Why is it that buying resistances on Squishy Champions feels useless?

BLIGHTBRINGER·Oct 19, 2018·11 votes·8,329 views

There is this thing apparently called Effective Health...

(Have a read about it)

http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Armor http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_resistance

Apparently Resistances Stacking has not much of an effect if you don't have extra Health to go with it, which is why only Tanks benefit so much from it. Or at least that's the idea I got from all this. If I am wrong, do not hesitate to correct me, I seem to have the tendency of getting things wrong lately.

36 Comments

OleandervineOct 19, 201813 votes

That's correct. If you don't have the bulk to survive the damage after it's mitigated, it's useless to try mitigating it.

For instance, let's do an example.

You are Mage Minion. You have 100 HP. You buy a Minion Cloak that gives you 10 MR. For the purposes of this example, let's say 1 MR will reduce damage by 1. Therefore, you will take 10 less damage from Magic Attacks. Let's say Annie is about to fireball you. Her fireball will deal 90 damage. You'll mitigate 10 of it. You'll take 80 damage, being left with 20 HP. She can auto attack you and kill you easily.

Now you're Cannon Minion. You have 200 HP. You buy a Minion Cloak that gives you 10 MR. Annie turns to you to shoot a fireball. It will deal 90 damage. You will mitigate 10 of it. You'll take 80 damage, being left with 120 HP. She will not only need to fireball you at least 2 more times, but she can't simply kill you with auto attacks unless you take significantly more damage.

As you can see, HP goes a LONG way towards making your resistances mean something. Mitigating damage if you have super low HP to begin with might prevent you from being obliterated on the spot, but it doesn't leave you in a good state after you've survived, and you'll easily be killed by a follow up. Mitigating damage with high HP will prevent you from dying, and it will also prevent you from dying to follow up attacks, because they have to take more efforts to cleave through your HP.

epic style broOct 19, 20182 votes

cannon minions don't have 200 hp

OleandervineOct 19, 201811 votes

[{quoted}](name=epic style bro,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=KImFnAOf,comment-id=00000000,timestamp=2018-10-19T15:49:11.385+0000)

cannon minions don't have 200 hp

That's irrelevant.

BLIGHTBRINGEROct 19, 20181 votes

He did just say that as an example.

StrawberrycocoaOct 19, 20181 votes

It's just an analogy to help explain the principles behind damage mitigation.

Hayaishi2Oct 19, 201811 votes

{quoted}

That's correct. If you don't have the bulk to survive the damage after it's mitigated, it's useless to try mitigating it.

For instance, let's do an example.

You are Mage Minion. You have 100 HP. You buy a Minion Cloak that gives you 10 MR. For the purposes of this example, let's say 1 MR will reduce damage by 1. Therefore, you will take 10 less damage from Magic Attacks. Let's say Annie is about to fireball you. Her fireball will deal 90 damage. You'll mitigate 10 of it. You'll take 80 damage, being left with 20 HP. She can auto attack you and kill you easily.

Now you're Cannon Minion. You have 200 HP. You buy a Minion Cloak that gives you 10 MR. Annie turns to you to shoot a fireball. It will deal 90 damage. You will mitigate 10 of it. You'll take 80 damage, being left with 120 HP. She will not only need to fireball you at least 2 more times, but she can't simply kill you with auto attacks unless you take significantly more damage.

As you can see, HP goes a LONG way towards making your resistances mean something. Mitigating damage if you have super low HP to begin with might prevent you from being obliterated on the spot, but it doesn't leave you in a good state after you've survived, and you'll easily be killed by a follow up. Mitigating damage with high HP will prevent you from dying, and it will also prevent you from dying to follow up attacks, because they have to take more efforts to cleave through your HP.

This is why i roll my eyes when anyone says "just buy armor against the fed zed" as ADC

BLIGHTBRINGEROct 19, 20183 votes

Legit what's the counterplay to things like this lmao

RalanrOct 19, 20182 votes

Some armor helps, but unless you’re stacking HP with a lot of armor then it’s not going to make you effectively durable. It’s basically just cutting down the immediate damage.

saltranOct 19, 20182 votes

Your support is the counterplay to Zed, playing with a duo supp has made me complain way less about assasins and realize that majority of the times I die is my fault for being out of position.

Bob the ToastrOct 20, 20182 votes

That's a decent example, but that's not quite how effective health works. (get ready for a bit of math)

Effective health (for a certain damage type) is created by multiplying your health by (1+(resistance/100)) So, for example, if you have 1000 health and 50 armor, then your effective health for physical damage is 1500. Your enemy needs to deal 1500 damage (before resistances) to kill you.

