Hi, it's me, Duff.

What are we doing here? This will be equal parts story, and guide. Equal parts thought project, and goal setting. Equal parts looking back, and equal parts looking forward.

With that out of the way, BACK again after 8 years of not playing this game AT ALL, not watching any streams, not playing a SINGLE game. It has been 10 LONG YEARS since season 3 when I last try-harded in this game and put in the effort to try to climb ranks, which led to my peak rank of 3500 on the NA ladder.

For those who don't know me, I'm an OG in the League of Legends and Mobafire world.

Back in season 1 and 2, I wrote several guides on this website which wound up totaling million views. My guides were famous for creating, outlining, and explaining my off-tank meta game, which absolutely blew up in the scene when StVicious (Back when he was a top laner) used my OffTank- Irelia guide item for item in tournament for CLG, and snowballed hard and carried multiple games.



Perhaps uniquely, I published my guides on how to play this game here on this very website, long before I had ever even played a single ranked game in my life, and then eventually when they announced the up-coming Victorious Jarvan IV skin, I spammed games on Olaf to catch my elo and support the (at the time) outlandish claims I had been making prior in my guides. I even invented the once-famous Statikk Shiv back when the magic damage did crit (abuseable on Tryndamere.) I did this about 2 months before Dyrus popularized it on stream, and wrote and published a guide on it which never really took off at the time. Which is funny, because it's one of the best builds I have ever come up with, and turned out to be so broken they had to rework the item. *Shrug* !



I had a good time with league, but after Season 3 when I hit my peak, I burnt out. My life was changing. My passion was gone for the game. I moved, and my new place had bad internet, I didn't have any money for stuff like that, I was broke and living with my girlfriend at the time and we didn't have the funds for that kind of stuff.

I eventually quit league in season 5, forever...

As a result of the culminated aforementioned elements, I have never built a mythic item, and I have never been in a game where one was built. (I've played some bot games recently to test stuff out, but I have not played a normal or a ranked game yet, I've decided to save ALL of my first real games playing against other people for live stream, starting with the very first match for 100% transparency.)

I have also never used a modern "rune & mastery page" in a normal or ranked game either... Back when I last played, you had to grind heaps of games upon games to get those, or at least buy the points to access them. (Yes, with cash.)



There were no "pro" teams back then when I started (I started playing about when Vladimir was released) because there was no pro circuit. By season 2 the major teams in NA were still CLG and TSM, and the korean scene was well known to be terrible and not yet formed in season 1. At that time, EU had the strongest scene and players in the world. xPeke on AP Gragas went on to dominate and shock the American playerbase, as they had never seen something like that before. By season 2 you had a few other names in the area like CRS and Dignitas emerging. I watched all of that unfold in real time.



I remember the big tournament for season 2 worlds, I stayed in the CRS gaming mansion in Beverly hills for almost a week, it was the first large scale gaming stream house of its kind. There were no streamer houses for any games before TSM and CRS pioneered the path forward.

During those grand final matches, Taiwan went on to produce a team of superstars known as "TPA" or "Taipei Assassins," who went on to dominate the tournament and cement themselves as the titans of the day, beating out the Korean teams like Azubu Frost, who at that time were still developing the Korean scene to produce the game's future super powers like SKT1. I still have the OG Riven skin from this event. Russian team Moscow 5 and their dynamic playstyle captured the hearts of most players, they were the first team ever to all flash forward as 5 at once on a grand stage like world's. The tournament energy was electric. The crowd cheering, I could never have imagined a sold out arena for a video game...



Over the years since leaving League behind, I've gone down a career path. All of this League of Legends history and my involvement with it happened an entire decade ago... I have moved on.

I have my full time job. I bought a house. I'm engaged now, and I have a lot of excellent hobbies... I stay busier than most. I have some rather brutal health issues in the form of an autoimmune disease and kidney disease, which affect both my physical body and as a result affect my mental clarity and my mood (It's not an easy cross to bear at my age, and it is quite often physically painful.) I'm not asking for sympathy, but I'm trying to illustrate the idea that my mind has not been on this game at all. In fact, for many years I wasn't even really any playing games at all.

