Clearing something up: old conqueror was mainly good because of the HEALING NOT THE TRUE DAMAGE

I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how tanks should be more or less viable after the conqueror changes. The true damage was instrumental to old conqueror’s strengths, but not chiefly in the way that many of you imagine.

Let me run you through an example. Setting aside the attack damage or the ap, how much damage increase did the true damage give to someone who had 100 dps on old conqueror vs someone who had 100 armor and 1000 health?

Normally, 100 armor would have the damage done to 50 dps, and it would take 20 seconds to kill said champion. Assuming conqueror procced before the fight (which is unrealistic, but does make old conq look stronger than it was), 8 dps would be true, and the remaining 92 would be halved down to 46. That’s 54 dps. Time to kill (TTK) is down to 18.5 from 20 seconds. If you built any armor pen the TTK/dps benefits would be even less. While significant, the time to kill only dropped by 7.5%, which usually shouldn’t make a difference, right?

That’s where the real strength of old conqueror comes to play. Old conqueror DIRECTLY CONVERTED THE TRUE DAMAGE TO HEALING (and also benefited off of both ravenous hunter and lifesteal where applicable). This means in the previous scenario, that would be 8 health per second (hps). Now, let’s look at new conqueror. 100 armor would have the damage you deal to 50 dps, and you’d only heal for 15% of that, making 7.5 hps. A loss of a seemingly miniscule 0.5 hps, however if it was 200 armor instead? Old conq would still heal 8 hps, while new conq would be healing 5 hps. 300 armor? 8 hps, and 3.75 hps for old and new conqueror respectively. New conqueror heals more than old conqueror ONLY if the target has less than 80 armor.

BUT WAIT! We’re forgetting the true damage! The difference between your target’s and your health is equal to the true damage+your healing. Not too shabby eh? So when would old conqueror break even with new conqueror? Here’s the math: 8+8+(92-100)(100/(100+x))=0.15100*(100/(100+x))

THIS ISN’T EVEN CONSIDERING % damage reduction from stuff like ninja tabi, randuin’s, adaptive helm, or items!!!

The result is old conqueror (assuming you could proc it and keep it up), was better against any target with over 43.75 armor. Aside from thresh with 0 souls (28 armor at 18), the least amount of armor at level 18 is orianna’s 68. If we consider her ball, then the lowest armor a champion has is heimerdinger’s 70.

What this means is that new conqueror is only better very early... or on champions who can abuse it being accessible to ranged champions.

TL;DR: old conqueror was better on its old users vs anyone who had above 43.75 armor, aka basically everyone past the very very early game. It wasn’t what was making tanks unviable (that would be the crappy tank itemization and crit+%pen+%hp damage), and it wasn’t good just because of its true damage, but at least just as much because of its “true healing,” something that notably made old prerework irelia good. It basically helped bruisers SURVIVE more than it actually really helped them do damage. The new conqueror is worse on all its main users of the past, and better on anybody who has spammy skills, is ranged, does true damage, or a combination of the above.