I'm curious as to whether you think the fact that stacking health to survive through both physical and magical damage is more effective against single damage comps than stacking the appropriate resist is bad design. Players instinctively think they should build the stat that counters the damage they're taking, but instead because of the changes to penetration and items they would be better off just building more items out of Giant's Belt.
Do you think that reverting the penetration changes or removing or completely reworking the items that make stacking defensive stats impossible is a more effective way of dealing with this?
I'm actually a fan of health being the primary defensive stat - mostly because health has severely intrinsic features that resistances don't, that lets it be more easily controlled.
For example:
1. Health doesn't reduce the effectiveness of lifesteal type effects - or the secondary effects of an opponent's abilities.
2. Raw health isn't multiplicative with other healing or regeneration effects - allowing it to be effective without drastically multiplying in value with other effects (self heals, shields and the like.)
3. Health is a more obvious indicator of high durability than resistances - just due to how basic UIs work.
4. Because of high health per level gains, the relative effectiveness of health is far more temporary than resistances - This is just a natural fallout of our stat per level gains, not an intrinsic advantage of health.
For example, let's take the following case here:
You have a Bruiser with 1000 health, 300 armor fighting an AD carry, versus a Bruiser with 2000 Health and 100 armor.
1. % Armor Penetration is more effective in the first case than the second as % armor penetration values go up - values start to skew drastically as % armor penetration goes beyond ~20% or so, relatively neutral for low values of % armor penetration. 2. However, Life Steal - is far more effective in the second case - whereas it is completely destroyed in the first case. 3. The Bruiser's life steal / shield statistics are also neutral in the second case - whereas they are multiplied in the first case.
Thus, the AD carry or any damage dealer actually has multiple paths to deal with a high health target than they did - because the other defensive aspects of the bruisers *aren't* being multiplied or their own secondary defensive statistic (lifesteal) isn't being diminished as well.
The flip side of this is that Flat Armor Penetration, the primary statistic of assassins, can be weaker and still be as effective versus Bruisers because of their ability to negate a far larger portion of armor.
Naturally, this has the flipside of making certain resistance focused tanks weaker - but that's something I feel like we should solve on resistance based tanks. So please, if there's a particular resistance based tank that feels weak, let us know.
Let's take another example, in lane:
Let's say I'm fighting a primary physical damage dealer, whose probably itemized some sort of flat penetration. I have something like 800 health and 50 armor. How much gold do I need to spend to double my life-span?
1. Well, I could buy 800 health and have another 1200 effective health! Success! 2. Or I build 150 armor and have another 1200 effective health!
However, let's take a look at how things change when the game continues - as the game continues, the relative contribution of that armor to my health levels doesn't decay mostly because our game awards much more health per level than armor per level. In fact, by the time I'm level 8 or so, I'll probably have 1200 base health - and thus that 800 health is only increasing my effective at a lower ratio.
However, that 150 armor advantage is "still there".
Note this isn't an intrinsic advantage of health versus armor - just a side effect of how we award stats per level - but it does mean that the relative advantage of health in this case is temporary - rather than one that persists through the game.
Xyph, can you tell us what you plan to do about the warmogs spam currently? I don't mind if you don't nerf warmogs, but please tell us you have some plan in action.
Not actually certain it's as big of a problem as the current environment thinks it is. Warmog's isn't really efficient in terms of gaining raw health per gold if you do the math on it. Buying any combination of ruby crystal items, for example, will net you more health than gold than buying Warmog's.
At the moment, it looks like it's more an environmental thing than an actual cost to gold effectiveness ratio.
Although, there's a couple of things tuned around old armor values that we'll probably need to look at in the future:
1. The tower damage / armor penetration formulae were based off old health / armor values. We'll probably have to revisit that soonish so that towers have more damage and less armor penetration.
2. We'll have to do a pass on character that used to scale primarily off health because their tuning is probably off - Probably not a huge surprise that Shen or Olaf are pretty decent now.
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Hey Xyph, I was the guy who stated that Vlad's pool needed to be nerfed in PB forum, you said I was wrong...
Then later, you were forced to nerf his pool, over and over.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
I typically don't comment on Vladimir at all, are you confusing me with someone else? I don't actually have a lot of ton of balance insight into Vlad - despite him being my forum avatar.
I always enjoy and appreciate your posts Xypherous, even if I don't agree with them. One thing I would point out is that, in my opinion, the health items available are much less interesting than the armor choices. As a tank/bruiser, if I want to start stacking a lot of armor there's Atma's, Frozen Heart, Randuin's, Iceborn Gauntlet, Aegis, Sunfire Cape, and Thornmail. For health, I just have Warmog's and Frozen Mallet. I know there's the kindlegem items if you're a more supporty tank, but those don't give very much health.
