Atma's Impaler hasn't been removed.. just disabled for us.. !

Yosuke Apperu·Jul 31, 2015·17 votes·1,820 views

WHY CAN GAREN BUILD IT WHEN WE CAN'T?

24 Comments

MarthianJul 31, 20157 votes

Silly bots and being outdated. They also at one point had dodge runes well past when Dodge was removed as a mechanic.

Yosuke ApperuJul 31, 20152 votes

Doesn't matter lol, why can't we have it if garen can? honestly they had no reason to remove it in the first place... That doesn't exactly help with their whole stance on "Diversity"

MarthianJul 31, 20155 votes

Go see why they removed it. It makes sense.

Yosuke ApperuJul 31, 20153 votes

That doesn't make sense. It just goes against "Diversity"

JustMyBassCannonJul 31, 20155 votes

The item was removed for having a host of balance issues that made it either overpowered or worthless with absolutely no middle ground to call balanced. By the nature of its design, it could not have been balanced for the sake of "diversity," which by the way is a terrible reason to argue for Atma's return. Atma's ruined diversity for the season that it was viable.

Critmaster GarenJul 31, 20154 votes

{quoted}

The item was removed for having a host of balance issues that made it either overpowered or worthless with absolutely no middle ground to call balanced. By the nature of its design, it could not have been balanced for the sake of "diversity," which by the way is a terrible reason to argue for Atma's return. Atma's ruined diversity for the entire season that it was viable.

there was a middle ground, but they never really attempted it.

its problem was the midgame power spike it granted. but instead of pushing the effectiveness into lategame, they nerfed it by reducing its overall effectiveness at all stages of the game, and it became a slot inefficient lategame item. cheap, by 30 minutes but the total stats too low to make it interesting. which is pretty much contradicting itself.

all they had to do is have the passive scale with bonus hp instead of total hp. that way you had to build some health to make it effective, which means only later on in the game.

the original total health scaling made a midgame rush of atmas just too powerful, since it was already incredibly cost effective off a champions base health.

otherwise the item was nothing but a convenient combination of ad and armor for most bruisers. it was literally just way too cheap too early.

lategame cost effective items are usually fine, if they take time to ramp up. like tear, or rod of ages that are incredibly cheap for the resulting stats they offer. all atmas needed was this rampup time added.

JustMyBassCannonJul 31, 20153 votes

Take a step back and look at it for a moment.

Atma's was originally 2% of max HP. Early-game, that's around 20 AD on an average, 1k HP bruiser. By late-game, it's in the neighborhood of 40 AD (the lowest level 18 HP without items is >1600, so the very least it could be is 32 AD)

It was pretty common to have 3500-4000 HP end-game w/ Atma's, which granted 70-80 AD.

Riot nerfed it to 1.5% of max HP, shifting all of those numbers in respective order to 15 AD (1000 HP), 30 AD (2000 HP), 24 AD (1600 HP) and 52-60 AD.

Yeah, that's a significant shift, but here's the important note: they didn't play around with middle-ground tests because it's highly unlikely that the secret point between "overpowered as fuck and controlling the entire meta" and "worthless piece of shit" was going to be found between 61-69 AD.

The problem was not the amount of the stats provided by the item.

[{quoted}](name=Critmaster Garen,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=8geOmE9V,comment-id=000000000000000000000000,timestamp=2015-07-31T09:18:34.148+0000)

all they had to do is have the passive scale with bonus hp instead of total hp. that way you had to build some health to make it effective, which means only later on in the game.

The thing about bonus HP scaling is that it would have made it harder to balance. If it was set at more than 3% of bonus HP, it could easily over-scale the old Atma's; if it was less than 3% of bonus HP, it would be much closer to post-nerf Atma's. People weren't interested in it as a last-slot item, and changing the scaling to bonus HP would not have fixed that. It would come down to the point of figuring out whether the AD from Atma's would be stronger than something else, and forcing it to the last slot is an irritating way to pigeon-hole a build.

RedCycloneJul 31, 20152 votes

They made like one change to the item

They never even tried to balance it Atma's could have been fine if they swapped out the crit cloak for something else

JustMyBassCannonJul 31, 20154 votes

Yes, they made one change to the item. That one change was enough to test just how terribly the item handles balance. It did not have any sort of stability.

Before the Atmog's meta, people didn't consider Atma's outside of a 5th item on Sion. Bruisers figure out that it gives them a larger damage spike and enough defense to be worth rushing early-game, and it controls the freaking meta for a full season. It gets brought down to a more reasonable level, and is immediately relegated to "only maybe a 5th-slot item" status again.

One of many problems with the item was that it was a pure stat block. There was no reason to take it other than the stats; once the stats weren't guaranteed to out-perform other item combinations, it faded to obscurity faster than you could say "Lee Sin, the Blind Monk."

Yosuke ApperuJul 31, 20151 votes

Okayy what about executioner's calling? Literally the only ad thing with grievous wounds is varus.. I just honestly felt like Riot heavily favors ap over ad

JustMyBassCannonJul 31, 20156 votes

Executioner's Calling falls into two main problems.

