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@Riot - Would you ever consider making items affected more by base stats?

Hinagiku33·9/15/2016, 5:52:44 PM·9 votes·540 views

Hey all,

So as the season is wrapping up and we're all getting started talking about Pre-Season 7, I wanted to see if any Rioters could answer a couple of question about the state of items in Season 6.

We've had all kinds of issues in Seasons 5 and 6 involving items (also in every Season prior). Namely the Juggernaut update and the Marksmen item overhaul. We had item 3025 item 3068 letting everyone be Tanky DPS toplane. We had item 3748 letting squishy champs like Fiora go Tanky DPS and stomp games. We had champs like Akali Ekko Yasuo building Tanky DPS to bypass their intended weakness of being squishy melee damage dealers. We had item 3053 item 3156 stacking and making Marksmen really Tanky and difficult to burst. And more recently we have items like item 3116 item 3151 item 3027 item 3030 item 3152 letting Mages build really Tanky in addition to their safety of range and CC/Utility, and items like item 3046 item 3078 into full tank builds giving flat Damage Reduction and powerful Spellblade procs to already annoying Tanky DPS builds.

I'm starting to think there may be a problem with Tanky DPS at the moment.

I can totally get why champions may want to build Tanky - most people don't like exploding instantly. If a build offers good defense and passable damage, then why risk being a useless glass cannon when you can bulk up and actually survive a team fight while still outputting decent damage? If the items support the play-style then obviously that play-style will become optimal.

So the solution seems to be to make that no longer possible.

I've seen some great threads in the last couple weeks that talk about tank items and possible changes to help Warden and Vanguard Tanks that won't make Diving Fighters, Skirmishers, and Assassin unbearable. In the past the issue has been that putting offensive stats on Tank items has made Fighters completely broken. But even putting too high defensive stats on a single item becomes a problem since it can make Divers very durable even when they only build 2-3 defensive items.

So let's talk Base Stats. Those little things that Riot uses to help keep champions balanced by determining how strong a champion can get by levels alone without getting items. There's actually a really good system in place here that helps to define class roles and strengths. Melee champs get MR/Level to compensate for having to wade through AoE spells to get to their targets. Marksmen get more Attack Speed/Level to compliment their intended builds. Tanks can have higher Base AD to let them last-hit better while building primarily defense.

One of my favorite changes Riot did was changing Health/Mana regen to % based rather than lots of flat amounts. Sure, it sucked when Riot made those nice % Regen items Support-only and gave Mages just flat Mana to work with, but at least Mana Regen Growth/Level was a stat that could be buffed on any struggling Mages.

Now I'd like to see that applied to other types of stats, especially Tank stats.

  • Health Regen on Tank items seems to already benefit Tanks more than Fighters. Base Health Regen and Health Regen/Level can also be buffed/nerfed to ensure that Tanks benefit more from the 100%-200% Health Regen on Tank items.
  • Health on full Tank items can be changed to Bonus Health based on % of Base Health (plus Health/Level of course). Someone like Chogath building two items with +25% Base Health (stacking to +50% Base since their Bonus health wouldn't affect other items anyway) would see better returns than someone like Ekko. Fighters like Jax could still get the items and still get a good amount of Health, but just not as much as pure Tanks would.
  • Armor and Magic Resist can work the same way, giving Bonus Armor and MR based on % of Base Armor/MR. Again, Fighters can still pick up a couple items and see a noticeable change in durability (since Fighters are intended to build semi-Tanky and should have slightly higher Base Armor/MR to support this) but Warden and Vanguard Tanks will always get the most benefit.
  • Offensive stats like AD on Fighter items like item 3748 item 3071 can also be based on Base AD to make them better on the Tanky Fighters they are meant for while making them weaker on champs that should be building more glass cannon.
  • We can still let non-Tank items give regular Flat Health, Armor, MR, and AD like they do now. This would just ensure that Warden and Vanguard Tanks have items that are suitably strong for them that can't be abused by other classes that just gets their items nerfed.

To go with this, I think we may want to look at Critical Strike too, namely the damage formula.

Recently, some Marksmen have being going for item 3142 item 3071 item 3147 types builds that let them completely annihilate squishy targets while adding item 3036 or item 3033 to still destroy Tanks in the mid-late game. Currently it seems that some Marksmen are combining Crit items like item 3031 item 3046 to add powerful Crits on top of their much higher than normal Armor Penetration. This is probably part of the reason there are so many threads claiming that Tanks just explode right now.

