Grievous Wounds is Reverted, Soraka is Slain, but Should it Exist? - A Nuanced Look

Aqua Dragon here; One of the undernoted aspects of the 6.9 Patch was the reverting of Grievous Wounds to work with all healing instead of just self healing.

Additionally, The Grievous Wounds application from Morello was changed to last longer, but is harder to apply

For those unaware, Grievous Wounds is a debuff that reduces healing by 40%. It exists on Ignite and is applied by Executioner's Calling and Morellonomicon. This change hits heavy sustain champions pretty hard. Notably, everyone who hates Soraka rejoiced. Coupled with the nerfs, Soraka’s winrate has fallen to a more manageable level. League of Legends became a perfect game and nobody complained about balance ever again.

But underlying this victory is a much broader question about what place Grievous Wounds has in the game. I will outline why Grievous Wounds must be problematically binary, then why it’s inherently difficult to communicate, and finally why it must exist, while noting some potential directions it could take.

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#Why Grievous Wound is Binary, and Must Be

GW serves as a hard counter to heavy sustain compositions. It seems to do the job fine, despite being a fairly heavy-handed, but it puts sustain champions into a super binary situation where all sustain has to be based around the existence of GW, or risk have the healing put into irrelevancy

As an example, healing that’s ‘supposed’ to do 100 must actually do 140 instead. But then, whenever GW isn’t available, this “overtuned” healing becomes absolutely overbearing to play against (Mundo, Soraka). Worse, it means any champion who is balanced around Moderate healing to survive becomes extremely crippled, as one of their only defensive mechanisms is an enormous 40% less effective (Trundle).

##Why Weakening Sustain is Not the Same as Weakening Damage

Exhaust might appear to do something similar initially, but sustain is fundamentally different from damage. Weaker damage can make things poor briefly, but the user can still contribute. Phrased another way, Damage goes from 0 to 100, where 0 is no damage and 100 is Annie. But sustain, by nature, doesn’t exist on that spectrum. Instead, Sustain exists from -50 to 50, where 0 is the point that sustain equals the damage taken.

When sustain is at this 0 mark, a champion is healing as much as they’re being damaged. Notably, when sustain is at the 0 mark and above, it's busted because there's no way to handle it since the champion will not die in combat. This distinction will be important in a moment.

When you weaken damage output, it can go from 300 to say, 200. Weaker but fundamentally not too different. Meanwhile, sustain must be implemented to stay around the negative range. There's our issue. When Sustain is weakened, it can go from 10 to -30, and that’s the difference between "literally not dying" to "explodes in two hits." It essentially changes.

##Where to Balance Sustain

When GW exists, where should Sustain be balanced on this line? If a champion is balanced around the Negative Sustain case, such as -10, then GW brings them to -40 which is the difference between "sort of surviving" to "dead instantly". We could say "just make GW weaker" and suddenly an even worse situation emerges.

If a champion has Positive Sustain, they become unkillable. GW has to bring sustain into the negative range to be effective or else it's pointless (it's worthless to bring sustain from 40 to 10; that's still healing more than is being dealt, and thus still unkillable). If a champion becomes fed enough to stay in the positive range, then there must be a way to bring sustain from positive to negative or else GW is fundamentally failing its job. This means GW has to be extremely binary to function.

Ultimately, champions who rely on moderate sustain to survive, the “balanced” case, are super screwed when GW is around (Aatrox, Trundle, Darius) while champions who rely on immense sustain to survive have to be overtuned to account for GW, and become unbearable if GW isn’t available (Mundo, Soraka). This is part of why Ignite has GW on it, to allow its accessibility in laning matchups.

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#Why Grievous Wounds is Prohibitive to Communicate

Before we can understand why Grievous Wounds cannot be easily communicated, we must first understand what it means to communicate an effect.

To communicate an effect is more than words. A player who reads everything will never have trouble with an effect being communicated. Those players are not the target of an effect’s communication. Dwarf Fortress players know what I mean. Instead, to be communicated, an effect must be evident to someone who has not necessarily read it.

Zigg’s bomb hits the ground, and it’s clear that it hits an area of effect. Ignite ticks, and you understand that you are burning to death. Vi uses Vault Breaker, and a huge shield appears in the air and gets sliced in half, signaling destroyed defenses.

Meanwhile, there's no easy way to visually show "You are receiving less healing now". Did you know Katarina's Death Lotus applies it? That Fizz, Tristana, and Miss Fortune used to as well? Most people didn't even know any existed because it's so difficult to communicate.

##Communicated Effects can be Ambiguous, with Restrictions

The closest thing provided is a small heart-slash symbol. The symbol is fairly ambiguous. Is my maximum health lowered? Am I being marked for death by a hunter? Nearly any sliced-heart symbol will encounter similar interpretation issues. But even if the meaning is ambiguous, it would be okay as long a player's intuitive reaction is correct, to a symbol that isn't immediately clear.

