Riot, your current experiments with Thorns effects don't address its problems

darkdill·Apr 12, 2017·2 votes·457 views

Thornmail is a crap item these days because it requires too many stats to work properly. You need bonus armor for the raw damage, HP to live long enough to use it, and MPen so that your opponent doesn't negate it with a single MR item. Unfortunately, the MPen part is something tanks and juggernauts simply don't get. You basically get a WotA problem as a result.

The Thorns effect being moved to Randuin's Omen isn't going to make it work, even if the damage is doubled against crit strikes. It's still going to get neutered by MR, lifesteal, and .

Care to share your point of view?

4 Comments

Meep ManApr 12, 20172 votes

I think it will work. I found the main issue with Thornmail was that the item's stats were incredibly weak (100 armor alone isn't good) and it's build path was horrific. This solves both issues and makes it available sooner in the game.

121E1VApr 12, 20171 votes

so item 3075 is now a 1200g item that:

builds from + + 600g
gives 30 armor instead of 100
reflects 15% of bonus armor + 15% of damage taken as magic damage when hit by basic attacks

it builds into the new item 3143 which costs 3000g:

builds from + + 800g
gives 50 armor instead of 60 and 425 health instead of 500
gives -15% damage on critical strikes (they decided to put that back in since it was the only item in-game to reduce crit-damage i guess)
when hit by basic attacks reflect magic damage onto the attacker equal to 15% of bonus armor (DOUBLED IF THE BASIC ATTACK CRITS)
no longer has the cold steel passive

This should be awesome on malphite. Too bad there's no more items that give 100 armor. i think they shouldn't allow PD's damage reduction passive to work on this. Especially not now that they're thinking of giving DD an increase to 30% damage spread over 3 seconds. Both should only apply to damage coming directly from a champion's kit, be it abilities or passives. (do they apply to any of the hydra passives item 3074 item 3748 ?)

PermabannedGarenApr 12, 20171 votes

{quoted}

Thornmail is a crap item these days because it requires too many stats to work properly. You need bonus armor for the raw damage, HP to live long enough to use it, and MPen so that your opponent doesn't negate it with a single MR item. Unfortunately, the MPen part is something tanks and juggernauts simply don't get. You basically get a WotA problem as a result.

The Thorns effect being moved to Randuin's Omen isn't going to make it work, even if the damage is doubled against crit strikes. It's still going to get neutered by MR, lifesteal, and .

Care to share your point of view?

Now all of the damage is dependent on your own armour, instead of the damage the enemy did to you. This is huge, because the previous thornmail had an issue where you stacked a whole bunch of armour to increase its damage, but the second source of the damage heavily reduced the damage you took, making its contribution fairly worthless before the ADC got penetration (which then made the item itself fairly worthless in general).

Now, crits will make them take 30% of your armour in damage, which is literally twice as much as old thornmail would have done. This seriously improves its mid game power, where tanks are meant to be at their strongest, but it still falls off a bit late game since pen and lifesteal will allow them to damage you more easily. This is fine. Damage should outscale defense.

You need bonus armour and HP on a tank every game, so those stats being mandatory is fine. They're stats you're already going to build. Might as well say that Infinity Edge is useless because you need crit, AD, and attack speed to make it powerful.

As for needing magic pen, no not really. ADCs can only really afford to get any MR, be it from a GA, a mercurial scimitar, or more rarely a maw as their fifth or sixth item slot. By this point they are supposed to outscale tanks, so there's no real issue here, you're not generally supposed to be a damage threat to an ADC this late into the game. Before then it will be very strong against them.

Now, there's a caveat here. The caveat is that melee carries like Yasuo or Mister Yi will still be able to kill you by themselves, since they can afford to get MR earlier into their build paths than ADCs can. This isn't a problem. You are not meant to be able to be a 1v1 threat against basically any skirmisher in the mid game. As a class, they are designed to be the kings of 1v1 manfighting. This is fine. Your class is the king of soaking up damage and CC, as well as disruption. You're a force amplifier, not a carry. You amplify the power of your carries. This is fine.

KilanostApr 12, 20171 votes

What the fuck is all i have to say. So they nerfed the most built armor item (sunfire) so tanks don't have the little boost to damage they need to lane against big damage champions. Now they're taking away the one way tanks had to not get eaten alive by late game AD/lifesteal stacking champions? AND they still haven't made a tank option for lifesteal counterplay.

This is just another example of how the balance team likes to throw shit against the wall to see what sticks instead of thinking through the changes they make.