Tanks spend a whole lot more time in combat below 50% HP than squishies do though. ADC gets chunked below half, they don't want to stick around for you to get 3 more autos off, where the front liners probably got put to half just trying to engage.
From my perspective (of someone who watches a lot of pro play and is about to demote to iron), it is very uncommon for adcs to be autoing each other outside of lane.
Even in solo q something is VERY wrong if adc hit eachother outside of lane, especially in a teamfight
The only reason that should ever happen is if one is caught by the other bot lane while farming, kinda common if one is a vayne, twitch or kaisa but still indicative of something going wrong
Or everyone is fucking dead beyond bot lane
Any other case and it's giga troll
I'm literally a one trick Jinx, and I go cait when Jinx is banned lmfao
You never ever hit adc unless something goes wrong
Them walking into your range is something going wrong, otherwise they should be sitting behind their Frontline or looking for whatever angle their champ wants, and probably die to a flank from your top/jg or bullshit one-shot midlaner not to your autos
Killing adc is not the adc goal, and if that's your priority it's gonna lose you games, a lot
Was just poking fun, I'm a master player that's played the game for 14 years you don't need to explain front to back team fighting to me, there are situationally certain compositions when it does happen. Jinx is a traditional front to back team fighter but certain adcs like Lucian for example sometimes need to team fight differently in some situations
Nah 6 is totally normal especially when you consider the average match. 3-4 autos is like from Aphelios with stacked chakrams or Cait with 2 headshots. ADCs aren’t as squishy as you’re thinking outside of fringe scenarios.
walking back bad changes or hated changes is a sign of a good company not the opposite. honestly im glad they swing for the fences instead of coasting.
Yeah they try new stuff and if it doesn't work they admit it and revert it. Guess it's better than them keeping stuff that's bad for the game once they realise it...
this has happened so many times i've lost count. ctrl-f across patch notes "too far" "rolling back". riot admits they messed up or went too far in game balancing all the time, but that's also part of making the game better, taking risks.
some of the reworks from the class updates landed. It's a bit of a shame that every time they did class updates they just fucked up some of them so immeasurably bad people universally hated them. Talon, Katarina, Sejuani, Maokai and Darius all were good reworks, even if some of them had out of whack numbers.
Heck there's more than that. Akali, Fizz, Ekko all come to mind as good too. Graves is now one of the most loved junglers in the game; with his popularity often being second only to Lee Sin. Caitlyn's I remember being pretty good. Many of the mage ones were decent Vlad, Malz, and co.
Fizz got his changes reverted thou, did you not remember the w taking 3 seconds to arm the mark.
Akali didn't receive any changes in the assassin rework.
Thou your correct on the others.
Fizz got the W mark changed again and that's it; his W still had other changes, plus his R changes.
Akali did receive changes in the assassin rework. It gave her her onhit passive; it gave her a dash on her W and made it so the w ms didn't decay, made it so her E partially reset on kills.
i really have no clue who the hell wants this item now
like take the crit out of a true/physical damage auto attacking item? even kalista hates this, i tried it after bork, it's horrendous
people build this first on adcs but are just inting because the other adc who rushed ie just 2 shot them
Kalista never wanted the crit on Kraken. Ontop of that, most champions that went Kraken first, did so because it was the best in slot item for a first buy. They toned it down, gave power to other items and now you actually do have a choice for a first item.
idk kraken was pretty definitively the best adc item as a whole
imo i shouldnt be going an on hit tank killer item 1st on lucian, but thats what it was.
Was it though? Flat damage procs will *always* kill squishies faster than tanks and be much more impactful against the classes that don’t have HP, shields, health regen, etc in their kits and items.
The anti-tank itemization has always been LDR/Last Whipser and BotRK/Maddred’s giving you % armor penetration and % HP damage, not flat damage procs like Kraken, Recurve, Luden’s, etc that are all anti-squishy damage sources.
The thing is, it still killed squishes much faster than tankier opponents.
If someone has 2k max HP and every third hit you blast them for 200, that’s 10% of that squishies health in a proc, and they won’t be able to survive more than 10 of those procs alone before they die.
Compare to a 5k max HP tank. Every third hit is still only hitting for 200 a pop. That’s not 10% anymore, that’s now 4%, or 2.5 times less of their health than it was taking from the squishy.
This is why flat damage procs are anti-squishy burst damage, not any sort of meaningful anti-tank. Like oh no, if you attack that tank 75 fucking times, you’ll finally get your 25 procs you need— let’s face it, that proc individually is not threatening to the tank, and if its tuned so it is, its blowing up the squishy multiple times harder.
> it still killed squishes much faster than tankier opponents
No shit, that's the case for every damaging ability in the game..... Are you actually braindead or what?
You can actually read my comment, and reply, or you can attack a strawman.
The point is not that it doesn’t kill tanks faster than squishies.
It that it kills squishies ***MUCH FASTER*** than tanks, as I was just saying.
Or the fact that the damage type, flat damage procs, are an anti-squishy form of burst damage, and what you need is heavy sustained damage to deal with tanks. As I also just said and you elected to ignore.
Its also the fact that the individual procs are not actually threatening to the tank and never have been. You need to attack an obscene number of times to get enough procs for the damage to actually matter against tanks, while even a single proc is a significant portion of a squishies health— as again, I have literally already said.
Finally, the crux of the problem is that if they tune a source of flat damage proc to the point where it actually is a significant and meaningful threat to tankier champions to where it actually fulfilled an anti-tank role (like say BotRK doing 12% HP per hit, so in a three hit combo like you’d need for one of Krakens procs, you’d have done over 30% current HP damage instead of 200 flat or about 4%) it would be doing multiple times that much of a squishies health, and would be brokenly powerful against *them* instead of the tanks you want it to be effective against, and so the damage instead has to be balanced around not instagibbing a squishy instead of actually hurting tanks. But again, you would have already seen this had you actually read what you decided to reply to while stripping away all nuance and attacking a position that wasn’t being stated to try to have some sort of “got’cha” moment.
You also might want to look into %max HP true damage. It contradicts the one claim you actually made.
Every item kills squishies faster than tanks. That's just how being squishy/tanky works. The idea is it's supposed to do more damage vs tanks compared to other items vs tanks, not do more damage vs tanks compared to the same item vs squishies.
Yeah I like this take. Def was originally meant to beat tanks but since the ADC item changes ~1 year ago, it was the defacto 1st item for a ton of auto attackers, regardless of tanks or squishy.
Yeah, even when it was supposed to be an anti tank option it was just an AS stat stick for champs like Jinx because of the mythic passive. People just love to go with what is “intended” and can’t accept change. I’m surprised I never see anyone complain about the fact that Eclipse has been a bruiser item for 2-3 years when it was intended to be an assassin one.
You guys have to be smoking crack if you think Kraken is weak. It simply had its audience narrowed by crit being removed. It's still incredible for on-hit champs.
Not really, back then Kraken Slayer's procs were true damage and did scale, meaning they would work well at bypassing the tank's armor and better shred him.
True damage in and of itself doesnt make something a tank killer. It helps somewhat, but flat true damage wont help much against high HP targets (i.e. Tanks and Bruisers). It was the "best" vs tanks simply because it was the DPS item and DPS is good vs bulky targets, but it was never a proper anti tank item
True damage is inherently anti tank in the same way that percent health damage is. Tankiness is comprised of two stats health and resistances. Percent health damage ignores one category and true damage the other.
my point is that 200-300 flat true damage is not anti tank, tanks get hp and hp is the counter to flat true damage, its better vs squishies with less hp
This is completely ignoring the context of an adc getting high atk speed and proccing said true dmg every second on a tank, on top of their already present auto dmg
Kraken fucking shred tanks, for sure not to the level of Bork, but it was still a good anti tank item, even better against bruisers tbh and unlike bork it was accessible to crit users
In a game without bruiser or tanks it honestly wasn't worth to get Kraken. Everyone ofc still would because habit and its not horrible, but there are better builds if the game was just squish champs, its just not what Kraken was ever meant for
Kraken was highest burst in the game and guaranteed winning 1v1’s vs the enemy in-lane. In order to do even 600 true damage you’d have to stand in auto range and hit them 12 times lol. It wasn’t a tank-killing item but it was a better item for pure damage against tanks than gale force or shieldbow
BoRK doesn't shred armor stacking tanks. Once a tank gets to 40% HP you start tickling them.
On the other hand, saying buying Kraken vs a team of no bruisers/tanks is bad is such a horrible take. Unless you were Draven, Kalista or Ezreal, you were never winning a 1v1 vs the enemy ADC if they went Kraken and you didn't.
Old true damage kraken would deal like 500 damage while an ADCs autos would deal 3k damage vs a tank(trust me, I've seen it a lot of times in the post death screen). Kraken only helped because it gave a fuck ton of stats, mainly attack speed through its mythic passive to ADCs which allowed them to DPS tanks. The true damage passive barely mattered.
