DerBattery Rising

Introduction The second preseason balance patch recently went through, and it made a ton of changes to both champions and items. There was a lot of talk about the patch, from Rengar and Diana fans were bubbling about how their champions were playable again to Eve players were mourning the lost damage on their favorite AP assassin.  However, I didn't see anyone talk about Ezreal. His change seemed  small - just an adjustment of his base attack speed from 0.665 to 0.625 - so I understand why it wasn't the talk of the century. But is a base attack speed change actually  insignificant? Just how much does fiddling with that stat change his power? Considering that he's one of the most popular champions in the League right now, I figured I'd do a very quick write up on what the 0.04 drop in base attack speed does to the Prodigal Explorer. Attack Speed Changes Ripple Why would I even think that a base attack speed reduction is a big deal? Part of my concern comes fro...

Introduction to Effective Health There's a popular misconception floating around that if the enemy team starts building a lot of percentage armor penetration, you need to build more health. Why would you invest in armor when that Kha'Zix reduces 25% of it with his Black Cleaver and then penetrates over 35% of your remaining armor with a Last Whisper? You get so little real armor from your armor items that the real secret to surviving burst casters is building more health. Right? Well, that's not very true. As I'll discuss in this article, what you should really be concerned about is your effective  HP. It's your EHP that determines how much damage you can sponge before you die, and it's related to both health and resists; they complement each other. Stacking health without gaining armor means that each point of health is quite ineffective, and stacking resists with a low health pool makes each point of health effective but you have fewer of them (incidentall...

Penetration Mechanics Help More than Bruisers One of the under-the-hood changes of Season 3 is the change in resistance penetration's order of operations. In Season 2 flat penetration was applied first followed by percentage penetration, while now percentage penetration is applied before flat pen.  Season 2:      EffectiveResist = (Resist-FlatPen)*(1-PercentPen) Season 3:      EffectiveResist = Resist*(1-PercentPen)-FlatPen The old penetration system made percentage penetration do less for you for each point of flat penetration you already had. While not the end of the world, the inefficiency of stacking flat and percentage penetration did make a difference, and League is won and lost by small advantages - for instance, merely owning a Brutalizer made Last Whisper give about half as much additional armor penetration to lower armored targets in Season 2. Over time, people learned to generally avoid building both Brutalizer and Last Whisper,...

Blue Katarina Is Best Katarina The Obsession with True Damage I can't be the only one who's noticed everyone's love of true damage. I hear about it everywhere, from posts recommending armor penetration runes on AD carries to "deal true damage in lane!" to casters seeing a triple mpen build and saying "Katarina will be doing true damage to the carries now!" or streamers swooning over Olaf's new potential to deal near true damage by using the reworked Black Cleaver. But the discussion point that's never mentioned is that by building all these penetration items they're choosing to not  build other damage items. We know triple pen Kat is a monster, but have you wondered if she'd be as effective going with an AP-centric build? Considering magic damage specifically, the main idea is that skill damage comes from both the base damage and a ratio of your ability power. Opponents' magic resist attenuates both parts of the damage (hur...

Bad Vayne Built Phantom Dancer I can't even tell if I'm a bk scrub noob anymore. A mere six months ago you could safely mock anyone who built Zeal or Phantom Dancer first on Vayne. What point was attack speed when you had no damage to back it up? You have to start Bloodthirster, I was told, it's the only viable option given her low range and survivability. And yet now you see (predominantly Asian) teams frequently starting with a Phantom Dancer on Vayne and even maxing Silver Bolts first, both of which go against the strongly ingrained habits of Western players. So what's the motivation behind each build path, and more importantly (to me), what do the numbers say on the comparison? Basic Justifications So what is the rationale behind each build? Completely ignoring numbers here, a Bloodthirster is commonly built because Vayne is quite short ranged and will have to be within range of taking damage in order to deal damage. Therefore we'd really like to build a l...