Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-6016076-20140628232622

Just going to make a dedicated thread for this. You wrote:

Willbachbakal wrote: I have a rough idea for the four jungle item lines:

Hunter's Machete: the carry item and the current base component, with the percent damage increase removed. Has the Maim passive, adjusted to compensate for the loss of the 10% damage increase. Builds into Madred's Razors and then Wriggle's Lantern.

Spiteful Hide: the tank item. Would have a lesser version of the Sapping Barbs effect, then build into Quill Coat and afterwards into a renamed version of PBE SotAG (or at least an item with similar stats) to apply to the new jungle monsters, something like Cuirass of the Sentinel.

Glowing Ember: the AD fighter item. Would have a lesser version of the Incinerate passive, only exclusive to minions, and would cause them to take true damage over time, with the true damage restoring health and mana per second. Would upgrade into an AD item with a stronger Incinerate effect, let's call it Cinderling Core, and then into the new SotEL, Heart of the Brambleback, which would then apply the Incinerate effect to champions (the health/mana regen would still only work on monsters).

Infesting Mushroom: the AP mage item. Would have the 10% increased damage and health/mana restoration per damage dealt (the Butcher passive, which could probably be renamed to something along the lines of "Devour"). Would then upgrade into an AP item with a 20% damage amp (so Spirit Stone with AP), which we could call Humongous Fungus (I have no clue), and then into the new SotSW, Gromp's Delight (again, no clue).

I'll come up with more precise item descriptions later, but what do you think? 

So two things:

1. These items are a clear thematic victory, but are the effects practical? Our goal with these items is to provide a jungle advantage by enhancing damage dealt to monsters as well as increasing sustain, and this should be done in a manner consistent with that role’s scaling. The item in question is the tank item—namely, Sappling Barbs for your item or for Riot’s new Quill Coat. My issue with it is that it is not consistent with a tank’s scaling. For example, Madred’s damage scales with the stat it provides (attack speed), creating incentive to stack even more attack speed. This helps pigeonhole the item into attack speed-based champions. SotEL or SotSW unique passives do not have the same exclusive synergy with the stats they provide. Because of this, any champion who can use AD or AP has a choice to pick either of these items; indeed, we have seen Eve do this in the past when SotSW was actually good, and she may be liable to do it again if the item ever becomes good again.

Eve is a special case because not many champions can use AD or AP. Getting to my point: The new tank item has the same lack of synergy SotEL and SotSW have, but the real issue is that the primary stat it provides, tankiness, is even less selective than either AD or AP, so it will benefit any class. Essentially, this route for the armor item still has overlap issues with bruisers. Beyond overlap, the lack of synergy introduces another issue: The item doesn’t scale for its given role. We saw with Madred’s that this kind of scaling synergy makes the item more exclusive for its designated role. At this point, we are left with the undesirable situation where we want to match the damage bonus of the Sapping Barbs to the passives of the other jungler items, but in doing so, we create an item that anyone can use because it is not exclusive by nature.

Snapping Barbs needs to scale with tankiness so we can lower its bottom damage threshold and allow tanky champions to scale into it. Even doing this, there’s no guarantee the overlap of tankiness will not lead bruisers to buying this item and outshining tanks once again. Even the 25% increased bonus health may not help, because it won’t pay real dividends until the mid-game or later—exactly where tanky junglers don’t need help right now. The SotAG granted immediate bonus health more likely to assist their weak early game (it synergized with % bonus health ratios), and that still wasn’t enough of a bias toward tanky junglers to favor them having SotAG over a fighter.

I’m honestly not sure what kind of combination of tanky stats and damaging passive would work to leverage the item as an exclusively tanky jungler buy. What are your thoughts on my point of view here?

2. I like your ideas thematically, but we already have a splitting of the items after Machete for specialized roles. These new items target the region of time in between Spirit Stone and Machete. Is this a point in the game that you see as problematic for the junglers? I would have said the issue arises with the later incarnations of jungler items, where the items begin granting enough stats to overshadow inherent advantages from base damages. Prior to this point, I can’t think of 300 gold worth of stats (or even 1000 for that matter) that will compete with an inherent lack of base damages or kit capability. The stat value is just too small to wield much influence at this point in the game over balance.

Functional considerations aside, I like the idea because it would certainly “feel” very right to have a dedicated item for each role while jungling, although I suppose a minor concern might be identifying for noobs which item they should buy. The Machete was nice here as the universal jungle buy that then provided an organized presentation of the available upgrade paths for actual specialization.



<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;background-image:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:initial;">What do you think of making the AP item apply to magic damage only, to further promote its unique identity? <ac_metadata title="New Jungler Items"> </ac_metadata>