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A place to post suggestions about the tank shredding issue:

Painted Celt··3 votes·541 views

Hello, As most players are probably aware, there have been a lot of recent complaints about full tanks being shredded too quickly. I am creating this thread as a place for people to post balance suggestions aimed at alleviating this.

I think that a big part of the problem is how well BOTRK synergizes with armor penetration effects, producing enough damage to easily destroy squishies and tanks alike. This can be extremely frustrating, as this combo is impossible to itemize effectively against (neither resistances nor health will allow one to keep up), which is ironic since tank items are kept slot inefficient in order to make them "counter buys" to help survive a losing lane. It is interesting to note that the champion that has been most lighting up the forums with nerf/complaint threads, Zed, typically builds BOTRK into absurd amounts of armor penetration (Last Whisper + Youmuu's + Black Cleaver). This issue also helps explain the continually growing rise in complaints about ADCs being overtuned.

Personally, I feel that this is a two-part problem. Not only does tank shredding itemization work too well as a source of damage (rather than just a defense mitigation) on non-tanks, but it also counters tanks too hard. I believe there should always be a significant, discernible, impactful difference in survability between someone investing in defenses and someone going glass cannon. Players should have the tools to manage tanks, but they should never be able to negate tanks' influence as much as they do and it should require more specific investment into tank-shredding at the cost of potential power in other areas.

I will start with a couple suggestions of my own. These probably wouldn't be enough, but they could be a step in the right direction. Please be sure to post your own ideas for what could be done.

item 3153 Blade of the Ruined King Cost: 3200 (900) +25 Attack Damage -> +20 Attack Damage +40% Attack Speed -> +35% Attack Speed +10% Life Steal -> 8% Life Steal

UNIQUE Passive: Basic attacks deal 8% of the target's current Health in bonus physical damage (max 60 vs. monsters and minions) on hit. UNIQUE Active (90 second cooldown): Deals 10% of target champion's maximum Health (min. 100 -> 150) as physical damage, heals for the same amount, and steals the target's Movement Speed for 3 seconds (melee champions steal 25% Movement Speed, ranged champions steal 15% Movement Speed).

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item 3144 Bilgewater Cutlass Cost: 1400 (240) +25 Attack Damage -> +20 Attack Damage +8% Life Steal

UNIQUE Active (90 second cooldown): Deals 100 -> 150 magic damage and slows the target champion's Movement Speed for 2 seconds (melee champions slow 25% Movement Speed, ranged champions slow 15% Movement Speed).

Would this be a potentially healthy tweak? It would remove some of the extra power on BOTRK to make it clear that the health shredding is the reason to upgrade it from its components, with slot efficiency and other tacked on bonuses just being icing. With these changes, it might become less of a must buy, especially on ADCs, and more of a strategic counter against heavy health stackers. All in all, this wouldn't change much, but I think it would probably be a healthy nudge and it is slight enough that it wouldn't require other major rebalancing alongside it...
[Obviously, Zed in particular might need some sort of specific nerfs alongside this since the ranged MS steal change wouldn't affect him. The attack speed nerf on the PBE hopefully has that covered though.]

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Also, here is an idea for a change in defense masteries:

Runic Blessing: Start the game with a 50 Health Shield. The shield regenerates each time after respawning -> Mastery removed; Legendary Guardian shifted into its position on skill tree.

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Tenacious: Reduces the duration of crowd control effects by 15% -> Effect unchanged but mastery moved down a tier in the skill tree (into Legendary Guardian's previous position). Requires 1 point in Swiftness.

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*NEW* Unbreakable: Reduces the effectiveness of Armor and Magic penetration effects by 25%. Requires 20 points in Defense.

I feel this would be a much more suitable final mastery for Defense (I don't think many people will mind Runic Blessing being phased out either) while providing a much needed buff to one of the non-offense trees. Obviously, players using this mastery would need to be quite invested in defense (IE., a real tank) for this to be effective due to the 20 Defense mastery points requirement.

Here are examples of how this would play out in a game:

Player A - 300 Armor (no Unbreakable mastery)

Player B - 300 Armor (with Unbreakable mastery)

Player C - Last Whisper [35% armor negation] + Brutalizer [10 flat armor pen]

Example 1 - Player A is attacked by Player C -> 300 Armor - (300 * 0.35 [Last Whisper] + 10 [Brutalizer]) = 185 effective armor on Player A

Example 2 - Player B is attacked by Player C -> 300 Armor - ((300 * 0.35 [Last Whisper] + 10 [Brutalizer]) * 0.75 [Unbreakable]) = 213.75 effective armor on Player B.

