The base expectations for classes REQUIRE tanks to be unsatisfying to play

BobaFlautist··52 votes·3,108 views

Marksmen: Do nothing (mostly) but ranged dps, need to position far from enemy carries, can often only hit tanks - they absolutely have to be able to shred tanks or they're pretty much unplayable when they're tuned right (which they aren't right now).

Skirmishers: Squishy melee dps champions. Specifically designed with the intention of being able to melt any class, basically unplayable if they can't shred through tanks quickly because against coordinates play tanks are all they can hit.

Juggernauts: Low mobility sustained burst, have no way past he frontline, are designed around the assumption that they can burst through durability.l, otherwise they are useless. Their fucking core item as a class makes tanks less tanky

DPS Mages: this isn't really a unified class under riot's terms, but champs like Cass and Karthus and Zyra are designed to have mediocre to poor backline access, no defensive tools, and backloaded damage, which means, once again, they have to be able to melt through tanks to be playable. They were actually so overtuned against tanks that riot gave tanks an item specifically to counter them (instead of just returning the interaction, because riot) but then made it garbage (again: because riot).

That right there is four classes which BY DESIGN, without anything else, as just part of the fundamental assumptions integral to their design, HAVE to do be able to kill tanks quickly, when the whole point of playing a tank is that you want to live for a long time.

That's not counting divers, which also love black cleaver, for some reason often get attack-speed steroids and heavy repeating damage and have to by their nature be durable enough to ignore a tank's damage, burst mages which can't easily kill a tank on their own but can heavily chunk them, and supports whose need to be effective enough to protect their adcs from skirmishers and divers, and therefore just sort of automatically remove the possibility of an adc ever being affected by a tank in any way whatsoever in the late game.

Seeing as riot has decided that tanks should never be able to duel or waveclear, eliminating them from the toplane, and that they shouldn't have meaningfully clearapeeda or jungle sustain (except Zac and Sejuani) making the jungle feel like shit for them, I'm at a loss as to when Riot wants tanks to feel like they're actually doing something.

And no, band-aid fixes like item 3193 really don't cut it.

125 Comments

Teridax6831 votes

I think the issue here isn't so much that all of these classes need to kill tanks quickly, so much as it is that many of these classes need to kill tanks quickly... or else they die before being able to contribute. Skirmishers especially are squishy frontliners with situational defenses who will die the moment they're locked down and focused in a teamfight, and both juggernauts and battle mages, who can only become as tanky as tanks (they're usually squishier) will also die quickly when tanks get shredded. The one outlier here is marksmen, who can more or less spend all the time they want shooting enemies from a distance when protected adequately.

The thing is, tanks dying too quickly is a problem pretty specific to League at this point. Games like HotS, Smite and Dota 2 have tremendously durable tanks, while also having viable equivalents to melee carries, juggernauts and DPS mages on the side at all levels of play. Part of the reason why they succeed is because front lines tend to be a little more porous (most players have a chance of affecting the back line if they play their cards right), but also because the overall amount of damage in the game is at a level where players can fight tanks, take a bit of heat, and still survive for long enough to make an impact in combat, unless they mess up spectacularly. By contrast, damage in League is so high that most champions effectively cannot survive long enough to operate at a natural pace, which is why light fighters, who are supposed to expose themselves to their enemies, only work when they can burst down the back line while avoiding most of their damage.

Because of this, I think part of the solution should be to actually tone down damage overall, or at least prevent champions from snowballing too quickly to a point where their damage becomes excessive. Creating a front line where champions, including members of squishier classes, can operate without needing either excessive burst or too many defenses, would allow tanks to be tankier without shutting down their targets altogether. I get that it's imperative to avoid noodle fights, but we're way past that stage at this point, especially when most new releases are given some form of innate anti-tank damage.

Stars Shaper10 votes

Imo this is an issue that popped out the moment life steal and self sustain became a spread and powerful thing.

