Stacking for Boots and Leech

[Softmints]

It's an odd exception that only two types of item bonus (movement speed and life/mana leech) don't stack in RoW, despite being "stackable" indirectly (buying agility or Phoenix Fury).

So I was thinking of making those items stack, but only slightly for balance reasons of course.

• If you have more than one movement speed item, the weaker one(s) contribute 10% of their value. So two boots of speed will give a whopping +33 speed. Three boots of speed? +36! What kind of movement speed item builds could be viable with this change?
  • 1×Greaves + 5×Naga Ring = +100 movement speed! Well, this was always possible.
  • 1×Greaves + 5×Comet Gloves = +97.5 movement speed! This gives 35% more attack rate, but 15 less str/int and 40 less agility for abilities. Probably not a good trade.

  On to more practical builds:
  

  • An extra pair of Comet Gloves will give +8.5, making them a pretty acceptable pickup even if the hero already has a boots item. However, Stormstrike is probably a better item as it gives +5 speed from agility anyway, as well as matching attack rate and its passives.
  • Two greaves will give +60.5 movement speed (and more importantly, +20 resistance and 36% traction). Might be useful against certain lineups?
  • Rocket Boots has base +40, which means that if a hero already has Femur/Comets/Geometrid, Rockets will give +8.5 (from 35 to 43.5). This makes them a marginally better investment, but I don't see it being popular to buy Rockets as a second boots.
  • It is almost never better to buy a second speed item over to +10 agility if speed is a concern.
    
    

• Life/mana leech will stack diminutively to a maximum of 22.5%. This means that buying two 15% leech items gives 20% leech. If Nerothos buys a 15% leech item, he gets a very marginal bonus of 2% to his existing 20%, but at least it's not completely useless. 

I don't really want to make heroes faster in general, but it would be nice if picking up two boots items wasn't partially redundant. I think this is a fair compromise?

The leech change is mostly for poor old Nerothos who "can't" buy certain items because the leech is redundant. Of course he benefits from Bloodhive's wound, which gives up to +50% leech on low-life targets, but the 15% was wasted so maybe this will at least make that item feel a little more attractive.

[Oxy]

Nero's passive could just convert life leech beyond his initial 15% to attack damage

[Oxy]

As for boots themselves, I always found them to be a questionable component of the aos genre. Everybody gets them, basically, so what's the point, you might ask? Samurai Legends got rid of them and gave everybody +50 base ms to make up for that. Not a bad idea, right?

A friend of mine tried defending boots by saying that they offered some form of early game choice. Fair enough in games balanced entirely around "we hit eachother to death". Except that for RoW, which doesn't feature a huge item vs. less item advantage thing (mostly because outplaying > outbuying), this is less obvious. Boots being nice but far from as big an advantage as they are in dota or lol to name the big ones. There's always the issue of them excluding eachother entirely, just because of the wasted "itemization" of speed. So maybe we should try getting away from that.

Comet gloves would be the obvious attacker's choice, perhaps too good for stacking early, and so it'd need a new effect and a cost increase.
Greaves would become the (necessary, might I add) magic resistance item by default. Need more traction? Woah, two or three greaves to counter that pesky HoD? That'd be new.
Guldan's would be a team utility/aura recipe (which again, we somewhat need).
And the caster's choice would still be Geometrid. Or two of them, if you really like your mana leech. Something we'd never see, right?
Rocket boots would still find their niche, but it'd likely be used more because of the new non-wasted speed.

[Softmints]

Lots of recipes incorporate boots because a lot of heroes need(?) boots. Similar to how there are plenty of +stat items to accommodate for the large variety of heroes who need stats (obviously their abilities rely on them!).

It might be interesting to assume there is no need and treat +speed like life leech, offering only 2 niche recipes which use it. Banning +speed items outright would be overreacting (though I understand the motivation).

That Nerothos change would lengthen a tooltip and is inelegant; things I am trying to avoid. I'm similarly trying to avoid the inelegance of two arbitrary item effects not stacking so I can remove those tips too.

