Reign of Gaming

Hey there Summoners. After my first post about the upcoming preseason itemization changes, which you can find here, I’d like to talk about an item path that both demonstrates some of the updates we’re making to item tooltips and previews an upcoming item.

One of our primary goals in League of Legends is to facilitate “clarity of design,” ensuring that things work exactly how you expect them to work – and then some. With the preseason update, we’ve gone back and retuned a lot of our existing items to fit under this new paradigm and to basically re-tool some of our lesser used items into items that can fit into a wider variety of player builds. Let’s go into today’s preview item and its upgrades:

It’s pretty much the Tear of the Goddess you’ve all known and loved for quite some time. You cast spells, you gain maximum mana. It does give a bit less total mana than it did before, but it’s also cheaper at a new cost of 700 Gold.

The passive is mostly the same, with one key difference: Tear of the Goddess used to trigger on spellcasts; now it triggers when you spend Mana, including through the use of channeled effects. While these two effects are one and the same for most characters, any character that has a channeled effect that costs mana will now be able to use Tears to greater effect. Characters like Anivia and Karthus who were already excellent with Tear of the Goddess now have additional ways to trigger it, while some characters like Singed and Ashe will have a newfound ability to trigger Tear of the Goddess from their toggled abilities, opening up new item paths for those characters.

You may have noticed the new words ‘Mana Charge’ – this is part of our new item tooltip terminology. Unique Passives that are shared across items now have a unique name and indicator to call them out. Unique Passives with the same name don’t stack. This mechanic is something you’re already familiar with on existing items; we’ve merely called it out explicitly with new terminology in an effort to clarify our item tooltips.

Archangel’s staff has been similarly changed in line with the new wording and functionality, and has undergone similar cost / mana and trigger recalculations so it will fit better into our new item pricing paradigm.

Archangel’s staff also has the Mana Charge passive to indicate that this passive doesn’t stack if you build a new Tear of the Goddess. However, with the Staff you gain Five mana whenever you spend mana, rather than Four mana. Upgrading to Archangel’s staff will thus increase your rate of gain on the Mana Charge.

You may also have noticed that there’s one curious line at the end of the tooltip.

If you think about it there’s no real reason why gold has to be the only way to upgrade an item. In the case of Archangel’s Staff we wanted to create an upgrade that flowed naturally from the usage and theme of the item. But if you already have 1000 Mana and 10 Mana Regen per 5, what possible upgrade could you want from Archangel’s Staff? Just what are you going to do with all that mana anyway when you’ve charged this item for 25 minutes of the game?

-Xypherous

EDIT: Whoops. Oversight here. Tears of the Goddess will still charge off all the old spellcasts it normally did - my bad on that.

You'll be able to fill up another Tears of the Goddess after AAA transforms - but since the AAA passive is now Unique, stacking them won't be as good.


Theoretically, you could do an really inefficient late game build with AAA / Manamune and a Tears and be able to fully charge tears 3 times - but at a certain point, buying Rod of Ages or Frozen Heart might be better for this case.

The big question is whether or not that's an interesting "splash" feature of a champion *or* if it's a core centerpiece of why you would pick them.

Interesting splash effects can be moved onto items that are niche or gated (like AAA's fully charge requirement). You don't pick Blitzcrank because of Mana Shield - you pick him because of Rocket Grab. So Rocket Grab would be a bad skill to put on an item because it invalidates Blitzcrank's existence - but Mana Shield is okay because that's not Blitzcrank's primary thing.

It also depends on whether or not the stacked effect makes that champion cooler or not. Blitzcrank's passive doesn't actually consume Mana - thus Blitzcrank with AAA can double scale off his own mana. If the champion with the similar mechanic in question doesn't get a different, more awesome stacked effect, then it's not as great. If we made a passive similar to Nidalee's passive for example - It wouldn't actually be a good thing because Nidalee is already uncatchable in Brush - and the stacked effect doesn't make her more awesome, it just gives her redundant unnecessary stats.

Rod of Ages has a very clear purpose: It builds out of Catalyst and is best when rushed early as it gives you a huge mid-game boost and solid survivability statistics. The other part of this is that Seraph's embrace potentially gives you a 600 to 1k health shield for 2.5 seconds. Rod of Ages just gives you 600 health all the time.

They accomplish similar things but Seraph's allows you to go far more glass - and the two items also have a pretty decent synergy with each *other* as Catalyst -> Tears -> RoA -> AAA will create a very strong durable tank mage. So one is Mana + Spike Survivability and one is Mana + Passive Survivability and when combined together they give you a decent mix of passive survivability, spiked survivability and raw ability power that makes you a fairly well-rounded mage.

Bonus Mana is tied to the 'Mana Charge' passive itself - which is tied to only the item itself. There's no getting around charging the item if you want it to upgrade.

It's actually a 3 second internal cooldown - and yes.

Potentially - but look at Singed's viable alternate: Rod of Ages, which gives him a similar amount of Mana (800 vs. 1000) and similar stats. While enabling tears on Singed might push him over the top - it wouldn't push him any more so than getting a fast Rod of Ages would.

The tooltip doesn't currently mention it - but anything that used to charge tears will still charged tears. 'Whenever you cast a spell or spend mana' is the actual full trigger.

Yes. Probably a better path to get a Manamune as the second item if you're going to get *two* tears.