While Warmog's may be the defining health item - Bulwark / Randuin / Locket of the Iron Solari / Sunfire Cape all over above 400 health in a single slot. Roughly half the armor items are as much health items as armor items at their core. Randuin's is the only item in there that provides more than 50+ armor in a single slot - so most of those are items are actually core health items.
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SHYVANA
Agreed. AS nerfs hit her pretty hard and the jungle changes were a double whammy onto her.
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Wouldn't it make more sense for resistances to be stronger? Simply because they only apply to half of the damage you're taking, less if there's an olaf/irelia/cho'gath/darius on the other team. Shouldn't they be stronger against that particular type of damage?
The strength of resistance is hidden in a lot of myriad ways. While they only apply to "half" the damage you're taking, that's not the whole picture. What resistances actually do is magnify the effect of your other self-healing, resistance and regeneration effects, while also mitigating the drain effects and % health effects of your opponents.
I agree that on the surface, it feels like resistances should feel stronger against a single type of damage but the power of the combined effect of resistances with other effects means that resistances can't be as strong innately on the 1:1 comparison.
I created a thread that went on for over 10 pages(ish?) stating that you WOULD need to nerf vlad because his pool was too powerful. You came in defense of Shurelia, who stated vlad was "fine" back when Vlad was new, which he wasn't.
Oh fair enough. If it was 2 years ago - yeah, I was probably wrong. I was wrong about like eeeverything 2 years ago.
I may have slightly improved since then - but still not by much. XD
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Olaf scales well with health for obvious synergies health has with his W and R, but I mention Irelia because she already has a lot of damage in her kit. The truth is, she doesn't really need to build damage to become an effective Bruiser. The most common thing to do with her in Korea is to rush Warmogs then pick up Zerker's followed by Zephyr. Do you really think that late game heroes getting to late game faster isn't a problem?
I'm not actually sure they are getting to late game faster - The build you've described is a 7000+ gold build, for example. Perhaps they are - but the fact is that Warmog's isn't actually all the cost-effective from a gold / statistic conversion value wise so the argument that "they are getting to late game faster" doesn't seem to ring true at first glance? What causes them to get to late game faster?
Isn't the intrinsic worth of this lifesteal against health also diminished against armor when coupled with armor penetration though? I've always understood that armor pen affects effective life steal
You can magnify the effect of lifesteal with armor penetration, yes - but that's because you are countering their armor which is what is actually diminishing your lifesteal.
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I mean it seems pretty much any champion that's relevant has a pen/shred function or scales off health. Whether it be Xin, J4, Darius, Olaf, etc..
Yes health feels better to buy, but that's primarily due to resistances feeling less so.
I totally agree with you - it became more and more obvious to me that armor was too cheap when we started throwing armor shred on basically everyone that wasn't a carry because none of them could scale to late game when people built optimally.
Like, Darius, who deals 3 types of damage, phys/magic/true also has 25% armor shred because he didn't do enough damage late game. Like what? That to me was the warning sign of 'hey, there's probably something deeper rooted that's wrong.'
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Malphite would be stronger in the armor case than the health case, right? Since he can stick to people and his AD would go farther in a 1v1. The case is similar for someone like Maokai, who heals based on his maximum health with his passive, and since he has high armor, his health is worth more. The difference between building health and armor, however, is that someone can negate all of their hard work with two items and some innate armor reduction, whereas they can't actually negate health - they have to burn through it. They have a choice. But since armor is subpar compared to health, they just build the health since they technically scale both ways; Malphite's passive is based off of his max health, so he still benefits, and Maokai's ultimate makes his health worth more like the armor would.
Even when health is the best stat, Sejuani and Nautilus aren't even remotely popular. Neither is Mundo. They don't usually get to choose between health and armor. They gain direct bonuses from health. Even though health is great on everyone, they still aren't picked because they lose a lot of health early on. This makes it seem to me armor is stronger than health over a long time where you can regen health (like natural HPRegen) even if your regen is based off of your health.
How come champions who are debate-ably stronger building resistances are still more popular than health based champions? Or is that just due to the specific champions I used for my example?
Sejuani, I'm not sure - but Nautilus is pretty easy to answer. Nautilus gets more health when he builds health on his shield. He doesn't get damage from his health ratio. In fact, building resistances is the best way to amplify his shield.