I think the problem is making Critical Hits do 200% damage.

This comes down to the same reason that Fiora Vayne were given % Max Health True Damage. So they could devastate Tanks and be serious threats to durable Fighters while not just deleting squishy champs in 2 hits. When a hit is meant to really hurt a Tanky target, you really only have 3 options:

  1. Make the hit do extremely high flat damage to compensate for 50+% of it being ignored by Armor and the target having 3,000-4,000 Health.
  2. Make the hit do more damage based on stats Tanks are likely to have more of - i.e. Health/Armor/MR.
  3. Ignore defensive stats like Armor/MR to hit Tanks hard while hurting but not deleting glass cannons.

Would it be possible to make Critical Hits ignore a % of Total Armor - NOT stacking with other sources of Armor Penetration?

This can work with the Tank item changes above, since Vanguard and Warden Tanks can have higher base Armor and Bonus Armor than Fighters so they will still have at least decent Armor left to soak some hits while Mages, Supports, and Assassins get hit a bit harder but not instantly deleted since they wouldn't have much Armor to reduce. Here's some lazy math:

  • Let's say Ashe with 400 Total AD attacks a Level 18 Cassiopeia with no Armor items. Cass has 84.5 Base Armor at 18, so 100/100+84.5 = 0.542. So she receives 54.2% incoming physical damage. 400 x 0.542 = 216.8 physical Damage on a non-Critical. If a Critical Hit ignores 60% of Total Armor, then 84.5 gets reduced to 33.8, so 100/100+33.8 = 0.747. So she receives 74.7% incoming physical damage on a Critical, which is 400 x 0.747 = 298.8 physical damage on Criticals.
  • Now an Ashe with 400 Total AD attacking a Vi with 150 Total Armor. 100/100+150 = 0.4, so only 40% incoming physical damage received on non-Criticals. 400 x 0.4 = 160 physical damage. On a Critical Hit it would be 100/100+60 = 0.625, so 62.5% of the damage is now coming through for 400 x 0.625 = 250 physical damage.
  • And an Ashe with 400 Total AD attacking someone like Chogath with 200 Total Armor would deal 100/100+200 = 0.333 or 33% incoming physical damage received for 400 x 0.333 = 133.2 physical damage on Non-Criticals, and 100/100+80 = 0.555 or 55.5% incoming damage received for 400 x 0.555 = 222 physical damage on Critical Hits.

This lets the damage really spike up on Tanks while squishy champs like Mages and Supports take extra damage but don't instantly die. If we let items like item 3031 increase the Armor Reduction on Critical Hits to 70-75% then in combination with Attack Speed, Marksmen will still be able to plow through Tanks but not quite as fast as they are now.

Obviously numbers are up for debate, but I think changes similar to this could let Tanks be really Tanky, let Fighters be kinda Tanky even with some of the same items in their builds, and let Marksmen punch holes in tough targets without turning glass cannons into a fine mist in two hits. Overall, I think the items in League could use a change like this so that one class can't completely ruin items meant for other classes - which seems to be a big problem right now. I'd really like to hear from a Rioter if anything like this has been discussed in-house already.

Thanks for reading my wall of text! Please let me know if you like this idea or not and let's see if we can get a Red response.

5 Comments

InsaneSamurai9/15/2016, 6:02:51 PM1 votes

I think the most important part of this is getting the game to a healthy state where they don't consider instagibbing defenseless characters to be standard procedure. If the standard baseline for tankiness was higher, but the scaling was lower, it'd probably promote more variety. As it is now, I hate playing a pure damage dealer because one mobile champ will just delete you if you get hit by any cc or end up in the wrong spot.

Anything where one mistake costs you the entire fight/lane/game just seems a bit too unforgiving, especially when you consider how easily many champs can force engages.

Meep Man9/15/2016, 6:03:41 PM1 votes

I think Armor and Magic Resist could be based more off of base stats. A couple health items too, but I really want more % Bonus Health Increase health items.

TequilaZombie9/15/2016, 6:30:17 PM1 votes

This post gave me a boner.

Riot, hire this man!

Tychusfindlay9199/16/2016, 6:04:40 PM1 votes

Im down for tank and bruiser itemization to be based on base stats.

Darius