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tl;dr
Lifesteal is op, that's why antiheal needs to be op. Here are some diagrams and an idea how to make lifesteal and especially heal stacking still good but not op, allowing us to reduce the absolut necessity of absurd amounts of anti heal, and thus hopefully fixing many of the frustrations that come from it.
Ability Haste
"For a decade, we've thought about CDR in terms of a cap. If you care about cooldowns, 40% CDR is a clear target you really want to hit, but once you do, you don't want more. It also makes tradeoffs between items clearer, in terms of "I can't get all these items because then I'm overcapped, which ones will I take?" "
- RiotAether
When Riot introduced the new stat Ability Haste to replace good old CDR, they did it because turning its power scaling linear allowed them to get rid of this pesky 40% cap, while also putting its scaling in line with other stats in the game, allowing for simpler item design as overcapping and the necessity to hit either 0 or 40% are gone. Graph displaying ability frequency by Gold invested. Now you might wonder if this conversion was a positive change. It for sure sparked a lot of discussion and threats to convert 1 value into the other, but that has died down. To be frank, i really didn't bother collecting data concerning the ability haste distributions for the final builds of different champions, nor did i evalueate the really subjective perception and understanding of the new stat. For me as a Masters Shyvana toplane otp, all i can say is that i am no longer forced to go
cdr rune → cdr boots → kindlegem → cawfields warhammer for 40% cdr→ finish old Deaths Dance. [god bless that item is gone]
Currently i have options to get any amount of Ability Haste to reduce cooldowns, and not feel bad about it.
Recursive Systems
Def. A Multiplier is recursive, when it scales with itself.
(Rabadons isn't recursive, but if it was it'd look like this)
Riot in general tries to prevent recursion whenever possible, but there are 2 interesting examples in the history of League of Legends coming to my mind where it broke the game:
Vladimir infinte Hp bug
and Rageblade Jhin.
It's also the reason, that taking conditioning on Malphite, Poppy and Ornn is way better than on any other champion in the game.
There has also been a really infamous recursive stat that, thank god, has been removed from the game in its infancy: Dodge.
Tho, Dodge did scale multiplicatively to mitigate some of the recursive nature, and it mostly got removed because of the randomness. Graph, comparing the effective hp multiplier from Dodge to Armor (by gold invested, gold value of Dodge based on V1.0.0.107 Phantom Dancer)
Generally, recursive stats are approximitely linear for small values, but suffer from the problem that they absolutely explode in power at some point. To prevent completely gamebreaking scaling, there has to be some arbitrary caPs; and items and other systems have to be shoehorned around it, potentially interfering and impeding even other game systems.
Actually, there still is a highly recursive stat, or rather a pair of highly recursive stats in the game, you just cannot buy them. Here i am talking about %Damage Reduction of course! Let's look at an example to explain what i mean: Starting with 1000 hp, cause the number is nice and realistic. 50% damage reduction essentially means that if you took 1000 dmg, you'd have 500, or half of a hp bar left. Those 500 hp are still impacted by the 50% damage reduction, and this can be repeated infinitely. Summing up the damage you took until you died, gives a simple 2000.
I can't really describe this that vividly using words, so here is a Gif. See how slow it rises in the beginning until it hits overdrive at some point?
Riot does solve this problem nicely tho! Armor and Magic resist are really elegant linear ways, to smooth the scaling of Damage Reduction. Similar Gif, but now with Armor varying.
But really, i want to offer a slightly different perspective here. And for that we need to, for a second, forget that antiheal and healingamp exist. We can use a different but equivalent way to phrase physical damage reduction: Instead of 'Reduce all physical Damage you recieve by X%' it might aswell be 'Heal for X% of all physical damage you recieve'. Looking at one of the previous gifs might help understanding this equivalence.
