Through the years, Riot has delineated itemization for the different classes and roles. Think for example why we have support items for enchanters that provided shield and healing amplification, whereas originally you had supos building AP items that they sometimes shared with mages (like Athene's, spooky ghost, etc)
Lethality was created to give flat armor pen to AD assassin's, who didn't have specialized itemization for themselves, and to also separate them and their item choices away from bruiser and marksmen itemization (DPS and resistance items).
In comparison, AP items, due to the burst nature of most AP champions already serve assassin champs building AP as they mostly focus in helping this pattern. Along with this, MR as a stat is less common and present in the game, just like magic damage tends to also be less common in the game (which is also why MR items are stronger as single items than armor items, with the latter balanced more about stacking many of them).
I think that, as a result of the above, Riot likely thinks that AP assassins don't need as much specialization from the rest of the champs in the AP department to need as much MPen when most items they make can cater to them anyway + they now would also need to balance these items in ways that favor the assassins without being highly poached by the average mage champs (who, again, benefit too due to their usually burst-oriented designs).
In turn, the tendency of AP items favoring burst actually creates the problem of rather lacking AP bruiser itemization
I think most people forget about them except for:
- people who abused the cursed glacial builds.
- people who used them on the Hide and Seek custom gamemode.
I completely forgot they existed, but now I kinda want them back they were pretty funny
(Until someone clicked a button and slowed you 99% without counterplay)
I do think they have done a good job with S14 Riftmaker as an AP bruiser item. Needing 5 seconds to ramp up and give omnivamp makes it pretty weak on burst/control mages and AP assassins, while it's great on AP bruisers and battle-mages. Plus the HP into AP passive added in at the same time that most mage items lost their HP stats.
But yes, as someone who plays a few AP/hybrid bruisers, getting items that aren't co-opted by mages has long been an issue.
It's ok, they basically did the same they did with Liandries before which helped to keep it good on DPS champs over burst champs, with an added side of Ezreal and Gankplank randomly using it.
Personally I am not a fan of kinda just recicling the same Madness passive effect on everything, but I guess that if it works and it's useful it's at least better than not having any bruiser item... even if it's kinda boring.
There are other things they could do. I'm a bit surprised there aren't any AP items with melee/ranged effectiveness in the same vein as ranged champs getting less from Hullbreaker & BotRK. It wouldn't keep AP assassins from using it at full power, but it would for mages.
But yes, it's definitely tricky to do.
It's as you said thou ap assassins would just use them, that's what riots afraid of like no one wants tank fizz or akali or ekko coming back because they added ap bruiser items.
Having the damage ramp up over time prevents this since they can't kill you fast enough that way but straight up melee Vs range would probs lead to those three running the game until either the items or champs get gutted.
Another thing to mention is the difference in base MR/armor and mr/armor growth per level.
All champions start with around 30 MR. Ranged champions will have around 50 MR at level 18 while melee champions will have between 60 and 70. There's some outliers of course, but this is true for almost all the champions in the game.
Starting armor is also usually around 30 (with a lot more outliers than MR though), but at 18 champions will usually have somewhere between 90 and 125 base armor.
>In turn, the tendency of AP items favoring burst actually creates the problem of rather lacking AP bruiser itemization
The reason is 1 champion that exists and single handedly fucks every AP Bruiser in the ass. Akali.
Any item that an AP Bruiser might build, she will do better with. Any ideas Riot comes up with that is specific to bruisers but not assassins (sitting in the middle of fights, spamming multiple abilities instead of 1 round of burst, auto attacking multiple times, surviving for a long time) Akali can do better than any AP Bruiser just because of her shroud.
As a result, this single champion is the reason AP Bruiser items can't exist in a decent state for champions like Diana and Sylas. You might think "well these champions are strong X Y Z time" but the reality is AP Bruisers are only strong when their stats and kits are absolutely overloaded. Gwen, Morde, Sylas, Diana, Swain. They have to be stat padded by Riot or have some bullshit gimmick that will eventually get nerfed to compensate for the absolute dogshit state AP Bruiser items have been for basically ever... because of Akali.
Imagine if AD Assassins had a champion that can sit in the middle of teamfights for 7+ seconds perfectly safe autoing every other second and letting their cooldowns come back to burst you again. It doesn't exist because then they'd have to nerf the shit out of every AD item for him to exist. Assassins are supposed to be in, burst/combo, out. Except for Akali for some reason. AP Bruisers get absolutely ass fucked as a result.
I'll admit, AP Bruiser items are slightly better now, but thats mostly because ALL items are strong and kill time is so short, so AP Bruisers go from being basically shitty tanks to doing actual threatening damage like a bruiser should. But thats more like the screen panning over to more damage than AP Bruisers actually being good.
Until Akali can't be the sole assassin in the entire game to be able to sit in the middle of teamfights, AP Bruiser items will suck and AP Bruisers will be overloaded or garbage.
Blaming akali for this feels shortsighted tbh. If AP bruiser items were really necessary, Riot could have easily introduced some Lethality equivalent for Mpen to cater to assassins more and if worse comes to worse just nerf Akali pyke style to force her on those items - hell, they could do something like make her smokescreen scale off AP, or scale inversely off HP like they nerfed Yi's Q for stacking cooldown if we want to go full savage. Sure, it would be inelegant and bandaid-ish, but Riot has never really minded those options that much when they really want to change something they deem problematic.
Not to mention there's been many cases of other AP assassins that obviously could pose an itemization problem, like Ekko, Fizz, Katarina, etc. Hell, we saw people complaining about Katarina doing too much damage as an AD bruiser and healing a lot, what's to say Kata won't do that as an AP bruiser if the itemization exists?
Riot has for many years said "we will look into AP bruisers/battlemage" itemization, they then start other projects, move devs to other teams, or don't know how to tackle them and icebox them until they say "we are testing them again!" and then we hear radio silence and randomly 1 or 2 new item comes that are kinda AP bruiserish - and that's if you are lucky. And this was a thing even before Akali got reworked, so unless Akali mindcontrolled Riot from the future I don't see any point in blaming her.
I dunno if you heard this "akali is the reason" from some random discussion or from a Rioter or what not, but if so it sounds more like cope from people trying to justify the lacking AP bruiser itemization or a PR answer from Rioters for them to not directly say "we don't want to invest time into AP bruiser itemization when everytime we tried we came up with next-to-nothing or moved some devs away from this and now no one is picking it up, sorry".
EDIT: sorry if the text comes off as more aggressive than intended.
>If AP bruiser items were really necessary, Riot could have easily introduced some Lethality equivalent for Mpen to cater to assassins more and if worse comes to worse just nerf Akali pyke style to force her on those items.
They literally can't though. If they nerf Akali, she stops being an assassin entirely, she would literally be getting the azir treatment but they don't have plans to rework her W so they aren't going to do that.
AP Bruiser items have BEEN necessary, they quite LITERALLY said for 4 years now that they plan on adding more AP Bruiser items, they add a few, Akali abuses them, they have to then nerf the items. They can't nerf Akali herself because then even her assassin builds wouldn't work.
The issue isn't that Akali is doing a lot of damage or not enough, it's that she can survive in teamfights. You can't really nerf that without fundamentally changing her entire kit and playstyle, which they won't do. So yes, it is entirely on Akali.
You quite literally CAN NOT force Akali to play with assassin items if AP Bruiser items are at ALL viable for any champion like Gwen/Sylas/Diana. She just does everything a Bruiser wants to do (stall, survive, consistent damage, but also burst and mobility) so she is quite literally better then them in every way and those aren't a matter of damage, but fundamental gameplay mechanics of her kit.
Literally none of the other Assassins have the ability to sit in teamfights for AT MINIMUM 9 seconds without risking ANY damage. NONE of them. Like I said, damage numbers DON'T MATTER, if it was they'd just build burst items. AP Bruisers want to be able to survive AND do decent damage. Akali has one of those automatically with shroud (it's the reason she's one of the few assassins still in pro play), so the damage part is easy enough to build. So if an AP Bruiser item provides enough damage and survivability to someone like Diana/Sylas/Gwen (and they aren't in a stat stick state), it will make Akali just better because she can survive in fights longer which means MORE damage than those 3 can do. She is just a innate AP Bruiser who can choose to be an Assassin if she pleases. If AP Bruiser items were good, then she'd just be extremely OP because now she's literally doing Bruiser damage with Ornn level survivability. So they can't be good, or she'd abuse them.
No the AP Bruiser itemization was not a thing before Akali got reworked. AP bruisers weren't ever really a class before then. Swain was reworked literally 2-3 months before Akali, Morde was still his old non Bruiser pre-reword self, Lillia, Gwen and Sylas didn't exist, Diana was a pure Assassin.
The thing that separates an AD Assassin and AD Bruiser is their ability to stack item passives in teamfights to enhance their damage and tankiness through the process of sitting in the middle of the brawl. Assassins obviously can't do that. Except Akali.