Honestly, I had largely forgotten about this game and the scene. It was behind me, something I would mention to people in passing as this "crazy thing I did, once upon a time."

Fast forward to now.

One of my employees recently told me he was getting into Valorant, and I laughed out loud because I knew that was also a game made by Riot. I gave him some advice on how the Elo system works, how to play around with the system and how to maintain mental and avoid tilting, and he was surprised to find that when he tested my feedback, it was actually true.


Eventually he asked me, after our conversation about League, "Do you ever miss it?"

IMMEDIATELY I responded "**** no!" and we laughed for like 30 minutes about how toxic these games are and their communities.

I went home and I didn't think anything of it.

The next time I saw him though, something was different. Something had changed...

Not anything I could quite put my finger on, but one thing became rather clear to me.

I wanted to keep talking about League... But why? Why now?

I haven't played this game in TEN YEARS.

The friends group I had at that time no longer play now. My friend list in game is a host of greyed out names, I had hundreds of friends added then, and now less than ten to 20 are online when I log in.

The community I was surrounded by then is dead and gone now.

The pro scene is different now.

The items are different.

The champions are different.

The objectives are different.

There is nothing left from what I had back when I used to play...

Right...?

But the more I think about the game, the more I begin to wonder.

What IS League like now?

HOW MUCH has it changed?

How much have I changed?

Would I even be able to cut it with these modern players who have had years of current and up-to-date practice?

How long would it take me to pick up the mechanics I once had?

Would I ever even be able to? They say the fast twitch reflexes go early, and the pro players seem to get younger every year. I'm 34 years old now.

These questions began to plague my thoughts, day after day after day.

Then it occurred to me...

There is a story here. This story has a beginning, and it has a middle, but it doesn't have an end... Not yet.

I MUST write the ending to this story.

I MUST provide answers to these questions.

So I'm making a proposal... I will take this journey, and I will do it publicly.

We will uncover the answers to all of these questions together.

Am I washed up? Is the magic gone? Has the game evolved too far past me to compete?

I'm calling this the TEN YEAR PROJECT. I believe this is the first EVER comeback story after a ten year break from try harding in a MOBA. Eight FULL years of not playing a SINGLE game against real people.

Join me, and let's find out what the answers to all of these questions are.

I will do my best to represent the OG Season 1 players, and in the following sections, I will outline my mission statement, my goals, and some strategic ideation and mathematical breakdowns.

Just as I had done in Season 1, way back when I made my first forray into writing League content... I'm going to lay everything out on the line first, and back up my talk later.

Thank you for reading this far, and now for those who are still with me, onto the TEN YEAR PROJECT.

We have outlined the questions that need to be answered.

How long is too long?

How badly have my skills decayed from the time away?
How much game knowledge has passed me by, and will I be able to compete with so much of a gap standing in the way?
How much better are the players now that 10 years have passed without me playing a single game?
Now being more than TEN YEARS older, have my mechanics rusted and my fast twitch dissolved?

Now, We're going to answer these questions.

We're going to stream this process, starting from ZERO!
I'm inviting you to join a tri-pronged community, YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, to track the progress, hang out, and enjoy one another's company.
We're going to do updates, discuss learnings, and include y'all on the process. If I can learn things, adapt, and perform, you'll be able to see how I did it, and learn and grow alongside me. My gameplay (which will be in the public eye), will be like a LIVING GUIDE that we all participate in.
We're going to have a hell of a lot of fun overcoming these questions, digging in, taking on the challenge.
We're going to do a lot of thinking, theorycrafting, and talking about these ideas.
We're going to put it all on the line.

THE SPECIFIC GOALS:

We are going to attempt to accomplish the following:

Crack into the TOP 1% of the playerbase in the North American ranked ladder, by the end of NEXT season, and I will stream this process candidly.

If we get GOOD, we will give coaching on a regular basis to players looking to develop and grow.

We are going to build a community of positive minded League of Legends players, a hub of GAMERS who are enthusiastic about winning and getting better and aiming at the highest level that they can achieve, whatever that level is. If the Iron player promotes to Bronze, HELL YES BROTHER, we celebrate that. If the Gold player goes to Plat or Diamond, LET'S F GO!!! This community will be supportive, and looking for the good. Even if the rest of the community is toxic, this particular microcosm will not be.

