Let’s Talk: Preseason state of AP and Magic Penetration

https://imgur.com/a/OrhFi.jpg

Preseason is going to change a lot of things, most of all the landscape of AP. A truckload of MR is flooding out of the system, up to 38 for squishes total in endgame (yes you heard that right, 27 for MR/lvl blues, 11 for Windspeakers Blessing on the support), and only 15 flat pen is going away with it (8.7 from runes, 6 from masteries).

What this means is that a squishy champion will ‘genuinely’ sit on 30-38.5 MR for a large portion of the game, and not just incidentally bloat up to 70-80 MR with 0 investment. Sorc Boots + Haunting Rush + Sudden Impact will actually result in True Damage unless the ADC finds some way to grab some cheap MR (which currently is either a minimal dip into resolve secondary, or Merc Treads purely because it is a 25 MR item that doesn’t detour them off the Inf Edge + Zeal Item core rush).

This looks like a grand feast for AP champions, but Riot will balance Magic Damage around this new equilibrium. I’m not sure which way they’ll balance this, lopping a few points off the Flat Pen items is promising but exacerbates their late game scaling issue, reducing the damage of mages wholesale will make them extremely ineffective versus anybody with an MR item.

These issues are going to be coupled with the fact that AP has weird scaling issues. AP has been sucked out of the system, and Deathcap’s been made clunky because the bar for “I shouldn’t be allowed to 100-0 you without a huge amount of effort” has been set at “the actual 0 defense investment ADC”.

Void Staff’s been the band-aid here, providing a scaling item that provides proportionally more damage to tank targets than squishy champions, but is still value-efficient versus low MR investment targets (which wind up at 70-80 MR because of aforementioned bloat). Void Staff actually amounts to 24.5 flat pen (!) on that enemy.

On live it functionally has no failure case. Now? Void Staff is actually a bad buy in some circumstances, but without that band-aid AP champions are in an awkward spot when it comes to damage dealing late game fantasies.

Understand me when I say that Void Staff no longer being the magic scaling item is a healthy thing for the game. The “I get this when the enemy stacks MR” item shouldn’t be the correct choice when there are 0-1 MR items between the 5 enemy champions.

This is a big reason why MR items are better/more prolific than AR items, because Void Staff is inherently core on mid-late game AP damage dealers, so 35% of the MR value is defunct on purchase. If void staff weren’t literally core as a second-third item rush, MR items wouldn’t need to be so overwhelming.

Tl:dr: I believe this is a solvable problem, but it’s going to cause a lot of changes for what AP means to the game, and the aftershocks are going to cascade through almost every item on the APvMR half of the store. It certainly won’t be easy.