Red Post Collection: Xypherous on Defensive vs Offensive itemization, life steal, "poke" balance, and more.

Note: While this all stems from the same thread and the same discussion, I've tried to break up the posts into different categories to make the reading a bit easier. Xypherous, while extremely informative and awesome, tends to be quite verbose.

Defensive vs Offensive itemization
Xypherous started things of by responding to a thread where one of our fellow summoners was discussing that a full armor item build should effectively counter a full attack damage item build.

"Quote:

Full Build armor should get shredded by the AP carry but should NOT be shredded by the AD. 

Ditto the other way around, Full Build MR should get shredded by a full build AD NOT a full build AP.

But in League tanks are laughed at. They might be used because they can stand a few shots and have strong CC capability but they are not true TANKS. This should be fixed. A pimped out ADC should not crush a 300 armor tank like it was nothing.

This makes several assumptions on relative game health: 

1. You are spending as much gold on defense as they are on damage 

It's somewhat unrealistic to assume that a full defense character should have a similar gold income, especially late game - as full damage characters. Full defense inherently takes less risks and opportunity costs for playing the game. Therefore - you are always going to have less gold at some point that players who actually expose themselves to a serious weakness.

We could solve this by severely increase the power of gold for defense statistics compared to offense but going down this line moots the entire point of buying offensive items. Offensive items intrinsically are worth more because they offer more play - people who buy offense can die. 

2. That invulnerable characters are intrinsically a good thing for the game 

I think this is where we'll probably disagree here - characters that become invulnerable, even to a subset of characters - are simply characters who don't actually wish to interact with a certain subset of opponents. 

Invulnerable characters are bad for the game in several ways - because as soon as you reach this threshold, there's very little reason to actually interact or play with the enemy team, outside of simply murdering them because they now can do absolutely nothing against you. 

While this would be fun for the invulnerable player - this is less of a game, and more of a 'Man, everyone who bought offense is really bad.' 

Consider what happens if this is true - if you buy offense, you can't damage a subset of their team - but you can now be murdered by anyone on their team becomes the norm, and under this state - defense is the only real option. 

3. The defining characteristic of a tank is 'immune to damage' 

The interesting dilemma here is that the tank role in many respects reads as 'durable' characters. However, the actions that a tank has to do to win any given fight does not rely on durability as much as some other classes - notably melee damage dealers. 

A tank dying in a successful initiation has a staggering impact on the success of his team - He has simultaneously started a favorable fight while wasting a large part of the opposing team's cooldowns. Contrast - most fighters need a prolonged engagement in order to actually output value to their team. 

Durability - at the end of the day, is a more valuable fighter statistic than a tank statistic - simply due to need / time required to stay in a fight. Tanks have many non-pure durability ways to simulate effective defense, every tank knows intrinsically that disabling their damage dealer for a few seconds is worth a massive amount of durability. If CC is a portion of a tank's kit - they will always have many different ways to mitigate damage - from disabling the opponent's damage outright by stun - or simply making it very difficult for the damage to be applied in time via slows or displacements. 

As a side note here, I actually believe that we should be putting more defense straight onto a tank's kit rather than force them to buy it. You should be able to rely on the fact that your tank has a baseline level of durability - rather than that shift wildly based on gold income. 

Quick aside on Armor versus Health 

Armor, being a net multiplicative statistic influences a lot more than just damage reduction - It also reduces life steal and amplifies the effect of other abilities like shielding effects (which lie on the same multiplicative axis as Health.) 

What this does (and did in Season 2) is create an environment where only characters with penetration could reliably damage other characters and negates a large subset of characters like AD Casters, Utility Supports and Tanks from contributing to anything in a late game fight outside of 'Protect the characters with % Pen.' 

Shifting away from primary resistances allows you to do a few things - It lets us control the power of in-combat sustain, like life steal or spell vamp because you interact with health more directly. It opens the way for penetration to actually be a counter statistic (though it's not there yet, admittedly) rather than simply the best damage multiplier you can get. It lets more people participate in the damage race because they no longer need both damage and penetration in order to pierce the opponents in-combat sustain."

