Well, since I accidentally made the whole burst AP thing about only Leblanc (even though I meant it for all of them like Annie and Brand)... can we please do something with her? She is absolutely my favorite AP to play. I used to be able to play her, but now with everyone at 3-4k HP... there is literally nothing she can do.

I'd really like AP as a whole to be better than they are now.. I mean, even with that new item that grants AP and armor, what good is 30 bonus armor when the person you are facing is rushing a Brutalizer?

I think the non-utility mids just need cleaning up more than anything. I think they didn't get attention because they just weren't popular. Like, why is Xerath's passive so janky while Kassadin's is so clear? Aren't they aiming for the exact same effect?

So much this.

True burst mages can have counterplay even in the ideal case, that you die from 100-0 in one go.
I think that burst mages and burst assassins are different, where burst assassins 100-0 you with no setup or preconditions at all.

People who play burst mages just want to see someone's health bar disappear, regardless how large. They don't really care if they can do it instantly or whether there is a good deal of setup involved (syndra). The people who want on demand burst with no real setup or delay play burst assassins, like talon. If I were involved with reworking DFG I would use this fact. Burst mages aren't going to be satisfied by poking someone down from full to around half of their health before launching their full rotation by utilizing liandry's torment. They would rather have no damage from the burn whatsover and just have a long lasting, stacking mark that amplifies magic damage because seeing someone's health bar disappear in one rotation is fun, even if it ultimately has the same effect on the opponent, with the damage just backloaded instead of distributed. If the opponent doesn't want to be killed in one combo, they can just sit back for 12 seconds or so to let the marks disappear, or buy a QSS to remove them in combat.

Reducing the enemy's %Reduction is tricky to calculate. For 100 Armor, you reduce 50% of incoming physical damage. If you were to reduce that to 50 Armor by penetration, it becomes 33% reduction. It looks like a 17% reduction of reduction, but the damage increase is actually 33%, as you were taking 50% damage before, but 66% damage now. I hate percentages. It's much easier to calculate through effective Health.

Yes, if you want to get specific, this is true. However, if you want to get specific in the context of this discussion then the correct comparison is to compare health itemization, or buying health items compared to shields / drains / regeneration.

The core here is that buying health does have an added conditional - it only takes effect when you're going back to base for the most part - you cannot add health in the field by buying health. Shields / Drains / Regeneration effects are essentially always up - the act of buying health, however, only happens once and typically cannot be replenished until you go back to base.

So while, yes, I agree that they are all health here if you want to get really specific - you also have to understand that when we talk about health in terms of itemization - you have to compare the act of buying health rather than health, the general stat.

Yes, which is why I'm asking for feedback on which tanky characters feel weak - those that relied upon conditional health mechanics. Some characters, for the most part, are fine - they were compensated in some way that they lost in resistances - but certain characters didn't make it out cleanly.

I mean, it would naive to think that we should go back and buff all shields because we changed this relationship because those characters may have gained or loss in other ways. Speed is easier to itemize for generally and a lot of characters needed durability to compensate for how hard it was to itemize for speed. Some characters are actually hurt by how generalized it is to itemize for speed and thus may need more attention than not.

Essentially - while in a vacuum this would be true, in the end, only the champion holistically matters.

A "noob trap" is something that is almost never right to buy ever - only one that looks good. Anything can tell you that stacking full HP without any armor still isn't the best call - otherwise double or triple warmog's would be the ideal build.

It's still right to buy armor sometimes, especially if you have a truckload of health behind it - it's just not right to buy it enough of the time.

True - but is it a more easily solveable problem than the flaws of the previous system? Hopefully, systematic changes are designed to shift focus from the problems you have and replace them with problems that are easier to solve or things that can meld together better. Essentially, you realize that you've hit a local minimum for "balance" or "optimality" so you take a step back to find better ground somewhere else.

Isn't it obvious? Talon has more sustained damage because he can auto-attack with his AD after his burst, while LeBlanc is more dependent on her burst, because after her burst is expended, her damage drops off much more steeply than Talon's.

It's a threshold system. To put it another way, the effective "time of survival" gained from the first 400 survivability can be much less than the next 400 survivability, depending on the different damage curves of the champion you are facing. 70 MR can put you into LeBlanc's "really bad bracket" from her "awesome bracket" whereas 70 armor may only put you from Talon's "good bracket" to his "okay bracket" because their damage-time curve are different. You counterplay much more effectively hitting LeBlanc's "really bad bracket," than you do hitting Talon's "okay bracket."

This isn't related to this thread, but if you have time can you take a look at this?

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=2999298

While this is true in terms of power-during laning, it's obviously a mechanic your team didn't think enough about while removing FoN and moving it's regen mechanic on to warmogs. Essentially you gave the biggest health item the ability to add health in the field, by providing warmogs with such a massive regen, and in doing so made health by far the most effective build for staying in lane.

However, beyond laning, you have argued previously in this thread that armour scales more strongly into the late game due to champion health/level increasing more strongly than armuor/level or MR/level. I'm sure you can realise, though, that the 'sustain abilities multiplying with armour' doesn't really apply when we get beyond laning (at least in terms of regenerations effects). Tanks and bruisers can't really leach anywhere near enough life or build strong enough shields to make armour a better idea than health in a teamfight, and the 'have to go back to the fountain' mechanic is null when we're outside of laning.

In short, warmogs regen makes health the strongest option in lane by a mile, and armour shred makes health the strongest option in teamfights in 95% of games.


The thing that's most worrying here, though, and the reason I feel this discussion has shifted gears to address bursters, is that all this comparison between the strength of health vs armour completely disregarded the fact that armour only worked against 50% of the cast, and it was *still* hard to argue it ever being better than health stacking.

I'm getting the feeling that your dislike of resistance stacking is something the community doesn't fully share with you, and if you intentionally shifted the balance to prevent the 'sustain problem', then it seems adding %regen to warmogs was a tremendous owngoal.

Further, for a chap who seems to like the idea of counterplay, I'm surprised you didn't like the fact that varying your damage type was a part of S2 team comp. There's a lot of counterplay to certain damage types requiring certain defensive strategies, but this thread suggest you prefer 'build more health' to be the go-to counter for anyone that's doing too much damage to you, regardless of how they're doing it to you. HP should ideally be the answer to true damage champions, hybrids, or mixed team comps with multiple even characters, as opposed to armour and MR being geared towards specific 'spikes' in the enemy damage pool.

(Oh, and as an aside, I feel that the new flask is overcosted, and I stopped buying it when the price increased. )


Final Questions:
1. Do you think that perhaps removing the S3 regen from warmogs might be a good first-port-of-call?

2. Could you or your team be persuaded to aim your 'balance scope' to having Armour be the best defense against a physical character, MR be the best defense against a magic character, and HP being a safe 'middle ground' for general cases (like it was in S1-S2)?

health is definitely better than armor right now, but will anything be done to buff champions that downright rely on armor to be effective? namely rammus since his passive downright needs armor to be any use whatsoever

This is depressing because it's true. You often can't even agree on who goes to which lane without having some dimwit throw a tantrum and toss the game. And on the st§rategic front there are so many people who win their lane, have no idea what to do next and end up just defending and putting out fires for twenty minutes until they lose.

One has to wonder if LoL succeeded because it takes much of the teamwork and long term strategy out of Dota and reduces it to straightforward ritual interactions between players (jungler gives second blue to mid) and a rigid gameplan (lane-gank-siege-teamfight-baron).

In that case, one could argue that these interactions and this gameplan themselves are not intuitive and should perhaps be communicated more clearly. This then leads into lane queue and other controversial features...