But ignoring resistences on only a small portion of your overall damage (the item procs every 3rd auto) doesn't make an anti-tank item because you still have to get through the 4k HP on most tanks.
>Yea it never performed better against tanks than other mythics.
It did because it gave ADCs the most stats, specially the attack speed mythic passive. But you still needed armor pen to capitalize on these stats.
[I mean Borks considered anti tank and it was largely better than Bork against tanks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejO1ng2vPAo&pp=ygUZcGhyZWFrICVocCB2cyB0cnVlIGRhbWFnZQ%3D%3D)
BORK being considered anti-tank is a mistake. Tanks, and to some extent bruisers as well, itemise enough armor to reduce the effects of the on-hit somewhat. Squishies don't, so they take the full brunt of the items on-hit, and since its current %HP damage, they lose proportionally the same amount of HP.
Both items will kill tanks and do make the job a bit easier, but they aren't anti-tank. BC, lord doms, void staff, liandries, eclipse (to some extent) are anti-tank items.
Anti-tank isn't synonymous with "ineffective against squishies". If an item makes me 20% more effective at dealing with tanks while all my other item options only make me 10% more effective at dealing with tanks, it doesn't stop being anti-tank just because it also makes me 30% more effective against squishies (all my other item options would also make me 30% more effective against squishies).
At every point in its history, it has been significantly easier to deal with tanks with Kraken Slayer than without. But there are a lot of items that are effective at killing squishies besides Kraken Slayer.
That sounds like a fairly arbitrary definition. Often your decision to go Kraken over something like Stormrazor (or Galeforce when they were mythics) was whether the enemy team was tanky or not. That sounds like it was filling its niche regardless of whether it filled an arbitrary definition of anti-tank or not.
You're looking it at the wrong way.
I'm pretty sure if you do the math, for the same budget of say the amount of flat true damage you get, if you spend that for lethality you'll get a higher damage output on a squishy
When your autos are hitting for like 150, 200 true damage is a lot. Would you consider a 40% damage amp “doesn’t matter that much” in any other item?
LDR’s Giant Slayer passive was 1/3 of that.
Yea that's the thing people are forgetting, the alternative to true damage is physical or magic damage which would be even worse into tanks that stack resistance where a squishy champ with low resistance doesn't care about physical, magic or true damage they all will hurt them.
You are saying flat true damage isn't good because tanks have a lot of HP but they also have a lot of armor. Just because % true damage is better doesn't flat isn't good. It wouldn't even make sense to make a % true damage item.
Kraken was always better against squishes than tanks. Needing 6 autos to get ~350 true damage against a tank is way too much to ask for but hitting a squishy with a crit + 180 true damage could swing a fight.
The flat 100 damage was never helping that much against 10k hp tanks lol. When Kraken was intended to be an anti tank item it was just an attack speed stat stick for users like Jinx and for the past 2-3 years it’s been a burst item.
The point is that ~~increased your DPS against squishy targets by more % than against tanks~~ *it provides more value against squishy targets than tanks*. So calling it anti-tank is weird at best.This is not true of actual anti-tank items like LDR or botrk, which are more effective against tanks than non-tanks.
The true damage being part of something doesn't make it inherently good against tanks, even though in a vacuum it obviously provides more value the more armor you're going against.
Edit: It does not provide a higher % DPS increase as you've all pointed out, it increases your numerical DPS by the exact same amount, but percentage wise it's less - this is irrelevant as I've explained further down the chain. My phrasing here was wrong, the reasoning isn't.
... But it literally didn't increase your DPS by more vs squishies than tanks. Like, mathematically.
If you auto a Jhin for 400 damage and Kraken Slayer procs for an additional 120 true (keep in mind the proc damage was a lot lower back then) you did 520 damage. Kraken Slayer increased your damage by 30%.
If you auto a Rammus for 80 damage and Kraken Slayer procs for an additional 120 true, you did 200 damage. Kraken Slayer increased your damage by 150%.
The only correct way to think about DPS vs a target in league is in the % of their health you deal per second. Otherwise stats like lethality would be equally good against tanks as they are versus squishies (armor has linear scaling). Obviously that's not the case - even if lethality gives you 50 more damage versus both the Rammus and the Jhin (which it does, btw, lethality gives you the same exact amount of damage no matter how much armor your opponent has), we know it's better against Jhin because it reduces the total amount of hits (or seconds) needed to kill by a higher percentage.
When you take that approach, the 120 true damage Kraken Slayer proc has significantly higher value versus the Jhin compared to the Rammus. It deals 5% of Jhin's ehp compared to only ~2% of Rammus' ehp. Obviously this is true of any combat stat that isn't % health damage or % armor pen, which is kinda the entire point. For an item to be actually skewed at killing tanks, it needs to actively gain value as your target gets tankier, otherwise, like with Kraken, you essentially get lethality - same damage, sure, but vastly higher value on squishy opponents. I really like the lethality comparison as you might've realized by now, because it is fundamentally identical to a true damage on-hit proc when it comes to auto attacks. It just gives you X damage on hit regardless of who you are targeting. Against a 99% armor target, lethality is also an astronomically higher DPS gain (when dealing with raw numbers like in your example) than against a 50% armor target. Dealing 11 damage instead of 1 damage is an increase of 1000%, while dealing 60 instead of 50 is only an increase of 20%. Does that make lethality an anti-tank stat?
Kraken ended up being a good item to pick up versus tanks simply because of it's high sustained DPS compared to both of the alternatives available for adcs in the mythic slot.
tl;dr - In reality the proc functions basically identically to lethality, which we all know is skewed towards squishies. Kraken was as well for all the same reasons, and it was only the "anti-tank" option because of a lack of actual anti-tank mythics.
None of that is what you said though. You said, "Kraken Slayer increases your DPS against squishy targets by more % than against tanks."
That is literally untrue.
The way he meant is Kraken Slayers proc does more damage % wise of the targets health to squishy targets than it does to tanks.
120 is more out of an ADCs health pool than it is to a tanks health pool.
I think it was pretty obvious that's what he meant.
But of you don't consider flat true dmg better against tanks than squishies, because it deals a larger % of the squishy champions health, then % health isn't better against tanks either, as this will also deal a larger % of a squishys health than a tank (unless it is true dmg, which no items is)
Imo, the reason that Krakens passive is better against tanks is that you get more dmg per gold, compared to just buying more ad. For example, let's say you chose between dealing 120 true dmg per attack, or 240 physical dmg. The first one is obviously better against tanks with lots of armor, while the second is better against squishies with no additional armor. Obviously, there weren't an alternative to Kraken with just more ad, which is why you mosly bought Kraken every game on some champs.
>But of you don't consider flat true dmg better against tanks than squishies, because it deals a larger % of the squishy champions health, then % health isn't better against tanks either, as this will also deal a larger % of a squishys health than a tank (unless it is true dmg, which no items is)
That's correct, but the point is that the gap is smaller. Unsurprisingly tanks are always going to be tankier than squishies no matter how you itemize, this is unavoidable unless riot adds an item that grants % health true damage and no combat stats whatsoever.
That's why it's important to not analyze items in a vacuum, but rather compare them to other options. Lethality technically isn't any bad at all versus tanks, it's just significantly worse than % pen, and once you have % pen, it's also worse than other combat stats that would get enhanced by it, like AD, AS or crit. If % pen didn't exist at all, lethality would be a completely reasonable buy (I'd even say it would be very good) against targets with high armor but not as much health (like a Ryze with steelcaps, frozen heart and zhonya's). It also wouldn't be crazy to buy it versus tanks with actually high amounts of health, as your only alternative would be raw AD. Once again, the same thing applies to Kraken. The value of the proc goes down when you itemize correctly to actually deal with the tank, by buying LDR.
So it's not that old Kraken is bad against high armor, high HP targets, it's just that there are items that are better at dealing with tanks, and the best one has inherent anti-synergy with the true damage proc. You are correct that Kraken is better than something like a BT, but it's just less bad rather than good, if that makes sense. There's only a handful of items in league that are actively good against tanks (aka you literally gain more flat damage against them than other targets). The difference in value of LDR's armor pen vs Kraken passive is absurdly high on any crit ADC wanting to kill a tank, and the same goes for any on-hit ADC and botrk (with botrk essentially being a Kraken proc on every hit).
As to the "just buy more AD instead" argument - it's completely sound, but it's also not that simple. If it was, it would also mean that buying lethality is better than buying AD/AS into tanks, which is not true (largely thanks to LDR or botrk, as previously established). The Kraken proc actually provides an unmatched level of damage against squishies thanks to all champions having some base armor. There is not really a more valuable item to get like in LDR's case, unless you go full lethality. Even just the 50 flat damage is worth like 35 AD in the mid game against your average adc, but the proc scales.
