Itemization: Defense Basics
In Wild Rift, there are three basic forms of defense — HP, armor, and magic resist. These three values determine how tanky you are against opponents with varying damage profiles. But what should you build? Is HP better to stack early? When is it time to get as much armor as possible? After reading this article, you should be better equipped to answer these questions. For now, let’s move forward holding any special or unique characteristics of certain champions constant.
Resistances
As you know, armor is the stat that provides you defenses against physical damage, and magic resist (MR) provides defenses against magic damage. Generally speaking, when you see enemy compositions that are primarily attack damage (AD) or ability power (AP) focused, players often start buying armor or MR as if they’re going out of stock faster than current gen GPUs. Let’s take a moment to ask, why? How do resistances actually work?
Resistances act as a multiplier against their respective damage types. Incoming damage is modified by the resistances you have, defined by:
Damage Taken = Incoming Damage* (100/(100+Resistance Type))
This formula is the same for both armor and MR, just with swapped values. For the sake of explanation, assume you have an attacker that deals 600 physical damage per auto-attack. The following graphs outline how much damage a defender would take, depending on how much armor they had:
Using the graphs, we can see that resistances mitigate incoming damage. A common example people often point out here is that 100 armor or MR mitigates 50% of their incoming damage types. We can also see that the graphs are not linear; that is, as you buy more of a resistance, the amount of mitigation per resistance bought decreases. This leads some to think that armor and MR provide diminishing returns once you hit a certain amount — but this is not the whole story.
Effective HP
HP is the most important stat in any game, as once your HP bar hits zero, you are dead (unless you have a revive). How does HP relate to resistances though? Well, if you continue with the assumption of an attacker that deals 600 damage per auto-attack, then a champion with 1200 HP and 0 armor will die in 2 auto-attacks. A champion with 1200HP and 100 armor will die in 4 auto-attacks. A champion with 2400HP and 0 armor will die in 4 auto-attacks as well. This relationship between HP, armor, and hits to kill is perhaps best captured by Physical Effective HP, or PEHP. Effective HP (EHP) is, as the name implies, how much HP you truly have against a specific damage type; how much of a damage type you can really absorb in a fight before dying. It is defined as:
Effective Health= HP*(1+0.01*Resistance Type)
To explain this better, let’s create a situation in which we have a theoretical average champion with roughly average base HP and armor values. We can describe a scenario where every shop (or in this case, every tick), this champion can buy either a Ruby Crystal or a Cloth Armor (or neither). Both cost 500 gold, and the former affords the champion 150HP, and the latter provides 20 Armor. We can then check different scenarios where the champion has different buying patterns over the course of many shops, and see how this reflects in their PEHP.
In the case where you only buy Ruby Crystal or only buy Cloth Armor, PEHP increases linearly. Obviously, buying neither results in PEHP staying the same. Note: don’t worry too much about the scales of the axes, as this is merely a hypothetical. Now, consider a case where the champion alternates buying a Ruby Crystal and Cloth Armor each shop, i.e. they are buying both HP and armor over time:
You might be surprised to see that PEHP rapidly increases compared to the other three scenarios, as this graph is quadratic. As a result of this quadratic growth of PEHP, we find that stacking armor does not necessarily have diminishing returns, provided you have the proper amount of HP to pair with it.
To put this in a more practical sense, PEHP is part of the reason why Darius has been such a nefarious champion. Prior to his recent nerf in patch 2.2b, at both levels 1 and 15, Darius ranked 2nd against baron laners in terms of PEHP and MEHP. For these metrics, he was also towards the top when compared to all other champions. Even if he didn’t get ahead in lane, Darius could very easily transition to being a very potent bruiser in later stages of the game.
What to Buy
We now know that we should strive to have a healthy balance between HP and resistances. But, what exactly is this balance? In 2014, Reddit user u/Spate_of_Fire made a post and a google docs article about what he calls the “HP/Armor-MR Equilibrium Curve”. His curve utilizes the relationship between gold efficiency values and apparent HP (which is just effective HP), and it is defined as:
HPequ= ResistanceGoldEfficiency/HPGoldEfficiency*(100+Resistance Type)
For those who are unaware, gold efficiency is how much gold it takes to get 1 of any stat. In Wild Rift, HP has a gold efficiency of 3.3, i.e. you need to spend 3.3 gold to buy 1 HP. Resistances have a gold efficiency of 25. So, the equation and respective graph come out to be:
HPequ= 25/3.3*(100+Resistance Type)
Generally speaking, when looking at this graph with respect to your own decision-making, you’ll want to see where your own champion’s numbers stack up against the curve. If you’re under the curve, you’ll want more HP, and if you’re over the curve, you’ll want more armor or MR. For instance, if you had 2000HP, and you wanted to optimize your build against magic damage, you would want to hit 164 MR.
Let’s try to make this graph more useful since most people won’t have enough time to refer to it when they are in-game. When you are primarily concerned about a single damage type and are trying to itemize accordingly:
In other words, starting at 1000HP where you’d like 32 of the resistance, every additional 500HP would need another 66 of your chosen resistance for ideal defenses against that damage type. I will also point out that the lowest possible resistance for any champion is 30 (the base armor or MR at level 1), and at 30 armor or MR, you would want 985HP. Typically in the early game, by this data, you will benefit more in the short-term by buying HP. This is part of the reason why Ruby Crystal is the best level 1 item if your goal is to be as tanky as possible.
Considerations and Conclusions
Obviously, the above does not take into account things such as flat resistance penetration, penetration %, true damage, and other factors. I may write another article in the future that goes into some or all of these factors, as well as methods of countering them. Furthermore, this article does not consider the benefits of certain item passives such as Armored (from Randiun’s Omen).
Finally, what you might also be wondering is what to build if the enemy team is seemingly split 50/50 in their overall damage profile, and/or you don’t know what to build in terms of defense. If you are a carry (ADC, mage, assassin), and can only afford to build a single defensive item, think about your greatest threats in teamfights, as well as the passive effects of the options available to you, i.e. Maw of Malmortius provides a barrier, while Guardian Angel provides a revive. If you are a bruiser or tank, it is a little more complicated. HP, unlike a specific resistance, increases both PEHP and MEHP. One could then say that when in doubt, build HP. This is correct, but also incorrect — because most champions do not get the same amounts of base MR as they get base armor.
At level 1, the majority of champions have slightly less MR than armor, between 5 to 12 less. However, as the game progresses and champions approach level 15, this difference widens — some champions end up having double the base armor than MR. As such, indiscriminately building HP as the game continues is more likely to be less useful against magic damage (averse to buying MR), relative to additional HP’s utility versus physical damage.
Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, as you get closer to level 15, you will have more base HP than ideal for your amount of base armor, and far more HP than ideal for your base MR. This is true for every single champion. Thus, the later the game is, the less potent it will be to blindly build HP. Instead, like for carries, try to identify the greatest threats on the enemy team. Look to build a healthy mix of HP, armor, and MR. For example, I think items such as Zeke’s Convergence are high value from a stats point of view, as this item provides you more than one stat; in this case, 40 armor and 40 MR.
Thanks for reading, and I hope that you found this article insightful.
We’re currently working on Riftech, a pipeline that provides prospective players, analysts, and coaches an opportunity to be exposed to Wild Rift in a competitive environment/mindset. We’re still getting things set up, but if you’re interested and/or want to learn more, the Discord is linked here. At this time in the Riftech server, you can find all of my previous analytical works and also interact with other NA players and analysts, several of whom were involved in professional Vainglory. We’ll be pushing more info in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
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— Q
