The Reason Why Spell Vamp Was Removed And How It Could Easily Be Brought Back And Balanced

The tl;dr is basically incosistency with AOE spells.

Lifesteal is much easier to balance than spellvamp. Auto attacks are usually always the same except for maybe a few exceptions like Yasuo's or Ezreal's Q. Damaging Spells on the other hand differ a lot from each other - From single-targeted spells to spells with extra conditions to AOE spells to even such bizarre things as Heimerdinger's turrets or AP scaling on-hit effects. Because of all this inconsistency Riot tried out a lot of different iterations of spellvamp which ended up being overpowered on a few champions and mediocre on everyone else. That is why at some point they just said screw it and completely removed it from the game.

But what this inconsistency actually just stems from is one simple factor - is the spell that applies spell vamp a single-targeted or an AOE spell?

Take Vladimir for example. If he uses his Q on a target and he has 20% spell vamp, he will heal for 20% of the damage it deals. But now, let's look at his E - if Vladimir uses it on a wave of 6 minions he will instead heal for 6 times of that amount, so his E actually has 120% spell vamp instead of the 20% he paid for.

Because of that Riot just decided that spell vamping effects have to be only 1/3 effective on AOE effects, this is how they are balancing it to this very day.

This didn't fix the problem though. Let's look at Vladimir again. In a 1v1, his Q still healed him for the full amount but all his other spells are still only 1/3 as effective which means that in a 1v1 spell vamp only is good on champions with mostly single target spells. On the other hand, his E and W vamp was still overpowered against minions. If he used his E on a minion wave of 6 minions he would still heal for double the amount of the spell vamp he actually had because 6/3 times 20% equal 40%.

So spell vamp would be overperforming on all champions that had really good wave clear spells and would only be consistent on champions who are mostly single-targeted. On the rest it was just bad. This is true to this very day. Just think about it - why does Akali buy a Gunblade and Katarina does not? Both make good use of the active and have decent AD ratios, that is not actually the problem. Akali buys it because everything but her E is single-targeted so her spell vamp against champions is consistent while her E heals her for a ton when she clears a minion wave with it. On Kat on the other hand it's just super unreliable. It's only worth it if she hits three champions at the same time or more and even with her playstyle this does not happen a lot. It just makes sense. This is why you don't see Death's Dance on Zed because of his Q and E or any other ability-based AD champion with AOE spells.

Riot was aware of that problem. The last iteration of spell vamp that ultimately failed was a nerf of the amount of spell vamp you get from Will of the Ancients, it changed from 20% to 15% but it would apply before resistances would apply. This meant that it would heal you less against minions which generally don't have a lot of resistances and more against champions who do have a lot of it. As you can already guess this change was made to tackle the fact that Vlad abused it to heal way too much health when clearing minion waves aswell as Mordekaiser. This didn't make up for it at the end though - its only user ended up being the old Vlad because of the reasons I pointed out above and he abused it to basically be an unhealthy ball of stats that was extremely toxic and could never be pushed out of the lane because he would just heal so much. After seeing that, Riot decided that spell vamp was done for and they just removed it.

While looking at the history of spell vamp I was beginning to question myself why they just didn't go for the most obvious and simple solution to the problem.

Don't just give AOE spells a 1/3 penalty, that won't work because of the reasons above. Instead, make AOE spells only apply on the first target hit in case of moving spells like an Ezreal ultimate which hits things one after another and only the nearest target when it's a spell like Syndra's Q which hits several targets at the same time.

This way it would always be consistent. Not 6.66% to 40% spell vamp depending on if you are fighting minions or champions or several targets or only one target, that is way too complicated. If it only applies to one target even if it is an AOE it would always be the 20% spell vamp you paid for, in case of the old Will of the Ancients.

This way a new and interesting AP/Spell Vamp item could be introduced and the quasi-spell vamp items that already exist would also be more consistent. Just think of all the champions who would be able to use Death's Dance better with that change - scroll through the champion list and look at all the Champions on which buying it just isn't worth it because of the fact that they don't have extreme wave clear spells or have mostly AOE spells that will heal for 1/3 of the spell vamp you paid for in a 1v1 scenario. Same counts for Gunblade and a theoretical AP spell vamp item.