Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-6016076-20140625164717/@comment-6016076-20140628234344

Ok, so this will be a reply to your response before the jungler item suggestion. I wrote this first and am now just copy and pasting it back in.

Hey! Thanks for the detailed response. My points:

1. I agree % health gain will still overlap with bruisers. A mitigating factor, and potential future control, is that bruisers don't have % Bonus Health ratios like many tanks. This means the bruisers get less offensive power out of such an item as tanks do. However, I don't think it will help for a number of reasons. Basically, I agree here.

2. '' "In the end, building AP gives them more damage, but they still remain utility-focused champions, and a lot of the AP-based power they get is focused there." ''

My problem with this is that utility scales extremely well if AP gains match the power progression of the match. A Lulu with gold equal to other solo laners is a powerhouse late game. Supports tend to have unusual mechanics that don't translate well to healthy gameplay in the mid lane (eg. Janna). At this point, we've seen Lulu, Janna, Soraka, Karma, and Zilean go mid in the past. That's almost every single ranged support, and none of them offer good gameplay. If you want to allow a support to scale, you end up walking this tightrope balancing between their solo and duo lane performance. The issue with nerfing mid/top Lulu is exactly because it would overnerf her support. Despite multiple nerfs, even in her current OP solo state, we're already very near the bottom threshold of support Lulu's viability. You can't balance them independently without independent ratios, or at least it’s proven elusive.

It's true supports don't have good AP itemization. The reason for this is because if they had it, then bot lane would be flooded by mid mages. Alternatively, if they are slot efficient, mid mages would buy support itemization and reap both damage and utility. Again: an issue of independent balancing. Annie's advantage was she brought decent utility, but also her damage with only a modicum of AP was nearly enough to 100 - 0 a carry. Brand, Annie, Leblanc, Ziggs, anyone with poke and high burst damage can go bot, Fiddlestick's has the CC to carry him to level 6 and afterward his ult alone wins teamfights with a little AP (Zyra similar). The main restraint is that if the rate of damage gain (AP) does not match the pace of power progression of other champions on the map, it becomes useless. A LeBlanc who can 100 - 50 someone is just not useful. This is also why a mid-range solution of slot inefficient AP items is not practical. Slot inefficient items would indeed not be abused mid lane where gold is plentiful, but they still wouldn't provide enough AP for support AP ratios to match the pace of match progression and be useful. More likely, they would act as a cost effective source of AP to be abused by mid mages going bot lane with their higher base damage and AP ratios on damaging abilities. Scarcity of AP items keeps mid mages going bot lane in check, while supports have a baseline of utility to scrape by with mediocre scaling.

You're right, support scaling is suppressed by lack of gold and AP itemization. The former is alleviated by going mid lane, to unhealthy results; the latter feels terrible for the support, but it is necessary to keep mid out of bot and to prevent itemization overlap with mids (which could lead to undesirable interactions in the same way AP stacking on supports has done). All these points may theoretically be balanceable. However, we haven't succeeded in a single one yet without it coming at a cost elsewhere and don't appear likely to untie this convoluted mess of correlated variables anytime soon. Removing their dependency with separate ratio types would present a lot of work in the future but at least reformulate the problem in a clearly solvable state that is additionally readily amenable to tuning later.

I checked for 3mptylord's blog but didn't see anything on this topic! Maybe I’m blind… And sorry, I don't mean to beat the point above to death, I just felt a little brief in my original post and wanted to provide more details for why I feel that way. We may just agree to disagree, so if you don't have any further thoughts on the matter, I understand.

3. "you would only want tanky utility champions to have divergent options if you don't want the tankiness and utility to scale at the same time: for that, you could always give the tank AP-to-utility ratios, which would force the champion to sacrifice tankiness in order to gain utility."

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<p style="margin:0in0in0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">It's not a question of utility or tankiness. It's a question of tankiness or early game damage. Nautilus clears too slow. He already has AP ratios. He needs an option for damage (and most tanky junglers are like this). Problem is: You make a tanky jungler item with AP ratios, and Elise and Fidd are all of a sudden abusing it, and who knows what other sleeper OP champions lie in the woodworks.

<p style="margin:0in0in0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">This is why I attached spirit to tanky jungler damage abilities--it's not just a utility stat.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">If you want to increase the AP ratios for their damage, you end up with tanks building RoA, Rylai's, Abyssal's, Zhonya's, as well as the difficulty of equalizing their performance in a gold-saturated state like top lane with their performance in a gold-meager state like jungle (similar to support issues). There are a lot of problems here with AP ratios on tanky junglers.