Wednesday 31 July 2013

Leona and Crowd Control

Leona is one of my favorite supports, and one I think is underrated a little. One reason is her damage output with her passive and absolutely no offensive items. Another is the strong survivability boost from W. But the main reason is her low cooldown, long range Crowd Control.
Oh, and she starts with a free Bead, practically (9 base hp5).

First, I'm counting her root from E as CC, and estimating its duration at 0.75 seconds. Assuming that's true, with 0% CDR, ignoring her R, she already has 26.2% uptime. Add 20% CDR, it rises to 32.7%, and at 40% CDR it's 43.7%. I think that's fairly impressive. And that's assuming an infinitely long engagement.
Lets look at what she does in a more realistic timeframe, say, 10 seconds, using the regular E-Q-R combo. That's 2 E's, 2 Qs and 1 R, 15% root uptime, 37.5% stun uptime, 52.5% total CC uptime (4.75 seconds free of CC).
At 20%, you can get this in over 8.5 seconds for 61.8% up time (3.1 seconds between the two rounds of CC), and at 40%, it happens over 7 seconds for 75% up time (1.7 seconds between rounds).

Of course these calculations aren't exactly directly LCS relevant, considering how little time supports spend at level 18 in LCS matches. And they rarely have the chance to get much CDR. But from a soloQ perspective, these are relevant numbers.

As always; numbers have been rounded to make them a little easier on the eyes.

Cooldown Reduction 101



I've received terrible feedback on this topic before, but damnit it's important.

Lets say you have a skill with 1 sec CD at 0% CDR. In 10 seconds that's 10 casts. Now lets add 40% CDR. You might think that allows 4 more casts, for 14 total. But it doesn't. The CD is lowered by 0.4 sec to 0.6 sec, which allows for 10/0.6=16.67 casts, an increase of two thirds.

As it works this way, it also means that each point of CDR is worth more than the previous, meaning the CDR you get from 0% to 10% is worth fewer extra casts(11.11%, one ninth) than the 10% from 30% to 40% (16.67%, one sixth), so the last 10% CDR is actually worth 50%(!) more than the first 10%.

As such, it is one of the three stats in League that scale synergistically with themselves, one other being percentage movement speed increase (which doesn't really count because there are two soft caps), and technically health regeneration, but the effect of that is so immensely miniscule.

It is also an often underrated multiplier for casters. I'll get into multipliers in a later blog.

Tuesday 30 July 2013

"Cost Efficiency" on the LoL wiki

Yes, those were mocking quotation marks. On the wiki, the value of a given stat is calculated from the purest, cheapest item with that stat. Which means that anything the wiki says under "Cost Analysis" is completely useless.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Beads, Charms and Potions

So, after the potion capacity nerf it finally dawned upon me that one could, get this, buy a Bead and then - shock and awe - not build it into anything and just sell it when the slot/gold is needed.

So lets examine the efficiency of this.

A red pot heals 150hp and costs 35g. A bead costs 180g and heals 1hp per second. That brings the gold efficiency of the potion to 4.3hp/g and the efficiency of the Bead to 0.0056 hp/g/s. Solving for time, you need to hold the Bead for just short of 13 relevant minutes. So that doesn't look so good. However, the Bead sells for 126g. If we assume we do this, the time threshold goes down to just short of 4 minutes. And of course the longer it is held, the more value it accrues. If we let health potions set the value of health regen, the bead produces a value of 0.23g/s (14g/min).

Now, this isn't exactly the whole truth. The potions can be used up much faster, giving more bursty healing, which lets you use the extra health when it's most valuable.

It does look like potions are altogether a bad idea in ARAM though, considering that almost every single second of ARAM is a relevant second, and it's 5v5 so you can't use the burst healing to establish much lane dominance.

Here are the corresponding numbers for the Charm:
No selling: 14 minutes 15 seconds
Selling: 4 minutes 15 seconds
Gold Value Per Second: 0.21g/s (12.6g/min)

Here are the corresponding numbers for Spirit Stone, attributing 0 value to the passive:

No selling: 10 minutes 10 seconds
Selling: 3 minutes 5 seconds
Gold Value Per Second: 1.14g/s (68.6g/min)

And lastly the numbers for Philosopher's Stone, taking the gp10 into account:

No selling: 10 minutes 5 seconds
Selling: 5 minutes 10 seconds
Gold Value Per Second: 1.16g/s* (69.4g/min)
*Note that it is assumed that every second is a relevant second.

As always; numbers have been rounded a little to make them a little easier on the eyes.