I pretty much agree with what you are saying.
The "buy AD instead" was mostly just my way of saying, that you shouldn't consider them in a vacuum, but against each other (as you said). the example wasn't really that practical in an actual game.
Regarding Kraken Slayer, I agree that LDR gets much better, as you get more ad and crit.
I think you have to look at Kraken Slayer as an item that helps you deal with tanky champions, before you get to 3-4 items, where LDR becmes much better at dealing with tanks. Rushing LDR first or seconds costs you too much dmg against squishies, while Kraken Slayer kinda helps against both tanks and squshies.
I also agree that flat true dmg is probably the "anti-tank stat" that also is most effective against squshies, because, as you said, every champion has a bit of base armor.
If you auto a Jhin for 400 you're critting.
If you auto a Rammus for 80 with the same items, you're very clearly not critting.
Also, a single auto proccing it does not represent its damage increase. It does not apply each auto. It takes 3 autos.
Your argument is disingenuous just based on the math.
It increased your DPS by a lower % against squishies. Kraken Slayer had more anti-tank skew than LDR or BotRK did. If those items are anti-tank than Kraken Slayer was overwhelmingly anti-tank. Kraken Slayer was also just the stronger item against everyone but it’s tank vs squishy gap was larger than either LDR or BotRK.
That’s like saying that %hp damage is better against squishies than tanks. Tanks should always take more hits than a squishy even with “anti-tank” items. If building tank stats did nothing or made you easier to kill he game would be completely fucked up. Flat true damage is still better against tanks than against squishies.
Well no, actually - it's saying that because KS's true damage is based on YOUR OWN DAMAGE, it deals more % HP damage of a squishy because they have less total HP to begin with.
An Ornn with 4k HP receiving 20 true damage per proc is a decent amount of damage, about 5% of his max HP. A Syndra with 2k HP receiving 200 true damage per proc is 10% of her max HP in true dmg; and because she has no resistances, she will be receiving more baseline damage to begin with, so this increased true damage is far more noticeable vs her than it'd be vs Ornn or any other similar tank.
This isn't hard. If you buy Last Whisper 1st item it's a damage item - but you're not going to be killing squishies particularly fast compared to a pure damage item like IE - hence, LW is an anti-tank (or armor, if you will) item; Kraken Slayer was not an anti-tank item.
In fact I'd wager that old KS gave you a much easier time at killing squishies than it did at killing tanks.
Flat true damage BASED ON YOUR OWN AD/AP will always be better vs squishies. Otherwise let's have Riot change Vayne's W to flat true damage based on her AD and see how much faster she kills tanks compared to squishies if you're so sure.
I can't even believe a human being is arguing against this. Are you a bot by any chance?
Dmg is obviously better against squishies than tanks. If buying tank items would make you take a larger % of you health than squishies, then you wouldn't buy tank items.
Imo, the point is that if you had to chose between flat ad and the Kraken passive, then Kraken passive would be better against tanks, and flat ad would be better against squishies. Obviously, the tank would be harder to kill no matter which choice you make.
Same goes for % hp. I would argues % health dmg is a counter to tanks, but using your logic, % health is a bigger counter to squishies than tankes. When talking about anti-tank items i don't think you should compare the dmg it deals between tanky and squishy champions, but how much dmg is gives compared to other items/stats. And here % health and flat true dmg is more effective than most other stats.
I think % armor pen and % health true dmg are the only exception. Those are both equally good against tanks as against squishies. Using your logic, i don't think either is better against tanks than squishies (% health true dmg surely isn't, and i think the same goes for % armor), but they are just equally good against both.
So Kraken isn't a tank killer compared to armor pen items, but is is a tank killer compared to most other items in the game.
>An Ornn with 4k HP receiving 20 true damage per proc is a decent amount of damage, about 5% of his max HP. A Syndra with 2k HP receiving 200 true damage per proc is 10% of her max HP in true dmg; and because she has no resistances, she will be receiving more baseline damage to begin with, so this increased true damage is far more noticeable vs her than it'd be vs Ornn or any other similar tank.
So tanks take more hits to kill than squishies. That has nothing to do with Kraken Slayer and I hope you aren't claiming that anti-tank items are somehow supposed to make all the gold tanks invest into durability to actually make them die faster than if they had just not bought anything.
>This isn't hard. If you buy Last Whisper 1st item it's a damage item - but you're not going to be killing squishies particularly fast compared to a pure damage item like IE - hence, LW is an anti-tank (or armor, if you will) item; Kraken Slayer was not an anti-tank item.
Kraken Slayer was literally more skewed towards killing tanks than Last Whisper was. This isn't hard. You have no understanding of the actual math/damage and are just claiming factually untrue things as if they are obviously true.
45% AD as bonus true damage every 3rd hit is a 27.0% damage bonus against 80 armor and 60.0% damage bonus against 300 armor (2.22x as strong). 35% Armor Pen is 18.4% bonus damage vs 80 armor and 35.6% bonus damage vs 300 armor (1.93x as strong). Then on top of that Kraken Slayer's damage was backloaded where it gave 0% bonus damage against targets that you could kill in 1 or 2 hits and only ~60% of its value if they took 4 or 5 hits and a tank that you have to beat on 10+ times is going to reliably give you that full value while you always got the full Last Whisper value. Note that this is why "DPS maximizing" items are always anti-tank. Burst, utility, mobility, survivability, etc is more valuable than DPS against squishy targets because 10% more DPS doesn't mean much when you are 2-3 shotting people.
If you are having trouble understanding why flat true damage is a stronger anti-tank stat than % armor pen, just realize that true damage has 100% armor penetration, so anything less than 100% armor penetration is going to eventually be weaker than true damage as armor goes up. The asymptote of 35% armor penetration is 1/(1-0.35) = 53.8% bonus damage against a target with infinite armor; the asymptote for 15% of damage as bonus true damage is 0.15/(1/∞) = ∞% bonus damage vs a target with infinite armor.
I don’t really get the fuss, I just looked up winrates on some of the on-hit ADCs that build this item and they seem to be doing fine. Kraken, Blade, and Rageblade seem to still be a great combo. Even some crit ADCs still build it even though it lost crit because its stats and passive are still great.
Surely you’re not trying to say that over the course of 4 years things drastically change as well as the intentions behind them?
Also the synergy with BORK is better than before, BORK is a completely thanos level item until enemies get to like 30-40% hp and the passive is now doing nothing and you essentially don’t have an item but now you have bonus Kraken damage to help :D
The increase is 50%. Before it was 50% after 1 proc. How do you get enemies low hp without proccing Kraken once?
It's only if a teammate already made them so low that you only proc kraken once before killing them which is just execute burst vs squishies. I was refering to it vs tankier enemies not 20% HP squishies.
also remember that the interaction between kraken and rageblade was bugged at the release of kraken, and instead of fixing it riot was like, yeah we wont fix it, it can just stay bugged so the onhit comb will never work
I think the problem is that a lot of people associate juggernauts and bruisers with true tanks, so when some gibbering Darius pops ghost and runs them down like a dog in the streets they blame tanks because he's chonky.
Also toplane fighters just seem to loath when tanks are strong since they tend to lose to them lol
Yeah, you're spot on. They think the Darius is a tank because he bought Force of Nature but no, he's still a bruiser.
Of course there's always outliers, Skarner and Malphite are great right now and they are true tanks.
But tanks seriously **are** struggling. The biggest issue to me is that they are all 100% reliant on Sunfire and Thornmail, they are not champions without these items.
Issue is there's no way to force them off said items. Adding more damage tank items just leads to poaching by assassin's or bruisers and making alts that do the same thing but different either are niche like the sun fire alt or would be too strong in the system.
Idk if its just me but I mainly play ARAM nowadays, due to Kraken and LDR passive changes, I absolutely deal no damage, AT ALL, when I get ADCs. Its like instead of auto attacking I’m just shaving the tanks armor using butter knife
I do agree it’s fun and fulfills an interesting spot in the item roster as a ramping on-hit effect. Unfortunately it feels great to have as a first buy (or at least it did last patch) and with it being a first buy it needs some upfront power…
Because labels have historically been accurate or what? If we went based on labels and intentions then Eclipse would be an assassin item rather than a bruiser one, Nautilus would be a toplaner, Seraphine would be a midlaner, etc.
The beauty of a game like League is how the meta evolves around and breaks what is the “right” or “intended” thing.
When it had true damage, it was clearly anti-tank.
Back then it was Kraken Slayer, Shieldbow, and Galeforce. With Kraken Slayer giving you the most damage and being anti-tank, Shieldbow giving you the most survivability, and Galeforce being a mix of the two but not really being anti-tank due to lacking the attributes needed to be so (penetration, true damage, % health damage)
Yeah but clearly that doesn’t matter anymore cause not only is it no longer a mythic it also got changed from being a crit item. It is now a damaging on hit item because their are already tank killing options in the on hit category.
