The tank item that needs to exist (in regards to balance between incomming damage types)

Wandering Wolf·12/26/2014, 1:45:21 PM·70 votes·6,234 views

There needs to be an item available that accomplishes the following:

+25 flat Armor, +25 flat Magic Resist +300 HP Unique Passive: Balanced Defense - Gain Armor equal to 15% of your purchased Magic Resist. Gain Magic Resist equal to 15% of your purchased Armor.

Keep in mind these numbers are completely irrelevant and should certainly be changed for the sake of Balance, I just gave specific values to paint a clearer picture of what I mean.

Generally speaking, the greater the mix of damage types from the enemy team, the less effective tanks wind up being later on in the game. Considering they have to split their gold into both MR and Armor, as well as HP, they tend to fall off every time they buy an item that grants a resist that doesn't apply to the opposite damage type enemy carry. Meanwhile the damage dealers have a very simple build path; More Damage. It's really simple for them, regardless of if they are AP or AD, and they scale at a steady rate regardless of comps.

Basically, the item is intended to assist a tank late game, when they have stacked one mitigation type, and then they find themselves -needing- a little bit of the other resist as well. The item is cost inefficient early on, as the unique passive will do close to nothing, however when a tank has +250 armor from items, they can get +37.5 MR from the passive (+the flat value) to help against those Corki rockets and Support Morg damage, they can get it cost effectively while still being able to gain even more armor / HP for that Riven Top, Lee jungle, and Zed mid, etc etc. The goal of the item is to only be efficient very late game, and to allow an Armor stacked, or MR stacked tank to cover the other neglected stat, and as such, scale appropriately into late game.

Thoughts?

Remember, the stats suggested are just an example so you can understand the purpose of the item, the important thing is the item concept.

125 Comments

Wheatloaf12/26/2014, 2:38:07 PM30 votes

My only major qualm with this is... how would it interact with Garen? Dear god, the tankiness...

BeatzBoyFTW12/26/2014, 1:52:54 PM20 votes

Jax: U fkin w0t m8?

MakersF12/26/2014, 3:59:12 PM10 votes

The explicitly stated that they are not going to make items with both Arm AND MR because the "counter" to magic and physical dmg is HP. This is why the removed the armour from the Aegis. You need to either purchase resistances to a specific type or build health. And that's make total sense, if it wasn't that they put %HP dmg on everything, and now running around with 8k HP but no resistances is completely useless, and you get destroyed by almost everyone.

Ah, and let's not forget Vayne . What's the counter of true dmg? HP. What's the counter of HP? %HP. What if we put that together? ---> no way anyone can survive

Sozan512/26/2014, 5:12:32 PM5 votes

I think that for starters Riot have to change following items:

Last Whisper Void Staff

They are simply too effective against no-tanks, while also being the best items against tanks.

I believe that both of them should be clear anti-tank items, with very little effect on squishies (the passive part of course).

LW and Void Staff penetration should be bonus Armor/Magic Resist penetration. That means this effect will be rather useless against non-tanks. Maybe give them a bit of flat penetration to compensate, like 10.

Of course, the same applies to Devastating Strikes mastery (I think they should add another tier 5 offensive mastery, like Penetrating Strikes: +2/3,5/5 flat penetrations, so you can choose whichever you want for 21 offense).

Anyway, what I wish is that LW and VS are only bought if you have problems with getting through enemy armor/mr. Right now they are bought no matter what, because they are still extremely good at killing any target with 60+ armor/mr.

exiledFromBadmen12/26/2014, 8:43:49 PM4 votes

No double-resist items should give HP...

Sejuani

But penetrarion items should be all flat, I agree with you.

John Berserk12/26/2014, 9:14:50 PM3 votes

What if the bonus % Armor/MR you get from the item came in stacks over the course of the game, to emphasize the fact that this was meant to be a late game tank item?

Gorbache12/26/2014, 10:51:32 PM2 votes

I don't think the issue for tanks is to get different items. Some champions like Maokai can tank just fine because he has the TOOLS to tank. What we need is more champions specialized in tanking.

Stars Shaper12/26/2014, 5:55:32 PM2 votes

Taric would be a Raid Boss xD

Since the problem are Armor and Megic Penetrations why don't make an on-use item that doubles Armor/MR or ignores Penetrations for a short time to allow the Tanks to have a defensive burst option?

Sneak Dog12/26/2014, 7:16:50 PM2 votes

I do think making offensive items a bit more "kill tanks" or "kill squishies" instead of just raw damage would be a better solution. Not only void staff and last whisper but even liandry's torment. Liandry's is actually incredibely confusing in that aspect. **This lack of specialisation is the source of the tank frustration I think. **Tanks are getting killed not by specialised tank-busters, but by generic damage-dealers. (See below my reasoning)

Armor has to be incredibely efficient for a tank to stand a chance against an adc (which they don't). Adcs scale with ad/as/crit/arpen, whereas tanks only scale with armor/health against this and also have to buy mr. Lategame, tanks just don't stand a chance, but due to the scaling of the adc, early- and midgame tanks do just fine. Only exceptions to this are tanks that can add a scaler to their resistances (Maokai ult for example). Other tanks just have to tank the adc by not getting right-clicked for a total of five seconds.

This would be fine if adcs would actually just be the counter to a tank. What they really are is the best and most reliable damage-dealer lategame if given five uninterrupted seconds. They kill tanks by brute damage more than anything.

gubigubi12/26/2014, 7:24:44 PM2 votes

No. No item should be a go to item for both MR and armor.

OyddAWqJ5r12/26/2014, 7:32:14 PM1 votes

Why though? Cuz you could just buy an MR item and an Armor item and then bam you have armor and mr. I don't understand the issue. Having the two stats seperate on most every item allows you to not waste gold on the other if you're only going for one. Such as when the enemy team is heavy physical or heavy magic you will build heavy armor or heavy mr. If the team is balanced? Build both. 1 item for armor, 1 item for mr. A half armor half mr item with half the stats of an actual armor or mr item doesnt seem to solve anything. Might as well just build the 2 seperate items. The item you're suggesting here seems like it would be better suited for bruisers in all cases other than the passive increasing armor n mr gains above 20%--which would in turn make tanks 20% more tanky which is pretty unreasonably broken.

Madra12/26/2014, 6:50:23 PM1 votes

If you are relying on % increase on an item to balance tanks, you are going to end up disproportionately favoring tanks with big defensive actives.

LankPants12/26/2014, 2:18:13 PM1 votes

I'm personally not 100% convinced that tanks need a super powerful late game item right now. I think that a double resist item should be geared more towards early game, as a late game tank with 4K hp and 150 MR can mostly just ignore most mages, making armour stack into the late game more effective. This 150 MR is the investmen of a locket or a Spirit Visage and runes in most cases, and their other effects probably make them better in the late game unless you're a Ramus or something.

As for an early game tank item my idea on how to do it is

item 3709 item 3717 item 3721 item 3725

Build path item 3713 + item 1028 + item 3067 > item 3713 + item 1028 + item 1029 +item 1033 HP 500 > 350 Armour 0 > 30 MR 0 > 30 CDR 10% > 0 Tenacity removed

My reasoning for each of the changes is that tanks don't really need tenacity, if they're CCing you you will probably win the fight as they are wasting CC on a member they can't burst. The early resists should help stop you just exploding in early fights before you get a ton of items, it won't make your early fighting Lee Sin levels but it will help you at least be tankier than him.