Fascinatingly, only changing 1 word gets us really close to a different stat in this game:
'Heal for X% of all physical damage you deal' = Physical Vamp (-not to be confused with Lifesteal)
Lifesteal
You see, Lifesteal is quite the different stat from damage reduction:
100% Lifesteal does not make you effectively immortal (actually your lifesteal has to reach a value of 'enemy dps'/'own dps' to do that instead)
Having a variable pole means we do not necessarily need a hard cap
Lifesteal generates value by attacking, while dmg reduction generates value by getting attacked
Lifesteal can sustain you vs minions and monsters
Lifesteal is *usually useless when on full hp (*overheal effects)
But even with all this in mind, i personally think we should probably treat Lifesteal, and all Vamp effects the same way as we already do with armor and mr. This would generally reduce the need for absurd counters to Lifesteal stacking (no other stat in the game has a counter that just plain removes 60% of it!), while allowing natural healing effects to be weaker while staying impactful because they don't randomly get reduced by 60%.
We also need a name for this new stat that is different from lifesteal, but can be easily understood to convert into lifesteal. My creativity atm is limited, so i suggest Health Leech.
//pls i beg you for better name suggestions
But to really do this, we also need some kind of balance estimate for 'enemy dps'/'own dps' over the course of a game. For simplicity, let's just also use 100% and inflate the cost of Health Leech by 20% because of the 1v0 farm minions/jungle value. This means it is balanced around doing at least as much dmg as you would take. We also need a formula to transform Health Leech into Lifesteal. Just applying the estimate we set to the classic armor/mr/ability haste formula, we'd get the following:
Lifesteal = (100%) * (Health Leech)/(Health Leech + 100)
// appreciate feedback here
Oh, and we'd also need a price for Health Leech. I would consider it a different defensive multiplier, in the same boat with armor and mr, but i'd consider 'your dps relative to enemy dps' a more general condition then either of those before. Armor and Magic resist are orthogonal stats and cost 20/18 gold per point respectively. Also we will consider a base of 30/30 to get similar %increases for low values. I'm not a riot employee so no need to get perfect numbers. I would suggest the geometric middle between a specialist build (19*(130%)= ~25 gold for the better stat) and a generalist build (~49 gold for 1 armor + 1 mr). This would land us at 34.93 gold, let's apply the 20% tax for 1v0 sustain, and we would land at (compare to 37.5 gold per point lifesteal before, and 46.88 gold per point lifesteal now) a solid 42 gold per point of Health Leech.
Actually at this point i would like to put this into some context, and compare the additional tankyness from these 3 versions of Lifesteal with the tankyness granted from armor/mr against a target with similar dps and resistences.
Huh, i guess when my carries tell me, that the enemy Shieldbow + Botrk irelia is super tanky, then they are actually correct, considering that these 20% lifesteal offers about as much survivability as an entire Aegis of the Legion. Crazy, huh? Including Conqueror bumps it up to 29% lifesteal, and thus an equivalent +53 armor and mr. But this isn't considering anti heal, so maybe we should compare Riots lifesteal to the other defensive multipliers when reduced by 40%.
Also gotta throw Health Leech that is reduced by 20% for comparison: Even more Graph
But this looks actually so reasonable. It seems that current Lifesteal and the Proposed Health Leech work in a rather balanced way vs the respective anti heal compared to mixed tank itemization. It also quickly explains why Shieldbow → Bt rush isn't the go to broken build on anything ad. Especially because the 40% antiheal effect is valued at 275 gold attached to a 800g opportunity cost.
And this diagram proves, that building mostly armor will yield the most tankyness against a full ad team. Seems obvious, but checking it really doesn't hurt.