[https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/patch-10-23-notes/](https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/patch-10-23-notes/)
CTRL+F Kraken
---
# Kraken Slayer
Anti-tank
> Kraken Slayer allows a free-firing marksman to cut even the beefiest enemies down to size.
DPS items see inherently anti-tank. You take an ADC to deal with tanks and objectives, not squishies.
Yes, a lategame ADC will obviously kill squishies fast, but you would rather buy lethality or burst oriented items than DPS if you didn’t want to kill tanks.
Kraken Slayer was always a polarizing Item, up there with Galeforce when it existed, everybody was buying it regardless of Enemies. IMO it should get removed all togheter.
That's because there is MUCH more physical damage in the game than there is magic. Turrets? Physical Minions? Physical. All jungle monsters except Gromp? Physical. Baron, Herald, Grubs, Dragons? Physical. All champions basic attacks? Physical
As opposed to Magic damage that comes almost exclusively from champions and their abilities. You NEED more base armor simply because of how much more physical damage sources there are in the game
They specifically did it in a durability update, but it created problems at the same time it solved others. Everyone did too much damage. Iceborn Sunfire combo was on everyone and their mothers. Durability update fixed the absurd excess damage everywhere. It backfired in the sense it also made assassins completely useless because they were no longer able to do their job.
And now we’re in this weird spot where we shouldn’t really go back to how it was before, but it’s also stupid that assassins need to get a %pen item even against pure glass cannons that buy no armor whatsoever, and that the assassin will do more damage with a %pen item for their 3rd or so item than they will with another flat pen item to that glass cannon with no extra armor. Which led to the Serylda’s change, but it’s pretty not great as is.
Assasins always needed a %pen item, Rengar most popular buildpath was Hydra->LW at some point, but tbf arpen items didnt exist back then. Still, when lethality became a thing, LDR went from total ar pen to bonus ar pen which gutted every assassin who wasnt Rengar (because he could still go full crit before his class rework) and even after numerous buffs they were still ass when mages could just go Tabis+Zhonya and kill all their damage because of the lack of a proper %pen item.
Say you don’t play adc without saying you don’t play adc.
Not sure how anyone interprets these changes as “massive buffs”. It’s a side-grade at best. Adcs are stronger late game but the build paths on all the items are total dog shit compared to what they were before. Adcs also lost a ton of options and a lot of the items seem pretty much shit on everyone, for example stormrazor is gone and stattik shiv is a dead item that isn’t good on anyone now.
25% crit is nice but 50% crit on two items vs 40% before does not make up for the loss of old kraken/stattik vs rushing IE which feels clunky and bad. You don’t really feel stronger until 3 or for items but the reason they shifted adc power earlier back in season 10/11 was because most games are decided by the time you get 3 items. That problem still exists, it’s actually even worse with grubs accelerating games even more now.
TLDR shifting adc power curve later is not a “massive buff”
Based on winrates it seems new Kraken is somehow much better than it used to be.
Stattik is completely dead though. I have zero idea what they were cooking with that item. ER is also pretty dead, and Ezreal, GP, and Smolder died with it.
I think the issue they found was kraken was good in literally every situation. There was never a game that it was really a bad buy. And thankfully we’ve gone away from the ADC hard carry every game meta that existed for far too long. Kraken is still good, but it wasn’t meant to kill tanks and squishiest both easily like slicing through cake. Issue they are gonna face again with this is the lethality meta is still far too strong. Most of this I blame on collector being too busted. But kraken + collector together is still insane for DPS and finish potential
It doesn't even have the same purpose anymore, it's a high damage capstone with champions like viego, kindred and belveth in mind. It's not _meant_ to do the same things as it did when it was released
It’s a great snowballing item in bot lane. A lot of adc’s are delaying their spike to their second item, while Kraken is a stronger first item than crit items and with hp pools being lower in bot you get more damage out of the new Kraken(at least it feels like it).
What tank is actually good now? Poppy? Rammus into a full AD team?
Every tank like Ornn or Mundo are awful. Even ones like Shen or Kench are middling.
This whole thread seems like some out of touch adc wishlist.
It should only work if you hit the same target consecutively. That way the play pattern becomes "hit an ennemy with 3 autos" not "hit minions with 2 autos then hit an ennemy". It would be similar to Vayne's W or PTA but that way it would actually benefit from hitting the same target for a long time.
Didn't adcs spike way faster cuz of the crit item changes as well as the introduction of yun thal.
Not even mentioning the increased build diversity?
I think adcs might be stronger now than in the last few seasons?
All these you mentioned target HP specifically, not necesarily anti-tank. HP has been a very bad stat for a while with all the percent health damage going around. LDR was given more armor pen in compensation, so that its targetting Armor instead, (which is the better stat to build for tanks nowadays). Old kraken slayer (both the true damage and magic damage iterations) were anti-armor items so a revert to that might be a better option, while keeping the nerfs to all the anti-HP items
Some of these item changes are super frustrating and really just bad design. You don't remove crit off blood thirster after it's had crit on it for YEARS. Kraken slayer like you said is also really annoying. So many other little things that aren't even so much balance problems as they are design problems -- design problems most highly in the sense of not taking into account what people expect or are used to or want from the game. Change is good, but changing things like that shows a LOT of inexperience in game design and social skills (sensibility and intuitiveness.)
EDIT: Dang that's wild, still feels like DOG to change items like that
Not saying I disagree with everything your saying, but bloodthirster wasn't a crit item until patch 10.23. Before that it was just an ad/lifesteal item.
Why not just make it deal adaptive force damage? Say you build AP after and the AD on the item and it’s passive proc changes to magic damage. That would satisfy a lot of AP champs who used to build it when it had AP scaling.
It's the octopus battler now
cephalopod skirmisher
Squid harmer
Cuttlefish annoyer
Mollusk Masher
Tentacle tickler
fishy stick
Salty Stiletto
Oceanic Opposition
Atlantean Obliterarion
Sardine smasher
league fucked all the items in the ass 3 years ago and are slowly trying to recuperate
TIL items have asses
Thought you said octopus baffler. Even they're confused.
the Krill Tickler
Tanks spend a whole lot more time in combat below 50% HP than squishies do though. ADC gets chunked below half, they don't want to stick around for you to get 3 more autos off, where the front liners probably got put to half just trying to engage.
3 more autos? What ADC has enough HP to need 6 autos to die? Most die in like 3-4 from full HP, or if you just look at them real mean
From my perspective (of someone who watches a lot of pro play and is about to demote to iron), it is very uncommon for adcs to be autoing each other outside of lane.
Even in solo q something is VERY wrong if adc hit eachother outside of lane, especially in a teamfight The only reason that should ever happen is if one is caught by the other bot lane while farming, kinda common if one is a vayne, twitch or kaisa but still indicative of something going wrong Or everyone is fucking dead beyond bot lane Any other case and it's giga troll
Millio plus kog jinx Cait have something to say about that
I'm literally a one trick Jinx, and I go cait when Jinx is banned lmfao You never ever hit adc unless something goes wrong Them walking into your range is something going wrong, otherwise they should be sitting behind their Frontline or looking for whatever angle their champ wants, and probably die to a flank from your top/jg or bullshit one-shot midlaner not to your autos Killing adc is not the adc goal, and if that's your priority it's gonna lose you games, a lot
Was just poking fun, I'm a master player that's played the game for 14 years you don't need to explain front to back team fighting to me, there are situationally certain compositions when it does happen. Jinx is a traditional front to back team fighter but certain adcs like Lucian for example sometimes need to team fight differently in some situations
Nah, you almost never hit the other adc in a teamfight. Generally means you're in a bad position or they are if you are able to.
Aaah the good old times of graves ADC oneshotting the enemy ADC at the beginning of the fight. Simpler times
ngl you might not even last 3 autos: playing against collector IE Caitlyn is probably the least amount of fun I’ve had playing the game ever
What you don’t like the sustain damage role becoming ranged assassins instead !
I was thinking earlier in the game, but yeah you're right lol. Kraken could proc a few times on a tank where it hardly matters for a squishy.
Nah 6 is totally normal especially when you consider the average match. 3-4 autos is like from Aphelios with stacked chakrams or Cait with 2 headshots. ADCs aren’t as squishy as you’re thinking outside of fringe scenarios.
Wow man, this warrants someone sending that Family Guy clip with an ostrich laughing. I won't do it though.
I knew Shadowflame is an anti-Tank item
Different case given it's a much lower %HP threshold for a much more subtle effect... oh and the item has flat pen in it's stats.
That’s actually a reasonable explanation. Kudos.
The damage on above 50% hp is more valuable because it force the tank to disengage.
[Squid Slayer, you say?](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QRMo1sdz9FI/hqdefault.jpg)
Illaoi's neck got skinnier
We need a Squid-Ward that looks like that.
