Thoughts on 7.14 Thornmail. What's it's new purpose?
> Total cost 2900g > Builds out of [Bramble Vest + Ruby Crystal + Warden's Mail + 600G] > Stats & Effects: > +250 Health > +75 Armor > Unique Passive - Thorns: Upon being hit by a basic attack, reflects magic damage equal to 10% of your bonus armor plus 25, inflicting Grievous Wounds on the attacker for 1 second. > Unique Passive - Cold Steel: When hit by basic attacks, reduce attacker's attack speed by 15% for 1 second.
From the looks of it it's being converted to be better on Bruisers/Jungles that are looking at taking some magic damage (250 HP) and primarily as a counter to Ravenous Hydra and to a less degree Hurricane.
In a straight up 1v1 vs a 100% physical damage autoattack heavy champion without Ravenous Hydra/Hurricane it's actually straight up weaker in all regards. At 255 armor you are looking at only around 42 damage returned and the grievous wounds effect would actually not make up for the lesser damage taken in return.
If we pull a numbers out of our asses and say 240 AD on a non crit without a BC/LW item/lethality was returning ~ 75 damage before and at 15% life steal was healing for something like 10. So a net loss of 65 HP While dealing like 65 damage. Where as now those number would look closer to Healing for 5.25 while taking 42. So Net loss of 36.75 HP while dealing 70.
With 300ad + IE + LORD DOMINIK'S REGARDS + an infernal + let's say 7% pen from mastiers on a crit... same 280'ish armor example
Old thornmail would have returned ~166 damage healed for 48 net loss of 118 health while you did 320 damage. New thornmail will still just return 42 and you'd heal for 25 for a net loss of 17 hp while dealing 370.
These are all rough numbers but it's within 5%. Also new thornmail would basically give you a 15% reduction in auto attack DPS taken assuming they are getting to land auto after auto.. which isn't always the case. The effective health gain is debatable. If we say going from 3,000 to 3250 but losing 25 armor... you actually lost effective health vs physical damage but obviously gained a good bit vs magic damage.
All that said I think really the only things that make the new Thornmail better than the old are the ability to take mixed damage slightly better.. AND lowing the healing Ravenous Hydra abusers get from fighting you inside your own minion waves. Even standing inside 6-7 minions though I'm not entirely convinced that the healing difference outweighs the lower armor/damage returned.
Also the 1 second duration still allows for champs like Renekton to simply weave their Q's in 1 second after their last auto. Which in itself is another form of damage mitigation I suppose, but meh.
Long story short it doesn't fix the issue tanks have with life steal champs in lane (autoing minions to easily fully heal) and does little that would make you pick it over a Randuin's/Deadmans. Grievous wounds is everywhere already. Randuin's is still better against most ADC's and AP's to boot. Deadman's is still going to be picked over it for the champs that use it.
