I still think towers, minions, and monsters should do 50/50 physical and magic damage

BobaFlautist·Oct 2, 2017·1 votes·130 views

Right now tanks basically stack armor and slip a single mr item into their build when they absolutely must. Ambient magic damage is so sparse in this game (oh no I need spirit visage or gromp's gonna fuck me up!) armor is almost always going to be more cost effective unless the enemy mage is bursting you out.

The fact that tanks are mostly at their leisure to stack armor means that armor pen needs to be stupidly strong, which means that when a tank really needs armor (against a full ad team, for example) it doesn't hit as hard as it could.

If we added more ambient damage, mr would be more important, and armor items could be allowed to work. A win for everyone involved except the 400 armor Malphite tanking 400 tower shots on live.

3 Comments

GrievousFetusOct 2, 20171 votes

Actually the entire reason there's a disproportionate amount of physical damage in the game is because it's actually advantageous for whoever is on offense and disadvantageous for the tank if most of the game's damage is physical and a little bit is magical.

BobaFlautistOct 2, 20171 votes

Say some more. That's an interesting claim that seems like it's going places, but then you just don't back it up

GrievousFetusOct 2, 20171 votes

okay, so if a tank is up against an all AD team or an all AP team they simply build all armour or all MR. If a team is evenly split between AD and AP, then the tank simply builds equal parts armour and magic resist and it's fairly efficient.

But, if a team is all physical damage save for one magic user (or if a team is all magic save for one physical user, but you have to have an ADC to push towers so you never see the latter) then the tank is forced to build magic resist solely for that single magic user, delaying his armour stacking for the other physical damage members of the enemy team and committing more of his total build/gold value/slot efficiency to MR than the enemy team actually warrants. But he still has to do this because the alternative is building no MR, and that's a far worse unviable alternative.

Essentially, being almost all of one damage type but then having a token member of the team who's the other damage type forces the tank to 1) delay armour which is strongest against most of the team and 2) overcommit to how much MR he's building because of the way slots work out. There's a bare minimum amount of MR the tank has to take, and if you only have one magic user he is forced to take this bare minimum despite the fact that it's too much.

Of course, hybrid resist items like Zz'Rot may have disrupted that balance in recent years.