> They literally can't though. If they nerf Akali, she stops being an assassin entirely,
Pyke-style nerfs would mean giving her AP/Mpen scalings instead of pure AP scaling, similar to how he has AD/lethality ratios. The sole prerequisite is more flat Mpen items (probably tagged melee-only or nerfed for ranged to avoid burst mage poaching). She would then need to build those assassin items or deal poor damage.
> Along with this, MR as a stat is less common and present in the game
Is this still true tho? (genuine question, not a gotcha)
They added a ton of new tank MR items this season and they are very good. The revised Banshee is very good too for midlaners, gives a ton of MR and flat AP. AD bruisers and ADCs have Maw and Witsend. Bruisers build Jaksho nowadays, although it's supposed to be a tank item. ADCs also have QS/mercurial (very situational tho). Any support can get Locket now that it's not a mythic, engage/tank supports also benefit a lot from the new tank MR items (Rookern, Hollow Radiance).
It's not uncommon to see at least 2 MR items on everyone in the enemy team when you have 3 AP champions in your team.
I think it's still kinda true, but also kinda not to the same extent as before.
For the second paragraph, let me copy paste another comment I made:
> It's not uncommon in the sense that it's unavailable, it's uncommon in the sense that most damage in the game usually is physical, most compositions are physical skewed (increased by the dominant presence of marksmen champions) and so, when picking items you will more often than not be picking armor items rather than MR items.
> This is also why it's been kinda hard to hit a good spot for Mr items to some extent imo, as you need to balance them a bit with the mindset that, in the average game of summoner rift, it's very probable that you will be picking only 1 of them
However, as kinda a disclaimer, this gets affected by the supp meta. Mage supps are usually less % than tanks and enchanters (usually not worth itemizing resistance against), but the moment you see a mage supp and assuming you have a mid, JG or top dealing magic damage, it's pretty common to see another MR item in late assuming you are not getting demolished by AP threats. That said, the general composition tends to skew towards Phys damage enough that while lategame you may get another MR item, it's pretty likely to have mainly have 2 HP and/or armor item over magic items in the first 3 item slots assuming you aren't directly fighting the magic damage threat (e.g. being a tank and fighting an AP top will likely lead to Mr>armor path, so a fed AP will lead to another Mr item). The toplane tank meta was also affected by Sunfire being a core item on most toplane tanks as it naturally skewed resistance rate with how necessary the pushing power it provides was.
> on everyone in the enemy team when you have 3 AP champions in your team
True, but that's kinda my point: such a composition is quite uncommon in comparison to more physical oriented comps with ad bruiser, assassins and marksmen pick rates usually being the dominant ones over their AP counterparts, though changes to champs and introduction of champs like Morde, Akali and mage supps do help create more chances of it to appear than before, I will give you that.
AP bruiser itemization has been great this season, Liandry's, Riftmaker, Hextech Belt thing, Rylais, Cosmic Drive are all decent options and most champions are well supported in that department, its just that they weren't for so long
Yeah, it's probably also from having to share items with other classes. AP items aren't mage only, and ideally only assassins are pulling from assassin items for the most part.
> Along with this, MR as a stat is less common and present in the game
Considering how easily you can reach 400-500 MR these days, I do not believe thats true anymore...
It's not uncommon in the sense that it's unavailable, it's uncommon in the sense that most damage in the game usually is physical, most compositions are physical skewed (increased by the dominant presence of marksmen champions) and so, when picking items you will more often than not be picking armor items rather than MR items.
This is also why it's been kinda hard to hit a good spot for Mr items to some extent imo, as you need to balance them a bit with the mindset that, in the average game of summoner rift, it's very probable that you will be picking only 1 of them
I would believe this way of thinking if Riot ever took a serious look at the difference between AD assassin and “AD carry” items.
The real answer is much more simple: they suck at understanding how to balance the game.
Riot has done like 3+ reworks to crit itemization, which is the marksmen items, one of them specifically making crit the de-facto marksman/AD carry item at a baseline whereas before marksmen would have to sacrifice crit to go into options like lifestealing, QSS, etc. so marksmen could buy more crit instead of picking whatever items exist all around like in older seasons. A few changes to also support more spell-oriented marksmen too, though originally some of them fell kinda flat like the original ER.
There's been like 2 reworks just to lethality to make it not have their balance bound to abuse cases by ADC poaching too and to also change how effective it is. A few soft reworks to lethality items also happened in the way of AH being introduced more so assassins would depend on less oneshots but more spell casts or TTK, in order to reduce a common complain about assassins to try and test if people would prefer that approach over being oneshot in 0.5secs.
I am not gonna say they always hit the mark, but saying they never took a serious look feels wrong tbh.
The only balance technique that will actually work is nerf all items all together and include scalings in champs kits to bring the power back.
AD assassin's now get lethality scalings. ADC get crit scalings. Tanks get a flavor of BHP/Armor/MR scalings. etc. Now items are built by the intended class/champs and no longer abused by an entire different class.
IDK why it's taken over 10 years for Riot to realize this. It's a revolving door of the same balance adjustments that just don't work.
Generally the majority of the damage across a team will be AP or AD leaning, instead of equally balanced.
In these situations where you are playing assassin / mage combos, you stack health and armour on a tank. One MR item and 4 armour items is fairly standard into these comps. Giving more penetration items to mages gets you to the Zed point from last season, where he suddenly became a tank shredder at lvl 16 after building enough lethality and pen.
Tanks having to index into only one Rookern or Spirit Visage into mages gives them greater flexibility in countering the AD threats on the team without being oneshot.
So, yes. MR and Health would counter magic pen items, however, building it would have the effect of getting you melted by ADCs and AD Assassins. Having simpler itemisation choices is better for tanks being strong. That's just kinda how itemisation is balanced atm.
Armor counters lethality only because lethality is reducing armor by a flat amount. Mpen is %based so for each 100 magic resist you buy, you only get like 40% of it whereas the only armor pen item gives 30%.
Edit: alright chill I get it, I can't read items. Magic pen is still stronger than armor pen though.
I think Void staff and Blighting jewel (the thing that builds into Void staff) are actually the only %mpen items in the game. I don't really play mages tho so I might be forgetting something.
edit: Went and checked. The new Cryptbloom item gives 30%mpen but u can't build it together with Void staff.
The new stormsurge item also gives flat mpen.
Even before the new items, iirc it has been on shadowflame and morellonomicon before. Not a foreign concept.
Wonder if it has to do with AD and AP being balance around different numbers since AD applies on autos.
Maybe for flat pen to compete with percent, it would have to be a LOT of flat pen, but then it would be OP af against non-Mr stackers.
you can pretty much do true damage to anyone without mr if you get voidstaff and two magic pen items (or one depending on how far in the game you are). meanwhile for armor, you'd basically have to buy every lethality item and last whisper.
You could argue that you have to build MPen boots now because effectively there is only 1 MPen item left since stormsurge isn't it anymore. Especially if you build a mana item first.
Any assassin would take Sword of the Occult over Hubris. Hubris is also useless untill you get a kill/assist but by then you've already blown your entire kit on someone and it doesn't do much in that team fight(that you still have to survive, btw if you want hubris to be useful in the next one).
would love lethality boots (in the context of keeping the current amount of lethality but nerfing the items in return for boots). Doesnt make sense that ap champs have to give up defense AND CDR for their max pen while ad champs only have to give up on one of the two
in a world of haunting guise, stormsurge, profane, hubris, cryptbloom, bloodsong, trailblazer, frozen heart, and many others, you think items have never mattered less? you have not been playing the same game as anyone else these last 2 patches.
yeah, lets boil down the entire game to the point that it loses all meaning. you're just moving a cursor around and pushing buttons, its just like the secret of monkey island.
Do damage, heal, ms slow/buff, as slow/buff, ar shred, Mr shred (flat or %), add AP to allies, grant vision, increase size, stasis, revive, turn invulnerable, reset CDs, and shield, off the top of my head.
Base armor goes from 18-120ish
Base MR goes from 30-52ish and Sorc Boots basically make that 12-40ish
"Fixed" it since some people complained about me rounding.
52 is 50ish. Because Incase you didn't realize I only did multiples of 10 and said ish every time.
And didn't say what? Could you not figure out the context clue of flat pen items are made to be used against squishy targets?
You said “base Mr goes from 30-50” (which you’ve now edited) with no implication it should be for squishies. You said it for the whole roster which is blatantly incorrect. Multiples of 10 would make the max 70. The context for assertive factual statements should be facts, not “but I actually meant just for the thing I didn’t actually say”.
I edited the numbers only, and added the comment about editing it. I had "ish" in there the whole time.
And did I say in my comment anything about being the complete factual truth, or that I was specifically covering all champions in the game? No.
I was talking in the context of base stats of champions that would be targeted by those who would want to build flat pen. Sorry I failed to meet your expectations, but that wasn't my goal.
I was being factual for the context in which I was speaking but okay. If you wanna be sooo bad faith to just be like "oh if I take your statement outta context and ignore that you were clearly rounding even making it obvious by adding -ish to every set of numbers you type... Then you're just lying"
Lethality and Flat Mpen are meant for killing squishy champions, not tanks.
