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Hello there, I am back to give an update on the two items as a lot has changed in the past few months. Most notably in the last patch 12.12 which had a huge bug fix to Shadowflame, not to mention the huge durability overhaul which made pen items worse right?
Will leave TL:DR just below this comment as the post will be long (Shorter than my original 7months ago as I will not bother detailing the process slowly, if you want to see into some of the things + algebra you can read that post HERE )
TL;DR:
Shadowflame is substantially better on 12.12 but still gets overtaken by Void quite quickly and especially if you think Void should be compensated with 9AP for the 200g gold difference. The average overlap for Void>Shadow (15 Pen) is about 57-63 MR but can vary for each champion. Void with compensation will be 7-9MR lower = 50~MR. Ask yourself.
Do they have 0 MR items and you want to snowball? Yes --> Shadowflame
Do they have MR items? Yes --> No Shadowflame
Void second isn't always that great so consider utility/deathcap second and void third.
Sheet for you to play around with. (Make a copy of it and then use the dropdowns) LINK
INTRO
Shadowflame and Void staff have been comparable all year in terms of providing you magic penetration but sadly since release Shadowflame has been bugged and lost a significant amount of it's power.(This also coincidentally made all my old work wrong :) ) I will quickly detail the bug.
BUG Explanation
In Season 12 Preseason they made a shift to trying to clean up tooltips and to do this for Shadowflame they made the item do 2 instances of damage, the first instance (D1) would be the damage before applying Shadowflame penetration and then second instance of damage (D3)**, which was the difference in damage when applying Shadowflame penetration and not. D3=D2-D1. And the tooltip value was D3. This value was accurate, however the game then reduced D3 by remaining MR before Shadowflame penetration to make D4.
I have explained the bug graphically on my Twitter HERE
But the main point is you lost this much dmg depending on your current magic pen vs enemy MR. No matter your champion or it's ratios you would always lose the exact same damage.
Dmg loss vs enemy MR with varying Shadow pens, and various flat pens (ludens,sorcs....)
No matter the spells, always lost the same % DMG
And due to the durability update giving everyone free MR you really started to hit the -5% damage loss at an early stage of the game. But that has been fixed, so you will now have the pleasure of doing anywhere from 0-5% more damage in your games!
12.12 Numbers
Carrying on from my old post I still am undecided if including VoidComp (Void + 9AP) to make up for the 200g price difference is still correct or incorrect. So some of the data and results I show include it and some not. Why? Well I have spent a long enough time playing with numbers which have no real tangible value to players and it is much easier to spot something and follow the thought process.
1 How changing the Base/AP ratio ratio effects the overlap to MR
Last time I discussed how using a spell which loves AP would shift the MR overlap higher. This is because the 35 extra AP in the Shadowflame build is much more useful than a spell with a poorer ratio. The ratio describes how much AP is required to double a spells damage. A value of 200 is considered extremely AP favoured whilst a spell with a ratio of 400 is considered heavily Base damage stacked. To show this graphically I took about 70 spells and plotted their individual overlap for Void>Shadow 15 (Why 15 pen and not 20, I will discuss further but you rarely use the 20 pen) for a few different builds. Each champion was taken as lvl 13, so 2 spells have rank 5, R has rank 2 and the last spell just 1 rank. These rank 1 spells have very low values and love AP, super useless (Unless you be very particular) data though.
MR Overlap for Void>Shadow 15 compared to Base/AP ratio/ ratio
And we can see almost a perfect line. Very clearly as the ratio increases the MR overlap drops! Why is this important, well last time I only quoted Orianna spells, specifically Q and QWR which had ratios of 360 and 325 respectively which fit in the middle but maybe don't showcase the full range of data well enough. (My mistake, I didn't know how large of an impact this had at the time, but it is big!)
So some champs like Rumble have really high Base damages (Rumble R has a value of 600!! ) and therefore are famous for loving pen items because that is what is most important to them.
2 Why is Shadowflame 15 pen the better value to use
I think this is self explanatory especially after the durability patch, everyone loves a large damage number which Shadow 20 pen can often give but realistically are you using your full combo on someone less than 1000HP? NO! Most of your damage in League is to champions around the 1750HP value which corresponds to Shadow 15 pen.