First, it's either worthless or absolutely destroying whoever you're fighting. There's no middle ground. Either your opponent's self-healing is too gradual to overcome Grievous Wounds, or they're still healing enough to win the fight.

Second, it didn't have an end-game build path. It was, what, 1900 gold? A bit of Crit and Lifesteal, eventually changed to Crit and AD close to the same time that they changed Vampiric Scepter to have a build path. The stats were low and didn't really carry well into late-game. It eventually was a catch-22, where the stats were making you too weak to fight, particularly against opponents that didn't rely on healing, but you'd have to choose between that problem or fighting against much stronger healing because you sold it to have damage worth a damn.

On top of those problems is the fact that the champions that would ever want to build Executioners are based on dealing DPS. All of them are attack-based champions, obviously, and thus don't rely on their spells to deal most of their damage. Spells have cooldowns, which are much longer than the wait time between attacks, especially once you've picked up a single attack speed item.

Basically, it was unnecessary for the archetype in the first place, and it was already a binary balance factor.

Yosuke ApperuAug 1, 20151 votes

Then just remove grievous wounds from everything :P there's a magic damage item for it, and kat's ult has it. :P If this "Basically, it was unnecessary for the archetype in the first place, and it was already a binary balance factor" Is a true statement ofcourse that is.

JustMyBassCannonAug 1, 20151 votes

Grievous Wounds was unnecessary for that archetype.

I assumed that you would know what an archetype is. My mistake.

Carries--usually Marksmen but a few melee Fighters as well--are the only champions that can afford Crit-based builds due to the glass-cannon nature of those builds. They did not need Executioner's Calling.

Burst champions--assassins like Katarina, or mages that would use Morrellonomicon, for examples--have to deal with their damage output going on cooldown, which gives an opponent much more time to heal before the next rotation.

Yosuke ApperuAug 1, 20151 votes

okayyy.. but aren't burst champions supposed to kill in one rotation?

JustMyBassCannonAug 1, 20151 votes

That's their ideal setup. Being able to kill a target in a single rotation is what they want to do.

And yet, Liandry's Torment and Morrelonomicon exist for very the very good reason that this is usually not possible.

Yosuke ApperuAug 2, 20151 votes

life steal is so strong right now though... you can easily life steal through a thornmail xD

JustMyBassCannonAug 2, 20151 votes

It would be if Lifesteal wasn't post-mitigation.

In small words, Lifesteal happens after Armor makes the damage weaker. Thornmail happens before Armor makes the damage weaker. 30% from Thornmail =/= 30% from Lifesteal.

In fact, Thornmail exists to counter Lifesteal, and it does so very well.

Yosuke ApperuAug 2, 20151 votes

Last whisper and botrk so hello to you my friend :D Also no amount of armor counters vayne and it's as if she's the only adc in the game, she's been so popular recently :p

JustMyBassCannonAug 2, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Last whisper and botrk so hello to you my friend :D Also no amount of armor counters vayne and it's as if she's the only adc in the game, she's been so popular recently :p

Let's just say that we actually did use Vayne for this setup. BotRK and Last Whisper combined cost about 5500 gold, while Thornmail sits at a 2200 gold cost alone. Keep in mind, whoever Vayne is facing has room for ~3k gold in other defensive options.

Let's also say that I chose Cho'gath, the champion with the highest innate HP in the game (hitting 2834 with feast stacks at level 18), who has 88.4 innate armor at level 18.

Cho'gath+Thornmail has 188.4 Armor. Assuming Vayne has the Armor Pen mastery in tandem with Last Whisper--by the way, it's not additive, it's multiplicative--then she ignores 38.9% of his Armor, bringing him to an effective 115.1 Armor. He ignores ~53.5% of physical damage.

Now, at level 18, Vayne has 109 base AD. BotRK+Last Whisper bumps her up to 174 total AD. Even after Last Whisper's Armor Pen, Cho'gath is taking 81 +3.2% current HP damage per hit from Vayne. Every 3 attacks is dealing (81 * 3) 243 + 60 + 8% max HP.

The maximum total damage he'll take from BotRK over 3 hits is 256, or 9% of his max health, assuming he was at full health at the start of the fight. This is calculated without using Vayne's Q or R, which would reduce that number very slightly.

ANYWAY, Vayne has dealt a total of at least 250 physical damage, up to 500 physical damage in 3 hits. This means that, over 3 attacks, Vayne has healed for 10% of that, or 25-50 HP, while also dealing a significant amount of damage to Cho'gath.

Meanwhile, Thornmail reflects 30% of the physical damage dealt (but for some arbitrary reason, currently does not include BotRK's proc), so Vayne has taken (243 * 0.3) 73 magic damage from Thornmail. Even after accounting for base MR, she has still taken 56 magic damage from Thornmail.

And, again, this is without accounting for any other defensive building available. We've given the Vayne player a 3k gold advantage, which is no small amount.

Ser GarlandJul 31, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Doesn't matter lol, why can't we have it if garen can? honestly they had no reason to remove it in the first place... That doesn't exactly help with their whole stance on "Diversity"

they'll probably build something like it back with the new fighter items.

Yosuke ApperuJul 31, 20151 votes

new fighter items? You have my attention :D

Critmaster GarenJul 31, 20151 votes

jelly?