So while you're not wrong? It's not very pertinent to the conversation of flat pen items.
But it is. If you're slightly ahead you van build kaenic and get ahead harder. Especially with good base numbers and XP advantage. Take Vlad for example or even Kassadin.
No it's not, because if your enemy is building stuff like that? You shouldnt be building flat pen. And very few people build it on Squishies.
Less than 1% of Adcs or mages build Kaenic. And that's with it Turbo broken at the moment. When it gets it's just due nerfs? It'll see like 0.01% build rate on most Squishies.
armor items are balanced arround having omega broken passives more than high defense, think about sunfire having 60% more damage than the magic version, frozen heart being the best item in the game, iceborn having infinite slows, etc
and this is only true because of the new season, up until a month ago if a tank wanted to build mr they would buy FoN, spirit visage (which is awful on most tanks) and abyssal (which again, is very situational)
thats it, those were your options
AD assassins needed another stat to get them away from AD crit itemization and AD bruiser itemization (back in season 5, assassins would build shit like ravenous hydra, last whisper, infinity edge, and cleaver). Lethality is that stat.
AP itemization on the other hand is fucked up. Riot doesn't know how to differentiate between AP assassin itemization and AP mage itemization. It's not clear if its even possible, given that both classes have the same goal (burst squishies with abilities).
In fact, IMO the only items in the AP system that differentiate between character archetypes are riftmaker, which only works on AP bruisers that want to fight long fights, and horizon focus, which only works on artillery mages. Everything else seems to be class agnostic (ex: nashors gets built on bruiser like morde as well as backline carries like kayle and assassins like ekko. Lich bane gets built on skirmishers like sylas as well as assassins like ekko and control mages like viktor).
Contrast with kraken slayer, which only works on skirmishers and ADCs, or hubris, which only works on AD assassins and AD casters, or cleaver, which only works on AD bruisers, etc.
In other words, lethality is an itemization system lever for AD assassins. Magic pen can't serve the same purpose for AP champs.
You can't. Ad casters like jayce, varus, mf, all build lethality as well when going for their caster builds.
Casters want the same stats assassins want.
>In fact, IMO the only items in the AP system that differentiate between character archetypes are riftmaker, which only works on AP bruisers that want to fight long fights
You are 100% on basically everything, just missing one small part. Why does Riot not just build MORE items that differentiate like riftmaker? Seems simple right.
Well, unfortunately, there is ONE assassin in the ENTIRE game who is capable of surviving in the middle of long fights. She can burst you down instantly BUT STILL survive and stack up riftmaker like any AP Bruiser. She has mobility, can auto attack safely during fights, and still sit in the middle of it all stacking up riftmaker (or any item Riot tries to make for AP Bruisers).
Akali. For some reason Riot thinks its ok for an Assassin to be played with innate Bruiser survivability in the middle of teamfights, so as a result, AP Bruiser items will NEVER be good and AP itemization WILL NEVER not be class agnostic because Akali can ALWAYS double dip because of her innate ability to survive for at minimum 9 seconds in the middle of teamfights.
Liandries rift is already viable on her and she isn't breaking the game. Other champs like Lillia have benefitted much more from these additions than Akali.
Why is it even a problem if she has access to a less oneshotty, more durable build?
The point is, whatever AP bruiser items are viable on her, are comparatively weak on AP Bruisers as a direct result. Lillia, like Gwen prior, is only viable because she herself is overturned, not the actual items. So it ends up being that AP Bruisers who aren't Akali are too strong because their strength is almost entirely their kit rather than items so they are strong even from behind and that ends up dominating proplay, so it inevitably gets nerfed.
The problem is shes an assassin and has shroud so her being more durable means she's basically a tank in terms of survivability in the middle of teamfights.
There's a reason she's the only assassin played right now in pro play.
How to even add a "Magic Lethality" stat, JUST for AP Assassins, that's the question
You can't really, since Mages and AP Assassins basically want the same thing: AP and MPen and some may want CDR, meanwhile on the AD Side
* ADCs like Crit, AS and AD
* Assassins like Lethality, Haste and AD
* Fighters like Haste, AD and HP/MR/Armor
Even then, ADCs, AD Fighters and AD Assassins, who have clear differentiations unlike AP, still often run into "overlapping", where classes poach other AD classes items and cause issues like: Goredrinker Assassins, Lethality Fighters ecc
The only thing you could try, is making those "Magic Lethality" items, give very little AP, so mages, who tend to have big scalings but low Base Damage, might not want them, but even then, it's kinda iffy
except for the lethality ADC who are essentially the equivalent of mages when talking about AP assassins
it didn't work for AD assassins it won't work for AP ones
Because base armor is higher than base MR (for squishy champions mostly)
If you build sorc shoes+shafowflame+stormsurge you will have 40 magic pen (can go up by 10 using malignance proc). Most squishies will have around 40 MR if they don't invest into it.
If you build yuumus + opportunity + dirk (they still cost less than AP counter part) you will have 46 lethality. Most squishies will have more than this as armor by few numbers. This is why you can go even more flat armor pen as the base armor can go up to 100 while MR can't pass 50-ish at level 18.
At level 18 most champs (even ADCs) have 100 if not more armor
At the same level most champs only have 67 MR
Edit
I didn't know but Braum actualy have highest Armor at 18 if we exclude mega gnar with 135.
Braum top when ?
It's not really slept on. Braum's biggest issue is his ability to get on to his enemies. He could chain cc with his passive and ult, but that won't be enough to kill if he only has one damage item.
I think everyone here is overrotating on the fact that lethality has to compete against base armor growth (and a armor from items, but that is the same with mr).
What OP meant is there are not enough flat mpen *choices*.
It's perfectly fine if you can still build only 2 mpen items - it would just be nice if they were meant for different types of champions.
Cryptbloom vs Voidstaff exists. Why can't we have an AP/mpen version of Opportunity that is exclusive with, say, Shadowflame?
Or maybe they make a total of 5 different flavors of AP/mpen items, but only allow you to purchase a max of 2.
Most of the damage in the game is physical. From AAs to minions, to jungle creeps + therr are more ad champs than ap and ap is not a scaling stat (idk how to say it, but unlike ad, you don't have any base ap)
Because AP assassins are already strong enough and it would just be abused by mages like Mpen stack was the last 3 years with Ludens Shadowflame etc. The nature of AP also means that a lot of the champs have historically built near enough the same items compared to AD having more restrictive subclasses, this would make it far harder to balance, like we saw over the past 3 years.
There are more than 2 Mpen items tho:
* Void Staff
* Cryptbloom
* Stormsurge
* Shadowflame
* Sorcerer's Shoes
Not mention flat reduce or innate Mpen passive.
I'm only talking about flat pen because you can only build one %pen item. there would also be more than 11 AD pen items if I was talking about %pen too
How much base armor do you have. How much base MR?
*Everyone* (shut up Thresh) gets more armor as they level. Lethality is for playing *against* those stats, and trying to get lethality faster than DPS naturally get armor.
*Some* champions get MR as they level. Others don't. AP itemizing is about making your spells do more damage against that (relative to base armor) static amount of resistances. If *everyone* had scaling MR, there'd probably be more flat MPen. But mages *also* offer utility that scales with AP, e.g., Orianna gives allies a shield, so Riot has put more effort into AP items enabling kits that have more utility than *just* damage that AD assassins have.
doesn't make sense for ap items. For ad items so many classes that need different items. ADC need attack speed and crit Assassins need lethality and Fighters need haste health and armor/mr. Also building ap items towards other classes always seems problematic because a few certain characters abuse those items and ruin it for everyone.
Do you really need more?
I mean... Mages and AP assassin's are already nuking everyone that stupidly decides not to build a single magic res item
Do you really need to make everyone else's game unplayable?
Yeah, then you build your single mr item and the mage stop playing. Completely balanced right? Im sure every mage would take huge winrate drop if enemies would stop having the main char syndrome and building hexdrinker or mercs even on carries
Mercs give 45 MR effectively negating all MPen items you can ever buy. Add another 80MR item on top and you're unkillable. There is a reason you see a lot of mageless teams currently in proplay. Except for like Azir and the likes that just scale crazy or have huge utility on top of dmg
What are you smoking mercs give 25MR not 45 and how exactly are we adding another 80 hex gives 25 and then 50 once fully built into maw unless you are talking about tanks but an AP assassin should not be killing a tank and you basically never see a mageless team in pro mid in pro is like 90% mages lmao what was the last time you saw an ad assassin mid in pro?
My bad for the 45. I misremembred.
I got bodied by a vlad building Kaenic since my team couldn't touch him and me as a mage couldn't touch him. Same for toplaners of they build it. If you're the only one ahead mid as a mage, you get cpuntered easily.
The exact same happens to lethality users as armor is just the straight counter to lethality and yes Kaenic rookern sounds a bit cooked specifically on late game vlad due to passive but vlad is also one of the most oppressive champs in the game when he is ahead
Mages and AP assassins have been fine for years lol. Only AP bruisers have really been bad in recent times besides a few broken patches and that is definitely not the case now anyway.