That is the point when burst damage had to become "oneshotting" because the level of self heals became so high that anything that survived longer than 2 seconds after a burst came back in the fight with all the hp/defenses needed to kill who had fewer than this (which usually are the mages) GW didn't help either as the only item capable of applying it without bringing the enemies in a near death state is an AD item.

Teridax6816 votes

I completely agree, one of the reasons why damage is so high overall right now is because life steal itself is so powerful that its users either die near-instantly, or out-heal the weaker follow-up damage that gets thrown at them, so damage needs to be adjusted so that the first outcome happens more often. High life steal also means marksmen and light fighters end up with extremely high DPS (which is why it's often in burst-per-second territory now), and the end result is an environment where the outcome of a fight is more or less determined within the first few seconds, and is often heavily dependent on stats rather than outplays, which doesn't benefit anyone and is the reason why entire classes feel out of whack right now.

I think the motive behind increasing damage and weakening tanks has been to increase the pace of matches, but while they've been ending faster overall, the game's pacing often feels unnatural, and too snowbally for one side to enjoy it. I also don't think it's worth sacrificing the fantasies of entire classes, as games like HotS and Smite have even shorter average game lengths while still having tanky tanks. If League is to increase its pace, it's going to have to do so through deeper structural changes, rather than "quick fixes" to key numbers that achieve the intended goal at far too high a cost.

Stars Shaper4 votes

The thing is that you can increase the pace of the game by letting ppl in a "wounded state" without them having to recall asap because anything can instakill them the moment they drop under 80% hp.

You used HotS as an example of a good state of damage and I agree a lot with this, game lenghts anyway aren't just defined by this: Bringing, lets call it, the "HotS HP/damage ratio" to LoL would be a huge improvement imo because what's making HotS matches short is just the map size.

HotS maps are like 1/3 of Summoner's Rift and thus any objective becomes a huge factor, not to mention that those maps also have a lot of things speeding the game up (think about having Rift heralds on a 2/3 min CD from the begin of the match).

lofi n chillhop2 votes

^ this this this. League games are naturally long because of their map layout, the importance of summoner spells for playmaking, and the timing and cooldown of jung objectives. before you factor in damage. the burstier affect of league is almost necessary to make its pacing interesting - if it had hots type of damage, a fight would breakout at first dragon, last long enough for baron to spawn, and still be happening by the time we've reached an hour's time frame. in order to remove the burstiness of league, and snowballing level, we'd have to fundamentally re-imagine the entire game. it's a necessary outcome of the many factors that lead up to it.

I'd certainly be interested in the game gaining a faster, more even pace. longer, more durable fights. but to accomplish this is no simple fix - and requires systematic adjustments to all aspects of league. without losing what makes league feel like league - flashy fights, baron, and 20+ minute games.

Sahn Uzal4 votes

Man, your suggestions make so much sense it makes me sad they're not a reality.

CasterGilgamesh7 votes

i love your suggestion would love if league had a global damage nerf to every high damage class

ZT Xperimentor1 votes

The classes he listed are all high damage, more dangerous to eachother than any tank.

BobaFlautist3 votes

In theory, you're right.

In practice, the play patterns of tanks require them to allow themselves to be vulnerable to all and any damage the enemy team cares to throw their way for extended periods of time.

I remember when I joined, in season 2, the general fight pattern for an engage tank was to dive into the enemy team, then sit as close to the enemy squishiest as possible, using your abilities on cooldown. If you died early or got cc-locked, then you probably won the fight, because the enemy team wasted too much damage on you.

Now the play pattern is to dive in, frantically trying to get off your rotation while being chain-cced, then flash out and wait for cooldowns because you'll die before they come up otherwise, then dive in a second time and probably die.

The prevailing philosophy (among pros and high level players too, not just my shit-tier games) was that thornmail and GA, while powerful, were poor purchases as they discouraged focus and you wanted to be focused.

Then I remember when thornmail was nerfed because tanks were buying it to discourage the adc from just autoing them down when they fought (which Randuins used to prevent) and riot wanted ADCs to be able to safely auto tanks. That's why the slow was taken off tonight passive, randuins and frozen heart have repeatedly had their attack speed slow nerfed, and ga was changed to make it much weaker on tanks. Tanks were so desperate for late game durability, they were buying ga.

