@Riot can you change Fearless(mastery) a bit?

Malicious Metal·Oct 21, 2016·15 votes·3,690 views

Currently Fearless provides 10% Armor/MR and some per level bonuses for a mere TWO seconds when being attacked with a 9 second CD.

I'd pretty much prefer it to last longer so that it's actually useful during extended trades and team fights. Battle trance in the ferocity tree grants 5% damage increase WITHOUT a cd to the bonus, the increase persisting the entirety of a fight.

So how about you make Fearless not decay in combat but have an internal 15-20 second cool down?

It would really help us tanky top laners.

Also, can you please address the lack of decent Juggernaut/Bruiser mastery in the resolve tree? Thanks

34 Comments

AtajoOct 21, 20166 votes

Cross-posting from http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/ejrFz7c0-fearless-and-the-reduction-of-damage-creep, I did some math on Fearless. It's really, really strong in short trades and the first part of fights.

{quoted} Numbers time, case 2: Wukong Engage with initial CC + tons of damage over time = incentive to survive long enough to use it. Again going to assume you take flat armor seals, flat MR glyphs and no other resistance items since Jungle Wu typically tries to go Warrior into Black Cleaver. Adding his passive is tricky, 4-8 armor/MR per enemy champ, but Fearless increases his armor by ~6-49 and MR by ~7-46 based on level and # of enemies. Comparing to his pre-buff defense, this increases effective health by somewhere from 4-23% (vs. physical) and 4-25% (vs. magic). Note that the percentage drops a little bit with increasing resistances, but since you start with a bigger number, it washes out some.

Example: Level 16 Wukong with above set-up has 1808 base HP , 85 armor, and 62 MR. Assuming he has +700 HP (Black Cleaver, Sterak's), and surrounded by 5 enemies he now has 2508 HP, 125 armor, and 102 MR. Fearless triggering at the start of a fight from full health buffs defense stats to 169 armor and 144 MR. For the next 2 seconds, it now takes 20% more incoming physical damage and 21% more incoming magic damage to kill the angry monkey spinning on the priority target. 7.5% increased damage from Bounty Hunter just got told (again) to sit down and shut up.

In summary: Riot seems to be taking the position (with Courage of the Colossus and Fearless) that opting for defensive choices means your best best is starting the fight early and getting a brief but large advantage in durability for that. If, however, you take poke or can't close the fight with the lead from the first few seconds, the person/team who opted for damage will win. This aligns with the fact that in general, damage outscales defense because Riot wants games to end at some point and not have 50+ minute slapfests because people can't close out every other game.

DengedenOct 21, 20165 votes

Look. Even presuming their philosophy is wrong, here's what Riot **doesn't **want with tanks: Them standing there and surviving because they're tanks. They want players to be proactive. Which is what a brief "burst" in tank stats allows. They don't want you to get caught up in an extended trade and win it with stats alone.

WoonStruckOct 22, 20161 votes

Then why do damage classes get to?

DengedenOct 22, 20161 votes

For two reasons: One, technically everything is a damage class, it's just that tanks don't scale with damage. They still need it for the early-mid game though. In other words, they'll be using "damage class" masteries too.

Two, damage classes doing damage are using their kit, which Riot wants to reward. A tank that tanks is doing pretty much nothing outside of using his shield if he has one.

WoonStruckOct 22, 20161 votes

If tanks still had the choice, they'd be going 0/0/30 into defensive, just like they went 0/30/0 in the defensive tree before keystones were a thing.

A tank that tanks is worth more than just one rotation. If you don't think that's not using your kit, you have some logic issues.

DengedenOct 23, 20161 votes

Erm, possibly but that's because the new masteries are all about making choices between two juicy options. Summoner spell CD vs HP regen, Tenacity vs Ar/Mr, etc.

And I'm not even sure how true that is. I know for a fact that junglers went 21/9/0 during the Cinderhulk meta. While it would make sense for champs like Mundo or Malph to go 0/30/0 bc their damage scales with HP and MR respectively. I think 0/21/9 was more common for TP CDs.

I ... am not sure I understand what you're saying here. Champions are nothing but their PQWER, their rotations. It's understandable that a tank, whose kit is more focused on teamfighting, peel and/or lockdown, couldn't do much against ranged poke. Again, the scenario is this: A melee is getting poked, if all he wants to do is tank and survive, he's doing next to nothing, right?

Now if he uses his kit to chase down the ranged champ like you can see here that's a different story.

WoonStruckOct 23, 20161 votes

The ones that went 21/9 were often slayers, juggernauts (before classification), and divers. Every. Single. Actual. Tank shot 30 points into defense unless they desperately needed the CDR and AP to make it through early.

The biggest issue with masteries now is that they often aren't choices, especially in resolve. Nobody that's decent at the game takes anything that's on the right side of the tree. Nobody. They're pretty much all non-negotiable, given the other options.

And the thing is, compared to the other trees, all of the options on the right side are absurdly weak still.

That's what everyone's upset about.

The goals of the new masteries (Season 5->6, not upcoming pre-season) are respectable. What the actual outcome was can be considered a massive failure, though.

DengedenOct 23, 20161 votes

Most tanks are divers though, Sej, Gragas etc.

True, in the end, there's always one option that's numerically superior to the other. Nothing can change that, masteries included. There are times when the right side of the tree is better, check out champion.gg. "Absurdly weak" is a bit of an overstatement.

GULAG 4 UOct 21, 20163 votes

Battle trance stacks up over 5 seconds on the other hand.

HazyCloud7Oct 21, 20162 votes

The new courage of colossus is going to give all tank players a HUGE buff keep in mind. Fair point on ferocity.

