Why I feel that Grievous Wounds is getting out of hand.

Hello everybody. Delivererofdeath here. I've been playing since season 3, and I'm currently a plat player. Today I'd like to start a discussion about grievous wounds (shortened to GW from this point on).

To begin, I'll explain why I think GW is healthy for the game, and why I DO agree that it is a needed mechanic. In League, there are several ways to go about healing your character. These options range from having built-in sustain (using the champion's kit), external sustain (using an ally's kit, such as Soraka), or itemized sustain (where you have to make a decision as to whether you'd like to build sustain that game or not). Because of these different ways of creating sustain, every champion has access to healing in some form or another, though some champions are much more suited to it. Because of the very nature of sustain, I'm aware that it can be difficult to balance, because if it's too powerful then an enemy can be too hard to take down at all even with good teamwork, but if it's not powerful enough then it has no use in teamfights compared to building offensive (or other defensive) stats. Even in instances where it's been balanced on average (seen as around a 50% win rate), sustain is still extremely volatile and can lead to feast or famine situations that can impact the 'fun' feeling of gameplay.

One great example is pre-rework Sion. Most of the time Sion was build as an AP champion, but back in Season 4 I had an absolute blast playing him as an AD top laner. The reason behind this was that Sion's ult (rank 3) gave him 100% lifesteal, 50% attack speed, and healed nearby allies for half of the damage he dealt, and the ult lasted for 20 seconds with a not-so-long cool down. In other words he was the perfect juggernaut, back before Riot had decided to use that term in champion design philosophy. He was easy to kite, but he was almost impossible to beat in a fight if you had to duke things out with him. There's been several times where if I've been fed enough, I could simply walk into their team 1v5 and get a penta, because with ravenous hydra your lifesteal applies in an AoE, and with 118% lifesteal and 405AD (my standard build, IIRC), I could get back to full hp just by hitting a minion wave with one AA. That was if your game was going well. If your game was going poorly, or the enemy team had a lot of crowd control, you became completely useless because you couldn't actually hit anybody being a melee champion, and therefore you couldn't heal, and therefore you would die BEFORE you could sustain yourself back up to full hp with 1 hit. Obviously this was a completely broken champion concept, and while deep down I wish Riot had kept the design because I enjoyed it so much, I can understand why it was removed from the game.

But I digress, the reason I brought up old Sion is because he was the greatest example of why GW SHOULD exist- if you have a giant juggernaut going around killing people and healing like it's nothing, you need to have the ability to opt into tools that can take him down. At the time, GW was paradoxically more common, but harder to obtain- the items that had GW were pretty bad unless you NEEDED the GW, but GW was present in more champions back then. If you happened to see that the enemy is picking a healing menace, you could lock into MF or Fizz, and you could deal with the problem yourself, but if you didn't pick a GW champion, you would have to build inefficient items that took up an item slot just to deal with the threat. Or you could take ignite, but ignite isn't good for everybody to take.

Fast forward to now, and the situation has changed quite dramatically. The average champion now relies on itemized sustain than they do on built in sustain. There's a million and one ways to get sustain just from masteries, and not only has the amount of lifesteal items increased, and gained more variety, but Warmogs provides extremely relevant healing for tanks if the match is being fought in skirmishes rather than full out teamfights. This creates the same problems that I've outlined in my previous paragraphs- if a champion with a lot of healing items gets too far ahead, it can become almost impossible to stop them if your team comp can't CC them to death. Logically, the answer was for Riot to make GW more accessible- both morellonomicon and Mortal Reminder (and now thornmail) are very good items on their own. Morello is so good that you consistently see it being taken even if the enemy team has NO regeneration, whereas Lord Dominick's regards is only more useful than Mortal Reminder if the enemy team either is extremely tanky, or has absolutely no regeneration. In almost every other situation it's more economical to take Mortal Reminder. The reasoning we can see from riot here is obvious, because the number one source of regeneration in the game is typically from an adc who has bought too much lifesteal. The purpose of these items is to give a quick and easy check to the enemy if they've over-optimized on one specific stat. The adc who is now being countered, will now have to make the decision of whether to sell their lifesteal items, or to keep powering through the healing reduction in the hopes that they can still remain relevant.

