Fearless and the Reduction of Damage Creep

(cross-posted from my post on PBE boards for more visibility, and because everyone is up in arms about this: http://boards.pbe.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/champions-gameplay-feedback/t1NeXhZz-new-resolve-mastery-fearless-clarifying-question-and-feedback)

The new Resolve tier 4 mastery is Fearless, which gives you bonus armor/MR when damaged by an enemy champion. More specifically. it's +10% of your total armor/MR plus an additional 2 per level.

Note: I haven't figured out if Fearless procs before or after the damage from the first strike is calculated. This is a huge swing in its power, as eating 30% of your max health to someone's flash+spell before you get the defense buff reduces the total amount of damage prevented by quite a bit (and the reverse, where triggering early is massive extra benefit).

While there's been some uproar about damage creep from people seeing the new Ferocity tier 4 masteries, people are HEAVILY discounting the shear defensive strength of Fearless. Playing a few games with Alistar, I definitely feel the extra durability versus live once I hit mid-game. Going to try a few other champions (ADC, junglers, etc.) to finishing rounding out my impressions, but I have a good feeling about this. Definitely a worthy choice over 15% reduced summoner spell cooldown, and easily stronger than any of Ferocity's tier 4 choices if you have 18 in Cunning.

While you do have to get up 45s CD on Flash, check out the numbers below (values taken from http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/ because they had a spreadsheet I could copy into Excel and tweak, don't take exact numbers as gospel).

Numbers time, case 1: Vayne Short range carry + tons of damage built in = incentive to survive long enough to use it. Assuming you take flat armor seals, flat MR glyphs and no other defense items, Fearless increases your armor by ~5-45 and MR by ~6-40 based on level. Comparing to her pre-buff defense, this increases her effective health by somewhere from 4-24% (vs. physical) and 4-28% (vs. magic).

Example: Level 16 Vayne with above set-up has 1700 HP , 77 armor, and 42 MR. Fearless triggering at the start of a fight from full health buffs her stats to 117 armor and 78 MR. For the next 2 seconds, it now takes 22% more incoming physical damage and 25% more incoming magic damage to kill her. 7.5% increased damage from Bounty Hunter just got told to sit down and shut up.

Numbers time, case 2: Wukong Engage with initial CC + tons of damage over time = incentive to survive long enough to use it. Again going to assume you take flat armor seals, flat MR glyphs and no other resistance items since Jungle Wu typically tries to go Warrior into Black Cleaver. Adding his passive is tricky, 4-8 armor/MR per enemy champ, but Fearless increases his armor by ~6-49 and MR by ~7-46 based on level and # of enemies. Comparing to his pre-buff defense, this increases effective health by somewhere from 4-23% (vs. physical) and 4-25% (vs. magic). Note that the percentage drops a little bit with increasing resistances, but since you start with a bigger number, it washes out some.

Example: Level 16 Wukong with above set-up has 1808 base HP , 85 armor, and 62 MR. Assuming he has +700 HP (Black Cleaver, Sterak's), and surrounded by 5 enemies he now has 2508 HP, 125 armor, and 102 MR. Fearless triggering at the start of a fight from full health buffs defense stats to 169 armor and 144 MR. For the next 2 seconds, it now takes 20% more incoming physical damage and 21% more incoming magic damage to kill the angry monkey spinning on the priority target. 7.5% increased damage from Bounty Hunter just got told (again) to sit down and shut up.

In summary: Riot seems to be taking the position (with Courage of the Colossus and Fearless) that opting for defensive choices means your best best is starting the fight early and getting a brief but large advantage in durability for that. If, however, you take poke or can't close the fight with the lead from the first few seconds, the person/team who opted for damage will win. This aligns with the fact that in general, damage outscales defense because Riot wants games to end at some point and not have 50+ minute slapfests because people can't close out every other game.