Why are some numbers given as "per 5 seconds"?

Dessem·Mar 11, 2016·134 votes·6,138 views

Suppose you have 3000 health. Warmog's will give you "450 health every 5 seconds" when it's active. I'm curious why it doesn't just say, "90 health every second" instead? It seems that much more easy to me if you know flat-out, "Okay, these runes give me 0.3 extra mana regen per second" instead of having to figure, "Okay, I get 1.8 extra mana regen per five seconds, so lemme just divide those by 5 to see what I actually see added to the number on my Mana bar".

Garen's also got a Passive that recovers per 5 seconds, which makes it a bit harder to gauge how much he's getting per second.

BASICALLY, I think it'd be much better for readability and immediately knowing what you get exactly if stats were listed "per second" instead of "per 5 seconds", and I'm curious why Riot's opted for a "per 5 seconds" structure instead.

64 Comments

BonipherusMar 11, 201675 votes

Yeah. It's annoying. I'm over here doing calculus on deathfire damage while thunderlords is just like bro i got you.

MarshbouyMar 12, 20162 votes

accurate

JayrettMar 12, 20161 votes

deathfire is a simple 1/4 or 1/2 but yeah, we should have to do it.

GhostOfShrimpmasMar 12, 20162 votes

Not just 1/4 and 1/2, but also x+1/4 for things like DoTs.

JayrettMar 13, 20161 votes

that's actually 1/4*(DotT time+1). makes it really strong with dots that last 4 or more seconds.

doombotMECHAMar 12, 20164 votes

meanwhile calulating dps on a manamura champ ACTUALLY takes calculus why it has to be current instead of max mana is beyond me. Thydra doesn't use your current health for it's damage, now does it?

SoMNiaMar 11, 201623 votes

Because "per second" ends up looking so small people underestimate its value, and "per minute" ends up being less useful in a game where a quarter of a second and a single health point can make all the difference. Given that we have a base 10 number system, I feel like "per 10 seconds" would be a more useful metric (just move the decimal to get your per second), but 5 was the number they chose as a happy medium.

Z StatisticMar 11, 20168 votes

per 5 is simply for historic reasons. Old mmo and rts games use per 5 units because there is delay in them. You cast a spell, mana doesn't regen for 5 seconds. It was 5 seconds because designers decided 5 seconds was long enough without being too punishing.

When you get to games that don't use this paradigm, you begin to see mps or mp10 units.

ArcticSiriusMar 12, 20161 votes

Nice little history lesson, thank you

SoMNiaMar 13, 20161 votes

I'm not sure how that follows. You have no regen at all during that delay, and after it, regen can happen at any given rate. It could have been a 15 second delay, and regen per 15 seconds wouldn't tell you how much you'd regenerate during that time — it would be zero. One has nothing to do with the other.

Z StatisticMar 13, 20161 votes

You're thinking of it backwards.

The regen in mp5 doesn't tell you how much time is required to recover spent mana. It gives you a more accurate and simplified view of your mana consumption per cast. If a spell costs 50 mana, and you have 13 mp5, then you are actually spending 63 mana to cast the spell because if you didn't cast the spell, you would have 63 more mana at the end of 5 seconds. If you were to do this with mps instead, you'd have to multiply it by 5 first instead of just directly adding the units of regen.

Do remember that in the old days, spells were not spammed like they would be in WoW today except in extreme circumstances. Getting the most out of a spell and mana required a lot of waiting around. Thus, the idea of chain casting heals was wasteful. The delay in mp5 regen for WoW lasted up through Wrath of the Lich King. It was abandoned because while encounter design was pigeonholed into constant max hps fights, the amount of excess regen not from spirit promoted frequent casts, which players liked a lot more than slow, methodical healing every 5-10 seconds.

SoMNiaMar 13, 20161 votes

So it's not how much you'll regenerate, but how much you would have if you weren't casting? That's fair. Although in that case, casting spells rapidly in short bursts would minimize the amount of time you spent not regenerating (because the delay after each cast would overlap), while spacing them out would cost you more mana in the long run.