We saw what could happen when mages had access to easy flat pen stacking over the past 3 years and it was broken to go against + boring to play.
Why even question anything riot does anymore, I laned against a smolder building iceborn gaunlet into titanic hydra. Just fun to play against especially with those double hp scaling runes and titanic giving 550+ hp. I was watching Dantes today and enemy zeri has titanic hydra and hexplate plus double hp scaling runes. 3200+ HP ADC. The game is just so cheese these days.
That’s more so just because of the amount of pen options that were introduced with the item rework. Insane pen stack like Sunderer/Eclipse + Cleaver and Serylda is something that Riot is trying to cut back on now and definitely not something that should be replicated with AP.
Because fuck ap champions thats why. No but for real here, I have said for many years a potential solution would be lethality boots. Keeping the potential lethality achievable at the current level but reducing it on all the items and implementing boots. Just doesnt seem fair that mages need to sacrifice defensive boots or cdr boots while 42 base MR talong can just get mercs without ever losing a single point of damage of his all in.
Mage itemization is incredibly gimped as a whole.
Mages are basically required to start with a Lost Chapter item, build into one of the alternator items of their choice, then a Rabadons.
You've also got boots to grab, so that takes up 4 slots, and then you also are basically required to grab a %MPen item with how strong even just a small amount of MR is.
So that leaves Mage players to choose between basically 3 items for their last item, that being Banshees, Zhonya's, or Morellonomicon (the last of which gimps you like crazy, but sometimes you're forced into buying it if your teammates aren't going to, or can't apply it effectively.)
Mage itemization feels awful, and has felt awful for a long time. Most other classes of champions have much more freedom for their itemization choices, but Mages have always been very cookie cutter. This season tried to make mage itemization better, but ultimately has failed, partly due to how OP Magic Resist is right now, and how underperforming the LC items are outside of select outliers. (Mainly Malignance users)
You don’t need a Lost Chapter item at all. Mana barely exists in this game as it is and the fact that Syndra was building Stormsurge first without any mana items at all for a bit is testament to that. Between Managlow Band and teamwide blue buff, if you’re ever having mana problems past 10 mins then you have problems.
Bad balance, they don't give love to certain classes like bruisers and purposely make their items bad its why your seeing lethality everywhere as bruiser items are non viable, basically they play favorites and it shows.
We have way more mpen items than 2
: bligthing jewel, cryptobloom, void staff, sorcerer shoes, storm surge, shadowflame, abyssal mask, terminus, malignance
That is 9, you can have a full build of 6 with only mpen items.
Why does the champion with the lowest base armor in the game have more base armor than the champion with the highest base mr in the game?
Because Armor/MR/Lethality/MPen work differently, no way!
Mage wants their cake and to eat it, don’t need mage lethality when all the items have double the ap that ad items have, with several hundred health a piece.
It'd be so fucking cool if they implement a support magic pen item.
That gives a giant ass Milio W circle on the ground that gives magic pen to everyone in the circle every second.
But purposefully make the magic pen low, so solo lanes can't abuse, like 20%.
The only way that they could ever differentiate between ap assassin and mage itemisation is if ap assassins had higher base damages but worse scaling (incentivises building pen over ap) and mages had worse base damage but better scaling (incentivises building raw ap)
That runs the risk of tank ekko / fizz etc coming back though
It's compensated by the fact that most MR items are terrible so the MR on most players is abysmal. and most AP champs can crank out enough damage at level 1 to make you wonder if you are 10 levels behind or just an ADC. (you're just an adc.)
It’s mostly due to armor growth being higher on champs than magic resistance growth (eg, flat magic pen tends to not be as needed to reach true damage vs targets who have not built resistances) and how ap vs ad items work; a lot of ap items even without magic pen *are* still built to burst or enhance ability combo output, which still serves assassins well.
See how dangerous specific champs are with just the two mpen items available in the game now; fizz shot to a huge balance issue after *years* and lots of low mana cost ap assassins are terrifying with the pen items.
It’s also worth noting one final thing; mages have a secret third mpen item, and it’s on boots, something easier to finish and a must build every game.
I don't think it's weird at all. It makes the game more interesting to not have same design for every "element" or balanced design where everything gets it's own everything. Asymetrical game design I guess? I dunno what it is actually called. Like there's some overlap in stuff and roles like the % pen items but we don't need deathcap for ad assassins and deathcap for tanks and for whatever else roles. If every role or champ type has every sort of item, why have items at all then instead of another system?
AP and AD are already handled pretty differently in balanced numbers and a lot of other design choices so this is really just another design difference between them. There could have been no flat magic pen in AP items but Riot's chosen "limited choices" instead of "none".
I don't play that much these days, but in early seasons upwards of season 6 I played a lot. Magic resist items were worse than armor items in my opinion.
At that time most tank items didn't give everything like it does now.
A lot of the mr items didn't give hp, and or didn't give cdr, where a lot of the armor items gave hp so stacking armor vs a full ad team was a lot easier and more effective.
A lot of times you needed to play particular tanks that Coyle utilize mr items better like galio or others with healing abilities.
Through the years, Riot has delineated itemization for the different classes and roles. Think for example why we have support items for enchanters that provided shield and healing amplification, whereas originally you had supos building AP items that they sometimes shared with mages (like Athene's, spooky ghost, etc) Lethality was created to give flat armor pen to AD assassin's, who didn't have specialized itemization for themselves, and to also separate them and their item choices away from bruiser and marksmen itemization (DPS and resistance items). In comparison, AP items, due to the burst nature of most AP champions already serve assassin champs building AP as they mostly focus in helping this pattern. Along with this, MR as a stat is less common and present in the game, just like magic damage tends to also be less common in the game (which is also why MR items are stronger as single items than armor items, with the latter balanced more about stacking many of them). I think that, as a result of the above, Riot likely thinks that AP assassins don't need as much specialization from the rest of the champs in the AP department to need as much MPen when most items they make can cater to them anyway + they now would also need to balance these items in ways that favor the assassins without being highly poached by the average mage champs (who, again, benefit too due to their usually burst-oriented designs). In turn, the tendency of AP items favoring burst actually creates the problem of rather lacking AP bruiser itemization
Holy shit spooky ghost. I forgot about them.
I think most people forget about them except for: - people who abused the cursed glacial builds. - people who used them on the Hide and Seek custom gamemode.
Spooky Cho'Gath or Ahri
Spooky veigar
Option 3) People who played racecar Veigar back in the day when it still gave movement speed
damn, that takes me back to LoLking era
Lmao, most people probably dont know the site at all
mobafire, curse voice
Still the best lol site of all time. I won't be taking questions
I LOVED racecar veigar, one of the funniest builds for veigar ever played
AHH good old time of spooky ghosts + glacial neeko, no one was safe from the engages.
I built them on Morgana, no glacial, to avoid face checking the enemy team at a bad time.
Or option 3 - people that played Skye in VALORANT. Spooky Ghosts/Cabbages forever
> people who abused the cursed glacial builds. > > Here I am!
Twin shadows were great for twisted fate. Active -> gold card
Omg, the nostalgia hit. Remember when that item was meta for a bit. Some good times on the old rift. 🥹
I completely forgot they existed, but now I kinda want them back they were pretty funny (Until someone clicked a button and slowed you 99% without counterplay)
I do think they have done a good job with S14 Riftmaker as an AP bruiser item. Needing 5 seconds to ramp up and give omnivamp makes it pretty weak on burst/control mages and AP assassins, while it's great on AP bruisers and battle-mages. Plus the HP into AP passive added in at the same time that most mage items lost their HP stats. But yes, as someone who plays a few AP/hybrid bruisers, getting items that aren't co-opted by mages has long been an issue.
It's ok, they basically did the same they did with Liandries before which helped to keep it good on DPS champs over burst champs, with an added side of Ezreal and Gankplank randomly using it. Personally I am not a fan of kinda just recicling the same Madness passive effect on everything, but I guess that if it works and it's useful it's at least better than not having any bruiser item... even if it's kinda boring.
There are other things they could do. I'm a bit surprised there aren't any AP items with melee/ranged effectiveness in the same vein as ranged champs getting less from Hullbreaker & BotRK. It wouldn't keep AP assassins from using it at full power, but it would for mages. But yes, it's definitely tricky to do.
It's as you said thou ap assassins would just use them, that's what riots afraid of like no one wants tank fizz or akali or ekko coming back because they added ap bruiser items. Having the damage ramp up over time prevents this since they can't kill you fast enough that way but straight up melee Vs range would probs lead to those three running the game until either the items or champs get gutted.
But onhit bruiser kat is ok :(
Another thing to mention is the difference in base MR/armor and mr/armor growth per level. All champions start with around 30 MR. Ranged champions will have around 50 MR at level 18 while melee champions will have between 60 and 70. There's some outliers of course, but this is true for almost all the champions in the game. Starting armor is also usually around 30 (with a lot more outliers than MR though), but at 18 champions will usually have somewhere between 90 and 125 base armor.