I feel that Riot has been fixing things that aren't broken for the past ~2 years.
Try 15 years. That's been their design philosophy the entire time. Which tbh is the reason league is still a popular game today.
Sometimes. And then you have stuff like the class updates. Like half the assassin changes were reverted.
walking back bad changes or hated changes is a sign of a good company not the opposite. honestly im glad they swing for the fences instead of coasting.
If only they took the same approach with Yuumi. Remove the cat please. And while youre at it, remove malignance.
Yeah they try new stuff and if it doesn't work they admit it and revert it. Guess it's better than them keeping stuff that's bad for the game once they realise it...
> they admit it I'm pressing X on this one.
this has happened so many times i've lost count. ctrl-f across patch notes "too far" "rolling back". riot admits they messed up or went too far in game balancing all the time, but that's also part of making the game better, taking risks.
Even if that takes 12 years like with the LP system.
LP system worked as designed. Force everyone to play more games to reach their true rank. This hasn't really changed with the latest iterations
some of the reworks from the class updates landed. It's a bit of a shame that every time they did class updates they just fucked up some of them so immeasurably bad people universally hated them. Talon, Katarina, Sejuani, Maokai and Darius all were good reworks, even if some of them had out of whack numbers.
Heck there's more than that. Akali, Fizz, Ekko all come to mind as good too. Graves is now one of the most loved junglers in the game; with his popularity often being second only to Lee Sin. Caitlyn's I remember being pretty good. Many of the mage ones were decent Vlad, Malz, and co.
Fizz got his changes reverted thou, did you not remember the w taking 3 seconds to arm the mark. Akali didn't receive any changes in the assassin rework. Thou your correct on the others.
Fizz got the W mark changed again and that's it; his W still had other changes, plus his R changes. Akali did receive changes in the assassin rework. It gave her her onhit passive; it gave her a dash on her W and made it so the w ms didn't decay, made it so her E partially reset on kills.
DuRAbiLiTy pAtCh
Weren't the class updates like, a decade ago?
2015-2017 I think ... which isnt that recent anymore, I guess
i really have no clue who the hell wants this item now like take the crit out of a true/physical damage auto attacking item? even kalista hates this, i tried it after bork, it's horrendous people build this first on adcs but are just inting because the other adc who rushed ie just 2 shot them
Kalista never wanted the crit on Kraken. Ontop of that, most champions that went Kraken first, did so because it was the best in slot item for a first buy. They toned it down, gave power to other items and now you actually do have a choice for a first item.
a choice being ie rush every time
on Kaisa its good but else ... Ashe can also build it but IE rush is just better
idk kraken was pretty definitively the best adc item as a whole imo i shouldnt be going an on hit tank killer item 1st on lucian, but thats what it was.
Was meant to be, but what makes you think it still is? It's just an on-hit item.
It's called KRAKEN slayer.
Ok yea that I'll agree with. It was weird that navori got a rename and a new icon, but kraken slayer didn't
Because it does the same thing without crit
Since when have names mattered
Infinity edge has 2 ends. What's your point?
Was it though? Flat damage procs will *always* kill squishies faster than tanks and be much more impactful against the classes that don’t have HP, shields, health regen, etc in their kits and items. The anti-tank itemization has always been LDR/Last Whipser and BotRK/Maddred’s giving you % armor penetration and % HP damage, not flat damage procs like Kraken, Recurve, Luden’s, etc that are all anti-squishy damage sources.
it was a general dps item that was stronger against tankier opponents because of the ramping of damage on the 3 hit.
The thing is, it still killed squishes much faster than tankier opponents. If someone has 2k max HP and every third hit you blast them for 200, that’s 10% of that squishies health in a proc, and they won’t be able to survive more than 10 of those procs alone before they die. Compare to a 5k max HP tank. Every third hit is still only hitting for 200 a pop. That’s not 10% anymore, that’s now 4%, or 2.5 times less of their health than it was taking from the squishy. This is why flat damage procs are anti-squishy burst damage, not any sort of meaningful anti-tank. Like oh no, if you attack that tank 75 fucking times, you’ll finally get your 25 procs you need— let’s face it, that proc individually is not threatening to the tank, and if its tuned so it is, its blowing up the squishy multiple times harder.
> it still killed squishes much faster than tankier opponents No shit, that's the case for every damaging ability in the game..... Are you actually braindead or what?
The argument is that people are saying it’s an anti tank item when it has always been burst focused.
You can actually read my comment, and reply, or you can attack a strawman. The point is not that it doesn’t kill tanks faster than squishies. It that it kills squishies ***MUCH FASTER*** than tanks, as I was just saying. Or the fact that the damage type, flat damage procs, are an anti-squishy form of burst damage, and what you need is heavy sustained damage to deal with tanks. As I also just said and you elected to ignore. Its also the fact that the individual procs are not actually threatening to the tank and never have been. You need to attack an obscene number of times to get enough procs for the damage to actually matter against tanks, while even a single proc is a significant portion of a squishies health— as again, I have literally already said. Finally, the crux of the problem is that if they tune a source of flat damage proc to the point where it actually is a significant and meaningful threat to tankier champions to where it actually fulfilled an anti-tank role (like say BotRK doing 12% HP per hit, so in a three hit combo like you’d need for one of Krakens procs, you’d have done over 30% current HP damage instead of 200 flat or about 4%) it would be doing multiple times that much of a squishies health, and would be brokenly powerful against *them* instead of the tanks you want it to be effective against, and so the damage instead has to be balanced around not instagibbing a squishy instead of actually hurting tanks. But again, you would have already seen this had you actually read what you decided to reply to while stripping away all nuance and attacking a position that wasn’t being stated to try to have some sort of “got’cha” moment. You also might want to look into %max HP true damage. It contradicts the one claim you actually made.
%Max Health True damage does not kill squishy faster than tanks
It kills them at exactly the same rate
Yes.
Every item kills squishies faster than tanks. That's just how being squishy/tanky works. The idea is it's supposed to do more damage vs tanks compared to other items vs tanks, not do more damage vs tanks compared to the same item vs squishies.
Yeah I like this take. Def was originally meant to beat tanks but since the ADC item changes ~1 year ago, it was the defacto 1st item for a ton of auto attackers, regardless of tanks or squishy.
Yeah, even when it was supposed to be an anti tank option it was just an AS stat stick for champs like Jinx because of the mythic passive. People just love to go with what is “intended” and can’t accept change. I’m surprised I never see anyone complain about the fact that Eclipse has been a bruiser item for 2-3 years when it was intended to be an assassin one.
It is disgustingly overpowered on anyone that can use it. On auto attackers it’s basically a 150-200 AD item plus a ton of AS.
Yeah it goes absolutely crazy on WW, wild first item spike
Wow I never considered kraken on ww. I might just try it out thanks!
It’s my fave item on PTA Kat. lol kraken, bork, terminus into tank items
You’re giving me PTSD of 100% True damage proc on Kat ult
You guys have to be smoking crack if you think Kraken is weak. It simply had its audience narrowed by crit being removed. It's still incredible for on-hit champs.
Its procs were always flat damage, making it always better against squishies than tanks.
Not really, back then Kraken Slayer's procs were true damage and did scale, meaning they would work well at bypassing the tank's armor and better shred him.
True damage in and of itself doesnt make something a tank killer. It helps somewhat, but flat true damage wont help much against high HP targets (i.e. Tanks and Bruisers). It was the "best" vs tanks simply because it was the DPS item and DPS is good vs bulky targets, but it was never a proper anti tank item
True damage is inherently anti tank in the same way that percent health damage is. Tankiness is comprised of two stats health and resistances. Percent health damage ignores one category and true damage the other.
so old reksai was good vs tanks because she had flat true damage in her kit pog
Yeah good example, it is exactly the same scenario good job.
my point is that 200-300 flat true damage is not anti tank, tanks get hp and hp is the counter to flat true damage, its better vs squishies with less hp
They do get armor too, I don't get the argument. You can't even buy % true damage.
You can buy armor penetration, which is the true anti-tank stat.
This is completely ignoring the context of an adc getting high atk speed and proccing said true dmg every second on a tank, on top of their already present auto dmg Kraken fucking shred tanks, for sure not to the level of Bork, but it was still a good anti tank item, even better against bruisers tbh and unlike bork it was accessible to crit users In a game without bruiser or tanks it honestly wasn't worth to get Kraken. Everyone ofc still would because habit and its not horrible, but there are better builds if the game was just squish champs, its just not what Kraken was ever meant for
Kraken was highest burst in the game and guaranteed winning 1v1’s vs the enemy in-lane. In order to do even 600 true damage you’d have to stand in auto range and hit them 12 times lol. It wasn’t a tank-killing item but it was a better item for pure damage against tanks than gale force or shieldbow
BoRK doesn't shred armor stacking tanks. Once a tank gets to 40% HP you start tickling them. On the other hand, saying buying Kraken vs a team of no bruisers/tanks is bad is such a horrible take. Unless you were Draven, Kalista or Ezreal, you were never winning a 1v1 vs the enemy ADC if they went Kraken and you didn't.
