Void Staff/Last Whisper Idea

Aheadatime·Dec 26, 2014·3 votes·490 views

% Penetration on both items reduced to 25% from 35%.

Combine cost of Last Whisper reduced to 660 from 860. (Total Gold reduced to 2100 from 2300).

Combine cost of Void Staff reduced to 595 from 775. (Total Gold reduced to 2115 from 2295).

This change would basically nerf the items' late-game damage output while maintaining their 'rushability' by keeping their prices scaled properly. I've increased the price of %Pen on both items in order to keep the numbers clean and because quite frankly, %Pen is too cheap atm, particularly in a late-game environment on an assassin. This would, hopefully, push the items more towards the niche realm and further away from the 'must-buy-every-game' realm. I'm curious as to what you guys think about the idea.

10 Comments

JustMyBassCannonDec 26, 20142 votes

It would be nice to have anti-defense items on a need-to-buy basis again, but I think it could be as simple as removing all sources of Flat Penetration, seeing how the numbers work, and if it's still too good, reduce % Pen to 30%.

25% seems to be very low, in my opinion.

RebonackDec 26, 20142 votes

While this would sort of help, it's treating the symptom instead of the problem.

The problem is that buying %pen is a false choice. You want it to get soft targets as close to zero as possible and you want it to negate a bunch of defense on hard targets. It would still be doing this, just not quite as hard.

What Riot needs to do is eliminate the false choice. This could be done by just removing %pen options and then making resist values sane, or by reducing the AD/AP drastically and then swapping the items over to a high %Pen value that only kicks in above 60 resist or so to make it totally ineffectual against soft targets.

JustMyBassCannonDec 26, 20143 votes

Flat Pen is more of a problem than % Pen, because Flat Pen is literally only truly effective against low-resistance targets.
% Penetration is only slightly overtuned currently. On squishy targets, it removes 25-38 Armor or 11-20 MR, depending on their bases. That's not nothing, but the fact that Flat Pen is calculated after % makes it much more problematic.

I know I already commented this on my own, but if we removed Flat Pen and just let things lie for about a month, then re-examined, if % Pen was still too strong, we could apply minor nerfs until it's balanced.

kanachoDec 26, 20141 votes

It's way less effective against squishy targets because of the lower armor/MR shred and the exponential factor of armor/mr scaling. Meaning that it is literally far less useless against them already.

TheKingDodoDec 26, 20141 votes

Sounds like something riot may consider... needs more nerfs.

kanachoDec 26, 20141 votes

Well considering both MR and Armor scale exponentially, Nerfing those items would mean BC would be picked more (gives you the same % shred after 5 applications of the armor shred but applies to your entire team I believe since it's a debuff on the enemy), then tanks would be much harder for ADC's to shred and kill, meaning Vayne or other hyper-carries that do % or true damage would be picked EVEN more, forcing people like sivir/ashe to be faded out even more too. That's not good considering this last season was basically the season of hyper-carries (all the talk about them and all).

RebonackDec 26, 20141 votes

Removing flat penetration would be pretty much the biggest nerf to Mages imaginable given that it's a stat meant to help you blow up soft targets, which happen to be who a Mage (or an Assassin for that matter) is going to be gunning for. In order to keep damage levels the same AP values would need to be buffed tremendously across the board.

I mean, yeah, it could be done. It would take a ton of work, though.

JustMyBassCannonDec 26, 20142 votes

That depends on the difference between the base damage and AP ratio of the spell in question.

I'd do the math right now, but I have something more pressing momentarily. I'll come back and do the math later. The focus of the problem is that it only affects low-resistance targets to any worthwhile degree, and then it stacks with % Pen fully, which causes the combination to reduce a squishy target's resistances by >50%.

I see it as a problem, and the main reason why % penetration is too strong against squishy targets.

KeyoshiDec 26, 20141 votes

They need to change it to 50% bonus armor/magic resistance or something.

RebonackDec 26, 20141 votes

I see it as a problem, and the main reason why % penetration is too strong against squishy targets.

Eh, it's less that and more the fact that %Pen applies before flat Pen does. If we were still using the old system then it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue. The problem could be addressed if Riot just reverted the Penetration changes, but when's the last time Riot admitted they messed up and reversed a decision?