You can then figure out what percentage of damage you resist by dividing your base health by your effective health, then subtracting from 1 ex. 1000 base divided by 1500 effective, means you take 67% of damage, which means you resist 33% of damage.

I'll throw in another example to show why you need a combo of health and resistances, not just one or the other.

Say you currently have 1000 health and 300 armor (4000 effective). You need to choose between getting 1000 more health or 100 more armor (assume same price) If you get the health, you will have 8000 effective health. If you get the armor, you will have 5000 effective health.

Now, let's try if you have 4000 health and 0 armor (4000 effective). Same choice If you get the health, you'll have 5000 effective health. If you get the armor, you'll have 8000 effective health.

As you can see, the better purchase depends on your current stats, and you need a mix of both resistances and health to survive.

Granted, this gets more complicated with resistance shreds, lethality and magic pen, percent damage reduction, regen, true damage, grievous wounds, heals, itemizing against both magic and physical, etc. but you can still see that you need a mix of resistances and health to be an effective tank.

AlzonOct 20, 20182 votes

^knowing and applying this is how I got out of Silver, back in S6.

LilxPaprikaOct 19, 20187 votes

Because the Devs haven't implemented this idea yet. Give it more upvotes. https://docdro.id/qG5Y6Ka This could give glass cannons ability to be a bit like fighters if they wanted to. But not more. It might give ADCs like 3 AS from going ninja tabis etc. Enough that the end result does not effect their win rate as much as their build options. This is abou allowing for players to play heroes at a play style that suits them. May e ud be a Lucian main if you felt better playing as him with a more fighter style

I'd rather have more subtle ways to play a hero than more heroes Already have a big champion pool. This way u'd have less need to learn massive pool of heroes.

BLIGHTBRINGEROct 19, 20181 votes

Interesting.

LilxPaprikaOct 24, 20181 votes

thanks hey I've made a revision see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/9r4bl2/feature_idea_merchants_value_to_offer_better/

BobaFlautistOct 19, 20184 votes

This is super super wrong.

I mean the mechanics of effective health are obviously valid and important, but if a mage is stacking flat pen or an assassin is stacking lethality (which is the biggest cause of insanely fast 1-shots, 'cause it gives them ridiculously efficient damage amps against squishies), one solid resistance item is a huge fucking deal.

Grabbing like a frozen heart or ninja tabi or QSS or a Spirit Visage or even just like item 1031 item 1057 makes it so so much harder for that assassin to delete you in your team or that mage to kill you from 1k distance with QW. It won't save you from a full rotation necessarily, but it makes them commit and land their shit to finish you, which gives you and your team a chance to react.

KirbyCakeOct 19, 20184 votes

Depends on how you mean by stacking and what is efficiency. If you build 50 mr, then want to build another 50 mr, the second 50 mr is no less effective than the first 50 mr in terms of absolute value so I don't understand what you mean by stacking resistances is useless.

If you have 100 health and 0 mr, 50 mr will give you 150 effective health, or 50 effective health. The second 50 mr will bring you to 200 effective health, or another 50 effective health. Your effective health gain is the same in both cases. However as a % then the first 50 mr gets you 50% more survivability and the second 50 mr gives you only 33%. It is true that the % is what matters here though.

This is really no different than an ad champion with 100 ad buying 50 ad, then buying another 50 ad on top of that, it's not specific to resistances.

There is a fundamental different between ad, armor, ap, and mr the way it is designed in league that is highly flawed and explains the insane inbalance between ap, ad, and defenses.

Armor scales to nearly 100 at lvl 18 on every champion, making building armor less effective in terms of a % as the game goes on.
Many champions have around 30 base MR that does not scale, or if it does scale it's still nowhere near as armor. Building MR is always effective in terms of %, and highly effective late game.
AP item's scale linearly, and MR far outpaces the damage of ap champions throughout the game. Buying resistances scales linearly as well, and currently takes most mages around twice the amount to negate a single defensive item. Basically if you invest 1k into pure MR then a mage will need to have 2k to negate that. CDR does increase damage but ap and ad playstyles are inherently different anyways. AP champions burst and then run away because they are unable to do damage in that time frame while ad champions can always fight. CDR does not increase that burst during the window of fighting so it doesn't really scale with damage that much. So pretty much mages scale linearly unless they are a machine gun mage ( which are pretty much the only viable ap carries )
AD item's scale with multiple variables that increase dps, and outpaces armor as the game goes on. AD champions that multiple stats that increase dps, attack speed, ad, and crit. Armor is still effective early in the game since your base armor is still lower and ad items have not scaled yet.

