Xypherous on AD Spell Vamp items.

Let's kick things off with his initial post, one responding to a summoner stating "Because Xypherous believes it would be too strong on champions like Xin Zhao and Irelia."

"Xin Zhao and Irelia actually wouldn't do well with AD / Spell Vamp - they're better off building life steal / attack speed in many cases. 

The champions in question that benefit from AD / SV the most are tanky fighters with a lot of non-autoattack base damage and the durability to stand there and soak - Essentially, if you can output a consistent steady stream of damage - while being durable enough to benefit from high amounts of in-combat regeneration.

For example, Lee Sin / Udyr / Shyvana oddly enough would benefit the most from an AD and Spell Vamp pairing because they are durable enough to make the non-autoattack drain pattern work and have relatively decent scaling with AD. However, the goal for the AD / Spell Vamp item - as people have continuously requested - is to make Glass AD assassins viable in lane (characters like Talon or Pantheon.) However, as the item tends to work betteron these types of tanky spell damage fighters - this poses a problem in more than one way. 

It gets exacerbated by the fact that these tanky spell damage fighters are the ones that the Glass AD assassin characters have the most trouble within the first place. We saw this in Twisted Treeline with Lord Van Damm's Pillager. It was a good Talon item, to be sure - but it was a great tanky Lee Sin or Darius item that then they used to wipe the floor with Talon.

In the end, if the goal is to help Talon and Pantheon out - it seems counterproductive to release an item that is better on the people who they have the most trouble with."

He continued, noting his interest in trying to get physical damage spell vamp to work.

"That said, I actually do want to focus on seeing if I can make some kind of physical damage lifesteal thing work, that nicely gets it away from the magic damage / true damage dealing characters and focuses it much more on characters who do heavy attack damage scaling spells without a lot of autoattacks.

Running into trouble with it though as the heal numbers tend to be ridiculously insane or pitiful depending on the AoE coefficient I put on it. It's odd that so many of our glass AD assassins use AoE damage as their "burst" combo. It never actually seems to work coefficient wise."

He continued further, discussing the problems with AD/Spell Vamp items:

"If the goal here is simply to introduce more options for AD itemization, I can be on board with that. I'll just make the point that AD / Spell Vamp tends to be counterproductive in the long run as the item tends to simply make glass AD casters less viable at the expense of tanky AD casters - and thus, the additional itemization will simply sacrifice a portion of these type of characters (the squishy AD assassins) in favor of more itemization for the tankier portion of this type of character"

Elaborating even more on items, he discussed the point that when making an item for a particular style of champion, you have to account for how it will effect their competition.

"Oh definitely - I agree with you that this item would probably be applicable to a lot of champions - however, in the items world - all you pretty much have to do is ensure that it doesn't benefit their direct competitor more and you've done the class a net plus - while also allowing for some fun off-builds. This is my main concern with AD / SV, for example - is that what happens is hurting the class that you originally wanted to help.  

BoRK does this somewhat for carries - really good for some carries as a self-peel - but also a decent fighter and assassin item for sticking and initiation. It just happens to be better on carries than fighters, for the most part although I will agree that this case is debatable.

In the end though, this logic is best applied to retuning the champion's kit itself - rather than itemization. Itemization is a fairly broad strokes approach and you have to solve things on the right level. However, champion redesigns are typically more disruptive and harder to undo than itemization adjustments - so there's some tradeoffs between costs and control."

Xypherous also replied to a summoner's question of "assuming you could perfectly design an item for such a specific purpose, will spellvamp on AD assassins specifically make the game better?"

"You're right in that adding sustain options on AD assassins (or even improving the AD assassin pattern) doesn't seem to have a whole lot of gains for the players facing them - nor does improving their primary pattern seem to hold a lot of gains for making the game more fun for anyone but the assassin. 

However, the goal here would be to create backup patterns for these assassins when things go poorly. If an AD assassin cannot burst a character in lane - we should not be providing itemization for him to automatically burst you down, we should be probably some kind of plan B, where he doesn't *need* to burst you down in order to properly fit on his team.

In short, you're right in that we probably can't make burst assassin's primary patterns a whole lot better - but what we can do is give them alternative strategies for when that gameplan doesn't pan out so that they can still do something that game, rather than being incredibly swingy feast or famine characters."

Continuing that thought

"This holds for a lot of characters - but there are some standout characters in which this isn't a good fallback. Pantheon has some great fallback patterns because his ultimate and his aegis give him some degree of flexibility. Talon or Akali don't really have this option.

To be fair, it could point to the fact that their kits should be restructured a bit to introduce more skillful play or fallback patterns - but see above."

Xypherous even went as far as suggesting re imagining the concepts of lifesteal and spell vamp into "Physical Vamp" and "Magical Vamp".

"Honestly, if it were up to me I'd like to phase out Spellvamp entirely and pursue vamp based on specific damage types - like Physical Vamp and Magical Vamp - It makes the purpose of the item a lot more clear.

I think I'll have time to really drill on it in a couple months - currently we're working on cleaning up some of our other systems that feel worse."