For tanks, the most important stats are health, armor, and magic resistance. Making the most of these stats can be the difference between winning and losing. Learn how to evaluate defensive stats to maximize your survivability.
When learning to itemize for tanking in League of Legends, it’s important to have a clear understanding of defensive stats. This guide explores the relationship between health, armor, and magic resistance. While there are other stats that are important to tanking, these three form the cornerstone of conventional tanking. Knowledge of these stats and how they interact with each other provides a solid foundation for learning tank itemization.
Though health scales very differently from armor and magic resistance, these three stats have an important relationship with each other. Health scales additively, meaning that 1 point of health on an item will always translate to 1 point in your health pool. On the other hand, armor and magic resistance scale reverse exponentially, with each point reducing less damage than the last.
There are many items and abilities in League of Legends that scale with health, armor, and magic resistance. Even some runes scale with these stats. Anything that scales with health, armor, or magic resistance increases the value of building those stats.
Take Braum’s W, ‘Stand Behind Me’, for example. The armor and magic resistance provided to Braum and his target increases with his bonus armor and magic resistance. This means that Braum gets more value out of resistances than most other champions since they directly impact the effectiveness of his ability.
Gargoyle Stoneplate is another great example. Its active ability grants a shield for 100 + 90% of your bonus health. Not only that, but its passive ability increases your bonus armor and bonus magic resistance by 5% whenever a champion does damage to you. Because it scales with each of them, all three stats are more valuable with Gargoyle Stoneplate.
It’s important to keep your items, runes, and abilities in mind when evaluating stats. Building around these things will help you get the most out of your build and your champion.
Looking at how they scale, you might assume that armor and magic resistance hit a point where they no longer provide any meaningful value. This isn’t the case, however. To understand why, you first need to understand the concept of effective health. Your effective health is the amount of raw damage (damage before mitigation) it takes to kill you. The reason this is important to understand is that effective health scales additively with both armor and magic resistance. For every point of armor or magic resistance your effective health for the corresponding damage type increases by 1% of your health stat.
Once you understand how effective health works, you can use it to compare the value of health, armor, and magic resistance.
For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use an example where you have 60 armor, 1,000 health, and are trying to maximize your effective physical health. In this example, you are choosing between a Ruby Crystal (+150 health for 400 gold) and a Cloth Armor (+15 armor for 300 gold). With the stats you have, your current effective physical health is 1,600 (1,000 + 60%). The Cloth Armor would increase this to 1,750 (1000 + 75%), and the Ruby Crystal would increase it to 1,840 (1,150 + 60%). Not only does the Ruby Crystal provide more effective health, but it’s also more gold efficient (0.6 effective health per gold vs 0.5 effective health per gold).
While the Ruby Crystal does provide more value in that example, how would the situation change if you had 2,000 health instead? With the extra health, you would now have 3,200 effective physical health (2,000 + 60%). The Cloth Armor would now increase it to 3,500 (2000 + 75%), and the Ruby Crystal would increase it to 3,440 (2,150 + 60%). Even though they are the same items, the Cloth Armor now provides twice as much value because of the increased health.
From this, you can see that resistances provide more value the more health you have. The opposite is true as well; health provides more value the higher your resistances are. Knowing this and evaluating your choices based on it can be extremely helpful when building against specific threats.
Despite how useful effective health can be, it also has a lot of limitations. The most obvious of these limitations is that it doesn’t account for the other stats or effects of items. Because of this, it’s important to remember that effective health calculations are only one part of evaluating an item.
The more serious limitation is that maximizing effective health only accounts for one type of damage. While it can be great when building against teams that primarily use one damage type, it’s a lot harder to use when facing a team that outputs a mix of physical and magical damage. On top of this, there is also lethality, magic penetration, armor penetration, true damage, and maximum health damage to consider. All of these change the calculation for effective health, making it more difficult to accurately judge the value of stats. In these cases, you may need to take a different approach to evaluate health, armor, and magic resistance.
As discussed above, most teams will have a mix of different damage types. Because of this, you need to decide who you are building against. The first thing you must do is identify who their main threats are now and who their threats will be later in the game. In some games, there will be one clear threat and in other games, there will be multiple. After identifying the main threats, you need to look at the enemy team composition. You want to estimate how much damage of each type the enemy team can deal. This helps you plan your build to mitigate as much damage as possible.
For example, if there is only one potential threat on the enemy team, building against that threat will provide a lot of value. Similarly, if the enemy team primarily uses one damage type, building to resist that damage will be extremely effective. While team compositions tend to be more complex than those examples, the important thing is to have a plan for your build based on your analysis of the enemy team. As you accumulate more experience and game knowledge, you will find it much easier to fit your build to the enemy team.
Lethality and magic penetration reduce armor and magic resistance, respectively, by a flat amount. This reduction scales with champion level from 0.6 resistance reduction per point at level 1 to 1 per point at level 18. It’s worth noting that these stats only reduce resistances for the purpose of damage calculation and don’t actually change your champion's stats. As we know from looking at effective health, armor and magic resistance increase the value of health. By reducing your armor and magic resistance, lethality and magic penetration lower the value of health. Thankfully, accounting for this is simple. All you need to do is reduce your resistances to match the enemy's lethality or magic penetration before calculating effective health.
As an example, imagine you had 2,000 health and 80 magic resistance. When working out your effective health against a level 18 enemy with 40 magic penetration you would calculate as if you only had 40 magic resistance. This is made slightly more difficult when the enemy is below level 18, but the principle still holds.
Unlike lethality and flat magic penetration, percentage magic and armor penetration reduce your resistances by a percentage of their total. What this means is that if the enemy has 40% magic penetration, each point of magic resistance you have is only worth 40% of its normal value. Again, reducing resistances also reduces the value of health. The ability to reduce the value of both health and resistances makes percentage armor and magic penetration very threatening. Regardless, you can still calculate effective health in the same way as with lethality and flat magic penetration.
True damage ignores all resistances when calculating damage. Against pure true damage, your effective health is simply your maximum health. While it might seem like this makes it easy to evaluate stats, that isn’t necessarily true. The problem is that you will rarely, if ever, face pure true damage. This means that you need to build against both the true damage and a second type of damage. How you go about this depends on the amount of true damage you’re expecting to take. The more true damage you are likely to take, the more value you get out of stacking health.
Maximum health damage, as the name implies, deals a portion of the target's maximum health as damage. Maximum health damage comes in a few different forms. For maximum health physical or magical damage, you can reduce the damage you take by building the relevant resistance. Maximum health true damage, on the other hand, can’t be mitigated by building health or resistances. The best way to deal with it is to mitigate it through other means, such as healing.
To conclude, the goal of this guide is to give you some important tools to help you evaluate items as a tank. Stats, although important, by no means paint a complete picture of an item's value. It’s crucial to understand an item's effects and other stats to accurately evaluate it. I hope that this guide has given you a better understanding of health, armor, and magic resistance as well as the ways they interact with each other. Good luck on your climb.
