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Question about Armor and how Much to stack.

Tehlawlfirm·9/11/2015, 2:02:56 PM·1 votes·316 views

Seems like once you hit a cap of 50% reduced damage or even 60% it doesn't really matter if you get to 70% or 80% by end game you get melted. So is there a cap that you should stop building armor as a tank or support like thresh and start focusing health?

Let's say the enemy team has 4 ads and 1 ap but the ap is a support. So as a tank your main goal is to buid armor, at what point do you say ok... this much armor is enough, anything after that is pointless and I should be building health or something other than armor.

Seems like on thresh no matter how much armor and health I build I still get melted no matter how many stacks of souls I get and yet on another champion I can build the same items and be tanky as as hell. Does Thresh just suck when it comes to building tanky and I should be focusing other items or is there something i'm missing because thresh seems to be squishy from start to finish compared to other champs that build tanky.

3 Comments

Z Statistic9/11/2015, 2:17:34 PM1 votes

No.

You're just trying to outscale dps , which scales faster and harder. If the enemy damage potential is virtually 100% physical damage, there is literally no reason to stop buying armor unless you skill has a health ratio on it or something.

To be clear, the defensive factors with respect to health scale as: linear, multiplicative, multiplicative, multiplicative, and hyperbolic. The offensive factors with respect to AD scale as: linear, multiplicative, multiplicative, multiplicative, linear proportional, and softly-hyperbolic.

They go tit for tat except AD has 1 more factor even though their 2 factors get destroyed by the defense's 1 factor. The problem is that the hyperbolic factor for defense (aka health regen) isn't even close enough to be a significant factor in increasing survival time, so in almost all cases you discount it as a factor completely. And now offense has 2 more factors than defense (which are BoRK on-hit and ArPen) in addition to going tit for tat on everything else. Except they really don't because the second and third multiplicative factors for defense (AS slow and crit damage reduction) aren't so much stats as singular bonuses whereas the second and third multiplicative factors for offense (crit % and crit damage) are pretty much incremental stats.

So, in conclusion, defense not only has fewer factors that go into maximizing EHP, the factors themselves have a smaller range than the offensive equivalents. Basically, as a tank, your mentality isn't to survive in a teamfight; your mentality should be to survive as long as possible. You are expecting death, and that's fine so long as you did your job to help your team win the fight and then push forward.

That's a broad overview. In practice, it's a good idea to get some EARLY offense in the form of a single item in order to snowball as a tank (usually it is warrior/juggernaut for junglers, BoRK on sponges, and BC/Abyssal on caster bruisers/tanks). And then you go defense.

But again, there is no reason to not buy armor vs an all physical team. That's why you want mixed damage on your team to begin with.