Thornmail is currently:
+70 Armor UNIQUE Passive: On being hit by standard attacks, returns 20% of damage taken as magic damage.
if you remember in dota, their blademail gave armor and 20% damage return AND you could actually stack them and they were still considered handicapped!
In LoL they made that weak 20% return dmg unstackable, making it more worthless than it was in dota!
Luckily dota changed their blademail to give 100% but only activated.. and changed to effect ALL incoming dmg, not just physical. Nukes too.
So what i am saying is this thornmail is pathetic. One probablem with it is it counters itself by giving you armor to reduce incoming damage, thus lowering the output return damage. Also, that it is unstackable, which means it should give even higher output instead of measily 20%.
Problems:
1. is unstackable.
2. Gives armor, reducing output when it should be blocking damage instead, allowing full damage to come in to be returned BEFORE reduction so there is greater output.
3. Not enough incentive for mages to use as it doesn't make use of ap, nor does it provide any..
4. low damage return.
5. lifesteal just matches or beats the thornmail so it's not really damaging anymore.
The thornmail i wish i had:
*********** OPTION 1 Thornmail ************
65% chance to block 75 damage, 20% damage return as magic damage. UNIQUE: Reduces incoming lifesteal-healing effects by 40%.
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*********** OPTION 2 Thornmail *************
65% chance to block 75 damage. UNIQUE: 35% + (3% x AP)% damage return as magic damage & reduces enemy lifestealing abilities by 40% on their attack.
What i am doing with these builds is using block instead of armor.. this way you are still protected about as good as the armor was doing, yet you increase your output because if LoL is anything like dota (or rather, war3's engine), blocked damage is calculated AFTER return damage. AFTER is the key word there.
and lifesteal is reduced by 40% so it becomes less effective so that their lifesteal wont match your armor output. the % chance on block and the 75 damage to be blocked are just figures i threw out there. it doesn't have to be those exact numbers but it's to give the idea of what this could be.
Personally i like option 1 best because i think they should be stackable. 20X5 blademails would only yeild 100% damage return but it would be reduced by their magic defense since it is magic damage and still never be really 100%. so the users of the thornmail would never really match their full damage.. plus these stacked mails woudlnt be offering any other stat so you would be overly passive and likely not very effective to the team, should you go this route.. But it's good for us to have that option! That's what makes games like this fun.. being able to stack stuff for fun. thus it isn't likely you would be owning much with such a build. So as you can see, even allowing these to stack would not make someone godly as they would no extra AP, mana, hp or anything to kill faster or damage bonuses to physically kill anyone.. they would be totally reliant on someone smacking them. So that's why they should let us stack.
For option 2, if Riot still believed it should be unique then it needs to be beefed up on how much damage return it does and be upgradable by AP.
Another possibility is having damage return on all incoming damage instead of just physical, but i was hoping my Mirrorshield item, that i requested for earlier, would get passed to handle incoming nukes.
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Senior Member