I also remember that riot tried to balance tanks around the time of the game when they're supposed to "Come online". First the idea was that they are strong mid and late game, because if they were actually tank in the laning phase it wouldn't be fair to players that wanted to kill them. That's why they eventually got balanced around hiding and waveclearing instead of actually fighting, because it was deemed unfair for them to be hard to kill when laning.

Then it got deemed bad that they were able to survive so long in the late game, because it made games too slow and besides ADCs had been patiently waiting all game to be strong and it wasn't fair for it to be hard for them to kill a champion with five armor items and a kit designed to make them hard for ADCs to kill without doing much else.

Then it got deemed unfair that they were using their waveclear base damages to actually fight people in the midgame, because a tank focused around the midgame shouldn't be able to dual an adc based around the late game in the midgame, especially when the ADCs team tried to dump damage on them instead of using cc to peel and got upset when they could burst the tank. So their damage got nerfed, and their midgame tankiness got gutted in favor of making them much tankier late game when all the damage threats that shred through any amount of tankiness are present and fully scaled.

Since tanks had no ability to fight people early or midgame, they started building double dorans so that their weakened waveclear could actually work and sitting under their tower, only sticking their heads out to delete waves. The dorans also helped with their shit-tier Mana sustain. Unfortunately, that was "uninteractive" because a class that was tuned for seasons and seasons to be unable to actually fight people was refusing to actually fight people so champions like Darius and riven and renekton weren't able to get the 3 free early kills necessary snowball a win against a tank top. So dorans were nerfed.

Now tanks are just kinda accepting that they will be low-income adc-bitches like the support of old and buying support items so that they can maintain their 48% winrates. And we'll all know that riot will respond by being support items, because tanks aren't supposed to do anything beyond engage and immediately die or peel for ADCs.

Big Lincoln20 votes

i don't see why marksmen should innately be allowed to wreck tanks

also that riot has homogenized tanks to a great degree

BobaFlautist6 votes

[{quoted}](name=Big Lincoln,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=OcyvEi0W,comment-id=0002,timestamp=2017-07-06T22:50:56.461+0000)

i don't see why marksmen should innately be allowed to wreck tanks

also that riot has homogenized tanks to a great degree

  • deleting previous explanation because it made no sense *

I agree. However, the basic concept of marksmen that riot has pushed is a late-game scaling low-defense class with target-agnostic damage.

Their supposed to do a lot of damage to everything they can hit, without bursting too hard or being hard to kill.

Also, I'm not actually complaining about any of these classes being able to "wreck" tanks, persay. They just absolutely need to be able to kill them in a reasonable time frame, given their base assumptions. When you have multiple classes that need to be able to kill a tank in a reasonable time frame, and you have more than one in a given teamfight (which isn't always the case) tanks feel really really shitty.

MonkeyMadness3 votes

without bursting too hard

Draven laughs

AirKingNeo2 votes

i don't see why marksmen should innately be allowed to wreck tanks

Because then no one would.

Big Lincoln14 votes

hello can I introduce you to juggernaut master race?

Hawkefire7 votes

Frankly I view juggernauts as the only (successful) melee carry to exist in league. So naturally they should counter the hell out of tanks. I also don't really have much of a problem when either of these 2 classes wreck tanks (granted they do tend to wreck them a bit too fast for my liking, but I digress). The real crux of the problem isn't that juggernauts and adcs counter tanks, it is that basically every single class has an extremely strong and effective answer to tanks (as the OP pointed out). Not only that, but all these classes seem to require that level of power to even function with a modicum of success (or at least, it seems that Riot believes that they do, whether they actually require that capability is highly suspect imho).

Partholonian2 votes

Assassins shouldn't have any answer to tanks except "try to catch someone squishier and kill them before the tank can interfere". If an assassin blows their combo on a tank they deserve to be useless for the rest of the fight and/or die.

