Giving players a tooltip legend
TL;DR It's about Tooltip clarity
Alright, so Riot has been designing champions for years now. We've seen champions with abilities that scale on Ability Power, Attack Damage, Armor, Magic Resistance, Health and Mana. There are a few with scalars like Movement Speed and Attack Speed, and a few with abilities that stack up a scaling bonus such Nasus and Sion.
Because of these varying tooltips, there are several that have differing levels of clarity. Just to take an example, if you look at Draven's Q, you'll notice that the tooltip points out that it scales on AD, and it shows the percentage as well (which changes with rank). But when you look at Talon's Q, the only thing the tooltip implies is that it scales on AD because the numbers are orange; it doesn't actually tell the player that it scales on bonus AD.
Another example would be comparing Mundo's W to Shyvana's W. Now, if you've played the game long enough to recognize that green=AP scaling and orange=AD scailng, you'll understand that they're both magic damage AoEs that scale on opposite stats. But this could be confusing to a newer player, because AD doesn't strictly scale physical, and AP doesn't strictly scale magic (Ezreal's Mystic Shot, for example). Shyvana's also doesn't tell the player via tooltip that it's Bonus AD, not Total.
There are two different things I'd like to see for tooltip clarity. The first is, as the title points out, a tooltip legend. Put it in a small tooltip that shows up in plain sight on the HUD, so you can roll over it and see it. Just a little corner box that tells players that Red = HP, Orange = AD, Yellow = Armor, Green = AP, Blue = Mana, Purple = MR, and whatever other scalars need specification (it bothers me that the one champion with an AS scaling spell uses red for it).
The other thing is that I think there needs to be a simple way to differentiate between total and bonus scaling in tooltips. An asterisk on bonus and no asterisk on total, or whatever seems to be best for it. Just so that players can learn scaling in-game while playing, instead of having to look up on the wiki.
This is showing up here because I don't see a forum section for display feedback and I avoid GD