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League of Tanks vs RIOT 2013

Aerinx·5/15/2015, 5:46:40 AM·1 votes·663 views
Red Post Collection: Xypherous on Defensive vs Offensive itemization, life steal, "poke" balance, and more.

Xypherous started things of by responding to a thread where one of our fellow summoners was discussing that a full armor item build should effectively counter a full attack damage item build.

This makes several assumptions on relative game health:

  • The defining characteristic of a tank is 'immune to damage'

    The interesting dilemma here is that the tank role in many respects reads as 'durable' characters. However, the actions that a tank has to do to win any given fight does not rely on durability as much as some other classes - notably melee damage dealers.

    A tank dying in a successful initiation has a staggering impact on the success of his team - He has simultaneously started a favorable fight while wasting a large part of the opposing team's cooldowns. Contrast - most fighters need a prolonged engagement in order to actually output value to their team.

    Durability - at the end of the day, is a more valuable fighter statistic than a tank statistic - simply due to need / time required to stay in a fight. Tanks have many non-pure durability ways to simulate effective defense, every tank knows intrinsically that disabling their damage dealer for a few seconds is worth a massive amount of durability. If CC is a portion of a tank's kit - they will always have many different ways to mitigate damage - from disabling the opponent's damage outright by stun - or simply making it very difficult for the damage to be applied in time via slows or displacements.

    As a side note here, I actually believe that we should be putting more defense straight onto a tank's kit rather than force them to buy it. You should be able to rely on the fact that your tank has a baseline level of durability - rather than that shift wildly based on gold income.

  • **You are spending as much gold on defense as they are on damage **

    It's somewhat unrealistic to assume that a full defense character should have a similar gold income, especially late game - as full damage characters. Full defense inherently takes less risks and opportunity costs for playing the game. Therefore - you are always going to have less gold at some point that players who actually expose themselves to a serious weakness.

    We could solve this by severely increase the power of gold for defense statistics compared to offense but going down this line moots the entire point of buying offensive items. Offensive items intrinsically are worth more because they offer more play - people who buy offense can die.

  • **That invulnerable characters are intrinsically a good thing for the game **

    I think this is where we'll probably disagree here - characters that become invulnerable, even to a subset of characters - are simply characters who don't actually wish to interact with a certain subset of opponents.

    Invulnerable characters are bad for the game in several ways - because as soon as you reach this threshold, there's very little reason to actually interact or play with the enemy team, outside of simply murdering them because they now can do absolutely nothing against you.

    While this would be fun for the invulnerable player - this is less of a game, and more of a 'Man, everyone who bought offense is really bad.'

    Consider what happens if this is true - if you buy offense, you can't damage a subset of their team - but you can now be murdered by anyone on their team becomes the norm, and under this state - defense is the only real option.

2 Comments

One Bind Morgana5/15/2015, 6:33:58 AM2 votes

its funny how they keep gutting mages while tanks like sejuani are 1v3ing teams with thornmail + gromp + cinderhulk

Critmaster Garen5/15/2015, 8:27:37 AM1 votes

i disagree with the last point. this is exactly the reason why we have a 3 damage type system. physical damage, magical damage, and true damage.

if a tank invests his entire gold to become practically immune to physical damage, he is extremely vulnerable to magic damage, as he has very little by way of mr.

a few flat magic pen items, and a void staff will allow someone to hit such a tank with close to true damage.

this is where teamwork comes in, and it is not the job of the ad carry to kill the tank anymore, but the job of the mage or that darius with a cleaver and last whisper and ignite.

we have the same situation, when the tank heavily invests into mr and health, and ignores armor for the most part in his build.

{quoted}

its funny how they keep gutting mages while tanks like sejuani are 1v3ing teams with thornmail + gromp + cinderhulk

the upcoming abyssal change is an indirect buff to mages. yes, its probably primarily going to be bought by tanks like amumu or sejuani. id DEFINITELY get it on galio. or the odd ap bruiser like rumble. but mages will profit from the mr shred similar to how ranged ad profit from an armor shredding bruiser with a cleaver in his inventory.

when your own tank sits in the midst of the enemy team and shreds their mr by 45%, your mage with a void staff and maybe some flat mr pen items will deal significantly more damage.