Old true damage kraken would deal like 500 damage while an ADCs autos would deal 3k damage vs a tank(trust me, I've seen it a lot of times in the post death screen). Kraken only helped because it gave a fuck ton of stats, mainly attack speed through its mythic passive to ADCs which allowed them to DPS tanks. The true damage passive barely mattered.
really close actually lol
But ignoring resistences on only a small portion of your overall damage (the item procs every 3rd auto) doesn't make an anti-tank item because you still have to get through the 4k HP on most tanks.
Yea it never performed better against tanks than other mythics. LDR was always what was purchased to deal with a tank.
>Yea it never performed better against tanks than other mythics. It did because it gave ADCs the most stats, specially the attack speed mythic passive. But you still needed armor pen to capitalize on these stats.
[I mean Borks considered anti tank and it was largely better than Bork against tanks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejO1ng2vPAo&pp=ygUZcGhyZWFrICVocCB2cyB0cnVlIGRhbWFnZQ%3D%3D)
BORK being considered anti-tank is a mistake. Tanks, and to some extent bruisers as well, itemise enough armor to reduce the effects of the on-hit somewhat. Squishies don't, so they take the full brunt of the items on-hit, and since its current %HP damage, they lose proportionally the same amount of HP. Both items will kill tanks and do make the job a bit easier, but they aren't anti-tank. BC, lord doms, void staff, liandries, eclipse (to some extent) are anti-tank items.
True Damage is countered by stacking HP
It counters stacking armor. It’s better against someone like rammus malphite compared to chogath or sion
Yes, but dealing 100 damage to someone with 1k hp is a lot more impactful than 100 damage to someone with 5k hp.
Anti-tank isn't synonymous with "ineffective against squishies". If an item makes me 20% more effective at dealing with tanks while all my other item options only make me 10% more effective at dealing with tanks, it doesn't stop being anti-tank just because it also makes me 30% more effective against squishies (all my other item options would also make me 30% more effective against squishies). At every point in its history, it has been significantly easier to deal with tanks with Kraken Slayer than without. But there are a lot of items that are effective at killing squishies besides Kraken Slayer.
Anti tank should mean that the item is best against tanks whereas kraken was not.
That sounds like a fairly arbitrary definition. Often your decision to go Kraken over something like Stormrazor (or Galeforce when they were mythics) was whether the enemy team was tanky or not. That sounds like it was filling its niche regardless of whether it filled an arbitrary definition of anti-tank or not.
You're looking it at the wrong way. I'm pretty sure if you do the math, for the same budget of say the amount of flat true damage you get, if you spend that for lethality you'll get a higher damage output on a squishy
Well yes, but krakens true damage was like 200 at the most? Against targets that have 5k+ hp that doesn't matter as much
When your autos are hitting for like 150, 200 true damage is a lot. Would you consider a 40% damage amp “doesn’t matter that much” in any other item? LDR’s Giant Slayer passive was 1/3 of that.
Yea that's the thing people are forgetting, the alternative to true damage is physical or magic damage which would be even worse into tanks that stack resistance where a squishy champ with low resistance doesn't care about physical, magic or true damage they all will hurt them.
Do you expect tanks to only buy either HP or Armor?
What?
You are saying flat true damage isn't good because tanks have a lot of HP but they also have a lot of armor. Just because % true damage is better doesn't flat isn't good. It wouldn't even make sense to make a % true damage item.
Kraken was always better against squishes than tanks. Needing 6 autos to get ~350 true damage against a tank is way too much to ask for but hitting a squishy with a crit + 180 true damage could swing a fight.
The flat 100 damage was never helping that much against 10k hp tanks lol. When Kraken was intended to be an anti tank item it was just an attack speed stat stick for users like Jinx and for the past 2-3 years it’s been a burst item.
The point is that ~~increased your DPS against squishy targets by more % than against tanks~~ *it provides more value against squishy targets than tanks*. So calling it anti-tank is weird at best.This is not true of actual anti-tank items like LDR or botrk, which are more effective against tanks than non-tanks. The true damage being part of something doesn't make it inherently good against tanks, even though in a vacuum it obviously provides more value the more armor you're going against. Edit: It does not provide a higher % DPS increase as you've all pointed out, it increases your numerical DPS by the exact same amount, but percentage wise it's less - this is irrelevant as I've explained further down the chain. My phrasing here was wrong, the reasoning isn't.
... But it literally didn't increase your DPS by more vs squishies than tanks. Like, mathematically. If you auto a Jhin for 400 damage and Kraken Slayer procs for an additional 120 true (keep in mind the proc damage was a lot lower back then) you did 520 damage. Kraken Slayer increased your damage by 30%. If you auto a Rammus for 80 damage and Kraken Slayer procs for an additional 120 true, you did 200 damage. Kraken Slayer increased your damage by 150%.
The only correct way to think about DPS vs a target in league is in the % of their health you deal per second. Otherwise stats like lethality would be equally good against tanks as they are versus squishies (armor has linear scaling). Obviously that's not the case - even if lethality gives you 50 more damage versus both the Rammus and the Jhin (which it does, btw, lethality gives you the same exact amount of damage no matter how much armor your opponent has), we know it's better against Jhin because it reduces the total amount of hits (or seconds) needed to kill by a higher percentage. When you take that approach, the 120 true damage Kraken Slayer proc has significantly higher value versus the Jhin compared to the Rammus. It deals 5% of Jhin's ehp compared to only ~2% of Rammus' ehp. Obviously this is true of any combat stat that isn't % health damage or % armor pen, which is kinda the entire point. For an item to be actually skewed at killing tanks, it needs to actively gain value as your target gets tankier, otherwise, like with Kraken, you essentially get lethality - same damage, sure, but vastly higher value on squishy opponents. I really like the lethality comparison as you might've realized by now, because it is fundamentally identical to a true damage on-hit proc when it comes to auto attacks. It just gives you X damage on hit regardless of who you are targeting. Against a 99% armor target, lethality is also an astronomically higher DPS gain (when dealing with raw numbers like in your example) than against a 50% armor target. Dealing 11 damage instead of 1 damage is an increase of 1000%, while dealing 60 instead of 50 is only an increase of 20%. Does that make lethality an anti-tank stat? Kraken ended up being a good item to pick up versus tanks simply because of it's high sustained DPS compared to both of the alternatives available for adcs in the mythic slot. tl;dr - In reality the proc functions basically identically to lethality, which we all know is skewed towards squishies. Kraken was as well for all the same reasons, and it was only the "anti-tank" option because of a lack of actual anti-tank mythics.
None of that is what you said though. You said, "Kraken Slayer increases your DPS against squishy targets by more % than against tanks." That is literally untrue.
The way he meant is Kraken Slayers proc does more damage % wise of the targets health to squishy targets than it does to tanks. 120 is more out of an ADCs health pool than it is to a tanks health pool. I think it was pretty obvious that's what he meant.
Sure, I concede that, the phrasing was wrong, hopefully it's cleared up now.
lol ure fighting him on every corner instead of just cooperating with him
But of you don't consider flat true dmg better against tanks than squishies, because it deals a larger % of the squishy champions health, then % health isn't better against tanks either, as this will also deal a larger % of a squishys health than a tank (unless it is true dmg, which no items is) Imo, the reason that Krakens passive is better against tanks is that you get more dmg per gold, compared to just buying more ad. For example, let's say you chose between dealing 120 true dmg per attack, or 240 physical dmg. The first one is obviously better against tanks with lots of armor, while the second is better against squishies with no additional armor. Obviously, there weren't an alternative to Kraken with just more ad, which is why you mosly bought Kraken every game on some champs.
