To get tougher, what do you usually get? Many people will say warmogs, derp derp derp. People seem to forget damage mitigation. Typical non-thinking, insta-locking player mindset.
I think health stacking is a little overrated these days and people don't think enough about the mitigation stats. I ran the numbers for kicks and figured people might benefit from seeing them. For the sake of simplicity I'll focus on Armor, but Magic Resist behaves completely the same and costs only very slightly more.
First, it's important to understand how mitigation works in LoL. It's very simple: for every point of Armor you have, you gain an additional 1% of your total HP in "effective HP" against that type of damage. So if you have 1000 HP and 100 Armor, it will take 2000 physical damage to kill you. 200 Armor means 3000 damage, and so on. It's much simpler to think of it this way than to confuse things with the percentage absorption. The more HP you have, the more valuable each point of armor is.
A slightly less obvious corollary of this is that it works in reverse as well - the more armor you have, the more valuable each point of HP is. If you gain +100 HP, not only are you adding that much to your HP pool, your existing armor also gets that much more HP to work with. So in effect you are also gaining +1 effective HP for each point of armor. With 100 armor, that means you gained +200 "physical HP."
In short, if you have too much Armor you should buy HP, and if you have too much HP you should buy armor. Now to look at the costs of each stat. I'll be basing the costs on the lowest level stat items:
HP: Ruby Crystal - 475 gold, 225 HP
Armor: Cloth Armor - 300 gold, 20 Armor
Magic Resist: Null-Magic Mantle - 400 gold, 25 MR
With this you can calculate which stat gives you the most bang for your buck at any given level of HP/Armor. I'll just give examples to illustrate, showing the benefits of buying the starter items at various level of HP/Armor:
1000 HP
50 Armor
Ruby Crystal: 225 HP + (50 * 2.25) = 337.5 Physical HP = 1.4 gold per Physical HP
Cloth Armor: 20 * 10 = 200 Physical HP = 1.5 gold per Physical HP
2000 HP
50 Armor
Ruby Crystal: 225 HP + (50 * 2.25) = 337.5 Physical HP = 1.4 gold per Physical HP
Cloth Armor: 20 * 20 = 400 Physical HP = .75 gold per Physical HP
2000 HP
100 Armor
Ruby Crystal: 225 HP + (100 * 2.25) = 450 Physical HP = 1.1 gold per Physical HP
Cloth Armor: 20 * 20 = 400 Physical HP = .75 gold per Physical HP
3000 HP
100 Armor
Ruby Crystal: 225 HP + (100 * 2.25) = 450 Physical HP = 1.1 gold per Physical HP
Cloth Armor: 20 * 30 = 600 Physical HP = .5 gold per Physical HP
3000 HP
150 Armor
Ruby Crystal: 225 HP + (150 * 2.25) = 562.5 Physical HP = .84 gold per Physical HP
Cloth Armor: 20 * 30 = 600 Physical HP = .5 gold per Physical HP
For magic resist it's the same, just slightly more expensive. Now, there are a couple things to take into account beyond just the gold cost. First, HP obviously covers both types of damage, while mitigation only covers one or the other(though part of the Ruby Crystal benefit we calculated above was from that mitigation too). So it's only a complete no-brainer if the cost is less than half so you can get both, otherwise it depends on the type of damage you're facing - mitigation is clearly much better against a team that is overwhelmingly based on physical or magic damage. Second, given the same amount of survivability, less HP with more mitigation is better - it increases the effectiveness of heals and HP regen. Having a boatload of HP is useless if you can't get it back after one fight without recalling. Don't worry about armor/MR removing abilities, they'll hurt you the same amount regardless of how much you have as long as you don't hit zero(which you probably won't even with just your base mitigation). Percentage armor reduction changes things very slightly but they're rare enough not to be a big factor.
To sum it up, an HP boost is the best investment for your first item, but before you go much past 2000 or so you should be sure to invest in getting at least 100 mitigation. If you hit 3000, forget about HP entirely and start stacking defense. Remember to take note in the beginning of the damage types of the other team's heavy hitters - if they're overwhelmingly one or the other, you should put very little emphasis on HP and stack that mitigation heavily instead. Mitigation is almost always the better value given a single damage type.
BTW, this is originally from Zeyk of LoL NA.
Originally Posted by remotay1
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