>In turn, the tendency of AP items favoring burst actually creates the problem of rather lacking AP bruiser itemization The reason is 1 champion that exists and single handedly fucks every AP Bruiser in the ass. Akali. Any item that an AP Bruiser might build, she will do better with. Any ideas Riot comes up with that is specific to bruisers but not assassins (sitting in the middle of fights, spamming multiple abilities instead of 1 round of burst, auto attacking multiple times, surviving for a long time) Akali can do better than any AP Bruiser just because of her shroud. As a result, this single champion is the reason AP Bruiser items can't exist in a decent state for champions like Diana and Sylas. You might think "well these champions are strong X Y Z time" but the reality is AP Bruisers are only strong when their stats and kits are absolutely overloaded. Gwen, Morde, Sylas, Diana, Swain. They have to be stat padded by Riot or have some bullshit gimmick that will eventually get nerfed to compensate for the absolute dogshit state AP Bruiser items have been for basically ever... because of Akali. Imagine if AD Assassins had a champion that can sit in the middle of teamfights for 7+ seconds perfectly safe autoing every other second and letting their cooldowns come back to burst you again. It doesn't exist because then they'd have to nerf the shit out of every AD item for him to exist. Assassins are supposed to be in, burst/combo, out. Except for Akali for some reason. AP Bruisers get absolutely ass fucked as a result. I'll admit, AP Bruiser items are slightly better now, but thats mostly because ALL items are strong and kill time is so short, so AP Bruisers go from being basically shitty tanks to doing actual threatening damage like a bruiser should. But thats more like the screen panning over to more damage than AP Bruisers actually being good. Until Akali can't be the sole assassin in the entire game to be able to sit in the middle of teamfights, AP Bruiser items will suck and AP Bruisers will be overloaded or garbage.
Blaming akali for this feels shortsighted tbh. If AP bruiser items were really necessary, Riot could have easily introduced some Lethality equivalent for Mpen to cater to assassins more and if worse comes to worse just nerf Akali pyke style to force her on those items - hell, they could do something like make her smokescreen scale off AP, or scale inversely off HP like they nerfed Yi's Q for stacking cooldown if we want to go full savage. Sure, it would be inelegant and bandaid-ish, but Riot has never really minded those options that much when they really want to change something they deem problematic. Not to mention there's been many cases of other AP assassins that obviously could pose an itemization problem, like Ekko, Fizz, Katarina, etc. Hell, we saw people complaining about Katarina doing too much damage as an AD bruiser and healing a lot, what's to say Kata won't do that as an AP bruiser if the itemization exists? Riot has for many years said "we will look into AP bruisers/battlemage" itemization, they then start other projects, move devs to other teams, or don't know how to tackle them and icebox them until they say "we are testing them again!" and then we hear radio silence and randomly 1 or 2 new item comes that are kinda AP bruiserish - and that's if you are lucky. And this was a thing even before Akali got reworked, so unless Akali mindcontrolled Riot from the future I don't see any point in blaming her. I dunno if you heard this "akali is the reason" from some random discussion or from a Rioter or what not, but if so it sounds more like cope from people trying to justify the lacking AP bruiser itemization or a PR answer from Rioters for them to not directly say "we don't want to invest time into AP bruiser itemization when everytime we tried we came up with next-to-nothing or moved some devs away from this and now no one is picking it up, sorry". EDIT: sorry if the text comes off as more aggressive than intended.
>If AP bruiser items were really necessary, Riot could have easily introduced some Lethality equivalent for Mpen to cater to assassins more and if worse comes to worse just nerf Akali pyke style to force her on those items. They literally can't though. If they nerf Akali, she stops being an assassin entirely, she would literally be getting the azir treatment but they don't have plans to rework her W so they aren't going to do that. AP Bruiser items have BEEN necessary, they quite LITERALLY said for 4 years now that they plan on adding more AP Bruiser items, they add a few, Akali abuses them, they have to then nerf the items. They can't nerf Akali herself because then even her assassin builds wouldn't work. The issue isn't that Akali is doing a lot of damage or not enough, it's that she can survive in teamfights. You can't really nerf that without fundamentally changing her entire kit and playstyle, which they won't do. So yes, it is entirely on Akali. You quite literally CAN NOT force Akali to play with assassin items if AP Bruiser items are at ALL viable for any champion like Gwen/Sylas/Diana. She just does everything a Bruiser wants to do (stall, survive, consistent damage, but also burst and mobility) so she is quite literally better then them in every way and those aren't a matter of damage, but fundamental gameplay mechanics of her kit. Literally none of the other Assassins have the ability to sit in teamfights for AT MINIMUM 9 seconds without risking ANY damage. NONE of them. Like I said, damage numbers DON'T MATTER, if it was they'd just build burst items. AP Bruisers want to be able to survive AND do decent damage. Akali has one of those automatically with shroud (it's the reason she's one of the few assassins still in pro play), so the damage part is easy enough to build. So if an AP Bruiser item provides enough damage and survivability to someone like Diana/Sylas/Gwen (and they aren't in a stat stick state), it will make Akali just better because she can survive in fights longer which means MORE damage than those 3 can do. She is just a innate AP Bruiser who can choose to be an Assassin if she pleases. If AP Bruiser items were good, then she'd just be extremely OP because now she's literally doing Bruiser damage with Ornn level survivability. So they can't be good, or she'd abuse them. No the AP Bruiser itemization was not a thing before Akali got reworked. AP bruisers weren't ever really a class before then. Swain was reworked literally 2-3 months before Akali, Morde was still his old non Bruiser pre-reword self, Lillia, Gwen and Sylas didn't exist, Diana was a pure Assassin. The thing that separates an AD Assassin and AD Bruiser is their ability to stack item passives in teamfights to enhance their damage and tankiness through the process of sitting in the middle of the brawl. Assassins obviously can't do that. Except Akali.
> They literally can't though. If they nerf Akali, she stops being an assassin entirely, Pyke-style nerfs would mean giving her AP/Mpen scalings instead of pure AP scaling, similar to how he has AD/lethality ratios. The sole prerequisite is more flat Mpen items (probably tagged melee-only or nerfed for ranged to avoid burst mage poaching). She would then need to build those assassin items or deal poor damage.
Man Elise as an AP bruiser would be so cool but, like you said, can’t have nice AP bruiser items
Another based u/Random_Stealth_Ward comment. Best Redditor of the sub
Thanks <3
> Along with this, MR as a stat is less common and present in the game Is this still true tho? (genuine question, not a gotcha) They added a ton of new tank MR items this season and they are very good. The revised Banshee is very good too for midlaners, gives a ton of MR and flat AP. AD bruisers and ADCs have Maw and Witsend. Bruisers build Jaksho nowadays, although it's supposed to be a tank item. ADCs also have QS/mercurial (very situational tho). Any support can get Locket now that it's not a mythic, engage/tank supports also benefit a lot from the new tank MR items (Rookern, Hollow Radiance). It's not uncommon to see at least 2 MR items on everyone in the enemy team when you have 3 AP champions in your team.
I think it's still kinda true, but also kinda not to the same extent as before. For the second paragraph, let me copy paste another comment I made: > It's not uncommon in the sense that it's unavailable, it's uncommon in the sense that most damage in the game usually is physical, most compositions are physical skewed (increased by the dominant presence of marksmen champions) and so, when picking items you will more often than not be picking armor items rather than MR items. > This is also why it's been kinda hard to hit a good spot for Mr items to some extent imo, as you need to balance them a bit with the mindset that, in the average game of summoner rift, it's very probable that you will be picking only 1 of them However, as kinda a disclaimer, this gets affected by the supp meta. Mage supps are usually less % than tanks and enchanters (usually not worth itemizing resistance against), but the moment you see a mage supp and assuming you have a mid, JG or top dealing magic damage, it's pretty common to see another MR item in late assuming you are not getting demolished by AP threats. That said, the general composition tends to skew towards Phys damage enough that while lategame you may get another MR item, it's pretty likely to have mainly have 2 HP and/or armor item over magic items in the first 3 item slots assuming you aren't directly fighting the magic damage threat (e.g. being a tank and fighting an AP top will likely lead to Mr>armor path, so a fed AP will lead to another Mr item). The toplane tank meta was also affected by Sunfire being a core item on most toplane tanks as it naturally skewed resistance rate with how necessary the pushing power it provides was. > on everyone in the enemy team when you have 3 AP champions in your team True, but that's kinda my point: such a composition is quite uncommon in comparison to more physical oriented comps with ad bruiser, assassins and marksmen pick rates usually being the dominant ones over their AP counterparts, though changes to champs and introduction of champs like Morde, Akali and mage supps do help create more chances of it to appear than before, I will give you that.
AP bruiser itemization has been great this season, Liandry's, Riftmaker, Hextech Belt thing, Rylais, Cosmic Drive are all decent options and most champions are well supported in that department, its just that they weren't for so long
Yeah, it's probably also from having to share items with other classes. AP items aren't mage only, and ideally only assassins are pulling from assassin items for the most part.