Finally, I have a secret goal. I want to go back to my roots. I want to create and cause a massive meta-game shift again. I want to innovate a playstyle so destructive like I did in season 1 that it catches on and causes items to need to be reworked. I want to permanently alter the landscape of this game once again, TEN YEARS after the first time.

I believe all of these things are possible.

I believe in myself and my ability to produce this impact.

Join me, and find out together in real time with me if I can do it.

The player who seeks Dopamine plays for fun.

The player who seeks Serotonin plays to win, and to improve.

I play to win, and to improve. I seek Serotonin in the result of my play.

I chase becoming a better version of myself, not the best in the world, but the best I can be.

Whether a player is in iron, or whether they are in Challenger, this form of Serotonin centric pursuit is available in the form of self improvement, focus, and drive, and THIS will be a centric mentality present in this project.

Many League players (who seek dopamine first) will consider me a sweaty try hard nerd who isn't even good enough to warrant this level of investment or focus, and that will be factual by default to the person who thinks this way since that is simply a perspective grounded observation, not a fact. Some people would call this, "An opinion."

We will theory craft, we will optimize, and we will aim for the good here.

Plan accordingly if you decide to join me! I want positive minded, engaged, and thinking people around me. We can make each other better as we pursue some of that good serotonin in our continued victory and progress.

I am not setting out to win every game.

I am not setting out to be the most famous name in the game.

I am not setting out to be rank 1, ever.

I am not planning to go pro.

I am not trying to stream full time. I like my job.

I am not planning to BE tilt proof, even though I will strive to be. Emotional and mental lapses in stoicism are human, and with my health the way it is, I am more vulnerable to it than I used to be.

I am FULLY aware that I may log in to this game and place directly into Iron elo. I have no expectations to the contrary. What I am NOT trying to do is prove anything to any single person in the sense that I am seeking your validation, or to show you that I can be good at this game, I have proven everything I need to know to myself in my life countless times. My own belief in myself is all I have ever needed in my life.

The last time I wrote guides on this website, I was an angsty young man in my early 20's. I'm in my early to mid 30's now, my life is good with my fiance and I think I can approach this game with a more measured and healthy mindset now.

I am not trying to dump my heart and soul into this game this time, but I'm also not trying to prevent myself from finding meaning in the pursuit of greatness if that so happens to materialize here.

If you accept my invitation to join me on this grand journey of discovery and community, I hope you will remember to accept this journey for what it is... Every bit as spectacular or perhaps initially underwhelming it may be. I'm planning to have a ROUGH start, which then smooths out into steady progress, and eventual lift off. We will see if it plays out that way or not...

I am going to write a few chapters outlining my initial thoughts, my initial plans, and my initial observations. Please read through to the end before drawing any conclusions, these ideas occurred in my mind in a sequence, and I am presenting them in the order they happened.

I will take you through these thought processes in sufficient detail, so that you can understand why I am thinking these things.

The purpose of this is that I have an "early League of Legends brain". I have been gone for a LONG time. I don't know what the meta is, I haven't been watching people play the game for eight years, and haven't try harded for TEN YEARS.

I want to outline what I BELIEVE the best builds will be for certain champions, take them into game, test it live on stream, and see what has to be adjusted and changed. This experiment will be fun, and it will test my ability to predict the power of items before ever even stepping into a game with them.

I want to spend ample time on this, because this is a literal ONCE in TEN YEARS opportunity.

After this item experiment, I will then also do the same thing, but for Champions.

We're going to start with ITEMS that seem strong, use MATH to support the claims as to why they may be good, and then work BACKWARDS to a list of champions that will be good vessels for these items that I think I should be able to play.

Then we will outline a list of champion variables, and we will conclude with whether the item kits are more significant, or the items are more significant, from a build-meta-analysis perspective. This process will be done here in this written project before I ever queue up to game.

Then, as mentioned before, with our predictions written down for all to see, we will go directly into ranked, SKIPPING NORMAL GAMES entirely to test these builds in real time where it really counts.

I am going to live, learn, test, and die by the sword, right in front of your eyes.

