Conqueror is balanced. Change my mind
Let the discussion begin. Numbers plox.
None of thos "omfg you are wrong."
I can scream gravity does not exist but that does not mean I am right.
12 Comments
I believe conqueror is a good idea, but it needs to be nerfed. reduce the amount of true damage it does and the amount of AD the champ gains while using it, and it will be more fair imo. 20 percent is too much, makes tanks almost feel like they aren't tanks, well what about that, how funny. reduce the percent damage extravagantly, make it like, 1-5 percent somewhere instead, and increase the AD gained at higher levels, so that the damage gained is still great against non tanks, and tanks, but the true damage doesnt completely rip out everyone.
The idea behind Conqueror is great, but it's too strong in practice.
It was supposed to counter Tanks and allow the Bruiser to fight against them during the laning phase, yet it's just picked up by every Bruiser regardless of matchup, since the free bonus AD and True Damage is, unsurprisingly enough, also just as strong, if not stronger, against squishies.
If the True Damage is absolutely something that has to stay and can't be removed, at least make it percentage current health based, so that it's actually supposed to counter Tanks, and not everybody.
Something like: "Converts 20 - 0% of your damage to champions to True Damage (based on target's current health) for the duration."
That's 20% damage converted at 100% health, 19% damage converted at 95% health, 18% damage converted at 90% health, 17% damage converted at 85% health, 16% damage converted at 80% health, 15% damage converted at 75% health, and so on and so forth.
This makes them stronger against Tanks, whilst weaker against squishies, which was the intended purpose of Conqueror in the first place
Damage conversion into True Damage, of course, being calculated pre the target actually taking the damage.
To enforce it's use as a laning keystone against Tanks, increase the early AD you get to 10 from it's current 6, but reduce the maximum AD to 25 from 35.
This, again, makes it so the Bruiser can reliably face Tanks in lane, but not deal absurd amounts of damage in the late game.
It adds on to a problem that has been plaguing the game for seasons; There is too much damage and not enough drawback for having that damage. Being able to roll over somebody because "hurr hurr I outstat you" is toxic, and will never be truly balanced.
It was made to deal with the tank meta. I'm tempted to say "I don't want to change your mind."
i mean Conquerors a bit part of what pushed tanks out of top.
As a standalone rune, Conqueror's gives more than the passives of Dominiks and Void staff combined against a tanks with any decent amount of resistances. Basically give that to someone like Jax, no wonder he got broken out of it.
Conqueror's problem is less that it is too powerful, imo, but that it is too generally strong between its AD buff (general power), true damage conversion (better against tanks) and stackability on minions (too strong in lane, as you can essentially can have it permanently ready to be activated). In contrast, the 4-second arm time sucks vacuum in the later game stages, as fights are probably mostly decided before it is ready to go. Also, there is the issue of its effectively unlimited duration on melee champions, as its duration after activation is extended on them by any combat effect.
Personally, this is how I'd redesign Conqueror:
Conqueror: While the rune is active, convert 15% of your physical and magic damage to true damage. Activate Conqueror by damaging an enemy champion within 500 range with an auto-attack or ability when Conqueror is fully stacked. The first auto-attack or ability to hit an enemy champion deals 5-90 bonus true damage. This buff lasts for 3 seconds (ranged)/5 seconds (melee).
Cooldown: 10-3 seconds after activation before stacking starts again
Conqueror stacks over 3 seconds after damaging or being damaged by an enemy champion. At level 12, the arm time is reduced to 2 seconds. Conqueror instantly stacks fully if the user champion takes 400-1800 damage within 5 seconds (same as Sterak's Gage).
Starting at level 10 (melee)/13 (ranged), Conqueror's active duration can be extended by 1.5 seconds (melee)/ 1 second (ranged), once by hitting an auto-attack and once by hitting an ability.
Numbers obviously just eyeballed.
Isnt it funny conq gives more % true damage (20) than infinity edge? A free rune gives double the % damage conversion of a fully built expensive item.
For some reason it also gives bonus AD (half of IE's AD at level 18) as if doing 20% true damage is not enough as a rune you can stack on minions.
Just for comparison, when IE was reworked to have 15% true damage conversion, people flipped and called it a buff and OP until Riot nerfed it to it's current 10%.
So here's your numbers:
- A free, easy to stack, endlessly refreshable rune gives double the true damage conversion of a 3400 cost item.
- It also gives half of IE's AD at level 18 as bonus AD when activates.
It would be like giving mages a 40% AP boost from level 1 with 60 AP on the side when they reach late game just for shits and giggles.
The idea of conq was to let fighter type melee deal with tanks, the problem at the time was that the tanks would just farm out a bit early, go back for some early armor then laugh through the fighter´s damage and kill them with base damage while they took very little damage back, especially after aftershock was added.
So given that the problem was tanks just shrugging off all damage and fighters not being able to deal with resistances the solution was true damage, this thought process seems pretty good at first but it had its own issues.
First up, the way it was made to work is to convert 20% of the damage dealt into true damage, this effectively ensures that in any all-in conqueror is absolutely hands down superior to everything else with no contest, it kills of almost all diversity in rune choice.
Lets say we take 2 auto attackers and put them in a fight early after letting them hit some minions each first, both deal 100 damage per hit and one uses press the attack while the other uses conq, they both have 100 armor or 50% damage reduction.
The PtA user will over the course of 10 hits deal 1096 damage, reduced to 548, PtA will have added 84 damage at lvl 1.
The conqueror user will deal 1060 with just his autos.
Now without the true damage part the conq user would have done 530 damage, but with 20% having been converted to true damage then there is a additional 212 true damage done if i am not mistaken in as how it works.
So total damage ends up being 742.......not even a contest, one does 84 damage and the other 212?
And on to my second view, conq does too much true damage, it makes buying resistances utterly pointless as the enemy will just bypass them anyway while building nothing but damage, this ensures that tanks and tank items are much, much weaker than they should be-
Now i wont deny that tanks just ignoring damage is a problem, but fighters ignoring resistances is just as much of a problem, and so is marksmen doing is.
So i find it good that both fighters and marksmen are losing the true damage.
Thirdly, the problem with fervor was that it was broken on some and useless on the others which is why it was removed, but conqueror is exactly the same but even worse.
Overall to me conqueror comes off as rushed, poorly thought out and poorly tested, and while acting as a remedy for a set of problems it also created far more becoming a greater issue in total.