Quality of Life Change to Spellvamp

Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker so I apologize for every grammar or spelling mistakes I'll make.

Right now Spellvamp is one of the stats that isn't bought as much. I personally think this stems from the fact that it has a mitigation for AOE abilities that only makes them heal for 1/3 of the amount of spellvamp you have instead of the full amount.

This makes sense in theory, AOE Poke mages would heal a lot of health from very long range rather easily without it, let's say Azir or Ziggs when they are clearing minion waves, which would give it an unfair advantage over lifesteal. There are also scenarios in which AOE spellvamp would be OP without mitigation, a Karthus ult or a Kat reset-killing through your whole team would heal for absurd amounts of HP.

The thing is that it is really meh when it comes to fighting in an actual 1v1 or 1v2 scenarios, where you only get 1/3 of the heal you would usually get when you have mostly AOE damage in your kit. This way it is really hard to balance, because either it will be an overpowered stat without the mitigation or an underpowered one with the mitigation like we have it right now.

If you think of champions who actually use spellvamp items in the meta right now, they all have in common that most of their damage is either single-targeted like Akali ( or even Jax and Xin who are also starting to pick up Hextech Gunblade ) or are reliant on it for their lane sustain like Vladimir and old Mordekaiser. This also shows how bad it is to pick up on most AOE champions.

Yet there are abilities in the kits of several champions which are balanced to be not too good when clearing minion waves or fighting several champions and not too bad when only fighting one or two champions when it comes to spellvamp or lifesteal. Hecarim's W for example heals him for 20% of his damage dealt. To not make this too OP when activating it in minion waves and basically just Q'ing, it has a healing cap against minions and monsters to make up for it. Yasuo's Q only applies lifesteal to the first target hit rather than every single one, Sivir's W only lifesteals for the initial target that you hit with your auto. Ryze's ultimate gives all his spells AOE but rather than just making it heal for 1/3 of the spellvamp it gives, it heals for the full amount for the initial target hit and 1/3 for the AOE around it.

Another attempt of balancing spellvamp was made in patch 5.13. The spellvamp value was changed to 15% from 20% but heals for the damage it would deal before resistances would apply rather than after it. With minions having really low resistances and champions having lots of it, I think it was a clever approach that wouldn't have come to my mind at first. Yet it didn't seem to quite make it viable, since the only one who really builds WotA is still Vladimir and nobody else.

When looking at all this I've come to my personal attempt of making spellvamp a good stat to pick up and to get out of the dilemma I've described above. Instead of having AOE's only heal for 1/3 of the damage dealt, it will heal for the spellvamp you have divided by the targets you have hit with your AOE ability. If you have 20% spellvamp for example and you hit one target with your AOE ability, you will have 20% spellvamp ( 20% divided by 1 target = 20 ), when hitting 2 targets you will have 10% spellvamp ( 20% divided by 2 = 10 ). You will heal for half of the damage dealt but for the 2 targets you hit. This way you will heal as much as you would heal if you would only hit 1 target, or 3, or 5, it doesn't matter, you will always heal the same amount.

Here's a list of items, runes, masteries and abilities this change would affect:

• Will of the Ancients
• Hextech Revolver
• Hextech Gunblade
• Death's Dance
• spellvamp runes
• Vampirism ( mastery )
• Soul Siphon ( Morgana's passive )
• Desperate Power ( Ryze's ultimate )

To suit these changes I would also change some abilities and items so that they won't be unbalanced:

Will of the Ancients:

• revert the changes of 5.13 I think the problem of it being too good against minions and too bad against champions will be mostly fixed with the changes above, so this change isn't needed anymore. Instead it would probably not reward opponents for building resistances while at the same time being kinda meh against minions.

Death's Dance:

• the values of the healing and the damage storing passive to 15% from 12% The problem with this item right now is not only the one that spellvamp has in general but also that it's not being as effective as some of their counterparts like Hextech Gunblade or Will of the Ancients. This is kind of opinionated and would also just be a straight out buff but I think it is not that good of a pickup atm.

Spirit of Dread ( Hecarim's W ): -remove healing cap against minions and monsters -change healing value from 20% at all ranks to 10/12,5/15/17,5/20% at ability ranks 1-5 -give it the spellvamp treatment I've described above This would clean up his values to be more efficient and to make his lane sustain a bit more conditional - it has been very oppressive at times, at worlds at least and it would make it suit the changes a bit better.

This was all I wanted to talk about. Since this is my first approach at trying to give a suggestion for game balance, please show mercy - I appreciate every criticsim I can get and I would love some feedback on this but I would also be very happy if you could also do that in a constructive and civilized manner.