Let's go ahead and move right along now into that item/champion/meta predictive analysis, and unpack the meat and potatoes about what this is all about.

You're not going to want to miss this.

IN THE BEGINNING the game was played with 2 tanky melee units bot lane, ADC mid, APC top, and only a select group of champions like Warwick and Udyr could even clear the jungle. There were no jungle items. There was no babysitting your ADC.

I wrote the guide that permanently changed the way the world played League. The Offtank-Meta guide. Off-Tank top laner, APC mid, ADC and support bot lane, and jungler.



In the EARLY days of league, after my guide was written and blew up, there was typically ONE champ in your game who could do aoe burst, one who could do massive single target DPS, and a couple relative tanks and some utility. That was it, the game was fairly straightforward at that time. RARELY you would see an assassin pick up in mid lane. Deviation was abnormal.

The game changed a lot by Season 3, assassins everywhere, APC top laners were more common (still not the norm) and jungle had evolved to have its own items that opened up the role to much more dynamic game play with a broader host of viable champions there.

By the end of season 5, (I was no longer playing the game seriously, just taking occasional invites here and there from friends, I actually finished the season in Platinum as a result of how few games I played!) the game was effectively unrecognizable in its evolution since season 1. This was a serious e-sport now.

But that's when I quit, and I haven't been back since.

I have spent some time reading the items in the game, and I have looked into Lolalytics as well to investigate win rates and analyze the game state from the perspective of data. I have also read through the abilities of many champions (not all of the new ones, it's a LOT to take in.) I am surprised to see just how many of my old favorites have been totally reworked. This has truly become an entirely different game from the one I once knew.

We're going to start with SURVIVABILITY theorycrafting in this now alien world.

I'm going to copy and paste a portion from my ORIGINAL Off-Tank anti meta guide which got to 2.2 million views so many years ago:

"The way resistances work in League of legends, there is sort of a "Diminishing returns effect" ... Allow me to try to explain in a simple way.

Go into a custom game, and buy 5 Thornmail You will find that as you get higher armor and higher, the % of damage reduction begins to scale up more and more SLOWLY.

I'll leave a few examples using math to show the progression and how it tops out.

---

Take your armor, for example, and divide it 100 times + your armor, then multiply by 100.
Example:

I've got 20 armor... So 20 / (100+20) = 0.17 x 100 = 17% reduction.

On higher armor values, like 350... 350 / (100+350) x 100 = 78% reduction.

---

So, I'll leave some example using that math now, to show the progression and how you get less and less reduction the higher you go.

20 / (100+20) = 0.17 x 100 = 17% reduction...

...

20 / (100+20) = 17%

(The next 20 armor provides 11% more reduction.)

40 / (100+40) = 28%

(The next 20 armor provides 9% more reduction.)

60 / (100+60) = 37%

(The next 20 armor provides 7% more reduction.)

80 / (100+80) = 44%

(The next 20 armor provides 6% more reduction.)

100 / (100+100) = 50%

(The next 20 armor provides 4% more reduction.)

120 / (100+120) = 54%

(The next 20 armor provides 4% more reduction.)

140 / (100+140) = 58%

(The next 20 armor provides 3% more reduction.)

160 / (100+160) = 61%

Etc...

350 / (100+350) = 78% reduction."



Now, while this IS TECHNICALLY LINEAR damage reduction,and I have to make that disclaimer before some mathematician gets angry, sometimes you get to "good enough" resistances and then buying health becomes BETTER in terms of increasing survival.

A good example here uses those final 2 values listed:

160 armor and 61% damage reduction...
350 armor and 78% damage reduction...

A Chain vest costs 800 gold for 40 armor... 350 - 160 = 190, / 40 = 4.75 or roughly FIVE cloth armors.

If your champion has 2500 HP, and you want 17% more survivability vs phys dmg, (or the difference between 78% and 61%, you can EITHER buy 4.75 Chain Vest, OR, you can increase your health by 17%, or 425 HP, AKA, THREE Ruby Crystal.

The price investment differential here is:
800 x 4.75 = 3800 gold
400 x 3 = 1200 gold

So at the point that you already have 160 armor, and 2500 HP, it is more than three times more efficient to build HP than armor for survivability.

