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The State of Spellvamp

Hinagiku33·2/10/2015, 10:50:16 PM·2 votes·785 views

Hey all, Fiora All Night here again to try and discuss more basic mechanics.

Today's edition: Spellvamp and You - Sustaining as a Mage

Akali Mordekaiser Morgana Vladimir

Just getting that out of the way first. Spellvamp is known for not being great and having generally bad itemization, and these are the primary reasons why.

We've heard all of this before. If Spellvamp is good then Vlad becomes insane, Akali and Morgana become drain tanks, and Morde actually becomes playable which is pretty bad. Viegar and also regen like his full HP bar with his ult. Riot also doesn't want mages splashing AoE around to heal too much and it only really works on strong, single-target burst...which is why so many people here despise Akali (even though she only gets 12% with her passive after Gunblade's AD is added, the 20% on Gunblade itself bumps it up to 32% which starts to heal her like AD Carries with Lifesteal).

So why don't we just remove it?

Well, because mages want to stay in lane to farm like the AD champs do. Mages need to use their spells to both farm/wave-clear and to poke/harass their lane opponent. Mana is already a big concern, especially in Season 5. But while AD champs can generally get item 1053 to keep their health up and heal off harass, Mages don't really have any options if their kit doesn't include a heal. Keeping health and mana up is important to stay in lane; nobody wants to back early and give their opponent a lead just because their opponent has targeted harass or they failed to dodge just one skillshot and are afraid of giving up a crucial kill because they are laning against an assassin.

So what do?

I actually think this is a really easy solution here. The problem is that Spellvamp heals on a percent of damage done and mages tend to deal tons of damage in burst - Riot has already made clear that they do not like sudden swings of health restored outside very specific situations. Well luckily for us there are already other ways of regaining health that don't have this problem.

  1. Health Regen Over Time - Just make the health return over time. It's not sudden so they still have to hang back while they heal. item 3211 is a great example, all we'd have to do is make an AP mage-oriented version. Make it work by taking harass but offer AP instead of resists, or making it work after landing skills and maybe cancel early if you get hit.

  2. Flat Health Gain - Instead of doing a percent of damage you could just gain a set amount of health. Think Ahri's new passive which actually did replace Spellvamp with this mechanism. Akali's passive could be made to work the same way by scaling the flat amount gained on spell-hit by AD. There could also be an item like Doran's Ring which offered AP and returned flat health after killing a unit/hitting a champion/etc. and scaled a little with AP. You could even make it return a larger amount of health over time.

I think it wouldn't take too much work to turn Spellvamp into something useful that also allows for values to be adjusted easier in case of balance problems. You could even give the items internal cooldowns similar to Sheen proc to gate highly spammable abilities. Boom. Mages can now buy into a bit of health sustain to keep up with the AD champs they are increasingly forced to lane with. Let me know what you guys think - criticism welcome!

1 Comments

67chrome2/11/2015, 12:41:55 AM1 votes

Riot also doesn't want mages splashing AoE around to heal too much and it only really works on strong, single-target burst...

Spell Vamp doesn't work better on single-target abilities due to that 33% on AoE.

Minions have no MR, and for most AoE spells you're doing it wrong if you can't hit 3 targets at once. Harass the enemy and hit 2 minions, hit all ~3 members of a jungle camp, peg ~3 enemy champions in a team fight.

Single-target generally comes with massive mana sustain issues if you use it on minions, leaving most single-target stuff more to champions: all of which start with 30 MR (23% damage reduction). Or single-target spells need to do 30% more damage than an AoE spell that hits 3 minions for the same sustain. Minions also aren't going to spontaneously QWER you if you get to close, and you can often target considerably more than 3 with AoE when an opponent is trying to zone you.

The AoE reduction doesn't hurt AoE abilities, it allows single target abilities to not be many magnitudes worse than AoE abilities at using it.

Out of the champions that consider spell-vamp, there's no real preference between AoE or single-target damage: Akali Jax Kennen Mordekaiser Nunu Rumble Vladimir

I'd go with "manaless" as being the main thing that makes spell-vamp appealing (Jax and Nunu in the list above can both use spell vamp without spending any mana).

Which I'd attribute to 2 main things:

  1. Any champion that's ability reliant enough to prefer spell-vamp over life steal is going to have a very bad time if they can't cast their abilities. So running out of mana is really, really bad. As such mana sustain in lane is extremely useful, and generally preferable to life sustain.

  2. item 3157 End-game life-steal generally serves the function of allowing sustained-damage champions enough sustain to sustain through a fight while they do sustained damage. Zhonya's allows burst-casters a burst of survival between their burst castings so they can burst and get a burst of defense between their bursts.

Ultimatly mana-sustain is considerably more useful early, and when late game comes around - why pick spell vamp when you could grab an hourglass? Difference between a Fiddlesticks with item 3157 vs. item 3152 is pretty much night and day. One allows you to 1v5, the other insures you'll pretty much evaporate after 0.375 seconds regardless.

Anyways - Flat HP over time from an AP sustain item could be interesting and probably not game-breaking, but it still runs into the same 2 problems with manaless champions being the main buyers.

It's unrealistic to assume a boost of HP/5 is going to keep up when entire team-fights can happen in the span of a Leona stun, and a set amount of HP pretty much says "good early, bad late".

If you try going hard in the paint with mana, you also run into the issue of Ryze and Swain being the closest things to Vladimir in overall play style, insuring AP can't have nice things :,(

What I'd like to see is Riot adding a new data field to every spell called something like "On-Hit-Effectivness", that will then modify how effective things like Spell Vamp and Rylie's Slows are on a case-by-case basis, rather than being 100% of 33% as they are currently.

That would be a massive change, but the issues with spell vamp are also fairly prevalent with any fun effect AP items can have. While AD has a massive number of fun on-hit effects, abilities (AP) are largely limited to item 3303 item 3151 item 3116 item 3165 and spell-vamp, which has caused otherwise cool spell-hit effect items like item 3188 to run into the "Vlad will abuse it so nobody can have it" issue spell vamp is currently kind of stuck in. Except with Blackfire the worst offender was Singed

Anyways - if implemented well, on-hit-effectiveness could make the game clearer and more intuitive rather than more muddled and archaic. Some things like the AoE of Alistar's Pulverize just feel off and awkward when hit with that 33% spell-vamp, where Singed's poison trail seems kinda OP even with the reductions. The Ryleis/Spell Vamp variable interaction is already in game but hidden, so making it obvious would at least clear things up. It would also give Riot a lever to hit offenders like Vlad and Singed directly when they break fun AP items.