Rushing a hex drinker as an ad champion has the same effectiveness throughout the game, and it is highly effective when you first buy it. Given that MR is twice as efficient as ap, buying MR gives you a lead that never falls off as the game goes on. This is why any ad champion should rush this or cowl against an ap laner. Rushing an armor item is highly effective at the start, but slowly drops off as the game goes on. This is why you should only buy armor if you truly need it to survive laning phase. Riot pushing for 1 item ad powerspikes is why most mages are just garbage right now.

There really needs to be a massive overhaul of the system to be closer to what dawngate has, which is far more balanced.

Tahminatrix Oct 19, 20182 votes

Resistances on squishy champions are only good against lethality/magic pen users (Champs with high base damage and low scaling/reliant on bursting)

And even then, you are only supposed to allocated a tiny bit into resistances , (like hourglass)

This is because if the enemy has enough lethality compared to your armor, they will start doing amplified damage rather than you having around 30% dmg reduction, that's the only thing you are trying to prevent, and even then it cant work on its own, you still have to avoid what you can and throw something back.

And ofcourse, this wont do diddly squat against fed champions who probably already finished all their penetration items and are several levels above you.

BLIGHTBRINGEROct 19, 20181 votes

Also stacking armor items is also as specially useless when X Assassin has Black Cleaver item 3071

DerMangoJoghurtOct 19, 20182 votes

Apparently Resistances Stacking has not much of an effect if you don't have extra Health to go with it

Not really. Let's just do the math.

As a starting value, let's assume you have 60 armor by default. (I've chosen Ashe lvl 11 for this example) All incoming physical damage is reduced by 37.5%. If you buy a chain vest you'll hit 100 armor. All incoming physical damage is reduced by 50%. That allows you to survive 25% longer than without the chain vest, which is why it's comparable to having 25% health more. (Assuming the incoming dps is consistent)

Let's compare that to buying a Kindlegem which has the same gold costs. Ashe lvl 11 has 1389 health. Buying a kindlegem gives you 200 health more. This increased your health by 14.4%, which means you survive 14.4% longer.

You get more effective health from buying armor than health. However, health has the advantage of working against magic and physical damage. For a kindlegem to become more valuable in this example you'd need to have 177 armor.

which is why only Tanks benefit so much from it

It's actually the other way round. Tanks don't benefit from buying health as much since their health pools are already quite big. If you have 3000 health and 200 armor a kindle gem will let you live 6.7% longer, while a chain vest will let you live 13.3% longer.

BLIGHTBRINGEROct 19, 20181 votes

Honestly just looking at everyone's comments it makes me a little confused all around.

Rock MDOct 20, 20182 votes

You're right about that, but there's also another thing that you have to consider

Tanky champions are melee. Squishies are generally ranged. Ranged champions have lower base stats at all points.

Beside that, sometimes the player who buys defenses on a squishy is positioning to take tons of free damage because they underestimate the opposing champion. They think, "oh I take no damage I'll be fine." and then get chunked multiple times because they think their null magic mantle is going to half all incoming damage when in reality it only provides ~15% damage reduction.

Elite4RunnerOct 19, 20181 votes

This is mostly true.

The exception to this is that Effective Health can be generated through Lifesteal / Spell Vamp (or what remains of spell vamp), Health Regeneration / Healing, and "Health Shields"

HP CrookshanksOct 19, 20181 votes

How is item 3155 useless?

OleandervineOct 19, 20181 votes

[{quoted}](name=HP Crookshanks,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=KImFnAOf,comment-id=0004,timestamp=2018-10-19T16:14:38.886+0000)

How is useless?

It's generally not going to keep you in a healthy place after you survive an attack because your overall HP isn't enough to make the HP you have remaining be significant enough to matter. It might allow you to survive a rotation, but you're going to need to run pretty much immediately because you're going to be useless. So in the sense that you're still going to have to remove yourself from your lane (and lose CS and experience), it's not terribly much better than dying. The only thing it has going for it is the shield and the lifesteal when you hit the lifeline trigger, that can keep you alive a little longer and allow you to recover a bit.

BLIGHTBRINGEROct 19, 20181 votes

I never said it was, I said stacking resistances is useless.

That defensive item is the best one out of all items honestly because once you have Maw, it grants a 350 health shield equivalent to Morgana's E shield value (at max rank).

An item like Zhonia's is just becoming useless in most situations now since you just open yourself as a free target, when the stasis effect ends.

Somebody Love MeOct 19, 20181 votes

[{quoted}](name=HP Crookshanks,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=KImFnAOf,comment-id=0004,timestamp=2018-10-19T16:14:38.886+0000)

How is useless?

