Tanks and Effective army HP are one of the least discussed yet most important aspects to balance, both from players and honestly internally when balancing.

Far too often, people will see a successful comp and immediately claim that whoever was on the top of the meters needs to be nerfed. They’ll see a big number on that damage done chart and say “Clearly that’s the issue”. But often times, it’s not even remotely the case. Believe it or not, internally we’re actually pretty good about balancing the DPS of the various carries.

What’s often NOT talked about is how important total effective HP is to an army. When all the damage is balanced, the difference is that EHP. This is most noticeable in Stage 2, where a single 2 star unit or a small amount of HP can make all the difference in a fight. We also saw stuff like giving augments an extra 50 HP could take them from D tier to A tier. That’s how valuable survivability can be.

Now let’s look at tank spells. Often we all (again, players and devs) look and go “Yeah they all just kind of shield and heal for a little bit”, but HOW they do that can be a massive difference. Let’s look at a popular comp and talk about Thresh and Ornn. In the typical 5 Fated comp, Thresh2 on 90 mana provides an 600 HP shield to himself AND the lowest HP ally while also giving that ally around 10-20 armor & MR. Now what’s interesting is that if he shields someone like Ornn, they are NOT mana locked with that shield, allowing them to more likely survive and get another cast. The amount of shielding you have to cut through gets pretty wild.

We see this a lot in complaint posts as well. “I had Ashe3 how did I lose to this comp??” And almost universally it’s because their front line was some 1 star champions with not great itemization. If your team doesn’t have high EHP, it doesn’t matter if you do triple their DPS. You need the time to survive and output that damage.

From a game design perspective, it’s a fascinating thing to think about. It’s clear most of our player base struggles with the importance of strong front line and EHP, but this is also one of the areas that leads to great improvement in game understanding. Is it too difficult to make strong front lines? Are the spell designs causing multiplicative EHP issues? Are items too important? Lots to think about here.

Obviously a deep topic. Internally I’m going to be helping raise that tank output needs to be looked at more closely. Externally I think we need to do a better job of highlighting when tank imbalance is an issue as opposed to just damage meters.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Too much going on right now, so I feel like I’m not getting perfect eyes on everything, but it’s part of being a lead on a growing team. Gotta delegate! Have a good week everyone, and take it easy 🙂