Armor vs Health

ScyPhan790·Feb 9, 2018·1 votes·1,561 views

Anyone care to explain how this works?

Why is it that if I build more armor than health, the armor is practically useless? But if I build more health than armor, it increases the effectiveness of that armor?

How is weaker than ?

Yes they have more health, but I have more armor. Hence I should be reducing more ad damage that comes in. Granted I know that all armor (physical and magic) scale more with health, but it still doesn't make sense that more armor doesn't reduce more damage. I've had this before where I built more health than armor (physical or magic) and they were still able to do lots of damage to me without any armor pen items.

2 Comments

InfernapeFeb 9, 20181 votes

Because of the way effective health works. If you have a ton of armour but little HP, your effective health towards physical damage would be much lower than if you had a ton of HP and a reasonable amount of armour.

If you had 500 armour and 1000 HP, you'd have 5000 effective health (as in it would take 5000 physical damage to kill you). If you had 2000 HP and 300 armour, your effective health would be 6000. It would take longer to kill a tank with a good mix of HP and armour, than it would to kill one with little HP and ton of armour.

ScyPhan790Feb 10, 20181 votes

Thank you, that does simplify it and makes more sense. So basically, overall defense is determined by 1/100 armor * health?

But shouldn't the type of armor just negate whatever damage you receive? Say you have 150 armor and they have 200 damage built, so you should be receiving 50 damage. If you have 1000+ health at that time, they shouldn't be chunking your health that much. Granted it would take them 20 hits to kill you, but their attack speed wouldn't be that high yet.

And again, from my experience, I've built majority health with smaller amounts of armor and I still get chunked. At that point they probably do have an item that helps bypass my armor which does make sense. But I've had times where I build items to bypass their armor and I still don't do much of any damage. For example, with adcs, a lot of them don't have to build that much damage just attack speed and they can chunk so much health. Granted it's cause they are doing less damage but at a faster rate, and crits do take a major role in that, but it still doesn't make much sense to me.

One example: I built tons of health with a little bit of mr as a Vladimir , against a Mordekaiser who had hardly any magic built, and he chunked my health with one E (his siphon). It was maybe about 1/8 of my health (point being it was a noticeable chunk and not just a little bit being chipped at over time). It's situations like this where I don't understand how they are doing lots of damage when hardly any is built. Especially whenever I'm in the opposite position and the situation is reversed; I hardly do any damage even though I'll have a similar if not exact build.