Phantom Dancer and Death's Dance

FantasySniper·Sep 10, 2016·2 votes·602 views

Why not name their damage reduction passives the same to prevent from stacking?

I mean, if anything, the name "Lament" would make more sense on Death's Dance.

7 Comments

SlythionSep 10, 20163 votes

They have entirely different passives...

item 3046 has the passive you are talking about where it causes damage reduction

item 3812 has a passive that converts damage taken into a bleed, but you still take the full damage just over an extended amount of time

FantasySniperSep 10, 20161 votes

Yeah, but that much percentage reduction is a big deal. Champs like Yi and Graves used to abuse the hell out of it.

SlythionSep 10, 20162 votes

but death's dance doesn't have a damage reduction passive

How are we supposed to name them the same thing when they have nothing in common?

FantasySniperSep 10, 20161 votes

It is damage reduction. It reduces initial damage. Even if it delayed 100% damage and let it burn over the next whole second, it's still a reduction of what you took in the meantime.

SlythionSep 10, 20162 votes

I'd call it a damage delayer more than a damage reduction because overall you still take the same amount of damage

but that's beside the point, they are both clearly different passives so how would we call them the same thing?

FantasySniperSep 10, 20161 votes

They fulfill similar niches of burst reduction coupled with offensive benefits - but for different roles. You could say that Death's Dance does its niche of burst reduction less reliably because it delays the damage over the next 3 seconds instead of removing it completely, but coupled with sustain that could cancel out even more damage than was delayed, the end result is the same as Phantom Dancer. Different methods, relatively same results. In essence the difference between them is that Death's Dance is risk/reward and Phantom Dancer simply reduces risk. If you take both items at the same time, that causes an unintended loophole where you mitigate the risk that comes with DD by having the risk reduction from PD. Not only are their passives synergistic, but also their stats, which makes the combination very appealing, heavily increasing the overlap between the niches when they're supposed to be used by entirely different roles. This is what happened when they received buffs within close proximity of one another, and champions that previously used only one or the other ended up combining both, or if they already used both, they received indirect buffs that were later addressed through the nerfs to duelers becoming tanks; Fiora, Yi, and Graves. I'm not going to pretend that they wouldn't still get nerfed if the passives couldn't be stacked from the very beginning, but Graves is the only one to still use the combination frequently and is the only one left with a significant win and pick rate.

TL;DR They have similar niches, so making them less synergistic with each other would be an effective nerf that could make both items healthier by reducing the overlap, thus making their overlapping target audience healthier.

(I'm sorry if it feels like I'm avoiding the question, but it's hard to describe a "similar, but different, yet still similar" concept like this)

AvienalSep 10, 20161 votes

{quoted}

Why not name their damage reduction passives the same to prevent from stacking?

I mean, if anything, the name "Lament" would make more sense on Death's Dance.

Very sure mechanic wise they work completely different where one requires ya to 'be in a fight with a enemy champion aka get hit by them and long as too much time has not passed and you weren't fighting with them to have the damage reduction to even stay online with that one particular enemy.' While the other one simply redistributes part of the damage you take into a slow burn over time damage.

(Course i guess when you think of it, Phantom Dancer's damage reduction 'might not' make it so effective against multiple enemies, unless the damage reduction procs on the first hit before starting to reduce damage from sub'sequent hits from that particular enemy champion. Because if it can constantly change if different enemy champions hit you, then that could make it annoying to make use of).

Either way its not exactly something i would see people building both items together that often, till its discovered they create a exploitive combo measure of cheating. Especially since the latter demands you need to build a good sum of life steal to not get killed by the 'self damage over time distribution after a trade'.

Though the concept of them creating measures to limit out particular unique abilities in a 'family' of abilities so they can't stack each other just like how you can't really stack particular abilities like spellblade so you can't pull something ridiculous like Jax stacking a large number of Trinity forces and result in some insane multi proc super damage shenan'igans.

Who knows it could be even used as another 'possible' measure to remove some retarded niche building or even go as far to 'restrict' how many particular unique abilities in a certain 'family' you can build before you are locked from being able to build another one of those items or even have its unique disabled. Might end up ruining some builds if they go a little too far but at the very least if they get creative with it, then they could keep hyper tank, hyper attack speed or even hyper on hit builds more in check so people have to think a little more smart and be more flexible in creating interesting builds, like taking advantage of the other tank items then just sunfire cape, spirit visage and deadman's plate for the most part.

[slayer-jinx-catface]