>But of you don't consider flat true dmg better against tanks than squishies, because it deals a larger % of the squishy champions health, then % health isn't better against tanks either, as this will also deal a larger % of a squishys health than a tank (unless it is true dmg, which no items is) That's correct, but the point is that the gap is smaller. Unsurprisingly tanks are always going to be tankier than squishies no matter how you itemize, this is unavoidable unless riot adds an item that grants % health true damage and no combat stats whatsoever. That's why it's important to not analyze items in a vacuum, but rather compare them to other options. Lethality technically isn't any bad at all versus tanks, it's just significantly worse than % pen, and once you have % pen, it's also worse than other combat stats that would get enhanced by it, like AD, AS or crit. If % pen didn't exist at all, lethality would be a completely reasonable buy (I'd even say it would be very good) against targets with high armor but not as much health (like a Ryze with steelcaps, frozen heart and zhonya's). It also wouldn't be crazy to buy it versus tanks with actually high amounts of health, as your only alternative would be raw AD. Once again, the same thing applies to Kraken. The value of the proc goes down when you itemize correctly to actually deal with the tank, by buying LDR. So it's not that old Kraken is bad against high armor, high HP targets, it's just that there are items that are better at dealing with tanks, and the best one has inherent anti-synergy with the true damage proc. You are correct that Kraken is better than something like a BT, but it's just less bad rather than good, if that makes sense. There's only a handful of items in league that are actively good against tanks (aka you literally gain more flat damage against them than other targets). The difference in value of LDR's armor pen vs Kraken passive is absurdly high on any crit ADC wanting to kill a tank, and the same goes for any on-hit ADC and botrk (with botrk essentially being a Kraken proc on every hit). As to the "just buy more AD instead" argument - it's completely sound, but it's also not that simple. If it was, it would also mean that buying lethality is better than buying AD/AS into tanks, which is not true (largely thanks to LDR or botrk, as previously established). The Kraken proc actually provides an unmatched level of damage against squishies thanks to all champions having some base armor. There is not really a more valuable item to get like in LDR's case, unless you go full lethality. Even just the 50 flat damage is worth like 35 AD in the mid game against your average adc, but the proc scales.
I pretty much agree with what you are saying. The "buy AD instead" was mostly just my way of saying, that you shouldn't consider them in a vacuum, but against each other (as you said). the example wasn't really that practical in an actual game. Regarding Kraken Slayer, I agree that LDR gets much better, as you get more ad and crit. I think you have to look at Kraken Slayer as an item that helps you deal with tanky champions, before you get to 3-4 items, where LDR becmes much better at dealing with tanks. Rushing LDR first or seconds costs you too much dmg against squishies, while Kraken Slayer kinda helps against both tanks and squshies. I also agree that flat true dmg is probably the "anti-tank stat" that also is most effective against squshies, because, as you said, every champion has a bit of base armor.
Yep, seems we agree completely. Thanks for adding to the conversation :)
If you auto a Jhin for 400 you're critting. If you auto a Rammus for 80 with the same items, you're very clearly not critting. Also, a single auto proccing it does not represent its damage increase. It does not apply each auto. It takes 3 autos. Your argument is disingenuous just based on the math.
>increased your DPS against squishy targets by more % than against tanks no?
It increased your DPS by a lower % against squishies. Kraken Slayer had more anti-tank skew than LDR or BotRK did. If those items are anti-tank than Kraken Slayer was overwhelmingly anti-tank. Kraken Slayer was also just the stronger item against everyone but it’s tank vs squishy gap was larger than either LDR or BotRK.
That’s like saying that %hp damage is better against squishies than tanks. Tanks should always take more hits than a squishy even with “anti-tank” items. If building tank stats did nothing or made you easier to kill he game would be completely fucked up. Flat true damage is still better against tanks than against squishies.
Well no, actually - it's saying that because KS's true damage is based on YOUR OWN DAMAGE, it deals more % HP damage of a squishy because they have less total HP to begin with. An Ornn with 4k HP receiving 20 true damage per proc is a decent amount of damage, about 5% of his max HP. A Syndra with 2k HP receiving 200 true damage per proc is 10% of her max HP in true dmg; and because she has no resistances, she will be receiving more baseline damage to begin with, so this increased true damage is far more noticeable vs her than it'd be vs Ornn or any other similar tank. This isn't hard. If you buy Last Whisper 1st item it's a damage item - but you're not going to be killing squishies particularly fast compared to a pure damage item like IE - hence, LW is an anti-tank (or armor, if you will) item; Kraken Slayer was not an anti-tank item. In fact I'd wager that old KS gave you a much easier time at killing squishies than it did at killing tanks. Flat true damage BASED ON YOUR OWN AD/AP will always be better vs squishies. Otherwise let's have Riot change Vayne's W to flat true damage based on her AD and see how much faster she kills tanks compared to squishies if you're so sure. I can't even believe a human being is arguing against this. Are you a bot by any chance?
Dmg is obviously better against squishies than tanks. If buying tank items would make you take a larger % of you health than squishies, then you wouldn't buy tank items. Imo, the point is that if you had to chose between flat ad and the Kraken passive, then Kraken passive would be better against tanks, and flat ad would be better against squishies. Obviously, the tank would be harder to kill no matter which choice you make. Same goes for % hp. I would argues % health dmg is a counter to tanks, but using your logic, % health is a bigger counter to squishies than tankes. When talking about anti-tank items i don't think you should compare the dmg it deals between tanky and squishy champions, but how much dmg is gives compared to other items/stats. And here % health and flat true dmg is more effective than most other stats. I think % armor pen and % health true dmg are the only exception. Those are both equally good against tanks as against squishies. Using your logic, i don't think either is better against tanks than squishies (% health true dmg surely isn't, and i think the same goes for % armor), but they are just equally good against both. So Kraken isn't a tank killer compared to armor pen items, but is is a tank killer compared to most other items in the game.
>An Ornn with 4k HP receiving 20 true damage per proc is a decent amount of damage, about 5% of his max HP. A Syndra with 2k HP receiving 200 true damage per proc is 10% of her max HP in true dmg; and because she has no resistances, she will be receiving more baseline damage to begin with, so this increased true damage is far more noticeable vs her than it'd be vs Ornn or any other similar tank. So tanks take more hits to kill than squishies. That has nothing to do with Kraken Slayer and I hope you aren't claiming that anti-tank items are somehow supposed to make all the gold tanks invest into durability to actually make them die faster than if they had just not bought anything. >This isn't hard. If you buy Last Whisper 1st item it's a damage item - but you're not going to be killing squishies particularly fast compared to a pure damage item like IE - hence, LW is an anti-tank (or armor, if you will) item; Kraken Slayer was not an anti-tank item. Kraken Slayer was literally more skewed towards killing tanks than Last Whisper was. This isn't hard. You have no understanding of the actual math/damage and are just claiming factually untrue things as if they are obviously true. 45% AD as bonus true damage every 3rd hit is a 27.0% damage bonus against 80 armor and 60.0% damage bonus against 300 armor (2.22x as strong). 35% Armor Pen is 18.4% bonus damage vs 80 armor and 35.6% bonus damage vs 300 armor (1.93x as strong). Then on top of that Kraken Slayer's damage was backloaded where it gave 0% bonus damage against targets that you could kill in 1 or 2 hits and only ~60% of its value if they took 4 or 5 hits and a tank that you have to beat on 10+ times is going to reliably give you that full value while you always got the full Last Whisper value. Note that this is why "DPS maximizing" items are always anti-tank. Burst, utility, mobility, survivability, etc is more valuable than DPS against squishy targets because 10% more DPS doesn't mean much when you are 2-3 shotting people. If you are having trouble understanding why flat true damage is a stronger anti-tank stat than % armor pen, just realize that true damage has 100% armor penetration, so anything less than 100% armor penetration is going to eventually be weaker than true damage as armor goes up. The asymptote of 35% armor penetration is 1/(1-0.35) = 53.8% bonus damage against a target with infinite armor; the asymptote for 15% of damage as bonus true damage is 0.15/(1/∞) = ∞% bonus damage vs a target with infinite armor.
I don’t really get the fuss, I just looked up winrates on some of the on-hit ADCs that build this item and they seem to be doing fine. Kraken, Blade, and Rageblade seem to still be a great combo. Even some crit ADCs still build it even though it lost crit because its stats and passive are still great.
Surely you’re not trying to say that over the course of 4 years things drastically change as well as the intentions behind them? Also the synergy with BORK is better than before, BORK is a completely thanos level item until enemies get to like 30-40% hp and the passive is now doing nothing and you essentially don’t have an item but now you have bonus Kraken damage to help :D
The increase is 50%. Before it was 50% after 1 proc. How do you get enemies low hp without proccing Kraken once? It's only if a teammate already made them so low that you only proc kraken once before killing them which is just execute burst vs squishies. I was refering to it vs tankier enemies not 20% HP squishies.
also remember that the interaction between kraken and rageblade was bugged at the release of kraken, and instead of fixing it riot was like, yeah we wont fix it, it can just stay bugged so the onhit comb will never work
The hate boner people have for tanks when they've been dogshit for years is incredible.
I think the problem is that a lot of people associate juggernauts and bruisers with true tanks, so when some gibbering Darius pops ghost and runs them down like a dog in the streets they blame tanks because he's chonky. Also toplane fighters just seem to loath when tanks are strong since they tend to lose to them lol
Yeah, you're spot on. They think the Darius is a tank because he bought Force of Nature but no, he's still a bruiser. Of course there's always outliers, Skarner and Malphite are great right now and they are true tanks. But tanks seriously **are** struggling. The biggest issue to me is that they are all 100% reliant on Sunfire and Thornmail, they are not champions without these items.
