game will go. If you get more than 1 crit every 5 autohits the opposite happens and you deal more damage than you are supposed to giving you an unfair advantage making luck count more than skill.

Now I'm going to discuss my take on fixing this problem. Right now every time you autohit a random number between 1 and 100 is generated. If this number is the same amount or a lower amount than your critical strike chance, your auto will crit.

Instead of that you'd have a mechanic that generates stacks equal to your critical strike chance on every autohit. Once you stacked 100 stacks your next autohit will critically strike. For example: you have 20% crit chance with an infinity edge, so on every autohit you will get 20 stacks. On the 5th auto you will reach 100 stacks and said auto will critically strike. This stacking mechanic would have some kind of cooldown on it to actually only make you keep getting stacks by constantly autohitting, simular to Voli's W stacks. Abilities that can crit will also give you stacks. For example: A Garen with an infinity edge autohits and gains 20 stacks, will autohit-reset with his Q and get another 20 and will now activate his E. Every spin will generate 20 stacks so that your 3rd Spin will crit and the fifth one after that and so on.

This would not only remove the randomness of crit but also add an mechanic to the game that requires skill and planning and you to keep track of how much stacks you currently have.

Spellvamp: This one is probably less known to the community. While it is balanced on single-taget spells, AOE spells create a big problem. This one is that you'd heal absurd amounts if you hit several targets that aren't your main target. An Akali with her singletarget damage would always heal her for 20% of the damage dealt ( having 20% Spellvamp ). But if we imagine that she would have 4 minions next to her she would also leach HP from them because she hits them all with her E. Like that she would gain 20% extra spellvamp for every minion hit, having 100% spellvamp in total which is absurd for obvious reasons. While Akali is a more simple example, imagine the spellvamp a Karthus Ult or a 5-man Amumu Ult would grant if it wouldn't be lowered. To fix this problem Riot has made it so that abilities that are able to hitmore than one target have their damage lowered by 66,6(...)%. This creates yet another problem though. If we take the example above again Akali would still heal more than she should. She should ideally heal herself by 20% of the damage she deals to her main opponent. She wouldn't get as high numbers as 20% for every minion she hits with her E but still 6.6(...)% for every minion. Multiplicated by 5 she now has 33.3(...)% spellvamp on her E, which is still more than she should get. On the other hand, if we'd assume that she would only hit her main opponent and no minions at all she only has 6.6(...)% spellvamp on her E which makes it less effective than it should be. To make it short, now we have the problem that spellvamp grants too much healing against multiple targets and especially minion waves but is not good enough in 1v1 situation. Another note we have to take is that now you have 15% spellvamp on Will of the Ancients instead of 20% but it now ignores MR when calculating the healing done. This fixes it's OPness against minionwaves a bit since minions don't have a lot of resistances but it now is a tank-counter item which in my opinion should not be the reason why you pick it up. Plus, the AOE against single targets-problem still exists.

My take on the item would be that the spellvamp you have gets divided by the number of targets you are hitting with an ability. If we have 20% spellvamp as stat for example and you'd hit one target with your ability you'd have 20% spellvamp in total (20/1=20), if you'd hit 2 targets you'd have 10% (20/2=10), against 3 targets 6.6(...)% ( 20/3=6.6(...)) and so on. Also revert the change that has been done recently ( see above ).

This would enable this item to be not only be a pickup for singletarget-heavy champions (Akali, Vlad Q) and Champions that need to restore health from waves that they spend with their abilities ( Vlad, Morde ) but also for champions that use a lot of consistent AOE spells and want to heal up from it ( Kog, Azir, Snydra...pretty much every AOE spammy mage ). It would also fix the balancing problems it has right now.

I'd love to see your opinion on my ideas and sorry for all the maths :X

7 Comments

DisasterSola2 votes

... Why do you talk about spellvamp and not lifesteal? Biased much.

ArnoldSchwarzens1 votes

Lifesteal is always single-target ( there are a few exceptions like jinx q and hydra though they don't matter as much ). So you don't really have the problem described above.

DisasterSola1 votes

{quoted}

Lifesteal is always single-target ( there are a few exceptions like jinx q and hydra though they don't matter as much ). So you don't really have the problem described above.

iirc you dont lifesteal off of cleave or on-hit effects. Spellvamp is 33% effective on more than one enemy; it has to hit 3 enemies to be 99% as effective as compared to lifesteal. Whats more, the maximum for spellvamp is something like 20%. On hextech gunblade.

Spellvamp also has a cooldown, due to most champions not having AoE high-damage spells up all the time. Vs lifesteal which stacks up to 50%, can heal 130~200HP on a 0.6s cooldown, AND has MUCH more itemization.

Sightless662 votes

Right now every time you autohit a random number between 1 and 100 is generated. If this number is the same amount or a lower amount than your critical strike chance, your auto will crit.

That's an inaccurate oversimplification. The game actually uses a pseudo random RNG formula that lowers the chance of lucky or unlucky streaks. Basically, your actual crit chance for any individual hit isn't what the number says it is. Instead, it increases every time you autoattack without getting a crit, but it lowers every time you get a crit. Your overall crit chance is still whatever the number says it is, but lucky or unlucky streaks should be much rarer.

Instead of that you'd have a mechanic that generates stacks equal to your critical strike chance on every autohit.

Hate this idea. Hated it ever since I first saw it god only knows how many years ago. I don't want to have a stack mechanic on every single ADC I play. It's incredibly homogenizing, which isn't fun. It makes every single ADC have to poke people with a variant of Caitlyn's passive. That's so goddamn boring. I play different champions because I don't want them all to have the same mechanics or play in the same way, so adding something like this that has the potential to shift all of them towards playing in a more similar way. That's not a good thing. That's exactly what we should be avoiding.

This would not only remove the randomness of crit but also add an mechanic to the game that requires skill and planning and you to keep track of how much stacks you currently have.

Yeah, in exactly the same way on every goddamn adc. Fuck that six ways to Sunday. I'm all for getting rid of randomness, but it can not involve the introduction of a major new homogenizing mechanic. I'll take randomness over homogenization any day.

Cressalia1 votes

People have come up with reasons, but in the end reworking a lot of champs, items, and the whole damage system itself (which should be tweaked a little) is not worth it in the end.

Ferrous Oxide1 votes

I like these ideas a lot, especially the crit one. One of the things that I like so much about league over dota is that league has almost entirely removed random chance from their game, crit strike is the last thing that is truelly luck based in terms of items and champion abilities. (Still have the luck of which direction a minion wave pushes at the start of the game when no one has attacked anything)

Kyrrion1 votes

Crit is not entirely random. Riot developed an algorithm to help keep it consistent on a basic level so you can't get screwed over long period of not critting. This was probably years ago now that I think about it... Before these new boards, that's for sure.

More from Gameplay

More by ArnoldSchwarzens