Diamond player advice: Thornmail is broken

##Explanation on how thornmail is broken You do more damage, you lifesteal proportionally.

You do more damage, thornmail does more damage to you, in the same proportion.

This is how much damage you do, we will call it D.

It can be with crits, without crits, it can be with 2 attacks per second or 1 it doesn't matter. Its whatever damage output you have that thornamail can reflect, so that means auto attacks, critical strikes included.

D * 0.3 = magic damage you receive.

Magic resist is just a damage multiplier that reduces the damage you take. The value is 100 / (100 + magic resist)

D * 0.3 * (100 / (100 + magic resist) ) = damage to your hitpoints.

Alright now lets figure out how much lifesteal you are getting per attack lets say your lifesteal is 20% or 30% or whatever it happens to be, equal to L.

So D * Enemy armor mitigation * L = amount you heal for per hit. the formula is just the same as it was for magic resist.

D * (100 / (100 + enemy armor) ) * L = hit points gained

See the problem?

damage to your hit points = hit points gained, only when D * (100 / (100 + enemy armor) ) * L = D * 0.3 * (100 / (100 + magic resist) )

Even if you had 30% lifesteal, you'd have to have EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF MAGIC RESIST AS THEY HAVE ARMOR, in order to cancel out thornamil. And that aint happening. You aren't getting 400 magic resist. Even if you get last whisper and go deep in the offense tree so that they have effectively 244 armor, you still aren't getting 244 magic resist. Hell even if you put black cleaver on top of all that, you sill aren't getting 200 magic resist. You cannot out heal thornmail damage if the thornmail wearer has a significant amount of armor.

This is why thornmail is broken in its specific niche.

##Why is that not a good thing? I think there are more creative and intersting ways to create an incentive to have magic damage on your team, rather than simply creating an item that craps on melee light fighters like tryndamere, yi, fiora, and yasuo in duels by being literally broken against them, and doing basically nothing to anyone else. Even ranged champions can just target something else within their range, whereas melee champions might have to move through threat zones and take time to move from here to there.

It doesn't feel good to have your entire identity and one of your fundamental core strengths as a duelist invalidated entirely because of one 2300 gold item. It doesn't feel good to have close interesting duels between fiora and jax only to have all that intersting close interactivity and FUN taken away from both of you because thornmail exists and jax has no reason to not use it in that scenario.

It is an unfair item that isn't only unfair, it also removes fun in its niche. It prevents interaction. I don't ever feel like I can win a duel against a heavy armor stacker when that stacker has thornmail.

If they don't have thornmail it will still take upwards of 12-20 seconds to kill a real tank, like malhpite for example. That represents a risk. Chasing through half the map to kill him is risky buisiness. What if his allies are in the brush waiting for me?

Its risky. Thats how I justify being ok with Yi's ability to duel tanks over the long run, and being able to EVENTUALLY kill a tank 1v1. I'm ok with that, because there is a risk involved.

With thornmail uber tanks, that entire dynamic dissapears. One strength that light fighters bring to the table completely evaporates.

And its not like the tank does literally 0 damage either. I can't even split against it or be near a shyvanna that has thorns because she has the base damage requied to kill me. The only thing I can do is run away, because if I even hit them back I'll be slowed by randuins passive.

Its a crappy item design when it removes fun and interaction from the game. Maybe you don't agree that light fighters should be able to duel practically the entire roster. Well I think they should, because they certainly pay for it. A tank can deny the light fighter that, even if the light fighter spends 18,000 gold on offense, and then go on to do good wonderful things in team fights, while denying the light fighter the ability to team fight just by being PRESENT through the aura attack speed slow of frozen heart and the large aoe slow of randuins omen. That just isn't a good balance of power.

One of the design criteria in league of legends, one thing that RIOT prides themselves on, is that the game does not have hard counters, whether in champion select or as the champions progress. According to their design philosphy, a player should always have options-- they should always be able to have some influence on the game by reacting to their opponents choices in the game, not before the game begins. They should be able to react to their opponents choice of itemization with their own itemization choices, so that "hard counter" situations cannot occur.

Obviously it does occur.