[Walter]

Jun 18, 2013 14:20:25 GMT Softmints said:

I'm similarly trying to avoid the inelegance of two arbitrary item effects not stacking so I can remove those tips too.

To be fair, they're not necessarily arbitrary. I don't think I've ever seen an AoS or even a Warcraft map with such items where life leech and movement speed stack. You'd have to be pretty new to not think that unless told otherwise.


I don't really mind the minor stacking from a balance perspective, seeing as in RoW you can get movespeed from agility. The life leech seems fine too seeing as most fights don't really have two heroes whacking each other with their autoattack until one dies. The most use life leech seems to get (Aside from certain heroes like Nero) is lane sustain. The stacking is really more of a problem in maps where ability damage cannot be built for (i.e. static) and autoattacking is core to fights.

[Grumbletok]

Okay, so, I can finally stack Bloodhives without wasting to much gold? Niiiice, been longing for that. <3 Anyways, I somewhat agree with Oxy that boots ain't that neccesary, if all heroes can't buy them, standard speed is just standard speed and it's up to Agi to increase MS. However, I enjoy my boot items and I'd prefer not to see them gone, simply for that reason. I don't think they should stack thou, especially if it's such a weak stack, rather just give the boots another benefit if you buy another pair... Yeah, I know that'd make the text longer, but that's just how I feel about it. Also, I kinda dislike not being able to stack Lifeleech, TBH... It's a wonderful stat to focus on and it can allow a squishy hero to survive, simply on sustain, which is a good thing, biggest problem ATM with it is probably that heroes with exceptionally long range (Agnes/Tyr) gets a bit much out of it, so I'd rather see Lech stack harder and not cap at 22.5%, but make it weaker for Ranged, like the Cleave on Lothar's is. Sure, I can see the problem with a Kuku stacking tons of Bloodhive or something like that, however, I think that is something to be countered or possibly changed on the Bloodhive, rather than the Lifeleech itself. It's a great stat, but it shouldn't be punished by being put on to good items to stack.

[Softmints]

This feature has been implemented as of 0.69j. I also normalised block so instead of 40% to block 20, it just blocks 8 all the time.

The three stats which use this type of stacking (I am tentatively calling it alpha stacking) are boots, leech, and block. This formula gives full bonuses on your first item, and each additional item adds x% of its bonus. Here's an example with block, for which alpha = 50%:

I have:

• 1 Ogremail (16 block)
• 1 Turtle Shell (8 block)
• 1 Slotted Kite Shield (8 block)
  = 16 + ½(8 + 8) = 24
  

I activate my turtle shell:

• 1 Ogremail (16 block)
• 1 Turtle Shell (30 block)
• 1 Slotted Kite Shield (8 block)
  = 30 + ½(16 + 8) = 42
  

Other items tend to use the usual beta stacking ("diminutively"), a more complex formula which means the third item gives less than the second (not the case with alpha stacking). This discourages getting too many of the same item, but is more of a headache to figure out. How much of a headache? Take a look at the graphs below:

What does this mean? You may notice that while Evasion, Eul's Eternal Flame healing bonus, and Pendulum's Moratorium duration bonus are all beta scaling effects which have curves, their curves are steeper as the bonus gets higher! So evasion is almost linear because it starts at 10%, while Eternal Flame suffers a significant drop because it gives a 33% bonus. That these curves are different is purely a side effect of the implementation, not an intended feature. Moratorium is a special case where the item gives a +20% bonus, but it's scaled as though it were 30% so it will reach a maximum of +67% duration (assuming infinite items). And I won't go into how beta scaling calculates evasion for a +15% item and a +10% one....

Alpha scaling on the other hand is really easy to figure out. It's simple to use even for the variety of block items, and manages to remain balanced (I hope!). This feature has been in RoW for a while (Mallaton and Phoenix Fury), I'm just formalising it here. It is likely that I will switch the existing beta-scaling items to alpha-scaling in the future.

[Sarenarass]

Looks like it'll be cool beans!