3 Oxymoronic part
Shadowflame with 0 other pen items has a much higher overlap to void than without it. So if you have Everfrost + Mercs +Shadow/Void, the overlap is much higher than with Void. The reasoning for this is because the 35 AP difference between the items is more important that the pen they offer because we are far from zero. As we increase Pen and get closer to the target having 0 MR the effects of being closer to 0 will increase damage significantly.
Why is this important to understand, later I will show you that we will go from 18 pen (sorcs w/everfrost) to 11 pen (Ludens) and the Overlap will actually be much lower despite less pen and that is because Ludens has 10 more AP. And the 10AP is more important at these high MR values where overlaps occur.
Overlap whilst changing flat pen before Shadowflame ( Yellow = 20, Blue = 10 )
4 The magical overlap numbers
Starting with some common mage combos we can see their overlaps.
We can see a pretty significant range here from these 3 mage combos we can see: (All void with NO compensation here)
Void > Shadow 10 = 38 - 52
Void > Shadow 15 = 51 - 66
Void > Shadow 20 = 65 - 80
All these values change on your champion due to the ratios and that's just the fact of it. I did some testing and averaged the overlaps (from my sample)
All of these are for overlap with Shadow 15 pen for previously stated reasons:
| Mythic (0Pen) | Mythic + Sorcs (18Pen) | Mythic + passive (11Pen) | Mythic + Sorcs+ passive (29Pen) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Items | 63.67 | 59.98 | 60.74 | 57.15 |
| 3 Items | 58.78 | 55.81 | 56.53 | 53.62 |
| 3 Items (W/dcap) | 60.3 | 57.1 | 57.8 | 54.7 |
Why does Deathcap favour shadowflame, well it's simply the 35 AP difference in Shadow>Void is amplified. But as you buy more and more items (excluding deathcap and infernals) the overlap will continue to reduce lower and lower and is approaching values of base MR (+ MR shard.) Late game favours void.
5 Including void compensation
So far everything has not included it because I think it gives a fair assessment (No the Hp on shadowflame does not matter for damage calculations, a LB buying shadowflame does not give a f*ck about the HP, don't comment this)
If you wanted to include the 200g compensation the overlaps shift a lot, for example here is Viktors overlap differences at the 2 item mark.
Comparison of Void with and without Compensation of 9ap
A shift of 8-9MR in favour of Void makes it look the clear option (Remember Viktor is a MASSIVE Shadowflame fan with his ratios). This was a test with 0 extra pen, with Ludens+sorcs+compensation the shift is more like 7MR. But still very noticeable. Everything right about now is making you think well we are approaching base MR, I guess Shadow is just booty cheeks still after the fix. Well yes and no.
6 Real game example
Let's finally take a random real game example from a scrim with pro players building optimally (pepelaugh) vs a sole AP Viktor (Great shadow spot right?!)
Dmg gained from completely Void > Shadow (With 2 differing pens)
The data in green shows damage gained from having void instead of Shadowflame, and the results show that despite the enemy having a decent amount of MR and approaching the overlap. The damage gained vs Squishies is so insane right! And that's why you buy Shadowflame everyone. You want to kill the Mid/Ad. And if they are just rocking base mr + MR shard at the 2 item mark Shadowflame will hugely out perform Void Staff.
Scaling is a very real issue but you buy this item to spike hard on 2 and 3 items and win the game. Void is the scaling option and overall a poor item second. Usually you'd want to prioritise a utility item before getting void later on when MR actually is an issue.
Conclusion
Shadowflame is an okay item and will benefit massively with its gained 0-5% damage increase on patch 12.12 but due to the durability update the item is still a bit weak in my opinion. It does fit it's role of a second item which provides a lot of pen and can snowball the game well giving you the optimal damage by enemies who gave 0 MR items.
However as soon as the MR items come in and/or you have a really poor ratio champion like rumble Void Staff just becomes more and more the appealing option. The rough value you should look out for in the table where at 2 items the overlap depending on other pen items is about 57-63 for Shadow 15. And that fits perfectly with no MR items = ~40 MR and if they have a null magic + MR will be ~65.
Any questions, mistakes noticed or any critiques I will try to acknowledge all. DM me on Twitter if you want too Twitter .
Sheet you can play with for your champion is linked under the TL:DR at the top.
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