He then began to reply to various summoner comments about his above statements:

"Quote:

What I take from your post, Xyph, is that "gold balance" is an important aspect of balancing, and that we will thus never see tanks or supports actually be allowed to get reasonable amounts of gold

Not exactly - Basically what I'm saying is that players who purchase items to mitigate risk should not be rewarded with more gold than players who are purchasing items that maximize their risk. 

Essentially - if you rewarded more or equal gold to the player who is trying to 'not lose' - then not losing becomes the best available course of action. 

Think about GP/10 - you incur more risk when you purchase a GP/10 item. They give you less raw statistical power than any other equivalent and frequently opens you up to punishment in the short-term - thus it's a great tool to manipulate gold streams so that the support / tank gets a larger share of gold - while not simply building to invalidate opponents.

For example, imagine a world where your towers had passive GP/10 and that taking enemy tower's down gave you nothing - What are you encouraging here, with this gold income model? Then think about how it applies to buying defense versus buying utility/support items."

 He continued, responding to a battery of follow up questions:

"Quote:

You didn't bother to compare the value of defense and offense gold per gold, instead your completely erroneously claimed that offensive characters will just have more gold because reasons. You are confusing two entirely separate issues, the efficiency of items and the amount of gold on characters.

Sorry, I'm being completely unclear in my statement here - this is a statement on whether or not players building full defense should have as much gold as players building full offense.

The answer is 'no' - because intrinsically you are taking steps to mitigate risk rather than leaving openings for yourself. This is why offensive items have better multipliers - that most gold sources require offensive acts or risk taking behaviors - and why you should have gold generally scale better on offensive actions than defensive ones.

Quote:

That's an odd thing to believe. Free defense does not mean that you will build more defense on them. If your base damage is high, then you may itemize for utility. If your utility is high, you may itemize for damage, and if you can't do that then ultimately that's a Support.

If anything, a kit based around free defense can only encourage either Carry or Support roles - one can skip defensive itemization to build more offense, and the other can skip defensive itemization because they have no gold to afford it. The only case where you'd still choose to build defense on top of your defense is if you have so much base damage AND utility that you can go for all out invulnerability. That's called a S1 Bruiser. 

I definitely agree with you that free defenses encourages you to build non-defensive statistics. If you give lots of free resistances to a character - they are encouraged to build stuff that isn't resistances - because you only need a certain level of defense to be able to do their job - assuming your job is damage and not utility. 

However, I also believe that a tank role needs to be an inherently reliable role - and thus the amount of unreliability based on gold needs to be lower than other roles. I'm not saying there won't be the negative side effects - merely that the game flows better when you can both rely on tank initiation and tank control at some baseline level. 

Essentially - While I don't think tanks feel quite right building non defensive items - I do feel like they should still act and do tank actions more reliably than being almost completely dependent on items to do so. It's kind of like a cost / benefit analysis at this point - The cost: They won't build tank items and might build a lot of damage items - The benefit: Tanks do tank things which help general game flow.

Quote:

Defensive items have no multipliers that make them absurdly cost efficient (crit, rabadons)
Offensive champions are already un****ingkillable because
A. They kill you before you can kill them
B. BOTRK and barrier 

I can think of at least 4 layers of multiplicative damage reduction 

1. AS% Slow - Randuin's Omen and Frozen Heart
2. Straight DR% versus basic attacks, ala Ninja Tabi
3. Health, Health Regeneration, Shield
4. Armor 

Arguing that Omen isn't cost-efficient is somewhat a losing battle - I've stated why we don't want more of them - but there are definite multipliers to defense that cause a full-build defense to consist of multiple items that synergize.

Quote:

I feel like there's a discrepancy between characters that "build risky" and characters that "are risky." I feel like the basis of your argument holds that characters are essentially the same except for the items that they build. The problem here is that, in actuality, the characters that are building defensively are the ones that are at the highest risk; they typically are melee champions that have to close quarters in order to perform actions or be effective while the ones that are "building risky" are the ranged champions that play from a far safer vantage point.