Nautilus has a health ratio on his shield to ensure that no matter what defensive statistic you build - it would amplify his shield. Health scaling wasn't intended to be his core thing - I just wanted to make sure that Nautilus felt like he could build any defensive item and be decent from it because he has some of the highest defensive requirements due to low starting stats.
I'm pretty sure that the answer to most of your question is similar to the Nautilus case. While Nautilus does scale off health on his shield (10% of his health, for example) that's nowhere close to how much armor would scale him equally. The benefits from gaining health or armor tends to be skewed towards armor, because a health ratio that would actually compete with armor would look pretty ridiculous. (For example, in order for health to compete with armor for Nautilus' case, it'd have to be like 25% to 35% of his health or something.)
Then couldn't the likely culprit be the residual effects of S2 balance work transitioning into S3 ?
Just throwing out some food for thought, that all the items may indeed be balanced but certain champion kits make them stronger than intended (namely those with high arm pen/shred as well as those who scale off health to a lesser degree)
Some of it is probably some residual effects from S2 balance, I definitely agree. We'll be looking at that when we get the chance. I think we can convert some of the % shred on some characters to flat shreds, for example.
Somewhere, in my unspoken secret dreams, I'd like to rip Kayle's passive off and give her her old one back.
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Well, my thought on the prevailance of Health is that (seems to, anyway) hurts mages more than anyone, especially burst mages. A lot of the time you can't keep up with the rate at which everyone is buying health, and once you blow your combo to not much effect, you're a sitting duck (the inherent problem with burst mages, it's true, but at least with resistances you could buy some magic pen. Health penetration not so much)
Yes, burst mages do get hit when health becomes the dominant statistic - mostly because, it turns out that health is a pretty good substitute for magic resistance when the going gets rough.
There's various implications of that - but that's why you see things like Liandry or DFG existing. We're doing an AP pass next patch to help mages out - and after that we can start looking at specific characters if they still feel weak.
So what are your plans for champions like Rammus? His passive is completely based around buying armor, which you nerfed 2-fold through cost and effectiveness........I remember you quoting something like "burning 1 champion to save a hundred" in a Heimer thread, it just seem like this is your go-to philosophy way too much and in the ends turns out to be maybe a dozen or so champions getting burned.
Rammus' problems I think stem from Jungle changes more than anything else. It's pretty hard to tell with him specifically. The increased health itemization should have helped him be generally tankier.
Rammus isn't really a resistance based character. Skarner, while he's not a tank, is a far better example of a resistance based character - because almost everything he is depends on that shield. Udyr is similar.
Typically, strong repeatable shield champions or champions with shields at their core are resistance based characters, because their health pool is actually several times larger than it seems.
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The problem is that Liandry's seems like a waste on a burst caster; if you're supposed to kill an enemy in a single combo, why spend so much money on a passive that's almost never going to see use? If an enemy survives your combo, they're probably so low that liandry's doesn't do anything anyway.
It is a waste on a burst caster, I agree - but it gives burst casters a way to itemize into more of a sustained damage caster, depending on what they are fighting.
Brand is an example of this, for example. While Brand is typically a burst mage, Liandry + Omnomnomnomicon can turn him into an effective sustained mage.
DFG attacks it by adding to more burst - while Liandry tries to attack it by offering an different playstyle out. We'll see how it goes.
On the subject of DFG, morello mentioned that if he could take it out of the game completely, he would (this was before the S3 rework). Do you agree with him on that?
I disagree with that - but I mean, sometimes late at night, I think I've actually gutted DFG. It used to be a 50% current health nuke. Now it's merely 15% max health.
I'm not actually sure whether the new DFG in any way, shape or form resembles the power / scope that the old DFG had.
I read that you don't think that hp is really a prob... but I found the latest tournament quite discouraging. The trend does not seem to be the best players getting over a fad... I know that Riot has a low opinion of the communities' ability to theorycraft... but... I saw one support rush a warmogs... not that supports shouldn't get nice items, but how is it ok that all 5 roles find warmogs to be worth it?
From what I saw of the last tournament data, there were roughly 43 warmog's built in 19 games - which means that one out of roughly three or 4 characters were getting it per game. Which seems to sync up with what I expected, since the fighter and the tank should like it - so at the very least, I expect 4 people to have Warmog's.
I mean, there's probably a lack of diversity there - but the numbers don't seem to be too far out of line - it just seems like we got the health / resistance ratio wrong, which we're addressing next patch.
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Secondly, Warmogs providing high sustain characters such as Irelia and Olaf with even more sustain makes them almost immovable objects during the laning phase. Having the ability to just sit in lane and farm does really contribute to you getting to late game a lot faster than your opponent. After they get this item, it is almost impossible to shove them out of lane.