Z StatisticMar 13, 20161 votes

Overhealing is a thing. Spamming Shadowbolt and Frostbolt was what you did for dps. Spamming Heal was both mana intensive and useless. Mana regen has always been more of a healer stat than a caster stat. I apologize for not being clearer before.

KingopantsMar 13, 20162 votes

The thing about per 5 seconds effects is they tick every 0.5 seconds. So the actually number calculation is a simple divide by 10.

SoMNiaMar 13, 20161 votes

That's actually a good point. So we have HP5 and MP5 for items and runes, and regen per second on the bar, but regen per half second is what actually happens.

L Psy KongrooMar 11, 201622 votes

Because people like to see big numbers on their items. It makes them look more powerful than they actually are, creating an incentive to buy them. 450 HP per 5 seconds looks better than 90 HP per 1 second.

DessemMar 11, 201631 votes

Honestly, I'd buy an item if it just said, "heals a shit ton of HP".

The issue is when you have a Glyph of Mana Regeneration, and it's like 0.33 per 5 seconds... which means you actually just get 0.06 extra Mana every second. It kind of obfuscates how much bang you actually get for your buck, and in that sense I think it's clearer to a lot of people if you just list the gains per second.

ChaoticPineconeMar 11, 20162 votes

I think you just answered your own question.

Instead of a system that ranges from over 100/second with warmogs passive to .06/second for glyphs of mana regen, they decided to keep it from the 100s to 10ths (cause the .03 per 5 is negligible).

SolaxoMar 12, 20163 votes

[{quoted}](name=L Psy Congroo,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=pnkEpqlr,comment-id=0002,timestamp=2016-03-11T18:00:30.815+0000)

Because people like to see big numbers on their items. It makes them look more powerful than they actually are, creating an incentive to buy them. 450 HP per 5 seconds looks better than 90 HP per 1 second.

Then people are idiots. 90 hp/1s looks much better to me than 450hp/5s

Ayame IsakiMar 12, 20164 votes

Ummm... They should look the same to you since they are equivalent.

ArakadiaMar 13, 20161 votes

They are not idiotics, they just look at things differently. DIfferent people look at things and learn different ways. Holy.... I can't believe you just said that. You might as well said "Their different and thus stupid".

DealthMar 12, 201617 votes

The shop keeper uses bigger numbers to get you to buy his items, it's just basic marketing.

Tis a nice dayMar 12, 20161 votes

Marketing in a nutshell.

MunchCrunchLunchMar 11, 20167 votes

the numbers for some of them are too low to quickly understand in the grand scheme of things. and they need some sort of a formal format. so they went with that. but i'd rather have per 10 seconds.

SeenanMar 11, 20166 votes

To be different from DOTA obviously.

QuephaMar 11, 20166 votes

All measurements of passive hp and mp regeneration are so small per second that it doesn't give a proper impression of what they're really doing.

Larger hp regen effects like Warmog's that would be large enough to wrap your head around a per second value still need to be standardized with the measurement used for hp regen from runes and masteries.

YossarianSenseiMar 12, 20166 votes

Pretty sure it has to do with historic reasons

You're selling the player base a little short when you don't think they can comprehend 10/5 is the same as 2/1

It Hertz When IPMar 12, 20163 votes

This is the same player base that routinely forgets/never learns what Thresh's lantern does.

cloman100Mar 12, 20162 votes

item 3070 Thresh

good4nothinMar 11, 20164 votes

Because Riot is completely insane and doesn't understand why people want to read numbers.

Ariel the CruelMar 12, 20161 votes

read

I'm confused. What is this word? And why does it seem so terrifying?

Billy VoHagenMar 12, 20161 votes

Nice joke to post on a fucking forum...

Ariel the CruelMar 12, 20161 votes

Thanks. I try. ;p

ModCaptainMårvelousMar 11, 20164 votes

Because "10 hp per 5 seconds" sounds a lot more impacting on paper than "2 hp per second".

