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We should probably talk about minions and their resistances

Riftic·12/14/2014, 3:04:00 AM·4 votes·1,036 views

(TL;DR at bottom)

Some of you may have noticed that farming minions and clearing waves with abilities is more difficult since patch 4.20. This is because of the changes to minion scaling: if you're not aware, minions had all of their resistances removed and instead gained health in amounts that keep them roughly equal to before in terms of effective hit points.

However, this actually makes clearing waves with abilities less effective since runes and masteries effectively gave you true damage against the minion's low armor and magic resistances before. As a result, minions now have higher effective hp against abilities.

Using Ahri as an example, using AP quints, all of the AP and damage masteries, a Doran's Ring, a Large Rod, and a rank 5 Orb of Deception at the 9 minute mark will not kill the caster minions in one cast - they actually survive with 15 health. At the 9:30 mark, the minions gain more health and they survive with even more health. Before the patch, this combination of items, runes, and masteries would absolutely have cleared the minions in one go.

Ahri's not the only one though, many champions that could clear waves before with one cast can no longer do that. Annoyingly enough, the minions often survive with so little hp that a single stray attack from one of your own minions will kill it before you can get the last hit.

It is worth noting that replacing the penetration marks with flat AP runes still does not allow champions like Ahri to single-cast clear caster minions like they could before, it only amounts to an additional 7 damage on Orb of Deception in Ahri's case (I have not yet tested other champions, but there have been similar reports which I have linked below). It appears that the minions have been given more overall more tankiness since the replacement of penetration with raw damage does not allow for the clearing that was possible before.

Going back to Ahri again since she fits this topic so well, this seems like a 180 from the direction Riot seemed to want to go with her:

Ahri's a cool fox gal that we'd like to see more of, but she's currently sitting just below the top-tier mid picks. That said, we don't think she needs too many buffs to keep up, so we focused on her ability to push the wave more efficiently so she can find more opportunities to roam.

Ahri's waveclearing and by extension, her roaming is now actually worse than before that patch. We seem to have gone backwards.

Is this intentional? Is all of this intentional? Or is this still a work in progress situation? If nothing else, CSing has become rather frustrating and more difficult with this change.

For those TL:DRers out there:

  • Minions are unaffected by penetration now, with their new stats resulting in higher effective hit points
  • Some champions that could clear casters before in one cast with a large rod such as Ahri, can no longer do so without an unreasonable amount of AP
  • Penetration for laners is now only effective against their laning opponent, and not the minions
  • Replacing penetration runes with raw damage runes doesn't bring back the waveclearing potential from before

Other discussions on this topic: http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2mvhtv/sneaky_lux_nerf_please_fix_it/ http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2n3whu/ahri_stealth_nerf/

So...what's going on? Was all this an intentional side-effect of "game clarity"? Waveclearing using abilities is universally worse now. If the resistance change is here to stay, I suggest reducing the health of minions to preserve the waveclearing capabilities that most champions had before.

4 Comments

ValyrianBlade12/14/2014, 3:30:12 AM2 votes

I honestly didn't get it when I read that patch note.

Who ever complained that penetration was helping waveclear? That made perfect sense to me. I can't understand for the life of me why Riot thought it was a problem that having penetration from either runes, masteries, or your build, helped your waveclear.

If it was an issue of penetration being too strong relative to AD/AP, then they should have just altered penetration. Why take its use away from lane minions?

I've had the same problems trying to single cast clear the caster minions. It feels like you have to get an early kill to have the build in order to waveclear effectively. It particularly hurts the AP champions who already can't use their MPEN/AP to take down towers.

Steelflame12/14/2014, 7:08:29 AM2 votes

The only thing that the change did was make it so that lifesteal was more powerful vs minions than it used to be, by them having an overall larger health pool to steal from/more raw damage vs them (Spellvamp slightly affected, but nowhere near as much due to how weak/rare it is).

DEmperor9512/14/2014, 7:29:06 AM1 votes

I believe this is intentional. They probably want to reduce the effectiveness of nonstop waveclearing with AP casters. I can't exactly remember but someone said so at some point.