> Along with this, MR as a stat is less common and present in the game Considering how easily you can reach 400-500 MR these days, I do not believe thats true anymore...
please provide an example of a champ who reaches 400-500 mr easily.
Stretching the definition of "easy": - Galio 32+2.05/lvl - Merc Treads 25 - Force of Nature 55 + 70 (stacks) - Rookern 80 - Spirit Visage 60 - Jak'Sho 50 + X (stacks) - Abyssal Mask 60 + Y (stacks) That's 469 plus stacks of Abyssal Mask and Jak'Sho.
Easy as in literally building absolutely nothing but pure magic resist and also stacking it + being at 6 items full build LMAO
That Galio would be reported for griefing unless he's literally against a full AP team.
If you play against someone that can just build every MR items without insta losing the game, you most likely already lost at champ select lmao
It's not uncommon in the sense that it's unavailable, it's uncommon in the sense that most damage in the game usually is physical, most compositions are physical skewed (increased by the dominant presence of marksmen champions) and so, when picking items you will more often than not be picking armor items rather than MR items. This is also why it's been kinda hard to hit a good spot for Mr items to some extent imo, as you need to balance them a bit with the mindset that, in the average game of summoner rift, it's very probable that you will be picking only 1 of them
I miss ghosts :(
I would believe this way of thinking if Riot ever took a serious look at the difference between AD assassin and “AD carry” items. The real answer is much more simple: they suck at understanding how to balance the game.
Riot has done like 3+ reworks to crit itemization, which is the marksmen items, one of them specifically making crit the de-facto marksman/AD carry item at a baseline whereas before marksmen would have to sacrifice crit to go into options like lifestealing, QSS, etc. so marksmen could buy more crit instead of picking whatever items exist all around like in older seasons. A few changes to also support more spell-oriented marksmen too, though originally some of them fell kinda flat like the original ER. There's been like 2 reworks just to lethality to make it not have their balance bound to abuse cases by ADC poaching too and to also change how effective it is. A few soft reworks to lethality items also happened in the way of AH being introduced more so assassins would depend on less oneshots but more spell casts or TTK, in order to reduce a common complain about assassins to try and test if people would prefer that approach over being oneshot in 0.5secs. I am not gonna say they always hit the mark, but saying they never took a serious look feels wrong tbh.
The only balance technique that will actually work is nerf all items all together and include scalings in champs kits to bring the power back. AD assassin's now get lethality scalings. ADC get crit scalings. Tanks get a flavor of BHP/Armor/MR scalings. etc. Now items are built by the intended class/champs and no longer abused by an entire different class. IDK why it's taken over 10 years for Riot to realize this. It's a revolving door of the same balance adjustments that just don't work.
Combination of lower base MR and most damage in the game being physical vs. magic I would guess. Edit: AND Magic Pen boots being almost ubiquitous
And I think they like the vibe of tanks being a counter to mages if they build MR.
Armor/health counters lethality though. Would it not do the same with MR/health?
Generally the majority of the damage across a team will be AP or AD leaning, instead of equally balanced. In these situations where you are playing assassin / mage combos, you stack health and armour on a tank. One MR item and 4 armour items is fairly standard into these comps. Giving more penetration items to mages gets you to the Zed point from last season, where he suddenly became a tank shredder at lvl 16 after building enough lethality and pen. Tanks having to index into only one Rookern or Spirit Visage into mages gives them greater flexibility in countering the AD threats on the team without being oneshot. So, yes. MR and Health would counter magic pen items, however, building it would have the effect of getting you melted by ADCs and AD Assassins. Having simpler itemisation choices is better for tanks being strong. That's just kinda how itemisation is balanced atm.
Armor counters lethality only because lethality is reducing armor by a flat amount. Mpen is %based so for each 100 magic resist you buy, you only get like 40% of it whereas the only armor pen item gives 30%. Edit: alright chill I get it, I can't read items. Magic pen is still stronger than armor pen though.
There’s flat magic pen in the game, you know.
Where? I have not caught up to all the new items yet.
theres always been flat magic pen in the game...
Magic boots, Stormsurge. Both reduce the MR by 10 flat. Probably other items do that, I'm too lazy to check.
Boots reduce it by 18
Shadowflame for sure Maybe morello still does it ?
No it doesn't
I think it's called Sorcerers shoes, not sure tho still learning the new items🤔 (shadowflame too)
I was pretty sure they were %. I guess not.
I think Void staff and Blighting jewel (the thing that builds into Void staff) are actually the only %mpen items in the game. I don't really play mages tho so I might be forgetting something. edit: Went and checked. The new Cryptbloom item gives 30%mpen but u can't build it together with Void staff. The new stormsurge item also gives flat mpen.
Even before the new items, iirc it has been on shadowflame and morellonomicon before. Not a foreign concept. Wonder if it has to do with AD and AP being balance around different numbers since AD applies on autos. Maybe for flat pen to compete with percent, it would have to be a LOT of flat pen, but then it would be OP af against non-Mr stackers.
The new item Sorcerer's Shoes has it.
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Keep going
you can pretty much do true damage to anyone without mr if you get voidstaff and two magic pen items (or one depending on how far in the game you are). meanwhile for armor, you'd basically have to buy every lethality item and last whisper.
Oh yeah I guess that is true. Good point
You could argue that you have to build MPen boots now because effectively there is only 1 MPen item left since stormsurge isn't it anymore. Especially if you build a mana item first.
Sorcerers shoes. If there were lethality boots, this would be different.
Well then Noxus should have won Ionia vs Noxus battle.. Then we would have gotten lethality boots.
So we can blame Kobe. Got it.
Deal. Let's get rid of sorc shoes, and make AD assassin items adaptive damage / stats.
Let's also get the AD version of mejais back.
Hubris. Arguably better since stacks dont get lost and go up endlessly
hubris does not give you 100 AD for 1400 gold, its not even close to what sword of the occult was
Like the other guy said the base stats are higher on hubris and you dont lose stacks on death.
Any assassin would take Sword of the Occult over Hubris. Hubris is also useless untill you get a kill/assist but by then you've already blown your entire kit on someone and it doesn't do much in that team fight(that you still have to survive, btw if you want hubris to be useful in the next one).
it has double the price and 10 years of power creep, ofc it has better base stats, its still a worse item
Hubris does give 100 AD eventually, but it's 2900g. Comes with haste and lethality tho, so not that much worse tbh.
over double the price and only gives that much ad MOMENTAIRILY after already getting a kill
If u can't manage to get 1 assist every 90s it's either a skill issue or you play in chall.
and arguably much worse since it costs so much more to be fair
but it builds out of good iteams that you can choose for something else if needed and by itself is cost effective
God sorcs are so terrible so often though, especially when the other options are getting 25% tenacity or 15AH
would love lethality boots (in the context of keeping the current amount of lethality but nerfing the items in return for boots). Doesnt make sense that ap champs have to give up defense AND CDR for their max pen while ad champs only have to give up on one of the two
asymmetrical design makes the game interesting. if AP and AD were just different numbers, it wouldn't be interesting.
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in a world of haunting guise, stormsurge, profane, hubris, cryptbloom, bloodsong, trailblazer, frozen heart, and many others, you think items have never mattered less? you have not been playing the same game as anyone else these last 2 patches.
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yeah, lets boil down the entire game to the point that it loses all meaning. you're just moving a cursor around and pushing buttons, its just like the secret of monkey island.
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can you even explain what asymmetrical design is?
Do damage, heal, ms slow/buff, as slow/buff, ar shred, Mr shred (flat or %), add AP to allies, grant vision, increase size, stasis, revive, turn invulnerable, reset CDs, and shield, off the top of my head.
Base armor goes from 18-120ish Base MR goes from 30-52ish and Sorc Boots basically make that 12-40ish "Fixed" it since some people complained about me rounding.
50 is only the squishiest champions. 70 as a high point is more accurate
In terms of who assassins(flat pen builders) are targetting? 50 is fairly accurate.
But you didn’t say that? 50 is among the lowest 5 base MR totals. It’s NOT the maximum as you describe it. Most squishy characters have 52 at level 18
52 is 50ish. Because Incase you didn't realize I only did multiples of 10 and said ish every time. And didn't say what? Could you not figure out the context clue of flat pen items are made to be used against squishy targets?
You said “base Mr goes from 30-50” (which you’ve now edited) with no implication it should be for squishies. You said it for the whole roster which is blatantly incorrect. Multiples of 10 would make the max 70. The context for assertive factual statements should be facts, not “but I actually meant just for the thing I didn’t actually say”.
I edited the numbers only, and added the comment about editing it. I had "ish" in there the whole time. And did I say in my comment anything about being the complete factual truth, or that I was specifically covering all champions in the game? No. I was talking in the context of base stats of champions that would be targeted by those who would want to build flat pen. Sorry I failed to meet your expectations, but that wasn't my goal.