Consider Nasus' Spirit Fire. It looks like some cursed zone. What kind of curse does it apply? Hell if I know when I first fought Nasus; what I do know is I gotta scramble! Later, I learned Spirit Fire reduces my armor if I stay in it, and this newfound understanding is in line with what I was intuitively already doing. Ambiguous communication can be fine if the intuitive reaction nearly matches what an understanding-reaction creates.

Sheen makes my enemy’s hand glow. That looks dangerous; I don’t need to know the exact empowerment it provides to know caution should be exerted. I took some damage after walking through Singed’s poison and have this little symbol above me; doesn’t look like it hurts much and they’re low so I’ll try to kill them! (Please don’t)

Compare that to GW. For many people like me, it was not a symbol I noticed easily since GW is most likely to be applied in the middle of combat where it's too hectic to see. Even when if the GW symbol is noticed, the intuitive reaction is unclear. I'm not burning (unless ignited, but that’s the burn I care about, not the GW), I don't think I feel weaker, I didn't hear any kind of scary sound effect telling me to run (Black Cleaver's armor break), and my elo isn’t falling. I guess I'm clear? Should I still fight? What's happening? The intuitive reaction to Grievous Wounds is unclear, and means it is inherently a poorly communicated effect.

And again, a player who just reads everything and sees the GW debuff on the little information bar won't encounter these issues. And again we're not really talking about that kind of player; That player who reads everything would be fine even if GW required them to run around in a circle two times to get rid of a debuff (Hello, Illaoi).

##GW isn't the Only Effect with Communication Problems

Note that Grievous Wounds isn’t the only effect that is poorly communicated. Renekton and Jarvan both have armor shreds on their kits (!) yet there is very little indication of this. The difference with these is that there’s precedence for being able to communicate those effects clearly with some work, as previously established by Vi’s Vault Breaker. No such precedent exists with Grievous Wounds.

Nor is GW the only effect that can’t be communicated. “Use the Joke Emote twice” to remove Buffy the Clown’s ‘have a good laugh or die’ debuff that could never be communicated. An effect that pierces magic immunity and makes you take damage as you run away would become notoriously frustrating for new players, who die and have no clue why, nor has a reliable way to intuitively communicate the effect (Don’t take this as a dig at Dota 2; the game has many unintuitive effects, but is balanced around a higher burden of knowledge. This’s not necessarily bad, and I enjoy playing DotA 2 also, but it’s also not what League’s philosophy has been).

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#Why Grievous Wounds Must Exist, and Band-Aids

This binary nature and difficulty of communication from Grievous Wounds feels kind of lazy. I'd rather sustain champions be balanced around having windows of available sustain, never being able to stay in that Positive Window during a teamfight. Unfortunately, champions who do have these windows get screwed over hard by GW (Trundle, Fiora, etc.).

But so long as champions like Mundo and Soraka exist, who play in that limited-window constant Positive Sustain pattern, GW must exist or the sustain will stay above the frustrating “unkillable” range. Riot has been working to put many of those champions into having more windows to play around (compare current Soraka, who must put themselves at risk to heal, versus Soraka of old who could heal infinitely with little risk). This is a great direction to be taking, though arguably isn’t quite enough yet.

##Improving a Grievous Issue

However, just because GW must exist doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon. We can assign the 0 point (healing as much as damage taken) easily in our hypothetical discussions here, but in a real teamfight, that 0 point is constantly shifting and may vary tremendously from one composition to another. **If the debuff could somehow shift along with that 0 point, it could predominantly punish the High Sustain champs it should without hitting the Moderate Healers nearly as hard. **

For example: A healing debuff that scales over a few seconds (from say, 10% to 60%). Such an effect would predominantly punish High Sustain champions since champion with Moderate Sustain do it during much shorter windows. **It’s fine to be in the +40 zone for a short while, but it becomes problematic when a champion exists in that +40 zone for a large portion of a teamfight. **

Additionally, gating the debuff behind its own window that becomes most effective against High Sustain champions is another option. Morellonomicon is a decent example of this, as it has a condition before allowing its GW debuff to be applied. This incentivizes trying to momentarily hit down High Sustain champions past a certain threshold so that they can be focused down and killed after the initial team burst is used. This isn’t a perfect solution, as it also punishes Moderate Sustain champions fighting tooth and nail during extended confrontations, but it’s still better than a free-for-all punish button.

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To answer the question in the title then: Grievous Wounds shouldn’t exist because of its binary nature punishing Moderate Healers and its inherent inability to be communicated, but it must, and while it must there may be alternative ways to implement the mechanic that primarily hits the High-Sustain champions it should be punishing instead of the Moderate Sustain champions.

Thank you for your time!