Ditto assassin-mages and burst-combo mages like Veigar and Syndra, and probably burst fighters like Riven and Kha'zix.

"You picked the wrong person to throw all your burst at" should totally be a thing that can cost you a teamfight, and tanks should be that wrong person.

TEKadeo19 votes

Been struggling with this a lot recently as a Sejuani OTP. I do not like her kit nearly as much anymore and the tank-suck meta is only making it worse. LAtely I have been building AD items (Titanic, TriForce, etc) just to feel relevant. Building tanky means nothing these days. You are either ahead and dominate, or behind and have zero chance...so the only option is to get ahead early (thus the early Hydra).

I hate it because I used to be able to build tanky and even if my team was behind my tankiness and AoE stun could win fights. Now building tanky feels like shit and her ult is fucking awful. Her ideal play is to force the 4 autos and get the E stun, break it, Ult and break again. Therefore your best play takes quite a long time (by league standards) to make happen. Feels horrible, honestly.

I Main Swain2 votes

i gotta say i feel like im relevant as her even without any damage items beyond frozen gauntlet but i agree completely on the ult, its extremely unsatisfying. i sorta understand why they did it, before it was hard to do anything about her ult whereas now you can body block it, but its just so unsatisfying.

TEKadeo4 votes

But that was just it: you traded having a good early game and decent clear speed/dueling power for the sweet late game and team fight. Now she is great in skirmishes and well below average in team fights. Also still not amazing early, will get beaten like a drum by many meta junglers.

I Main Swain1 votes

yeah exactly, i dont like that shes not really a teamfighting goddess now like she used to be, now shes more of a catch-them-out kind of tank. i like the new kit in a lot of ways, primarily the fact that her early game is a lot easier in mana, jungle clear, and in some ways with the ganks too, but they made a lot of sacrifices to her core identity to give her that. honestly im not really sure why they felt like she needed reworked, her kit was fine, only problem there ever was was with numbers

LankPants3 votes

primarily the fact that her early game is a lot easier in mana

How? You need to use W to clear any camp except buffs or Gromp in a reasonable timeframe and that spell has an 80 mana cost. Old Sejuani could just use W to clear with it's 40-20 mana cost. New Sej uses way more mana and has huge mana issues as the game goes on. I never feel like I can give away my second blue anymore because I need it just to sustain myself through jungle.

honestly im not really sure why they felt like she needed reworked, her kit was fine, only problem there ever was was with numbers

This is completely correct and the best thing Riot could do at this point is admit that the whole tank rework was a fuckup and do mass reverts to Sejuani, Zac, Maokai, Rammus, Armour itemisation and GA while pulling Stoneplate from the game.

ESeTyRC1 votes

I had a lot of trouble readjusting to the new Sejuani too.

If you're up for trying recommendations, I recommend taking the Keystone giving 5% bonus max hp w/ other Masteries that benefit armor / mr and hp.

W -> E -> Q for basic spells, but E first for single target damage on Red or Blue

For items, Cinderhulk of your choosing ASAP followed by boots (I usually take Mercs since I need to E every chance I get) and Warmogs. Warmogs activates immediately on purchase for me.

Iceborne Gauntlet after this for the giant AoE slow and CD.

If the match drags on, Abyssal or Spirit, depending on whether you need to worry more about killing enemies or regenerating after a fight. 40% CD either way.

You just have to remember that you do have Warmogs, so sometimes, saving Q to disengage after taking hits for a squishier teammate helps to win prolonged fights.

If ever fighting solo against an enemy, auto -> W -> Q -> auto -> E -> auto -> ult -> auto usually gives enough of a lead to kill the opponent or run away if that fails.

gg gl hf

Edit: Smite + Ghost summoners

I Main Swain1 votes

quick question, are you saying starting ability order w e q or max order? bc i dont really see a reason to max e over q at all. starting abilities i like to start with e just because the stun with the % max health damage is great for taking out that first buff. also i prefer flash over ghost for the flash plays, ive turned a lot of teamfights and lanes and even games around with a well timed and placed flash on sej.

but anyways though, i dont think what he means is so much that shes really bad right now as it is that her core identity she had as a teamfighting goddess is just gone because they took away the aoe slow and the team stun on her ult. i still love playing her but its just so much less satisfying and less rewarding.