Malicious MetalOct 21, 20165 votes

Not ALL tanks.

Those with hard engage, so basically the Vanguard class.

Other tanky champions like Juggernauts for example can't even use it

RalanrOct 21, 20162 votes

This is true. It really only leaves them grasp for resolve keystones. Which got nerfed.

Malicious MetalOct 21, 20163 votes

And not every tank wants/needs the sustain

Hell, Morde and Garen even went SotA instead of grasp.

Morde got his Harvester heal and Garen his perseverance

RalanrOct 21, 20161 votes

Honestly I'm still debating whether I'll keep grasp or not on Sion. CoC is nice, but Sion's CC is pretty easy to avoid.

Malicious MetalOct 21, 20162 votes

Well, I might not even use it on my top lane Nautilus

Grasp helps trading and CoC's shield depends on how many enemy champs are near you when you hit your cc and most of naut's CC is "ranged"

RalanrOct 21, 20161 votes

I may end up using it in the jungle. If it worked on jungle creeps it'd be better (or broken).

Malicious MetalOct 21, 20163 votes

It should also trigger on slows and silences IMO :^)

RalanrOct 21, 20162 votes

But then Mundo would never die.

Malicious MetalOct 21, 20161 votes

Implying he doesn't already :^)

RalanrOct 21, 20163 votes

MUNDO DIES WHEN HE PLEASES!

YumaS2AstralOct 21, 20161 votes

Would CoC be a good choice for Malphite?

He only has his ult to activate it, but otherwise this mastery would seem like a good choice for him, stacking with his passive shield.

Critmaster GarenOct 23, 20161 votes

{quoted}

Would CoC be a good choice for Malphite?

He only has his ult to activate it, but otherwise this mastery would seem like a good choice for him, stacking with his passive shield.

it will be godlike on malphite.

there is a decent cooldown on the shield anyways, so you probably will be able to trigger it once per fight.

but courage of the colossus + his own frontloaded shield, combined with the resistance burst from fearless + the bonus resistances from his w + the bonus resistances from legendary guardian is going to make him impossible to deal damage to for the first couple of seconds of a fight.

hell be able to shrugg off things like velkoz, mf and kennen ults. pretty much everything that deals a ton of burst in a short time window.

those masteries are practically made for malphite ulting into the middle of the enemy team.

DeathBurstOct 25, 20161 votes

Humm, I always took Grasp on Garen, I much prefer the early trading it enables than the late game survivability of SotA. I already don't die in late-game anyway...

HazyCloud7Oct 22, 20161 votes

Just to clarify when I say tank I am referring explicitly to champions like Nautilus, Malphite, Sion, Poppy ect...that build only health and resistances and melee tank supports.

Having it activate on slows doesn't sound too bad, but I think they would need to heavily, heavily increase the CD in that case because of how easy it is for certain champions to apply a slow. Don't even want to imagine what the likes of FM Yasuo for example would do with that gigantic a shield every 30 seconds, heck at 30 seconds I'd seriously consider taking it on Viktor and Malzahar if it applied on slows, auto win trades and get a nice shield in every teamfight.

Dominick DestineOct 21, 20162 votes

{quoted}

The new courage of colossus is going to give all tank players a HUGE buff keep in mind. Fair point on ferocity.

Courage of the Colossus is a straight downgrade from Strength of Ages.

TyrekGoldenspearOct 21, 20163 votes

Really?

Let's see. 300 health.

Or a potential massive health shield that scales with max health and enemies nearby?

Wonder which one gives better protection?

Dominick DestineOct 21, 20162 votes

{quoted}

Really?

Let's see. 300 health.

Or a potential massive health shield that scales with max health and enemies nearby?

Wonder which one gives better protection?

Except SoA worked all game, had a universal stat and provided sustain later.

Not to mention it was viable on all junglers whereas this one is only viable on certain types.... to make it even worse, Courage has a fairly long CD and short duration. It's a garbo mastery compared to SoA.

YumaS2AstralOct 22, 20161 votes

CoC of course

Shields allow you to increase your effective health without increasing the damage taken from sources of damage based on a percentage of your health, like Blade of the Ruined King, or Vayne's Silver Bolts.

TalisidOct 21, 20163 votes

Major nerfs to DrMundo with SotA and Oppressor going away and he can't use Colossus.

And I still have to deal with the fact that every single mage builds Morello's so every team has access to grievous wounds at like 10 mins into the game.

RocketRelmOct 22, 20162 votes

To be fair, that "some flat per level" is gonna outsize the 10% even when you have 300 Armor. Even at Lvl 10 you'd need 201 Armor for the 10% to be bigger than the flat. I think it's actually moderately powerful, especially for the top laners that want to build an HP only item first (Ex: Black Cleaver).

DealthOct 21, 20161 votes

Battle trance and Fearless should not compared. They are two completely different masteries

RisenDarkKnightOct 22, 20161 votes

Please no, that mastery is amazing. Don't dismiss the per lvl bonuses, they are most of the point of the mastery. You get 36 armor and MR at level 18 which is more than you get get from the 10% unless you have 360 armor and MR.

Also it has only a 9 second cooldown. So it has 22% uptime which is quite high. It really good for short trades. Most champions often engage in trades that only last 2 seconds and are often limited by a cooldown that is longer than the 9 second cooldown of this mastery to re-engage. Also, it's better on melee champs because it allows you to effectively have around 17% more effective health vs poke of either damage type at lvl 6 (assuming you have 50 armor and MR), and it only gets better from there as you get more resists and levels.

Seriously, this mastery is really good. it just tilts me to see you and other posters dismiss the "some per level bonuses" without thinking about it to realize the per level bonuses are FAR greater than the 10% bonus.