FantasySniperMar 12, 20162 votes

It's easier to see the impact over time if it gives you an incremental stat like "every 5 seconds."

Which sounds better? "6 HP per second" or "30 HP every 5 seconds"

It was also easier to compare between items back before they did the base regeneration system.

CarryMar 12, 20161 votes

{quoted}

It's easier to see the impact over time if it gives you an incremental stat like "every 5 seconds."

Which sounds better? "6 HP per second" or "30 HP every 5 seconds"

It was also easier to compare between items back before they did the base regeneration system.

Not really. With sustain stats you're generally interested in how much hp or mana they will give you over a long period of time.

Like you might compare the mana sustain given by fairie charms vs Dorans ring passive by calculating the mana charm gives over 1 minute vs the mana Dorans gives from 2 waves. In that case it's easier to see in /sec so you can more readily do the math.

Why would anyone care how much they sustain over 5s? 5s is an irrelevant time period for sustaining, you sustain over long periods of time during laning phase.

FantasySniperMar 12, 20161 votes

5 seconds is a lot longer than 1 second. It's easier to understand how much you'll regenerate over time with increments of 5 instead of 1. If they made the stat "per 10 secs", nobody would even complain.

Comparing between passive and circumstantial rewards isn't really the problem here.

Captain AishiMar 12, 20162 votes

because back in the day, it was actually per five seconds, like, health regen and mana regen would only tick once every five seconds, so buying /5sec stats made sense and the presentation for regen stats didn't change with the game changing to have regen every second instead

TeCoolMageMar 12, 20162 votes

per second is more efficient

per 5 seconds makes it sound better

I don't know why people would prefer per 5 seconds simply because it makes the numbers seem larger, it's the player's fault for relying on a first glance to evaluate an item's worth but it's not the player's fault for having to spend time dividing everything by 5 to know how much they actually get.

LordOfTheLeagueMar 12, 20162 votes

Legit concern.

Jungle Lux GodMar 11, 20161 votes

It's mostly a clarity issue when the numbers are really low and something to make you feel better when buying something because the numbers are larger without having to make everything actually larger.

When the numbers are low, it can be really difficult to understand how much impact something is. Using Aatrox as an example, he has 6.59 base health regen and .5 health regen per level each over 5 seconds. That's more useful than 1.318 health regen per second and .1 health regen per second per level, especially considering you don't really need to understand exactly how much regen you have at each stage of the game since an estimate is usually enough.

Health regen per 5 seconds feeling larger is mostly a feels thing. It feels better to get an item that gives you 5 health regen per 5 seconds rather than 1 health regen per second because the number of the regen is larger. This is also why many products at a grocery store give costs in terms of 99 cents; it feels better to buy a package of cheese that costs $5.99 instead of $6.00 because it feels like it costs less when in reality the difference is negligibly small.

ThubanMar 11, 20163 votes

IDGAF what it feels like, because it doesn't matter. And no, it feels worse to buy anything X.99,I can't even walk into stores without passing out from the stress of resisting to change all the prices to the nearest ten.

Wish I could sue the family of the person who though of that X.99 scam.

Ariel the CruelMar 12, 20161 votes

Now for my next trick: Gas will cost X.989 per gallon. (Final price rounded up, naturally.)

ForeverLaxxMar 12, 20161 votes

It's just a system in place so they can claim a product is "less than ten dollars!" while still pricing it at $9.99. Most everyone realizes it, I'm personally disgusted at the notion, and marketers/business people will continue doing it because it's practically just legal false advertising.

It Hertz When IPMar 12, 20161 votes

So basically we have to lie to the playerbase about how strong items are, but it's OK because they're too stupid to notice?

Billy VoHagenMar 12, 20161 votes

I mean, dividing something by five is really easy. It's not an issue.

DessemMar 12, 20162 votes

Sure, but when I'm in-game, dividing 393 by 5 isn't exactly high on the list of things I want to be doing when I could be preventing Tristana from taking my inhibitor.