ESeTyRC2 votes

E is more important than Q because E increases her stun duration and gives you more time to arrive at each target in teamfights for the max hp% proc (or more time for your allies to kill them).

Maxing E second has other benefits too, but the stun duration is definitely the biggest one. It's the only way to make up for losing the AoE stun on her ult.

If you're not comfortable with taking my word for it, I noticed that the Champion Analytics page on op.gg for Sejuani already lists what I did, so you could try checking that out too for data.

I Main Swain1 votes

alright ill have to check it out, like i said earlier i only just got back into league so idk all the changes that have happened with my ol kiddos

BobaFlautist17 votes

OP was already too long and poorly organized, but here are some more thoughts in no particular order:

  • Riot has made it clear that they don't want tanks to be propped up by consistent low-cost play cc like malph, amumu, and old sej ulties. This sounds great until you realize that that means they want engage to be consistently negated at high levels of play by Thresh Flay or Janna Q (in the case of champs like Amumu or Zac) or body blocking/sidestepping (in the case of champs like Sion or Sejuani) there is no counter counterplay against this, you just never get to hit a competent backline.

  • Tying into supports, Riot wants supports to be just as impactful as everyone else, but not have "selfish power) such as damage or tank stats. This means that adcs will never have to even acknowledge a tank's damage ever again, as tanks aren't meant to have strong damage and supports basically have to have huge heals and shields.

  • Sion is held up as the ideal tank, but his ability to lane is entirely propped up by his e, a poke-mage ability, and late game he is relegated to ulting in, soaking some ults, and dying; or peeling for his adc.

  • What all this means is that a tank basically gets to do one of two things: Tickle and cc the enemy frontline (other tanks who don't really care or juggernauts who just use you to stack up damage and burst you out) or sit back and peel for your adc, completely wasting your tank stats in favor of being a shittier Janna. Exciting.

RavenMagus5 votes

The problem is, when you have tanks that don't have weak damage, you end up with super cancerous unkillable assassins that jump into the back line and kill enemy squishies while CCing them and tanking the rest of their team.

I think it's hard to have a "tank" class that feels satisfying for both sides, just thanks to their core concepts - "have cc" and "be hard to kill". I can see your points, but the alternatives can be just as bad.

LankPants9 votes

The problem is, when you have tanks that don't have weak damage, you end up with super cancerous unkillable assassins that jump into the back line and kill enemy squishies while CCing them and tanking the rest of their team.

The solution to this is to make everybody tankier off of just base stats and allow Tanks much more extreme tankiness as the game goes on. At this point you can give tanks DPS without them feeling oppressive and create a world where a tank will rend down an ADC over the course of several seconds. It would also allow you to differentiate Assassins and Fighters more by giving Fighters the baseline DPS required to kill a Tank but minimal burst and giving Assassins burst capable of killing a carry but minimal DPS.

Big Lincoln5 votes

i wish everyone was tankier

:^(

chipndip11 votes

So the solution is to go back to the days of "Taric simply walks out of an enemy base with ulties and skill shots pelting his back"?

The real question isn't just "How long should a tank last?". It's "How long should a tank last given he's tanking X amount of people building varying amounts of damage/penetration?" Totally changes the question when you think on it like that.

LankPants3 votes

So the solution is to go back to the days of "Taric simply walks out of an enemy base with ulties and skill shots pelting his back"?

Honestly yes. The game was better then than it is now. Better to go back to that than having the twitch "everyone explodes, even tanks" garbage fest League has become.

Rockm Sockm6 votes

New bramlevest is going to make top a tank only wasteland.

It is also gonna shut down adc draintanking and allow them to be burst.

