True Damage, % Health Damage and Lifesteal
Why is there so much of all three of these things spread across champions that it no longer feels unique?
It's overused.
4 Comments
Only 6 champions have lifesteal built into their kit (probably 5 after warwicks ultimate is changed in the champion update): Lee sin, Nasus, Olaf, Sion, Warwick and Udyr.
True damage is common because armor and magic resist can be stacked so damn high that in order to make an ability do respectable damage to a resist stacking tank it would have to one shot squishies unless it was true damage.
% Health damage is common because health can be stacked so damn high that in order to make an ability do respectable damage to a health stacking tank it would have to one shot squishies unless it was % health damage.
Most of the time a tank can partially mitigated the true damage or % health by building health and resists respectively. There are some abilities that are meant to be immune to any form of mitigation, namely % health true damage.
Deciding whether or not to do action X while taking damage Y means estimating whether or not the value of X outweighs the cost of Y. Tanks are generally able to make a wider variety of actions X because they mitigate Y. There are some abilities/attacks that force tanks to reconcile X with Y more carefully, or in some rare cases, with the same care as everyone else.
Saying true damage and % health damage are overused is tantamount to saying that tanks should be able to have a wider variety of actions X. I don't want to play a game where every tank can go where they please any time they please. Even tanks should have to think about positioning every once in a while, and I don't just mean positioning for their ults or to body block skill shots for their allies. I mean avoiding damage.
I don't think league has too much true damage and % health damage. In fact, I think it doesn't have enough.
However, I think its kind of absurd that the true damage and % health damage that league does have is overwhelmingly targeted damage-- its kind of hard for a tank to avoid that.