A Newbies Guide: Resistances

So, today I was playing with a bunch of friends that recently hit level 30 and are relatively new to the game. We needed a hard tank, so I chose Poppy to spearhead our tanking operations. About halfway through the game, they started questioning my build: The enemy had a Vayne and Leona bot lane, with a Elise Jungle, Kayle Top, and Akali mid. Because of this, I had to build both magic resist and armor to counter their entire team. Kayle and Vayne started getting fed, and it quickly became clear what my build would have to be. However, my friend asked why I didn't stack pure armor, because Kayle was all auto-attack based.

It made me realize, that many people don't understand how to build against some champions in terms of what you should build as resistance, especially if you never look at the damage recap, which appears to occur more often than you'd expect. So to start, I thought I'd explain the damage types and what reduces them.

There is a total of 3 Damage Types in League:

True Damage - True Damage cannot be reduced no matter what; It will always deal its set amount of damage, no matter how much armor or magic resist you have.

Magic Damage - Magic Damage is the dominant damage type for most mages. This can be reduced with Magic Resist.

Physical Damage - Physical Damage is the dominant damage type for Fighters and ADCs. This can be reduced with Armor.

Now that we got that covered, lets get into some of the more unclear aspects of this, and this is the part I wanted to emphasize on.

DAMAGE TYPE IS NOT DETERMINED BASED ON WHETHER A PERSON IS AD OR AP NOR BASED ON THEIR PREFERED FORM OF ATTACK

This is definitely a concept that may be unclear at first; because for the most part, AP = Build Magic Resist, while AD = Build Armor. This is further confusing when you combine the playstyle into account. While Kayle, although she uses purely auto attacks, Armor wouldn't be completely beneficial. This is because of how their ability sets work. A good example of this is Kog'Maw and Ezreal. Although they are both ADCs (and thus build AD Items.. unless you're a rebel and still play AP Kog and Ez) their ability sets make it so they both do a decent amount of Magic Damage against their opponents, meaning that you would ALSO have to build Magic Resist to reduce some of their damage. To further extenuate this, I'll use the example of an AP Miss Fortune (Yes, she has AP scalings!). If you see an AP Miss Fortune, you're tempted to press tab, see they have all AP items, and then build Magic Resist to counter it. Because of Miss Fortune's ability set however, shes almost ALL Physical Damage, meaning that you would need ARMOR to reduce her damage. Although she's building AP, the AP translates into physical damage because of her ability set. The ABILITY SET AND BUILD BOTH DETERMINE WHAT YOU SHOULD BUILD. For that, I'll give a VERY Outlandish example: ADC Sona (It works, try it some time if you wanna screw around). ADC Sona's Ability set is all magic damage. However, because she's building like an ADC, it would be wise to build Armor instead because of the fact that Sona has no AD Scalings, meaning none of her abilities will be directly enhanced by her build.

Ultimately, the ending message is two fold: Learn how champions scale, learn their ability sets, study their build, and refer to damage recap if you just have no clue what damage type or types they're doing. In cases where you see True Damage, there's only really two decent options. If you're a tank, and the opponent does true damage with Autos and is AD (Vayne, Camille, Yi, etc.), you have two options: Build tons of health, or build thornmail / frozenheart, based on whether or not the true damage is % health based or not. If it is, then just go for thornmail / frozen heart; if it isn't, consider doing one or both. In the case of a singular ability that deals True Damage (Cho'gath, Syndra, Ahri, etc.), definitely stack health, or if you're a mage, you could consider Zhonya's to initally prevent the True Damage and then hope for your team to come help you out if you can't take them from there.

I hope for every player out there, that this post accurately explains when and why you should build resistances, and to perhaps maybe look at the death recap more often to understand what you should.

Now, go forth and dominate the Rift, your local bridge, or spooky woods, and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors!

• Queen of Heals

[slayer-jinx-wink]