When tanks are strong, they are oppressive. When they are weak, they become massive c/c bots.

I honestly don't know what the solution is.

LankPants11 votes

I honestly don't know what the solution is.

To stop running in the direction of "tanks shouldn't deal damage" and allow tanks damage to exist on a continuous line between low damage tanks like Braum and Alistar and near bruiser level damage at the high end. Also tanks need to have less CC, recent tanks and reworked tanks have CC on 3 or 4 of their 5 abilities. There was a time when the only tanks who boasted that were Naut and Leona (later Braum and Ali). It makes sense for these low damage/high bulk support tanks to have this much CC, it doesn't make sense for champs like Sejuani, Galio, Poppy and Zac to have CC on almost every ability.

Tanks intended to be played top or jungle need to be allowed to function more like bruisers. They also need itemisation options which don't suck, and I don't think Thornmail will fill this void.

Ralanr2 votes

Though Poppy's W is only useful against mobile champions and her stun is conditional. I think that might be a better start for CC on tanks, conditional or only useful against certain champions (or super telegraphed, like Sion)

Which is why I think we should get at least one tank with grounded CC.

LankPants2 votes

Poppy's still an example of a champ with an absurd amount of CC regardless of how conditional it is and it's part of the reason why she's been an utter pain in the arse to balance.

She has CC on 4 of 5 abilities. Slow on Q, disrupt on W, knockback and stun on E and either a forced Zhonya's or huge knockback on R. I'd say she's probably one of the champions where this problematic trend started, alongside Sion TBH.

It's only getting worse too, Zac had the CC on his Q strengthened, Sej's rework loaded a ton of extra unneeded CC onto her kit, Maokai's CC was megabuffed and even Rammus had a slow added to his R. And yet people wonder why tanks are just buying support items when Riot's insisting on forcing every tank into that design space.

PrinceOfStorms2 votes

It is also gonna shut down adc draintanking and allow them to be burst.

Good ADCs are a design failure.

BobaFlautist5 votes

Oh also Divers suffer a lot from a similar problem: As long as divers can fulfill their job of being sufficiently beefy marksmen and burst mages can't fulfill their role of being sufficiently damaging; and as long as divers can fulfill their job of being sticky and damaging enough supports can't really fulfill their role of having good peel/protection. This particular conundrum has been at the heart of balance since season one, but nobody really knows what to do about it.

Big Lincoln8 votes

divers are just a poor design atm

too specific in what they want to do

AirKingNeo6 votes

If only we had a diver update.

JSTIN810 votes

Yeah, let's give riot another go at ruining tanks/fighters kits and items while buffing ADC items more!

Thilmer4 votes

I have a clear opinion about this issue: Tanks will never be popular as long as Juggernauts exists.

Firstly, Juggernatus are basically "tanks with a ton of damage", a dumb concept that I haven't seen in any other game (for obvious balance reasons).

Who is going to play a Tank, when you can play a Tank that also does high damage? Nobody.

Nik Nikerson6 votes

I prefer several tanks over juggernauts. I mean, I'll play both, but honestly I prefer Nautilus to Darius. I guess I'm the guy that prefers making big plays setting up my teammates.

This is also probably why I play support as well.

CasterGilgamesh2 votes

Juggernauts have almost no CC in their kit you would need a CC heavy mid and support to justify having a juggernaut also Tanks are always going to be more useful just because of the what I've just said they have much more CC.

chipndip11 votes

Pokemon has tanks that do a ton of damage...off the top of my head.

CasterGilgamesh4 votes

i solidly disagree with everything on this post Tanks want to take damage adcs people specifically say ignore the tanks adcs shouldnt be able to shred tanks they are supposed to avoid them and if they can't the support is supposed to peel for them along with the rest of the team to an extent now granted some adcs have ways to day with tanks.Riot panders too much to adcs to the point were they give adcs items to literally deal with tanks by invalidating most of the gold tanks spend item 3036 item 3153 item 3033

kasfas4 votes

I've pretty much hated stoneplate since its inception, because not only does it take power away from the tank items that are supposed to make you harder to kill all the time but is also super abusable by the other tanky classes in the game, divers who are waiting on cooldowns, and juggernauts who deal true damage. It doesn't even make you that much tankier when you coincider how much % damage there still is in the game and how much armour pen there is.