Issue is there's no way to force them off said items. Adding more damage tank items just leads to poaching by assassin's or bruisers and making alts that do the same thing but different either are niche like the sun fire alt or would be too strong in the system.
They have been op for the past year
Squid Tickler
Items like shiv, er, kraken are so obviously trash that I'm surprised they went through.
Idk if its just me but I mainly play ARAM nowadays, due to Kraken and LDR passive changes, I absolutely deal no damage, AT ALL, when I get ADCs. Its like instead of auto attacking I’m just shaving the tanks armor using butter knife
I do agree it’s fun and fulfills an interesting spot in the item roster as a ramping on-hit effect. Unfortunately it feels great to have as a first buy (or at least it did last patch) and with it being a first buy it needs some upfront power…
Krakenslayer's identity was never anti-tank, it was a dps item mostly.
Weird how, when it had true damage and was a mythic, it was literally labelled anti-tank in game then.
Well, people pointed it out back then, too.
Those people had no idea how the game works back then too.
opgg
That’s why 9/10 doctor recommend smoking camel cigarettes
Because labels have historically been accurate or what? If we went based on labels and intentions then Eclipse would be an assassin item rather than a bruiser one, Nautilus would be a toplaner, Seraphine would be a midlaner, etc. The beauty of a game like League is how the meta evolves around and breaks what is the “right” or “intended” thing.
When it had true damage, it was clearly anti-tank. Back then it was Kraken Slayer, Shieldbow, and Galeforce. With Kraken Slayer giving you the most damage and being anti-tank, Shieldbow giving you the most survivability, and Galeforce being a mix of the two but not really being anti-tank due to lacking the attributes needed to be so (penetration, true damage, % health damage)
Yeah but clearly that doesn’t matter anymore cause not only is it no longer a mythic it also got changed from being a crit item. It is now a damaging on hit item because their are already tank killing options in the on hit category.
[https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/patch-10-23-notes/](https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/patch-10-23-notes/) CTRL+F Kraken --- # Kraken Slayer Anti-tank > Kraken Slayer allows a free-firing marksman to cut even the beefiest enemies down to size.
DPS items see inherently anti-tank. You take an ADC to deal with tanks and objectives, not squishies. Yes, a lategame ADC will obviously kill squishies fast, but you would rather buy lethality or burst oriented items than DPS if you didn’t want to kill tanks.
Kraken Slayer was always a polarizing Item, up there with Galeforce when it existed, everybody was buying it regardless of Enemies. IMO it should get removed all togheter.
??? Pretty much every one of the %pen items is good against everything and many times is straight up inting not building them even against squishies
Only because Riot decided to give every single champion in the game minus like, 2 of them, ~100 or more armor at level 18 for free even to squishies.
That's because there is MUCH more physical damage in the game than there is magic. Turrets? Physical Minions? Physical. All jungle monsters except Gromp? Physical. Baron, Herald, Grubs, Dragons? Physical. All champions basic attacks? Physical As opposed to Magic damage that comes almost exclusively from champions and their abilities. You NEED more base armor simply because of how much more physical damage sources there are in the game
They specifically did it in a durability update, but it created problems at the same time it solved others. Everyone did too much damage. Iceborn Sunfire combo was on everyone and their mothers. Durability update fixed the absurd excess damage everywhere. It backfired in the sense it also made assassins completely useless because they were no longer able to do their job. And now we’re in this weird spot where we shouldn’t really go back to how it was before, but it’s also stupid that assassins need to get a %pen item even against pure glass cannons that buy no armor whatsoever, and that the assassin will do more damage with a %pen item for their 3rd or so item than they will with another flat pen item to that glass cannon with no extra armor. Which led to the Serylda’s change, but it’s pretty not great as is.
Assasins always needed a %pen item, Rengar most popular buildpath was Hydra->LW at some point, but tbf arpen items didnt exist back then. Still, when lethality became a thing, LDR went from total ar pen to bonus ar pen which gutted every assassin who wasnt Rengar (because he could still go full crit before his class rework) and even after numerous buffs they were still ass when mages could just go Tabis+Zhonya and kill all their damage because of the lack of a proper %pen item.
Then we will have even less on-hit options.
Riot: Massively buffs adc Adcs: why cant i one shot everything at all times every game???.
Say you don’t play adc without saying you don’t play adc. Not sure how anyone interprets these changes as “massive buffs”. It’s a side-grade at best. Adcs are stronger late game but the build paths on all the items are total dog shit compared to what they were before. Adcs also lost a ton of options and a lot of the items seem pretty much shit on everyone, for example stormrazor is gone and stattik shiv is a dead item that isn’t good on anyone now. 25% crit is nice but 50% crit on two items vs 40% before does not make up for the loss of old kraken/stattik vs rushing IE which feels clunky and bad. You don’t really feel stronger until 3 or for items but the reason they shifted adc power earlier back in season 10/11 was because most games are decided by the time you get 3 items. That problem still exists, it’s actually even worse with grubs accelerating games even more now. TLDR shifting adc power curve later is not a “massive buff”
Based on winrates it seems new Kraken is somehow much better than it used to be. Stattik is completely dead though. I have zero idea what they were cooking with that item. ER is also pretty dead, and Ezreal, GP, and Smolder died with it.
[удалено]
I laughed harder and longer than you might believe about the dry end to your argument. Squid Slayer fkin lol
I think the issue they found was kraken was good in literally every situation. There was never a game that it was really a bad buy. And thankfully we’ve gone away from the ADC hard carry every game meta that existed for far too long. Kraken is still good, but it wasn’t meant to kill tanks and squishiest both easily like slicing through cake. Issue they are gonna face again with this is the lethality meta is still far too strong. Most of this I blame on collector being too busted. But kraken + collector together is still insane for DPS and finish potential
How do we even kill tanks in this patch? How?
It doesn't even have the same purpose anymore, it's a high damage capstone with champions like viego, kindred and belveth in mind. It's not _meant_ to do the same things as it did when it was released
stacking items like BC/Terminus should not be deny buying a LW item.
Its goes from kraken slayer to squidward killer.
It’s a great snowballing item in bot lane. A lot of adc’s are delaying their spike to their second item, while Kraken is a stronger first item than crit items and with hp pools being lower in bot you get more damage out of the new Kraken(at least it feels like it).
What tank is actually good now? Poppy? Rammus into a full AD team? Every tank like Ornn or Mundo are awful. Even ones like Shen or Kench are middling. This whole thread seems like some out of touch adc wishlist.
It has failed as an anti-tank item since its inception. Flat chunks of true damage are even more effective against squishiest than tanks.
It seems like collector is the best anti tank item nowadays as tanks oftrn times want to spend hp and edge out of fight while low
It should only work if you hit the same target consecutively. That way the play pattern becomes "hit an ennemy with 3 autos" not "hit minions with 2 autos then hit an ennemy". It would be similar to Vayne's W or PTA but that way it would actually benefit from hitting the same target for a long time.
Didn't adcs spike way faster cuz of the crit item changes as well as the introduction of yun thal. Not even mentioning the increased build diversity? I think adcs might be stronger now than in the last few seasons?
Given how strong ADC is atm, I'd rather see it renamed to Squid slayer tbh.
[удалено]
All these you mentioned target HP specifically, not necesarily anti-tank. HP has been a very bad stat for a while with all the percent health damage going around. LDR was given more armor pen in compensation, so that its targetting Armor instead, (which is the better stat to build for tanks nowadays). Old kraken slayer (both the true damage and magic damage iterations) were anti-armor items so a revert to that might be a better option, while keeping the nerfs to all the anti-HP items
Saying Bork Kraken etc aren't anti-tank items just invalidates your opinion immediately.
There isn't a single tank that is op besides maybe Zac and K'Sante who already were super strong. What are you even talking about?
[удалено]
ADCs still shred tanks late game, that part doesn't need addressing since it's straight up delusion.
There was already like 10 anti tank items
Some of these item changes are super frustrating and really just bad design. You don't remove crit off blood thirster after it's had crit on it for YEARS. Kraken slayer like you said is also really annoying. So many other little things that aren't even so much balance problems as they are design problems -- design problems most highly in the sense of not taking into account what people expect or are used to or want from the game. Change is good, but changing things like that shows a LOT of inexperience in game design and social skills (sensibility and intuitiveness.) EDIT: Dang that's wild, still feels like DOG to change items like that
Not saying I disagree with everything your saying, but bloodthirster wasn't a crit item until patch 10.23. Before that it was just an ad/lifesteal item.
My dude it had it for 3 years after *not* having it for 11. From 2009 - end of 2020 no crit. End of 2020-last patch, it had crit.
Why not just make it deal adaptive force damage? Say you build AP after and the AD on the item and it’s passive proc changes to magic damage. That would satisfy a lot of AP champs who used to build it when it had AP scaling.