This is OF COURSE ignoring shields and heals which begin to sway the line of reasoning back towards armor, especially against mono-damage compisitions.

Well, now that we understand resistance efficiency a bit better, let's examine why I'm bringing it up:

The MOST MR you can buy on a single item is curently 60 before it's effects are considered.

The MOST Armor you can buy on a single item is 90 ( Frozen Heart) but most common buys range between 60-70, so we'll use 70 for our math.

With a base Armor value of 107.4 at level 18 (Using Jax as our model) we can see your phys dmg reduction go from:
107.4 = 51.78% dmg reduction
177.4 = 63.95% dmg reduction.

I would certainly say this level of increase of 12% DR for a melee champion is warranted, the debate begins when you do it again.

247.4 = 71.21 dmg reduction

This 7.26% increase is immediately harder to justify.

What do we do with this information?

Itemization looks EASIER to me than it did in season 1, 2, and 3. Back then you had to think about 3 or 4 item sets, and you'd have large gaps in your stats if you didn't plan carefully.

Now, most items have 3, 4 even 5 major stat groups that you need, and most items have a little bit of something you want now or later. The result is more rounded champions with more smooth growth patterns.

But that doesn't mean we can't min-max by being deliberate...

My value proposition here is that currently, based on the way items are laid out, HEALTH appears to have disproportionately high values, specifically in Heartsteel, and Warmog's Armor. Grasp of the Undying can come into play as well.

The long short is that most defensive items carry a blend of stats, but the ones that do not are currently able to push a kit towards extreme ends of stat pools.

Think about the very statistically simple Infinity Edge. It's hard to imagine a more role defining item than this.

Once you've got your crit locked in, and your attack speed is good, you can build Infinity Edge to incredible effect on most adc role champions. I'm not claiming this is the optimal pathing, but it is a good example of how the math works, and how multiple stats combine leading to amplification of those desirable metrics, culminating in the form of DPS. You could choose utility over pure math when you wind up in game, but that's not what we're outlining here right now.

Defense is the same way, buy think of armor as AD, magic res as AS, and health as crit and crit dmg.

You might get to some decent situational defenses by forgoing hp, but you'll never be a TANK that way. Just like you might hit hard with autos on full ad and lethality Zed or Talon, but you'll never be able to reliably win games by right clicking that way.

Big right click damage is produced by that blend of AS, Crit, and AD.

In the same sense, that HUGE tank that nobody seems to be able to knock down has to utilize a blend of defensive stats, HP and armor being the primaries, but also benefitting from MR, and other defensive buffs that are available such as the shields that are present in items like Sterak's Gage, Eclipse, Maw of Malmortius, or auras.

But while everything laid ut about is factually true, there IS a potential problem with this logic, and it's not a small one; we're going to unpack just exactly what that problem is in the next section of this written work, and what we plan to DO about it.

Please read on.

NOW...

Here is the moment SOME of you may have been waiting for... Remember I said we're starting with items, then evaluating champions?

Let's get to that part, because this is where it all gets very interesting to me.

I think I have figured out just by reading items and kits what the problems are with the current game state, and we can use game state problems to our advantage.

As I was reading through the champions, I noticed something which intially I found interesting, but eventually I began to realize was a deliberate and effectively unilateral game design choice...

EVERYTHING has % hp damage now. Almost EVERY single champion in the game has access to some degree of % hp damage.

I found this extraordinarily bizarre at first glance.

It was such a drastic contrast to the prior game state that it was hard for me initially to even grasp how major of a change this really was.

After nearly a week of mulling over the possible implications, I realized that this was the SINGLE LARGEST change to the game state in League I had ever witnessed. Back when I played, if you wanted % hp damage you picked Brand or Vayne, and that was considered common knowledge. % HP damage was a price you payed for at champion select, by leaving something else behind, typically mobility or defenses or burst.

Now, it's built into almost every champion's kit, and is present on more items than it used to be as well.

With this newfound revelation, I had to go back to the drawing board.

That 150 armor we mentioned is still 60% damage reduction, but if somebody buys 40% pen, it goes down to 47% reduction. That would mean that HALF of the % HP damage that is present on nearly everybody's kit will be getting through, and while this is "decent" damage reduction, in many cases you will no longer feel durable anymore as an offtanky character with these numbers.