Irelia being able to sit in lane and farm forever isn't a new problem. In fact, it's pretty much been her problem forever.
I'm not actually sure why Irelia seems stronger, to be perfectly fair, because she used to do the same thing with resistances, for example.
Olaf, on the other hand, I can understand. The skill that gives him his primary sustain in lane, also gives him bonus AD based on health - which has doubly amped their farm/sustain potential - but that's more of a health scaling thing in my opinion - though I admit, I could be totally off.
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Thirdly, I want to add on that health is the most effective stat in the current meta. Sure I could buy Randuin's or Sunfire, but if my opponent is running 9 points in offense and has a Black Cleaver then I am paying for 67% of the actual Armor value. If they have LW, I am paying for 32% of the actual Armor value. If I get Warmogs, I am paying for 100% of the health value, which makes it a much more effective option against massive armor penetration.
I'm just going to nitpick here and say that armor penetration stacks multiplicatively. If they had 9 points in offense, and have full stacks of cleaver and last whisper, you are paying for 45% of the actual armor value - granted, that's low - but in S3, if they had 9 points in offense and a last whisper, you were paying for 54% of the actual armor value.
Yes, a significant difference - but not as big as you'd think.
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Warmogs looks good! It is incredibly slot efficient, provides massive amounts of health, and gives me some good sustain in lane! Not only that, but the extra health will make it a lot harder to gank me and probably serve as a deterrent from the jungler since they will waste a lot of time if they don't manage to pull the gank off. I can just sit up here and farm all day.
I hope you get the point that I am trying to make. Warmogs may not be the most effective source of health, but with the rise of Black Cleaver it is probably the most effective item to get. It can be core in almost any build and only scales better as the game goes on and you acquire more health.
Kind of - it doesn't really scale better as you acquire more health - you certainly get more regeneration but there is a threshold where you should be building Randuin's or Sunfire cape to massively multiply your survivability from armor.
The lane case that you've stated is a problem - and I completely agree with you on that. That's something that Scarizard has pointed out to me recently that I'll need to start digging into, that it might still be too good as a health regeneration item, even if we took off 40 HP/5 from the base.
@Xyph, is resists being less effective than health in S3 bad design?
Do you think that reverting the penetration changes or removing or completely reworking the items that make stacking defensive stats impossible is a more effective way of dealing with this?
For example:
1. Health doesn't reduce the effectiveness of lifesteal type effects - or the secondary effects of an opponent's abilities.
2. Raw health isn't multiplicative with other healing or regeneration effects - allowing it to be effective without drastically multiplying in value with other effects (self heals, shields and the like.)
3. Health is a more obvious indicator of high durability than resistances - just due to how basic UIs work.
4. Because of high health per level gains, the relative effectiveness of health is far more temporary than resistances - This is just a natural fallout of our stat per level gains, not an intrinsic advantage of health.
For example, let's take the following case here:
You have a Bruiser with 1000 health, 300 armor fighting an AD carry, versus a Bruiser with 2000 Health and 100 armor.
1. % Armor Penetration is more effective in the first case than the second as % armor penetration values go up - values start to skew drastically as % armor penetration goes beyond ~20% or so, relatively neutral for low values of % armor penetration.
2. However, Life Steal - is far more effective in the second case - whereas it is completely destroyed in the first case.
3. The Bruiser's life steal / shield statistics are also neutral in the second case - whereas they are multiplied in the first case.
Thus, the AD carry or any damage dealer actually has multiple paths to deal with a high health target than they did - because the other defensive aspects of the bruisers *aren't* being multiplied or their own secondary defensive statistic (lifesteal) isn't being diminished as well.
The flip side of this is that Flat Armor Penetration, the primary statistic of assassins, can be weaker and still be as effective versus Bruisers because of their ability to negate a far larger portion of armor.
Naturally, this has the flipside of making certain resistance focused tanks weaker - but that's something I feel like we should solve on resistance based tanks. So please, if there's a particular resistance based tank that feels weak, let us know.
Let's take another example, in lane:
Let's say I'm fighting a primary physical damage dealer, whose probably itemized some sort of flat penetration. I have something like 800 health and 50 armor. How much gold do I need to spend to double my life-span?
1. Well, I could buy 800 health and have another 1200 effective health! Success!
2. Or I build 150 armor and have another 1200 effective health!
However, let's take a look at how things change when the game continues - as the game continues, the relative contribution of that armor to my health levels doesn't decay mostly because our game awards much more health per level than armor per level. In fact, by the time I'm level 8 or so, I'll probably have 1200 base health - and thus that 800 health is only increasing my effective at a lower ratio.