The problem herein lies in the fact that GW has been given out aplenty in order to counter adc healing, and therefore been made easy to access, just as it is easy to then sell the items, creating an optimizational arms race between the two teams. The purpose of putting the GW on an already good item is so that if the lifesteal items are sold, the player with GW items can still remain relevant. But in thinking of this, no thought has been given to the champions that NEED sustain to function. Your Mundos, Vlads, Sorakas, Swains, and to a lesser degree, your Zacs. Yes, these champions have been given buffs to make them BALANCED in spite of these changes, but with GW so easy to obtain, it's made them extremely unreliable. Where adcs with huge amounts of lifesteal can simply sell the lifesteal if they hit a brick wall, these champions can't completely rework their kit halfway through the game to rely less on healing. It becomes oppressive, and if you're carrying the game as, say, Vlad, a singe GW purchase can gimp you so hard that through no fault of your own, you can no longer continue to carry, causing a lost game.

To give some perspective to players who don't regularly play sustain oriented champions, let's take Randuins Omen. Now let's say that instead of reducing crit damage to YOU by 10%, we'll make it an aura that puts a debuff on enemy champions that reduces all their crits by 30% for 5 seconds (refreshed if they stay in the aura). For the average champion, if somebody buys that item, they could simply invest more into non-crit sources. However, champions such as Trynd and Yasuo who already rely heavily on crit, would be adversely affected by the purchase of the item, since they can't design their champions to rely less on crit. The problem gets blown even further out of hand by the fact that Randuins Omen isn't even a bad item without the anti-crit passive.

While I like the implementation of the new thornmail passive as it regards to the power of sustain on adcs vs. sustain champions, I still feel like it's another slap in the face and another reason as to why I shouldn't ever play a champion reliant on sustain.

So I've done a lot of complaining, but not a whole lot of suggestion making, so in order for this to be more of a suggestion than a rant, I'd like to offer some alternatives to anybody who is interested.

1. You could simply buff the healing on champions reliant on healing, but most of those champions aren't in that bad of a spot winrate wise, so that probably wouldn't be the best idea.

2. You could rework sustain oriented champions to be less sustain oriented, but that's a lot of work, and I doubt people would be happy that you're eliminating these champions' identities, so that wouldn't work.

3. You could follow your example given with thornmail, and have GW be more of a defensive measure than an offensive measure. I like this idea, but it's pretty counterintuitive to be getting defensive bonuses from an offensive item, designed to be played on offensive champions that shouldn't be getting hit in the first place.

4. You could completely redo which items give GW, and make them less slot efficient. This way your players know that they're decisively opting in to GW for a specific reason, rather than getting it because the item is good an 'oh look, it also gives GW.' The problem with this is that it makes it harder to check adcs with runaway lifesteal values. If you wanted to follow through with this idea, you could also slightly nerf lifesteal to make it so that unless somebody's taking 3 lifesteal items, the GW probably wouldn't be needed in the first place.

5. My favorite idea, is that morello and Mortal Reminder could have their passive GW worked into an active with a short CD. Morello's could be that you apply GW to one champion for 8 seconds, with something like a 30 second CD. For Mortal Reminder, it could be that for the next few seconds, any champion that you deal physical damage to is given GW for 5 seconds (Or could possibly be an AoE nova that puts GW on all targets in range. I think it's better from a balance perspective, but it wouldn't make as much sense.). The cooldown on this would be longer, say, 90 seconds. There are several reasons that I like this idea more than the others- adcs don't typically last a long time once they start getting hit. This ensures that if you're in a good chance to take the adc down, then you can put GW on him and still have just as much utility from that as you usually would. And when the overfed Mundo is 1v5 in your team, healing infinitely, you can hit him with GW and would still normally have enough time to take him down, or force him to run away. On the flip side, it also ensures that GW isn't getting constantly reapplied by a stray skillshot or an unavoidable Luden's proc when you're trying to heal at the back of the fight. It would give counterplay around the GW, because if you know it's been used you can try to disengage, and wait for a good time to go back in, knowing that the GW is now off CD. It could prevent the issue where you'll see a team end up buying 3 or 4 forms of GW, just to have it be redundant, but with each person too afraid to sell it back, worried that they'll find themselves in a 1v1 with no GW. Furthermore, it removes the confusing requirements of the Morello passive- it only applies GW if you're low, but most champions with built in healing heal extra the lower they are. Keeping Morello as it is now is counterintuitive in the first place because it makes sustain tanks afraid of getting low, when they should feel more empowered the lower they are.

6. Obviously GW could be kept as it is now. I wouldn't like it, but ultimately what I like doesn't matter to the balance of the game if nobody else agrees with me.

If anybody has any questions, concerns, comments, or ideas, feel free to share them with me, whether you agree or disagree.