It's a combination of the resistances and shield that make the item strong, considering the nature of makes in the lane phase. Without the shield, it feels like seekers does on mages.

PandaNator43Oct 19, 20181 votes

Apparently Resistances Stacking has not much of an effect if you don't have extra Health to go with it, which is why only Tanks benefit so much from it.

Mostly correct, I'd add that its more that tank items add both health and resistance. So tanks get tanky more from the the items system than actual champion design.

For example, Cait and Ornn have essentially the same base max HP at level 18, Cait -> 2028, Ornn -> 2096.

As far as it feeling useless, its situational.

As an adc, if the enemy is all burst, and you survive it, then you do infinitely more damage since you aren't dead. But if the enemy is more sustained damage, then a little more resistance/health might only allow you to get 1-2 more AA off, which is negligible.

Also, building Black Cleaver and/or Frozen mallet gives you a lot of health, making any resistances you buy more valuable. I'll sometimes do that as Lucian-mid if my teammates have a lot of damage and are ahead.

There are mage items that give a lot of HP as well.

So building one or more HP damage items ( item 3071 , item 3022 , item 3027 , item 3151 , item 3116 ) plus resistance boots ( item 3111 or item 3047 ) and just a single resistance item ( item 3143 , item 3065 ) can make a big difference in the right situations. But there are times when that's bad (or straight up wrong) too, i.e. when you are the teams only damage source, or if the enemy team can get a bunch of sustained damage (ADC) on you, or if the enemy burst is so fed it can pop you anyway.

BLIGHTBRINGEROct 19, 20182 votes

It just annoys the hell out of me that almost all Assassin's can get away with building full damage, full penetration build because they have mobility/dashes to allow them to easily get away. While if you build a couple of Resistance items you still will die because almost every item they buy either ignores/reduces your armor, magic penetration.

This one game I bought a Frozen Mallet and Ninja Tabbies + Guardian Angel and I still kept getting one shot by a Zed who wasn't even Fed or any other AD on that team (check my match-history).

PandaNator43Oct 19, 20181 votes

Yeah Zed has a ton of burst, maybe the most in the game. If you have no mobility to dodge, or no peel on your team he is really tough to handle.

Pika FoxOct 19, 20181 votes

Resistance stacking without HP doesnt do a ton, and champions designed to be tanky have abilities/passives that massively boost their ehp.

Buying something defensive on squishies can still be worth it though. You dont need to be tanky, just survive 1 exrltra hit, even if its by 1 hp. Thats all you should need.

StrawberrycocoaOct 19, 20181 votes

It's also why you'll more commonly see ADCs buy Guardian Angel and Mages buy Zhonyas. Reversing or Preventing the kill is generally more effective for them than trying to build durability and losing out on their damage as a result.

fjZBSPlQ9bOct 19, 20181 votes

Buying resistances on Tanky champions feels equally as useless.

ThefrostyvikingOct 19, 20181 votes

While its true that you need health to truly become tanky in addition to resistances its also true that just having some resistance is much better than none.

What flat penetration does is just lower you resistance 1 for 1, and many can stack like 30-40 of it which is really bad news for a squishy carry that only has around 30-50 resistance.

That means the penetration user will almost or really do true damage which is a devastating advantage for them, thus as a squishy you absolutely must gain some resistance just to prevent that.

Just having 100 armor or MR after enemy resistance shredding is done means you take 50% less damage, of course they might have a lot of it so you might just end up with 50-60 as a squishy even if you commit and buy a fair lot of it.

But that still like 40% damage reduction which is priceless.

9NINEOct 20, 20181 votes

true dmg, % health dmg, and etc

ZerenzaOct 20, 20181 votes

I will say this, i agree you are absolutely correct there are a few things to keep in mind though.

Caitlynn has 34.5 MR at Level 9

If we say Evelynn has Oblivion Orb, Sorc Shoes and Sudden Impact that means she'll have 38 Magic Penetration. This means that if Evelynn Attacks Caitlynn her MR will be 0 so you'll be taking true damage.

In this situation and any situation VS an assassin as a Squishy champion, you should ALWAYS buy atleast one resistance item, this way your never put at or under the 0 marker and you won't take true or bonus damage, this is also the reason you see many player's despite not buying any health items going for items such as Hexdrinker, Mercurial Scimitar, Banshee's Veil or Zhonya's Hourglass. The resistances make a gigantic difference, especially the later you go into the game, most assassins fall off and if you make it past that point and you've already got your resistance item you have a much higher chance of not dying to them and winning the game.