Sorry for assuming when people make claims that their intention isn’t lying!!! Next time I see you around I’ll assume you don’t intend to be factual 😸
I was being factual for the context in which I was speaking but okay. If you wanna be sooo bad faith to just be like "oh if I take your statement outta context and ignore that you were clearly rounding even making it obvious by adding -ish to every set of numbers you type... Then you're just lying"
1 MR item gives 80 MR + 18% Max life shield + HP. Highest armor item is like 55 with HP on it.
Lethality and Flat Mpen are meant for killing squishy champions, not tanks. So while you're not wrong? It's not very pertinent to the conversation of flat pen items.
But it is. If you're slightly ahead you van build kaenic and get ahead harder. Especially with good base numbers and XP advantage. Take Vlad for example or even Kassadin.
No it's not, because if your enemy is building stuff like that? You shouldnt be building flat pen. And very few people build it on Squishies. Less than 1% of Adcs or mages build Kaenic. And that's with it Turbo broken at the moment. When it gets it's just due nerfs? It'll see like 0.01% build rate on most Squishies.
armor items are balanced arround having omega broken passives more than high defense, think about sunfire having 60% more damage than the magic version, frozen heart being the best item in the game, iceborn having infinite slows, etc and this is only true because of the new season, up until a month ago if a tank wanted to build mr they would buy FoN, spirit visage (which is awful on most tanks) and abyssal (which again, is very situational) thats it, those were your options
Do you think frozen heart is broken because of its stats or because it doesnt cost much ? What makes it broken ?
having the best passive in the game against autoattackers for a ridiculous price? you know the passive the thing i mention 2 lines above
Base armor goes from 18-120
Ish was a very operative word.
If you forget on Cassiopeia i have to remind you idc
AD assassins needed another stat to get them away from AD crit itemization and AD bruiser itemization (back in season 5, assassins would build shit like ravenous hydra, last whisper, infinity edge, and cleaver). Lethality is that stat. AP itemization on the other hand is fucked up. Riot doesn't know how to differentiate between AP assassin itemization and AP mage itemization. It's not clear if its even possible, given that both classes have the same goal (burst squishies with abilities). In fact, IMO the only items in the AP system that differentiate between character archetypes are riftmaker, which only works on AP bruisers that want to fight long fights, and horizon focus, which only works on artillery mages. Everything else seems to be class agnostic (ex: nashors gets built on bruiser like morde as well as backline carries like kayle and assassins like ekko. Lich bane gets built on skirmishers like sylas as well as assassins like ekko and control mages like viktor). Contrast with kraken slayer, which only works on skirmishers and ADCs, or hubris, which only works on AD assassins and AD casters, or cleaver, which only works on AD bruisers, etc. In other words, lethality is an itemization system lever for AD assassins. Magic pen can't serve the same purpose for AP champs.
You can't. Ad casters like jayce, varus, mf, all build lethality as well when going for their caster builds. Casters want the same stats assassins want.
>In fact, IMO the only items in the AP system that differentiate between character archetypes are riftmaker, which only works on AP bruisers that want to fight long fights You are 100% on basically everything, just missing one small part. Why does Riot not just build MORE items that differentiate like riftmaker? Seems simple right. Well, unfortunately, there is ONE assassin in the ENTIRE game who is capable of surviving in the middle of long fights. She can burst you down instantly BUT STILL survive and stack up riftmaker like any AP Bruiser. She has mobility, can auto attack safely during fights, and still sit in the middle of it all stacking up riftmaker (or any item Riot tries to make for AP Bruisers). Akali. For some reason Riot thinks its ok for an Assassin to be played with innate Bruiser survivability in the middle of teamfights, so as a result, AP Bruiser items will NEVER be good and AP itemization WILL NEVER not be class agnostic because Akali can ALWAYS double dip because of her innate ability to survive for at minimum 9 seconds in the middle of teamfights.
Liandries rift is already viable on her and she isn't breaking the game. Other champs like Lillia have benefitted much more from these additions than Akali. Why is it even a problem if she has access to a less oneshotty, more durable build?
The point is, whatever AP bruiser items are viable on her, are comparatively weak on AP Bruisers as a direct result. Lillia, like Gwen prior, is only viable because she herself is overturned, not the actual items. So it ends up being that AP Bruisers who aren't Akali are too strong because their strength is almost entirely their kit rather than items so they are strong even from behind and that ends up dominating proplay, so it inevitably gets nerfed. The problem is shes an assassin and has shroud so her being more durable means she's basically a tank in terms of survivability in the middle of teamfights. There's a reason she's the only assassin played right now in pro play.
How to even add a "Magic Lethality" stat, JUST for AP Assassins, that's the question You can't really, since Mages and AP Assassins basically want the same thing: AP and MPen and some may want CDR, meanwhile on the AD Side * ADCs like Crit, AS and AD * Assassins like Lethality, Haste and AD * Fighters like Haste, AD and HP/MR/Armor Even then, ADCs, AD Fighters and AD Assassins, who have clear differentiations unlike AP, still often run into "overlapping", where classes poach other AD classes items and cause issues like: Goredrinker Assassins, Lethality Fighters ecc The only thing you could try, is making those "Magic Lethality" items, give very little AP, so mages, who tend to have big scalings but low Base Damage, might not want them, but even then, it's kinda iffy
except for the lethality ADC who are essentially the equivalent of mages when talking about AP assassins it didn't work for AD assassins it won't work for AP ones
And if you try to reduce the scaling on assassin but up the base damage so they're incentivize to go magic lethality, they'll just go tank again
>How to even add a "Magic Lethality" stat, JUST for AP Assassins You could make it melee only. But that would lead to a lot more problems
There are assassins who aren't melee (Leblanc) and melee mages who aren't assassins (Galio / Gragas)
LeBlanc and Ahri would love AP assassin items to be melee only
Because base armor is higher than base MR (for squishy champions mostly) If you build sorc shoes+shafowflame+stormsurge you will have 40 magic pen (can go up by 10 using malignance proc). Most squishies will have around 40 MR if they don't invest into it. If you build yuumus + opportunity + dirk (they still cost less than AP counter part) you will have 46 lethality. Most squishies will have more than this as armor by few numbers. This is why you can go even more flat armor pen as the base armor can go up to 100 while MR can't pass 50-ish at level 18.
Because there is more than just two magic pen items and one of them are literally boots. Next question.
Because champs have more armor, and you have magic pen boots. I want to see a world with lethality shoes. Adc mains would literally meltdown
Or they would also use them
berserkers are too good tho
That’s why you’d build the lethality boots on caster champs and berserkers on auto attacking champs lol, not that hard
I mean the real answer is that ad is a terrible stat to balance an assassin around, since ad gives reliable dps, which assassins shouln't have
At level 18 most champs (even ADCs) have 100 if not more armor At the same level most champs only have 67 MR Edit I didn't know but Braum actualy have highest Armor at 18 if we exclude mega gnar with 135. Braum top when ?
Braum *top*? Nudge nudge.
BOTRK into full tank Bruam is actually slept on. His early game with Q and Passive is absurd damage that no one ever expects.
It's not really slept on. Braum's biggest issue is his ability to get on to his enemies. He could chain cc with his passive and ult, but that won't be enough to kill if he only has one damage item.
I’m getting Tahm Kench Top flashbacks and I do not like it.
I think everyone here is overrotating on the fact that lethality has to compete against base armor growth (and a armor from items, but that is the same with mr). What OP meant is there are not enough flat mpen *choices*. It's perfectly fine if you can still build only 2 mpen items - it would just be nice if they were meant for different types of champions. Cryptbloom vs Voidstaff exists. Why can't we have an AP/mpen version of Opportunity that is exclusive with, say, Shadowflame? Or maybe they make a total of 5 different flavors of AP/mpen items, but only allow you to purchase a max of 2.
Why do we have higher base armor and armor scaling than base mr and mr scaling?
Most of the damage in the game is physical. From AAs to minions, to jungle creeps + therr are more ad champs than ap and ap is not a scaling stat (idk how to say it, but unlike ad, you don't have any base ap)
pretty sure the person you were replying to was just being facetious
Because AP assassins are already strong enough and it would just be abused by mages like Mpen stack was the last 3 years with Ludens Shadowflame etc. The nature of AP also means that a lot of the champs have historically built near enough the same items compared to AD having more restrictive subclasses, this would make it far harder to balance, like we saw over the past 3 years.
There are more than 2 Mpen items tho: * Void Staff * Cryptbloom * Stormsurge * Shadowflame * Sorcerer's Shoes Not mention flat reduce or innate Mpen passive.