In the context of everything said before, i would personally claim, that a swap to Health Leech would have the following benefits:
the tankyness Health Leech provides scales linearly
fully outhealing a champion with similar dps would become impossible
this directly allows scaling of the counter stat from an absurd 40/60% to 20/40%
it also allows for more item diversity, as now having a splash of Health Leech on completed items will neither be useless (only source of Lifesteal vs 60% antiheal) nor broken (Lifesteal stacking vs no antiheal)
it would generally just smooth the powercurve of Lifesteal the way Ability Haste did to CDR
So much awsome stuff brings with it some disadvantages too tho:
- Lifesteal is a way cooler name than Health Leech
- People would not understand that Health Leech basically works like Armor/Attackspeed and similar stats, and spend endless hours trying to understand the conversion, or at least talk about how it is complicated
The biggest one tho, is a rebuilding and convertsion of all things that have to do with healing, from Lifesteal items themselves, to the anti heal items, Omnivamp and support items to all healing related runes and abilities
Rebalanceing after such big changes takes a lot of work and could conflict with competetive integrity
In this context i really do understand and appreciate the way Riot adresses Lifesteal in the new patch, but i am not fully satisfied. I really want to show that rebuilding anything healing is a doable task that is worthile for the hopefully long future of this awsome game!
Healing and adjacent Systems
So now after this exploration, we'd have to think about all the stuff currently existing in the game that is in some shape connected. Items, Runes, Champion abilities, Healing, Grievous wounds and so on.
First of all, to organize and intigrate the Omnivamp system into the Health Leech system proposed, i am gonna introduce a new Unique Passive – Omnipotent: Health Leech grants Omnivamp instead of Lifesteal.
This allows us to just naturally include Omnivamp items in the System without too much work. Also with the limiting of Health Leechs recursive power, we are allowed to put slightly higher values on items. In general the values of Health Leech should be based on spending similar amounts of gold on it, as you'd do on defensive stats like armor and mr. Bt for example would go to 25 Health Leech which is equivalent to 25/125 = 20% lifesteal in isolation, while falling perfectly in line with Maw of Malmortius and Deaths Dance.
This would also remove the necessity to only have low cost low value lifesteal on items, and would open up design space to actually balanced and interesting healing builds. (Looking at you, Negan Graves or full lifesteal irelia)
For anti heal, i already hinted at transforming Grievous wounds to a debuff that reduces Health Leech, regen effects and healing from other sources by 20% / 40% bringing it more in line with items like voidstaff, making it less volatile investing gold into a healing focused build or being a healing based champion.
All onhit healing runes would just be converted into Health Leech, such that both stats are the same on a champion without other Health Leech. Other healing runes might need a small nerf.
And for the last and most difficult one, Champion abilities: You see, healing being a recursive stat is not necessarily limited to lifesteal, but also all other forms of healing. For myself, i think champion specific scaling curves are a good concept as it allows for individual balance and adjustment while not interfering with the rest of the game systems too much. (For example jax dodge essentially being 100% aa dmg reduction) So i am absolutely fine with enchanters and healing inherent champions (where the healing is fundamentally different from Lifesteal or Omnivamp) to keep their recursive powerscalar.
That being sad, significantly nerfing healing reduction forces us to also take their healing rank ups down a notch. I suggest reducing any champion healing rankup past rank 1 spells (including rank 1 if they are ultis) by 25%. This would even itself out, when comparing 20% antiheal to 40% (0.8 * 0.75 = 0.6) and in general slightly amplify their power vs the powerful antiheal. (0.6 * 0.75 = 0.45 >> 0.4 by ~11% healing amp, or about 600 gold in heal and shield power)
This might lead to enchanters being slightly too powerful, but then again one could rebalance that by the cost of heal and shield power or further adjust the specific champions.
FIN
I appreciate any feedback, especially in respect to gamedesign by riot. (i know i've not touched on many things about lifesteal and how it interacts in fights, 2v2 or why it generally should be a powerful stat)
If this post gets some traction, i'm gonna actually put in the work to rework all items, runes and champions according to the notes from the last part.
Also diving deep into the stats of the game just makes me appreciate all the work riot put into their game and how smart many items are designed.
if someone for some reason needs my Op.gg, it's CC Relrax