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Armor 101 for Riot

Cdore·1/22/2020, 3:37:52 PM·4 votes·1,646 views

Hi! =) I'm just here to help inform you all how armor building works. When you build armor in League of Legends, the damage reduction you get from physical attacks goes up at a reasonable rate, but starts giving less returns as you reach 200. Basically, the gains of getting more armor fall the more of it you buy. Realistically, most tanks will get 200-275 armor since this is considered the "sweet spot" of damage reduction. Anything after is just a bonus, assuming you're building another item for health or other effects.

https://i.imgur.com/W6Fb9V4.jpg

Why is this important? Because it seems Riot has forgotten how one of their depreciating stats work for patch 10.2! The more armor you build, the less you want of it. Frozen Heart is NOT a first buy item. Nor is it good as a second. It is a third buy armor item, when you have supporting stats in front of it. I would say it's even a fourth item. You buy it for mid into late game, and by then, that +10 armor does NOTHING. Sunfire, Thornmail, Righteous Glory, even Seeker's Armguard as a component, all of them are better buys than Frozen Heart ever will be.

I will like to know what decision or what edge case was the reason for such a meaningless buff. I can't even fathom when it comes into play, and I wonder if anyone at Riot thought about it, either. Did they really believe Frozen Heart is a counter to the game, despite the majority of the power pickers so far have been ap and ranged carries? You know, the classes that Frozen Heart doesn't care about? Where are the MR buffs? Or something to compensate for the explosion of mage items?

Tanks do not want a +10 armor on Frozen Heart. They want something to deal with all the tank killing mechanics currently in the game. +10 armor is not going to stop Sett, the anti-tank champ just released. It won't stop Fiora, who just wants to run you down with vitals. It won't stop Vayne, it won't stop Darius's true damage nuke after a five stack passive, it doesn't stop Botrk builders ,it won't stop anything that it hasn't stopped already.

34 Comments

nm10101/22/2020, 4:03:37 PM7 votes

Going from 0% to 50% damage reduction is the same effect as going from 50% to 75%, which is the same as going from 75% to 87.5%. The % point change may not be as big, but the change in survivability is the same. Resistances do not give diminishing returns, though there is a "sweet spot" in defense efficiency of roughly 100 hp to 10 resistance stat.

Darkdemon6531/22/2020, 4:03:13 PM6 votes

{quoted}

Hi! =) I'm just here to help inform you all how armor building works. When you build armor in League of Legends, the damage reduction you get from physical attacks goes up at a reasonable rate, but starts giving less returns as you reach 200. Basically, the gains of getting more armor fall the more of it you buy.

That is completely false. Putting aside penetration and reduction, the amount of survivability armor provides is completely static. At every single value, gaining 1 point of armor will always increase one's effective health by 1% of one's health.

DuskDaUmbreon1/22/2020, 4:24:21 PM4 votes

##And here's armor 101 for the boards: Since, you know, apparently it's that time of year again and education needs to happen.

Each point of armor is exactly as effective as the last. The algorithm Riot uses is one that makes it so that each point of armor reduces the damage you would take by the same relative amount each time.

Going from 0 armor to 1 armor reduces your damage from physical attacks by 1%. Going from 1 armor to 2 armor reduces it by .99% more, or by 1% of 99%. This stays true for all armor values - Each point reduces 1% of the damage you'd have taken without that point. The only exception to this is when rounding occurs and makes it slightly more or less effective, or when armor penetration is higher than armor (this will literally never happen to a tank that's not too busy huffing paint to play the game), in which case armor will reduce nothing.

Yes, it reduces a lesser percent of total damage. However, it remains at a consistent efficiency when looked at relatively, which is what actually matters in terms of actual math. If it reduced the same percent of total damage then each point would become more effective than the last.

The reason you don't stack armor isn't because it loses efficiency. It's because AP champions also exist and armor does fuck all against them (Usually). The other reason is because HP becomes more efficient the more resistances you have, and resistances become more effective the more HP you have. This means that ideally you want to keep them at a specific ratio. I don't know this ratio off the top of my head (The wiki probably has the math somewhere), but it ultimately means you want to spend slightly more gold on HP than on resistances.

Why does this matter? Because Riot wants you to buy a variety of stats, and because just buying armor to win would be shitty.

Pika3101/22/2020, 4:30:15 PM3 votes

The "damage reduction" chart is intentionally overly used to mislead players into believing buying armor is pointless. A blatant misnomer.