The new question we have to ask is, HOW can we itemize against ALL threats?

The long short of it, is that you cannot. You never could, really, but it's even worse now trying to itemize defenses.

You can still probably attain raid boss status on a few champions, and we'll get to that shortly and to which champions those probably are, but for now let's unpack defensive itemization in a world FULL of % HP damage.

Full tank isn't confusing to build, and so I'm not going to waste anybody's time deep diving it. Hit 4k+ hp, and 300+ armor and you'll be a sturdy tank in most games.

Offtank is now (and has always been) a more difficult role to itemize, and so we're going to be spending more time on that concept here.

I think in terms of armor, and my predictions surrounding this hybrid role in a game state full of % hp damage, 220 currently sounds like a great target to reach for in terms of defensive stats on an offtank...

With no pen at all, you've got 69% resistance to the physical damage type.

Through 40% pen, that still leaves 57% damage reduction.

I also think 3500 is a great and realistic target for HP on an offtank as well.

This spread of stats would allow you to survive 16 unique instances of 350 damage. These could be ADC crits or significant abilities, but regardless, the point is that is a pretty solid level of durability.

Here's the problem, there is basically NO DESIRABLE item path for an OFFTANK that would allow you to get this degree of good offensive mix going on, and unless the champion's kit carries something with a tremendously low CD to routinely proc Sheen in all of it's upgraded forms, then by building the level of defenses you would need to build, you would have no damage at all.

This incentivizes us to pick Sheen users with low cooldowns, and so based on this, I am predicting a lot of Trinity Force, Iceborn Gauntlet, and Divine Sunderer will be popular and effective picks in the current game state based on the fact that % HP damage means you MUST have BOTH health AND resistances to be durable at all.

The only alternative I see is to get your HP and Armor vis-a-vis level advantages, because you don't have to buy those stats... Because of this I am predicting bruiser top laners and fast clearing junglers to be good in the current game state (An interesting side effect to be implicated purely based on a game with tremendous % HP damage.) If you are feeling like fast clearing junglers and bruisers are oppressive in top lane, this could be one explanation as to why, but...

There might be another way though;

If a champion's kit additionally offers us enough defensive capability internally that we can forgo buying very large quantities of resistances, AND we run them in the JG or top lane for the aforementioned reasons, then we are NOW talking about possibly getting into that space where our items can look a little goofy (mix of dmg and health and a little res) and not follow a straight line, but because our CHAMPION'S KIT and a LEVEL ADVANTAGE it rounds us out, and we will actually hit those good targets of 220 armor, and 3500 HP, and we can do it while buying those classic juicy aggressve staples like Black Cleaver for example, stretching the effectiveness of the HP offered by the item with the natural durability in kit.

Garen is a good example of somebody who can make Black Cleaver and Hullbreaker look like a pretty tempting buy in tandem with Stridebreaker. With Courage and Hullbreaker alone, we're looking at A combination of stats that will place us between 120-250 armor right there by themselves, depending on what level Garen is. These are all examples of items with desirable offensive stats for Garen, that offer hefty HP stats. When you look at an item like Hullbreaker on Garen, we're entering into a VERY interesting space on a champion who will have LOADS of aggressive utility in these items, TONS of HP, and actually tremendous Armor and MR pools provided he is alone in a sidelane which you will often be on any top laner (catching and pushing sidelanes quickly is crucial to climb elo.)

Is Garen the only example of a viable offtank now?

No, and I used to think Garen was trash, but he is currently one VERY interesting and compelling example in what is now actually not a very large champion pool of potential Offtanks, in a game that does offer a huge but fairly arbitrary host of choices.

I think by the time this written work is done, we will narrow down on less than ten viable offtanks, which is unfortunate because the role is very enjoyable and fulfilling to play, but we have to acknowledge the game state and adjust to it.

The reality is that the MASSIVE amounts of % HP damage introduced to the game will have likely incentivized building full damage rather than these items which contain a mix of stats on most champions, leading to the popularity of assassins and burst, and what is likely an accelerated the game state to a nearly frenetic break-neck and wild pace.

