[2021] Shadowflame is NOT an anti-shield item and here‘s why

As a disclaimer when I say it’s not an anti-shield item I don’t mean „uuh it’s not as strong as serpent so it’s bad“ I mean it is virtually useless against shields.

The problem is that the magic pen also applies based on health so you actually don’t get 10-20 magic pen vs shields but actually 0-10 magic pen because you need to compare the difference between shield vs non-shield champs.

Now let’s look at the actual numbers of a realistic scenario. Let’s say we have a carry with 2k hp you start of with 13 magic pen and then it increases up to 20 until you reach 1k hp and at that point it caps at the max 20 mpen.
If you now have shields it instead is at 20 mpen all the way through which means you start of with 7 more mpen and it decreases down to 0 mpen at 1k health and stays there for the rest of the health.
If you now calculate the average mpen bonus over the 2k health you actually get 1.75 mpen so the difference between hitting a shield champ and a non-shield champs is 1.75 magic pen in this scenario which is virtually nothing.

Don’t get me wrong I am not saying the item is useless. It’s a decent flat magic pen burst item but it has absolutely no anti-shield identity and the fact that riot marketed it as such implies we will never get an ap anti-shield item because apparently this item should do that already even though it clearly doesn’t.