In this case, this is equivalent to Last Whisper's armor penetration effect being reduced from 0.35 to 0.2625 and Brutalizer's flat pen being reduced from 10 to 7.5.

5 Comments

Stephenizgod3 votes

It might also help to make certain pen item (mainly LW and VS) only effect bonus resistances and have AD ratios lowered slightly, the compensation is to allow them to penetrate more bonus resistances (say from 35% to around 45%). This way those building Glass Cannon are not effected and the champion building this item loses out on more damage for Glass Cannons or other squishier roles. ADC's are the primary counter to tanks, thus they should be one of the only roles buying pen items, bruisers/fighters and mages would be secondary counters. Assassins of any kind should not be buying pen items, their job is to kill the carries quickly and to get out, not to kill the first champion they see be it tank or marksmen.

I feel there is a lot of misunderstanding from Assassin and Marksmen mains that Tank mains just want to be unkillable, this is not true. What we want is to be just as useful and viable as they are suppose to be. Currently these two roles go above and beyond their intended usefulness, Why? Because they can build both to counter tanks and deal more damage to other roles with the same items. Assassins take it even further then Marksmen in how far beyond their intended role they go, building resistances is suppose to counter their damage and currently this is not the case.

One of my personal solutions is to add new tank items with different unique mechanics. During the Poro King event i had the idea for an item that used the same mechanics as when the Poro King was summoned, he would absorb any enemy Poro's thrown at the enemy team. I thought this would make an interesting active for a pure tank item, they would absorb a portion of the damage meant to go to their team. This portion would be dependent on their bonus resistances. The higher your resistances the more damage you mitigate for your team.

Other solutions i have seen on the boards also offer great ideas for items, late game pure tank items like %HP items which are only effective on pure tanks. There was one post about making certain build paths easier for tanks early game, like making Giants Belt build out of Ruby Crystals. I believe on the PBE Riot has taken this idea and implemented it.

LilxPaprika2 votes

i wrote this in another thread

i think new tank masteries that would be good would be to reduce % health damage and true dmg by 3%. or have an item that can mitigate these types of champions. with the prevelence of healing reduction, truedmg,%health and the power of armor /magic pen, armor shreading champs, its too hard to itemize for it all. which is why often times just going dmg with a guardian angels is most effective.

I do think the tank masteries are subpar to the offensive masteries. by a small margin. the main thing being dangerous game tilting it. one of the biggiest issues too is that once your below 50% health your tankyness suddenly drops, especially vs a jinx or leesin. the stacking of exposed weakness also hurts a lot. suddenly incoming damages end up amplified by 10%. i,d like a tanky mastery that gave you 5% damage reduction at 50% or less to counter act it The perserverence mastery leaves wanting too. when it was first released it was noticeable. then it got nerfed... but with the amount of burst it doesnt have time to kick in.maybe have it scale per level? so its more significant late game.

Painted Celt1 votes

I agree on the perseverance mastery. Perhaps a middle ground between its old value and new value could be met. I think people tend not to recognize how much people need to pay to go into that mastery, considering it takes 3 points to obtain its full value. The equivalents in the same tier of offense certainly appear to be stronger.

On the topic of a mastery that reduces incoming true damage, that would ideally be achieved by increasing maximum health (AKA, the Juggernaut mastery). I do see your point though considering the presence of %hp true damage, but I think Vayne's theme is really specifically about being an anti-tank. I think the situation with BOTRK being amplified by armor pen is having a stronger and more negative impact on the game, and true damage defense wouldn't actually help with that due to the damage being technically AD (even though it's cutting through armor like butter).

As for a mastery to counter executions, I think that Second Wind was supposed to do that, but it falls short. Perhaps increasing the health ratio trigger to 35% would help with that?

Thanks for joining the discussion by the way.

LilxPaprika2 votes

fixing critical strikes would help too. it can be pretty cheezy to get chunked so much right off the bat.

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/e7dZXbTB-critical-damage-versus-percentage-damage

Painted Celt1 votes

Hopefully, making the Defense masteries more appealing would allow more people to take the Reinforced Armor mastery (10% incoming crit damage reduction). I personally don't mind the RNG factor, as it tends to make the game a bit less predictable/formulaic, but I do see how it can be frustrating in some cases. On the bright side, working on the armor penetration issues should at least make it somewhat more effective to build defenses against critical hit stackers.

Thanks for posting.

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