This is all because buying defense doesn't work in a game where the right defensive mix on most champions is at least twice as expensive as the offensive counterpart. Only a handful of champions can even use health now and feel durable. Are you starting to see the bigger picture?

Additionally, in the current item spread, the stat lethality is looking plentiful.

In the early era of this game, you used to build Giant's Belt to counter flat armor pen and the champions who would build it. You cannot build pure HP to survive the massive amounts of % dmg that the game has however, this means that the effect of that is ALSO that will not be buying to to counter flat pen like you used to do back when I played.

So the summary here is that because you can't build flat HP by itself, lethality will be overpowered, and only FULL TANKS with LOW CDs will feel really strong or viable now, because they always planned to build a Sheen item anyway and then itemize full tank which is the only way to feel truly durable in a game state like this.

I think the problem I see here is that fixing the frenetic game state would require either removing the % HP damage, or nerfing it across all champions who don't need it to be defined in their kit...

Is Riot likely to do this, or should we make peace with the fact that their game design choices have led us into an assassin mid Lethality CLOWN FIESTA where even ADCs will be finding viability buying these items because NOBODY (Not even the kits who would like to do this) can viably the ideal build flat HP to counter the burst.

% HP being in everything in my opinion is likely a design error for the above reasons. They can nerf the % HP that exists in all kits and this would help to bring lethality into a better place passively, by allowing more HP to be available in the game for purchase, thereby reducing the effectiveness of selecting an assassin.

But rather than observe to whine, we will observe to adapt, to utilize these ideas, and then implement into gameplay.

We will USE the game state to our advantage, and understand that trinity tanks and lethality are going to reign supreme.

If everything I have laid out above hold to be true, we will look for champions that are incentivized to build armor to be very strong, or champions with low CDs who can afford to build 4 armor items to be very strong as well.

With ALL of that being said, we move on to damage, and how the old timer season 3 brain thinks about League, and then onto new time thoughts as well.

As mentioned before, the fact that building flat HP with no defenses is not a viable source of survivability in a game smashed full of % HP damage intrinsic to so many kits for free means that lethality's stringest counter (flat hp to survive an assassin's burst) doesn't win us the game now.

The response here is that AD lethality mid laners will be very strong, and this should accelerate the pacing of the game to a quasi absurd degree. Every game will be a clown fiesta. assassins have a hard time closing games out however, and this will lead to a lot of throwy type situations where we should be able to capitalize on aggressive positioning, forward posturing, and pick-seeking plays and body language.

Knowing that in every game there will be a Talon or a Kha'Zix can morally deflate somebody with weak mental, but we don't have weak mental. We understand observe and learn game states, and we figure out what to do about it proactively.

Picking champions which gain free armor is an easy solution, but also remembering that champions who have silences, stuns, taunts, etc are also really powerful into assassins.

Some great options for damage in a meta full of AD assassin style mid laners could be K'Sante, Poppy, Garen, Rammus, or Malphite, just to name a few. Nasus, Ornn, and even Graves should also feel good, due to the passive armor they recieve from their kits. Any kind of survivability in kit, including the forms that Hecarim and Amumu and Cho'Gath have are likely to be strong as well, and the beautiful thing about these options are that ALL of them have a way to itemize into a decent amount of damage.

The modern bruiser has to look for blended stats in their damage items, typically HP and offense, and bring defenses in their toolkit. A single item has to constitute all the defense they bring, like a Hullbreaker or a Gargoyle Stoneplate. Death's Dance is a cheeky survivability tool that still leans into some damage as well and carries some armor into the equation as well.

Inversely, the modern tank has to bring either the damage intrinsically to their kit (Think Amumu or Rammus) or low CDs in their kit that will actvate Sheen procs reliably, and build pure defense from there in their items.

Long gone are the days of the OG forms of Trinity Force combining with Warmog's Armor and Atma's Impaler along with Force of Nature and Randuin's Omen. (Throwback reference for you OG players.)

Long gone are the days of ADCs simply buying AS, AD, Crit, and a pen item. Now ADCs have a choice between lethality and AD, ability haste, AS, Crit, pen, and AD. And in a meta where people cannot viably itemize pure health for defense, lethality ADC item paths are liable to be quite strong as well.

