Wednesday, July 13, 2011

League of Legends: Aegis of Protection

There's an item in League of Legends that is my targeted first real item when I'm playing a tank. It's the Aegis of Protection and it provides health, armor, and magic resistance all at once. On top of that it has an aura which gives armor and magic resistance to your allies as well. It's relatively cheap and I've felt it's been effective thus far, but has it? On occasion I've played with teammates who have yelled at me for wasting my time buying it. One guy yesterday went so far as to tell me I couldn't possibly tank with it. My general thought behind wanting it is it's good when they're attacking me since it makes me a lot tougher, and it's good if they're not attacking me since it lets me mitigate damage going to my team. But is it economical? If it turns out to just be a lot worse than a warmog maybe I should start skipping it. So let's take a look at how good it is...

As my baseline I'm going to look at the level 11 stats for Amumu. I'm going to pretend I already have a philosopher's stone and some go fast boots. I have 1408 health, 60 armor, and 36 magic resistance. The Aegis is made out of:

Ruby Crystal - 180 hp for 475g
Null-Magic Mantle - 24 mr for 400g
Cloth Armor - 18 ar for 300g
Pattern - 270 hp, 18 ac, 24 mr + aura (12 ac, 15mr, 8 attack damage) for 750g more

Giving all EH values as straight physical and then straight magic we have:

base - 2252.8 / 1914.88
ruby - 2540.8 / 2159.68 for 475g
mantle - 2252.8 / 2252.8 for 400g
cloth - 2605.24 / 1914.88 for 300g
aegis - 3188.2 / 2936.5 for 1925g
warmog - 4444.8 / 3434.6 for 3000g
force - 2252.8 / 2984.96 for 2610g
thornmail - 3660.8 / 1914.88 for 2000g
sunfire - 3808.9 / 2526.88 for 2610g
aegis aura only - 2421.76 / 2126.08 for 1925g

What is our gain for each item for every 100g spent?

ruby - 60.6 / 51.5
mantle - 0 / 84.48
cloth - 117.48 / 0
aegis - 48.6 / 53.1
warmog - 73.1 / 50.7
force - 0 / 41.0
thornmail - 70.4 / 0
sunfire - 59.6 / 23.4
aegis aura only - 8.78 / 11.0

It's important to point out you can only have 6 items total, so looking at that chart and thinking you should just stack cloth armors won't work. You'd spend 1800g total doing so and then go home. The aegis aura is not as good as I thought it was going to be, but it does give extra damage to your team as well and actually does something if the enemies are smart enough to not attack you. (The alternative is to build enough damage oriented items to convince them to attack you because you're a threat but Amumu in particular doesn't really have any decent options to do that.) I'm a little surprised that it's more efficient than both warmog and force of nature in terms of efficiently mitigating magic damage, though they both come with a lot of health regen as well which isn't accounted for here. One other option for making them want to kill you is the sunfire cape. It deals damage to everyone who stands near you and is ok at bulking up too. At least if the enemies have lots of physical damage dealers.

Seeing that cloth armor wins out helps explain why junglers seem to always take it and 5 potions. The potions add on 1200 more health and the armor is just great at mitigating creep damage. It also goes into the aegis which has been a reason I build it, too.

Looking at the numbers it seems like the aegis isn't just the best thing but it is very solid. Against teams smart enough to avoid attacking you it seems like a very good thing to have. And if they do like to attack me? I'm building warmog next and good luck to them!

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