Buying armor increases your effective HP against physical damage by a pure linear equation. Every point of armor increases your maximum effective HP by 1%. Hence why at 100 armor, your effective HP is doubled (+100%); at 200 armor, it's tripled; 300, quadrupled & so on.

Having said all of this, buying armor is pointless, but for completely different reasons:

item 3035 item 3071 item 3134

Skia Asteri1/22/2020, 7:11:27 PM2 votes

{quoted}

Hi! =) I'm just here to help inform you all how armor building works. When you build armor in League of Legends, the damage reduction you get from physical attacks goes up at a reasonable rate, but starts giving less returns as you reach 200. Basically, the gains of getting more armor fall the more of it you buy. Realistically, most tanks will get 200-275 armor since this is considered the "sweet spot" of damage reduction. Anything after is just a bonus, assuming you're building another item for health or other effects.

Why is this important? Because it seems Riot has forgotten how one of their depreciating stats work for patch 10.2! The more armor you build, the less you want of it. Frozen Heart is NOT a first buy item. Nor is it good as a second. It is a third buy armor item, when you have supporting stats in front of it. I would say it's even a fourth item. You buy it for mid into late game, and by then, that +10 armor does NOTHING. Sunfire, Thornmail, Righteous Glory, even Seeker's Armguard as a component, all of them are better buys than Frozen Heart ever will be.

I will like to know what decision or what edge case was the reason for such a meaningless buff. I can't even fathom when it comes into play, and I wonder if anyone at Riot thought about it, either. Did they really believe Frozen Heart is a counter to the game, despite the majority of the power pickers so far have been ap and ranged carries? You know, the classes that Frozen Heart doesn't care about? Where are the MR buffs? Or something to compensate for the explosion of mage items?

Tanks do not want a +10 armor on Frozen Heart. They want something to deal with all the tank killing mechanics currently in the game. +10 armor is not going to stop Sett, the anti-tank champ just released. It won't stop Fiora, who just wants to run you down with vitals. It won't stop Vayne, it won't stop Darius's true damage nuke after a five stack passive, it doesn't stop Botrk builders ,it won't stop anything that it hasn't stopped already.

+10 armor makes item 3110 slightly over 100% gold efficient just from armor and CDR. That makes the value of the mana and aura both be purely bonus.

item 3068 item 3025 item 3075 item 3742 item 3143 are all less that 100% gold efficient based on their stats. In the case of the other items that build out of item 3082 , & are still under 100% if the attack speed slow on them is valued at the 200 gold needed for to be 100% efficient.

The only tank oriented armor items that have 100% efficiency from stats besides item 3110 are item 3800 item 3050 . And both of those are only after factoring in the gold value of their mana.

Eedat1/22/2020, 5:20:49 PM2 votes

Every 100 armor gives you 100% more effective health. It's not diminishing. 1 resistance per 10hp (Ex: 3000 hp with 300 armor) is the sweet spot. That's all you need to know

Captain Racoon1/22/2020, 5:21:41 PM2 votes

CDore... mate... they're saying the basis of your entire argument "The more armor you build, the less you want of it." is false because how much armor you have is literally irrelevant to the choice of buying more armor as a tank.

The reason you buy more armor or buy MR instead is the enemy team composition. If the enemy is all AD, then FH is a wonderful pickup to increase utility and make you more survivable. If you have 1 armor, 100 armor, or 500 armor, getting 1 more armor has the same value.

No diminishing returns, no depreciating value.

Illabethe1/22/2020, 6:34:24 PM1 votes

The point of more than 275 Armor is to compensate for the ways to penetrate/reduce it. Curve charts don't compensate for the baseline math of reduction.

This is why when Malphite or Rammus was built tank, they were a sizeable threat, because their armor rates could far exceed most penetration making them STILL tanky.

Beginning at 600 Armor and getting reduced to 172 Armor is far better survivability than beginning at 300 and getting reduced to 92 Armor.

The only caveat that gives a little ground to the argument: MOST champions generally scale better to balancing offense with defense to shorten exchanges than by being overly tanky and relying on their teams. Yet...... we still have late game Ornn who almost exclusively builds defense.

This post seems more about Frozen Heart than Armor. The point of Frozen heart is to counter Lethality builds, NOT % damage/true damage tank killers. Don't try to use armor curves to compensate an argument against 1 item getting a buff.

Summoner SpeII1/22/2020, 3:48:36 PM1 votes

they should just undo the attack speed nerf they did on it