I want the actives power to be greatly reduced and to be shifted into every other top tank item in the game. In fact I'd be ok if this item was just removed and they rebalanced the game after that.

Like you said, this item was a bandaid fix for a problem that riot refuses to solve, that being tanks want to be hard to kill, and one must buy item that inflicts self reduced damage is not going to fix that.


One of the games I've been playing more often now is terraria, and I feel they have a decent balance going on there, with a favour to melee champs. The point is terraria has its own way to deal with the melee-ranged discrepancy. All attacks can miss, every one of them, meaning there are items that have good ranged dps, but they have the capacity to be dodged and miss their target. Melee items have this too, a ranged attack that has a cooldown but can also be dodged. The only exception to this rule are chlorophyte bullets which are significantly weaker than other types of bullets because they have a small homing range.

The point is, if league had its sustained dps champions damage placed in an avoidable manner, the game could potentially be balanced a lot easier.

Acheron161 votes

{quoted}

I've pretty much hated stoneplate since its inception, because not only does it take power away from the tank items that are supposed to make you harder to kill all the time but is also super abusable by the other tanky classes in the game, divers who are waiting on cooldowns, and juggernauts who deal true damage. It doesn't even make you that much tankier when you coincider how much % damage there still is in the game and how much armour pen there is.

I want the actives power to be greatly reduced and to be shifted into every other top tank item in the game. In fact I'd be ok if this item was just removed and they rebalanced the game after that.

Like you said, this item was a bandaid fix for a problem that riot refuses to solve, that being tanks want to be hard to kill, and one must buy item that inflicts self reduced damage is not going to fix that.


One of the games I've been playing more often now is terraria, and I feel they have a decent balance going on there, with a favour to melee champs. The point is terrorism has its own way to deal with the melee-ranged discrepancy. All attacks can miss, every one of them, meaning there are items that have good ranged dps, but they have the capacity to be dodged and miss their target. Melee items have this too, a ranged attack that has a cooldown but can also be dodged. The only exception to this rule are chlorophyte bullets which are significantly weaker than other types of bullets because they have a small homin range.

The point is, if league had its sustained daps champions damage placed in an avoidable manner, the game could potentially be balanced a lot easier.

Dodge used to exist and worked exactly like you suggested... and it was terrible. Mages were literally gods because spells cant miss while anything else that was based on AA's was trash tier.

It was removed for a reason: things being able to miss based on random chance is bad design, same way dealing sustained burst damage with the present crits is also bad damage but Riot is too lazy to change that.

kasfas1 votes

not a random chance to not take damage, but the ability to maneuvre away from an attack, similar to spells. You can dodge some spells, but you cant dodge auto attacks, thats something that doesnt exist (for the most part) in terraria. Everything can be dodged, and the things that cant are SIGNIFICANTLY weaker than their avoidable counterparts.

Acheron161 votes

{quoted}

not a random chance to not take damage, but the ability to maneuvre away from an attack, similar to spells. You can dodge some spells, but you cant dodge auto attacks, thats something that doesnt exist (for the most part) in terraria. Everything can be dodged, and the things that cant are SIGNIFICANTLY weaker than their avoidable counterparts.

Once again, auto-attacks are meant to be a reliable source of DPS. As they currently are, they are too spikey and random, but that's the fault of the crit system, which pretty much everyone has wanted changed from a random system into an AA damage multiplier system.

Your suggestions would:

  • Make auto-attacks lose their value niche (no longer reliable source of damage)
  • Require auto-attacks to be even stronger, since they now can miss

In order words, it would change literally nothing for the better.

Sohleks3 votes

When they're balanced they're pretty unsatisfying. It sucks. That's why I suggest they should have better growth for late game.

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