However, that 150 armor advantage is "still there".
Note this isn't an intrinsic advantage of health versus armor - just a side effect of how we award stats per level - but it does mean that the relative advantage of health in this case is temporary - rather than one that persists through the game.
At the moment, it looks like it's more an environmental thing than an actual cost to gold effectiveness ratio.
Although, there's a couple of things tuned around old armor values that we'll probably need to look at in the future:
1. The tower damage / armor penetration formulae were based off old health / armor values. We'll probably have to revisit that soonish so that towers have more damage and less armor penetration.
2. We'll have to do a pass on character that used to scale primarily off health because their tuning is probably off - Probably not a huge surprise that Shen or Olaf are pretty decent now.
Then later, you were forced to nerf his pool, over and over.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
I agree that on the surface, it feels like resistances should feel stronger against a single type of damage but the power of the combined effect of resistances with other effects means that resistances can't be as strong innately on the 1:1 comparison.
I may have slightly improved since then - but still not by much. XD
Yes health feels better to buy, but that's primarily due to resistances feeling less so.
Like, Darius, who deals 3 types of damage, phys/magic/true also has 25% armor shred because he didn't do enough damage late game. Like what? That to me was the warning sign of 'hey, there's probably something deeper rooted that's wrong.'
Even when health is the best stat, Sejuani and Nautilus aren't even remotely popular. Neither is Mundo. They don't usually get to choose between health and armor. They gain direct bonuses from health. Even though health is great on everyone, they still aren't picked because they lose a lot of health early on. This makes it seem to me armor is stronger than health over a long time where you can regen health (like natural HPRegen) even if your regen is based off of your health.
How come champions who are debate-ably stronger building resistances are still more popular than health based champions? Or is that just due to the specific champions I used for my example?
Nautilus has a health ratio on his shield to ensure that no matter what defensive statistic you build - it would amplify his shield. Health scaling wasn't intended to be his core thing - I just wanted to make sure that Nautilus felt like he could build any defensive item and be decent from it because he has some of the highest defensive requirements due to low starting stats.
I'm pretty sure that the answer to most of your question is similar to the Nautilus case. While Nautilus does scale off health on his shield (10% of his health, for example) that's nowhere close to how much armor would scale him equally. The benefits from gaining health or armor tends to be skewed towards armor, because a health ratio that would actually compete with armor would look pretty ridiculous. (For example, in order for health to compete with armor for Nautilus' case, it'd have to be like 25% to 35% of his health or something.)
Just throwing out some food for thought, that all the items may indeed be balanced but certain champion kits make them stronger than intended (namely those with high arm pen/shred as well as those who scale off health to a lesser degree)
Somewhere, in my unspoken secret dreams, I'd like to rip Kayle's passive off and give her her old one back.
There's various implications of that - but that's why you see things like Liandry or DFG existing. We're doing an AP pass next patch to help mages out - and after that we can start looking at specific characters if they still feel weak.
Rammus isn't really a resistance based character. Skarner, while he's not a tank, is a far better example of a resistance based character - because almost everything he is depends on that shield. Udyr is similar.
Typically, strong repeatable shield champions or champions with shields at their core are resistance based characters, because their health pool is actually several times larger than it seems.
Brand is an example of this, for example. While Brand is typically a burst mage, Liandry + Omnomnomnomicon can turn him into an effective sustained mage.
DFG attacks it by adding to more burst - while Liandry tries to attack it by offering an different playstyle out. We'll see how it goes.
I'm not actually sure whether the new DFG in any way, shape or form resembles the power / scope that the old DFG had.
I mean, there's probably a lack of diversity there - but the numbers don't seem to be too far out of line - it just seems like we got the health / resistance ratio wrong, which we're addressing next patch.
I'm not actually sure why Irelia seems stronger, to be perfectly fair, because she used to do the same thing with resistances, for example.
Olaf, on the other hand, I can understand. The skill that gives him his primary sustain in lane, also gives him bonus AD based on health - which has doubly amped their farm/sustain potential - but that's more of a health scaling thing in my opinion - though I admit, I could be totally off.
Yes, a significant difference - but not as big as you'd think.
I hope you get the point that I am trying to make. Warmogs may not be the most effective source of health, but with the rise of Black Cleaver it is probably the most effective item to get. It can be core in almost any build and only scales better as the game goes on and you acquire more health.
The lane case that you've stated is a problem - and I completely agree with you on that. That's something that Scarizard has pointed out to me recently that I'll need to start digging into, that it might still be too good as a health regeneration item, even if we took off 40 HP/5 from the base.