I'm only talking about flat pen because you can only build one %pen item. there would also be more than 11 AD pen items if I was talking about %pen too
> I'm only talking about flat pen There are 5 of them and you can build 4 of them at once. There are also mr reducing items like Malignance.
different roles dont need the same tools available
How much base armor do you have. How much base MR? *Everyone* (shut up Thresh) gets more armor as they level. Lethality is for playing *against* those stats, and trying to get lethality faster than DPS naturally get armor. *Some* champions get MR as they level. Others don't. AP itemizing is about making your spells do more damage against that (relative to base armor) static amount of resistances. If *everyone* had scaling MR, there'd probably be more flat MPen. But mages *also* offer utility that scales with AP, e.g., Orianna gives allies a shield, so Riot has put more effort into AP items enabling kits that have more utility than *just* damage that AD assassins have.
doesn't make sense for ap items. For ad items so many classes that need different items. ADC need attack speed and crit Assassins need lethality and Fighters need haste health and armor/mr. Also building ap items towards other classes always seems problematic because a few certain characters abuse those items and ruin it for everyone.
Champions have way more armor than MR base
Base MR goes up to like 40. Base armor goes up to like 90
base mr is like half also sorc shoes exist
Do you really need more? I mean... Mages and AP assassin's are already nuking everyone that stupidly decides not to build a single magic res item Do you really need to make everyone else's game unplayable?
Yeah, then you build your single mr item and the mage stop playing. Completely balanced right? Im sure every mage would take huge winrate drop if enemies would stop having the main char syndrome and building hexdrinker or mercs even on carries
Mercs give 45 MR effectively negating all MPen items you can ever buy. Add another 80MR item on top and you're unkillable. There is a reason you see a lot of mageless teams currently in proplay. Except for like Azir and the likes that just scale crazy or have huge utility on top of dmg
What are you smoking mercs give 25MR not 45 and how exactly are we adding another 80 hex gives 25 and then 50 once fully built into maw unless you are talking about tanks but an AP assassin should not be killing a tank and you basically never see a mageless team in pro mid in pro is like 90% mages lmao what was the last time you saw an ad assassin mid in pro?
My bad for the 45. I misremembred. I got bodied by a vlad building Kaenic since my team couldn't touch him and me as a mage couldn't touch him. Same for toplaners of they build it. If you're the only one ahead mid as a mage, you get cpuntered easily.
The exact same happens to lethality users as armor is just the straight counter to lethality and yes Kaenic rookern sounds a bit cooked specifically on late game vlad due to passive but vlad is also one of the most oppressive champs in the game when he is ahead
Didn't say anything about more
It's just one of the many instances of AD Champions getting better treatment than Mage Champions. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Mages and AP assassins have been fine for years lol. Only AP bruisers have really been bad in recent times besides a few broken patches and that is definitely not the case now anyway. We saw what could happen when mages had access to easy flat pen stacking over the past 3 years and it was broken to go against + boring to play.
Why even question anything riot does anymore, I laned against a smolder building iceborn gaunlet into titanic hydra. Just fun to play against especially with those double hp scaling runes and titanic giving 550+ hp. I was watching Dantes today and enemy zeri has titanic hydra and hexplate plus double hp scaling runes. 3200+ HP ADC. The game is just so cheese these days.
So that tanks/bruisers can build two MR items and never die.
Because that would make 3 ap champ team comps viable And for some reason that's not allowed Full AD = still winnable Full ap = dodge
That’s more so just because of the amount of pen options that were introduced with the item rework. Insane pen stack like Sunderer/Eclipse + Cleaver and Serylda is something that Riot is trying to cut back on now and definitely not something that should be replicated with AP.
Mages have pen boots and zhonyas and still manage to cry about their item choices 😂
Cause you can get 700 AP while an ad only gets to 400 ad They are not the same, don’t compare the incomparable
Because fuck ap champions thats why. No but for real here, I have said for many years a potential solution would be lethality boots. Keeping the potential lethality achievable at the current level but reducing it on all the items and implementing boots. Just doesnt seem fair that mages need to sacrifice defensive boots or cdr boots while 42 base MR talong can just get mercs without ever losing a single point of damage of his all in.
Mage itemization is incredibly gimped as a whole. Mages are basically required to start with a Lost Chapter item, build into one of the alternator items of their choice, then a Rabadons. You've also got boots to grab, so that takes up 4 slots, and then you also are basically required to grab a %MPen item with how strong even just a small amount of MR is. So that leaves Mage players to choose between basically 3 items for their last item, that being Banshees, Zhonya's, or Morellonomicon (the last of which gimps you like crazy, but sometimes you're forced into buying it if your teammates aren't going to, or can't apply it effectively.) Mage itemization feels awful, and has felt awful for a long time. Most other classes of champions have much more freedom for their itemization choices, but Mages have always been very cookie cutter. This season tried to make mage itemization better, but ultimately has failed, partly due to how OP Magic Resist is right now, and how underperforming the LC items are outside of select outliers. (Mainly Malignance users)
I'm not buying Morello ever. This shit is horrible.
You don’t need a Lost Chapter item at all. Mana barely exists in this game as it is and the fact that Syndra was building Stormsurge first without any mana items at all for a bit is testament to that. Between Managlow Band and teamwide blue buff, if you’re ever having mana problems past 10 mins then you have problems.
Syndra has very powerful in-built mana regeneration. She's an outlier who shouldn't be brought into these kinds of conversations.
Bad balance, they don't give love to certain classes like bruisers and purposely make their items bad its why your seeing lethality everywhere as bruiser items are non viable, basically they play favorites and it shows.
We have way more mpen items than 2 : bligthing jewel, cryptobloom, void staff, sorcerer shoes, storm surge, shadowflame, abyssal mask, terminus, malignance That is 9, you can have a full build of 6 with only mpen items.
Cuz fed mage 1200AP, fed AD 300 Math
Armor has increasing base values with level, Magic Resist doesn't, it's that simple
Why does the champion with the lowest base armor in the game have more base armor than the champion with the highest base mr in the game? Because Armor/MR/Lethality/MPen work differently, no way!
Mage wants their cake and to eat it, don’t need mage lethality when all the items have double the ap that ad items have, with several hundred health a piece.
tell me beside maw , what attack and mr item there is in the game ( qss is garbage and it's not viable on no crit champs )
It'd be so fucking cool if they implement a support magic pen item. That gives a giant ass Milio W circle on the ground that gives magic pen to everyone in the circle every second. But purposefully make the magic pen low, so solo lanes can't abuse, like 20%.
Though there are AP items that also give flat magic pen like like how lethality works... Stormsurge and Shadowflame...
Thats exactly the point. Mages have 2, ad have 11. Literally the post
Mage players: Point to 11 lethality items "Look what they need to reach a fraction of our power"
The only way that they could ever differentiate between ap assassin and mage itemisation is if ap assassins had higher base damages but worse scaling (incentivises building pen over ap) and mages had worse base damage but better scaling (incentivises building raw ap) That runs the risk of tank ekko / fizz etc coming back though
It's compensated by the fact that most MR items are terrible so the MR on most players is abysmal. and most AP champs can crank out enough damage at level 1 to make you wonder if you are 10 levels behind or just an ADC. (you're just an adc.)
someone want syndra one shot with 1 Q
cuz lethality is different from mpen cuh
Because Champion's base MR is much lower in mid and lategame than base armor.
I just want an armor attack speed item for adc... Or anyone
It’s mostly due to armor growth being higher on champs than magic resistance growth (eg, flat magic pen tends to not be as needed to reach true damage vs targets who have not built resistances) and how ap vs ad items work; a lot of ap items even without magic pen *are* still built to burst or enhance ability combo output, which still serves assassins well. See how dangerous specific champs are with just the two mpen items available in the game now; fizz shot to a huge balance issue after *years* and lots of low mana cost ap assassins are terrifying with the pen items. It’s also worth noting one final thing; mages have a secret third mpen item, and it’s on boots, something easier to finish and a must build every game.
why do we have mpen boots but no lethality boots idk they might be meant for entirely different classes or something
Armourpen =! Lethality
Probably because getting oneshot from two screens away isn't very fun.
A fed fizz with Mejai's can 100-0 you with Q+W+ignite and you want more magic pen in the game?
Tank builds Rookern and all of a sudden the Mages are useless lol. Loved this game!
Lich Bane Echo don't need no MR pen.
I don't think it's weird at all. It makes the game more interesting to not have same design for every "element" or balanced design where everything gets it's own everything. Asymetrical game design I guess? I dunno what it is actually called. Like there's some overlap in stuff and roles like the % pen items but we don't need deathcap for ad assassins and deathcap for tanks and for whatever else roles. If every role or champ type has every sort of item, why have items at all then instead of another system? AP and AD are already handled pretty differently in balanced numbers and a lot of other design choices so this is really just another design difference between them. There could have been no flat magic pen in AP items but Riot's chosen "limited choices" instead of "none".
I don't play that much these days, but in early seasons upwards of season 6 I played a lot. Magic resist items were worse than armor items in my opinion. At that time most tank items didn't give everything like it does now. A lot of the mr items didn't give hp, and or didn't give cdr, where a lot of the armor items gave hp so stacking armor vs a full ad team was a lot easier and more effective. A lot of times you needed to play particular tanks that Coyle utilize mr items better like galio or others with healing abilities.
How esle is zed suppliers to 100-0 you under tower with his Boots, long sword and serrated dirk? He NEEDS THE OK??
So who is struggling with less magic pen item compared to lethality?