This only further suggests that armor stacking bruisers and tanks utilizing Thornmail might be a good source of damage now, given that the squishy DPS ranged carries and assassins won't build hp, and that means Thornmail is also passively buffed by game state produced by the abundant presence of % hp damage... Look to see spiking winrates on champions that can build Thornmail.

It all comes back to the % hp damage.

So should we buy things like Blade of the Ruined King or Kraken Slayer, given the game state is so fast and frenetic, and most players won't even bother building HP?

Probably yes, items like that are generally statistically impossible to balance and tend to outperform the investments made into the item. And just because WE know the math behind HP requires defense now to be good doesn't mean EVERYBODY knows that. You will still see full hp stacking players, we can chop them down.

Speaking of damage, keep an eye on guys like Master Yi when you have item paths like Guinsoo's Rageblade and the aforementioned Blade of the Ruined King and Kraken Slayer available... It should be impossible to survive an ulted Master Yi with that build, almost regardless of what you itemized in terms of defense. It's just too much % HP damage to fast.

Finally, and I'll keep this relatively short, there's a lot of modifiers based on "Bonus" stats.

This was NOT the case last time I played.

For the most part these show up as "win more" mechanics, scaling stats you already possess in a beneficial way.

Most commonly they turn health into a more viable stat to lean into, typically into damage or shields. I'm looking at Champions like Dr. Mundo as a great examnple of this, but he is far from the only instance of this.

Keep your eyes on items like Lord Dominik's Regards as people stack health as an incredible damage multiplier. Not only will your damage be greatly increased from the tremendous armor pen stats (This item will be one of the best DPS increases at level 18 even if no armor was built on many champions...), but you'll also get that hefty bonus of up to 25% more damage. In most cases, this damage buff will out DPS any heal mitigationb you might have received from Mortal Reminder, so try to remember this when you're on the rift. You should reluctantly build Mortal Reminder, only if you see incredible healing sources, and typically more than one instance. (Those who heal in this game tend to also stack health, be aware of this.)

Liandry's Torment is a huge potential pick up for any AP carry with relatively low cooldowns as well for the same reasons, in a game where tremendous sources of bonus health abound, and building defensive stats is hard to do due to slim availability within kits, we can lean into these shredding effects for a big portion of our damage.

Champions that can utilize these items are my final emphasis in terms of theory craftting as potential focal points in the new (new to me) item and Champion pools.

I'm looking at Cassiopeia, Heimerdinger, Xerath, Viktor, Azir, Zilean, Veigar, Teemo, etc for Liandry's Torment. The low CDs and build paths that likely land you lower HP than your opponents.

The meta we have described is my prediction of the current game state based on the previously described elements I found in the items, and the champions.

The champions listed in the build guide are the ones that we have our eyes on as our prescribed cure to this game state. Not that we can resolve the game state, only Riot can do that by nerfing the abundant % HP damage present in te game. Rather, we use the "cure" in the sense that we will simply use the best tools to deal with the current job. And those tools will have to bring the stats we need to survive it, given the item paths that exist now.

The builds we plan to utilize will bring these defensive in-kit-stats forward, by adding a mix of stats into kits that already have some intrinsic defenses, and can utilize damage items well.

We're going to try to carry games through this hybrid role, focusing on building EXP leads and crushing down squishy champions with exagerrated and oppressive stat pools that they hopefully cannot compete with.

I invite you to join me on this journey of meta destruction for the second time.

I realized at some point in my life that I never really understood what I had accomplished last time with all of this.

Millions of views on anything is absolutely mind boggling, I appreciate each and every one of you who reads and thinks about this stuff, and I can't wait to see you on stream, on Tik-Tok, and on Youtube.

I want to become a better player, and a better person, and I want to help you do the same thing.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts, I hope you are interested in following me through the 10 YEARS PROJECT as I try to tackle the goals I laid out. let's build a positive community that aims for the good and tries their best.

Wishing you the best,

See you soon guys,

- Duff

Follow me on ALL platforms to stay current and up to date on the 10 year project, progress, and all future endeavors.

This will be a whole lot more than just League of Legends.

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