I definitely agree with you that the more risk inherent to your character, the more defenses you build so that you can minimize it - because you need a baseline level of survivability to perform your role. However, above the minimum required survivability, you now try to maximize effectiveness proportional to the risk that you incur. 

However, let's say that your role is crowd control - there is literally no reason to build anything but defenses or utility. If defensive items were more powerful - that would still not get you to incur additional risk, because you've already satisfied the minimum requirement to survive in a team fight - and you already have what you need to perform your role and win the game.

Quote:

Yeah balance...And even worst Lets INCREASE Magic penetration items and buff them

Every source of magic penetration has been reduced - so.. not sure where you're coming from here.
Their combined effects are slightly stronger if you have a full build of magic penetration - but this build has certain costs.

Quote:

And people say "dude buy frozen heart" Yeah because -20%AS is gonna do to much when the adc have bersekers pd or static

Attack Speed debuffs are multiplicative - so it subtracts 20% from their total Attack Speed, not their additive attack speed. The more attack speed the opponent's ADC has - the more powerful this effect becomes."

Lifesteal discussion
Xypherous also devoted time to discussing Life Steal

"Lifesteal as a defensive statistic has some interesting play - in that it's pretty much the most interactive form of 'survivability' ever. 

Lifesteal follows this weird nuclear curve, where just below the level of lifesteal they need to fully drain tank you, lifesteal has great gameplay. And then if they can drain-tank you, lifesteal has terrible gameplay. 

However, this is an argument for health in a lot of cases. The more powerful armor is, the more powerful and binary lifesteal needs to be in order to pierce through armor - since armor reduces damage and thus the effect of lifesteal proportionally.

What then happens is that the raw lifesteal amounts tend to be inflated for lifesteal to be able to do its job which spikes its value against minions and squishy targets, effectively turning them into giant health batteries."

 He continued, responding to a few questions about his comments on lifesteal:

"Quote:

Lifesteal works at 33% effectiveness versus minions.
Please give me one good reason why this hasn't been tested yet.

One reason: It makes poke compositions dominate as it makes the glass DPS roles extremely vulnerable to poke. 

There are several reasons - but that's my favorite. :P

Quote:

So is there anything being done by this? Because the way you phrase it you kinda just said "oh well."

At the moment - I think lifesteal is in a decent spot. Bloodthirster's lifesteal might be too strong but honestly, you'd have to make a good argument with some solid evidence. Right now - Bloodthirster is being bought a lot - but is it really game warping? Eeeh."

Continuing further,

"Quote:

I don't see this as a bad thing whatsoever, it provides counterplay to the class. Why aren't ranged carries allowed to have this as a weakness to them?

Poke is inherently an a non-interactive strategy - the idea behind poke being to get free damage while being unassailable. 

It's also determined at team composition mostly - which makes it a weakness determined at champion select rather than a play-style.

Quote:

Why aren't ranged carries allowed to have this as a weakness to them?

Specifically, I said glass DPS - this isn't specific to ranged carries - but damage dealers who build little or no resistances in general.

Quote:

One thing I dislike about lifesteal is 'minion have 300 HP, you last hit 600. Then you heal from the 600 damage, not the 300 life steal.' You know what I mean? 

Other thing is BT give you high lifesteal, but no attack speed, however, with BORK combined, you heal a lot, do consisted damage and heal a lot because you have AD+AS+Lifesteal. I think you should make something like "extra lifesteal items will have 50% effect." 

Making lifesteal a named unique passive would be great and give us a toooon of control over the statistic on items. 

It's a little heavy-handed though for my taste - but it could be the right direction if lifesteal becomes a problem. I'm not necessarily convinced that it is - but I also admit I'm not actually looking at lifesteal at the moment (nor am I particularly qualified to comment on how lifesteal changes the flow of higher level games.)