Boards›Gameplay

Rune stat shards: Defensive choices aren't great choices (Warning: Math)

Acanthus·11/18/2018, 1:38:39 PM·2 votes·1,774 views

In terms of gold efficiency and actual stat efficiency, there's no reason to pick defensive stats because they simply are not equal in performance to the offensive stats, especially with runes supplementing offense and not defense. Now, these are the stat shards per Riot MapleNectar located here:

Row 1: 10 Adaptive (6 AD or 10 AP), 9% Attack Speed, 1-10% CDR (lvls 1-18). Row 2: 10 Adaptive (6 AD or 10 AP), 5 Armor, 6 Magic Resist, (We’re debating adding a 4th here). Row 3: 15-90 HP (lvls 1-18), 5 Armor, 6 Magic Resist

To those that don't know, armor and mr essentially increase your effective health by 1% per 1 point. Since I'm thinking about this primarily from a solo tank/bruiser perspective. If I'm Naut, who starts with 576 hp and 35 armor, my effective hp against physical damage is about 778. If I was to add 5 armor to that, it would be an effective hp of about 806, which is a 28 hp difference. And Naut has a decently sized hp pool.

Anyway, what I don't like about this is that it's such a poor choice over offensive runes that it's actually really easy to overcome that difference of effective hp if you have scaling on your abilities and pick the 6 ad. I doubt that in a fight, that the effective hp would give you even an extra second at any stage of the game, especially when you're melee against ranged.

For the third row, I also have a serious problem with the hp choice vs armor or mr. For starters, the hp choice works against everything. It also increases the usefulness of your starting armor and mr. In the Naut example, it would add 20 effective hp against physical damage at level 1 with his starting armor, and it scales up. There is literally no reason to ever pick the 5 armor or 6 magic resist because you gain another 88 effective hp throughout the game against physical damage from just that before even considering level up armor or bought items. With his max level up armor the scaling hp shard actually gives him 179 effective hp against physical damage. The direct comparison would be 5 armor increasing his level 18 effective base hp by 101. While you can get more out of the stat if you're buying large pools of hp, you're obviously going to more easily get more out of the other stats unless you have a special scaling like Rammus/Malphite or if you're Cho/Sion, who can infinitely stack hp.

Lastly, I don't feel like there are enough stat shards. I'm not talking choices in stats, I'm talking about rows. I like the idea of having to choose between offense and defense or utility or defense or utility and offense, etc. There should be more of that to supplement the runes, especially if the runes are going to continue adding mostly frontloaded burst.

Off-topic: Why isn't there a resolve rune rune that literally says: "if you take damage >15% of your max health in one ability/auto, reduce it by x%?" I mean, fuck, you can make the ability scale with bonus hp and give it a cooldown if you don't want squishies to use it.

4 Comments

Acanthus11/18/2018, 2:02:02 PM1 votes

Forgot to say, but if anyone has a doubt that 12 ad or 20 ap won't get you much more, you pick a champion, I'll pick the rune, and I'll math out for you how much more you'll get out of it in a typical trade or plausible rotation (in the event I don't play that champion) for that champion.

Hügö11/18/2018, 2:24:48 PM1 votes

They shoudl just remove those masteries and include more stat shards.

ProfDrDeath11/18/2018, 2:28:18 PM1 votes

You're missing the difference between primary stats and scaling stats.

AD, AP and HP are primary stats - they are stats that directly influence a champion's general offensive and defensive qualities. AS, CdR, Armor and MR are scaling stats - they increase the effectiveness of the primary stats, but require a certain amount of primary stats to be truely effective.

Take attack speed as an example. As a champion which does not have increased AS benefits (for instance, through on-hit effects), it is better to increase AD than AS at the start of the game. The reason is that low amounts of AS do not make much of a difference in lane - most of the time, only having increased AS from stat bonuses does not mean that you get more attacks in during a short lane trade - and thus, it is better to make the attacks you make hit harder. In the same manner, increasing AD makes you last-hit more reliably, whereas AS does nothing for last-hitting.

Also, concerning the trade between Resistances and offensive stats in slot 2:

Yes, 10 AP or 6 AD are giving more damage at level 1 than the given amount of resistance will negate. However, once base damages and AD/AP are increased through levels and items, 10 AP/6 AD will mean much less.

{quoted}

It is not even necessary to tweak these stats. The numbers are set up in the current way due to the fact that AD/AP are primary, additive stats, which HP would also be. In contrast, both Armor and MR are multiplicative stats. As such, despite having roughly have the gold value, 6 MR are in fact worth much more than 10 AP. On top, and this is especially important for AP, abilities have base damages.

Add Xerath's other sources of AP (+10 from slot 1, +15 from Doran's Ring) to OP's numbers: Against 25 AP Xerath (98.75 Q damage), Morde takes 74.8 / 71.6 damage (95.7%). Against 35 AP Xerath (106.25 Q damage), Morde takes 80.5 / 77.0 damage (95.7%). Bold are the numbers that would correspond to OP's two figures.

However, what about level 5? Level 5 Morde has 36 MR, or 42 with an additional 6. Xerath's Q at rank 3 has 160 base damage. Against 25 AP Xerath (178.75 Q damage), Morde takes 131.4 / 125.9 damage (95.8%). Against 35 AP Xerath (186.25 Q damage), Morde takes 136.9 / 131.2 damage (95.8%). Oh, look, Morde takes less damage in the cases with both bonuses than in the case without both bonuses.

The effect only scales up from there.