Why do some unique passives that only exist on one item have names?

Reaper Review·5/29/2016, 7:49:43 PM·3 votes·532 views

The point of naming unique passives is so they don't stack across multiple items with the same passive, like Spellblade and Rage.

However, there are certain items that have named passives despite said passives ONLY existing on that one item.

Runaan's Hurricane: Wind's Fury Phantom Dancer: Spectral Waltz and Lament Dead Man's Plate: Dreadnought and Crushing Blow

Frozen Mallet is the only item that has a passive labeled Icy (which I know is a hold-over from when Phage's passive was the RNG version of Icy), but Iceborn Gauntlet's slowing field is considered Icy in the game engine IIRC, so it only half-counts.

Yeah, just a thought that was on my mind.

(On an unrelated note, the active on Wooglet's Witchcap isn't named Stasis on the tooltip. This isn't actually an issue at all since Zhonya's doesn't exist on Treeline, but I just found it interesting.)

8 Comments

IronwallJackson5/29/2016, 7:53:04 PM1 votes

Unique passives exist so that they don't stack period. Imagine an assassin with 4 Yoummu's. 80 armor penetration and 4 movespeed and attack speed boosts.

Black cleaver used to have it's armor shred on a non-unique ability and everyone stacked them to get true damage.

Drakylon5/29/2016, 8:14:11 PM1 votes

It's just flavor text -- same with the additional italicized text under Ionian Boots of Lucidity -- and it also covers the case where upgrades/sidegrades to those items get released.