Sunday, July 10, 2011

League of Legends: Defensive Rune Values

Back when I played World of Warcraft I used to normalize stats based on how much you'd get of a stat from the same quality gem. It wouldn't be fair to compare stamina to dodge at a one for one ratio since you actually got 50% more stamina for the same cost. Earlier I compared health to magic resistance in League of Legends, but I did so with end game gear. How would things change if I went to a scale actually useful at the start of the game? How good are each of the best defensive runes compared to each other? Let's look at how good each rune would be for my level 1 Amumu with a 1/15/11 talent build.

I start with 568 health, 27 armor, and 52 magic resistance. So the increase in effective health for one more health against physical damage is 1.27 and for magic damage is 1.52. The increase from one more armor against physical damage is 5.68. The increase from one more magic resist against magic damage is 5.68. So, what runes can we get?

red: .97 MR, .91AR, 3.47hp  - vs physical: hp = 4.4069, ar = 5.1688  - vs magical: hp = 5.2744, mr = 5.5096
yellow: .74 MR, 1.41AR, 5.35hp = vs physical: hp = 6.7945, ar = 8.0088  - vs magical: hp = 8.132, mr = 4.2032
blue: 1.49MR, .7AR, 2.67hp - vs physical: hp = 3.3909, ar = 3.976  - vs magical: hp = 4.0584, mr = 8.4632

Almost across the board mitigation fares better in these comparisons. There are some important caveats to remember, though. Resistance only affects one type of damage, against a balanced team you're likely to take a roughly even split of damage. Even still, blue MR seems really good compared to the other two options but the rest could go either way. If you're jungling the monsters do predominantly physical damage so extra armor is hot. And healing does exist in the game. If you're jungling you'll typically drink around 8 healing potions before even running into an enemy hero. That's 1600 extra health that isn't accounted for in the formulae above and makes both resistance stats better than health for sure.

This makes me wonder a little about the previous comparison. It could just be that Force of Nature is a bad MR item. Maybe Warmog's Armour is an absurdly good max health item. (I have been building both on Amumu recently to pretty good effect.)

1 comment:

Robb said...

I've been thinking I should redo your previous comparison, but using Chain Armor and Null Cloak (whatever the $700 armor and $740 MR defense items are) as the base for comparison, instead of the items they build into. And either a health gem or a giant's belt for HP. In theory, most of the base stats you're buying from items come from those, and the extra recipe cost is what grants you the effect (which is often a small bonus to the base stats). A lot of the cost of Force of Nature is the hp regen.