Yesterday, Riot August, the lead champion designer of League of Legends, had another stream of him about answering questions, mostly questions from players about issues related to the design, balance, and adjustment of champion strengths and items of League of Legends.
In the livestream, an interesting comment sparked Riot August about % true damage. Specifically, the player asked:
“What’s the reason behind AD scalings on Max Health% true damage? Buying AD already makes you better at killing squishies, seems harder to balance.”
Riot August:
“You mean Fiora right? The story goes like this, the effect of dealing true damage as a percentage of health means that even if you’re tanky, you can still get killed after a while. If we don’t let this effect scale with AD, people will go full tanks on champions (like Fiora) and can still take down opponents easily. This will obviously make League of Legends extremely bad and even more unbalanced.
The fact that putting AD scalings on % health true damage on champions like Fiora will make you buy AD items so that you can scale better with her passive. While you are able to deal with tanks better, you will also be very squishy, making you a more vulnerable target. Also, % health true damage won’t help you scale better against marksmen or mages.
So, if Riot were to not put AD scaling on % health true damage, players will go full tank on these champions and can still deal an extreme amount of damage while being tanky. This can cause the imbalance in the game and the struggle for players.
This scalings also goes with champions like Vayne and Yasuo, according to Riot August. Vayne’s ability to deal true damage requires her to build in an Atk Speed build and Yasuo also has armor piercing effects on his critical hits. This makes players have to build AD items for these champions instead of building full tanks and just killing them all.
Nonetheless, that’s why Riot forced the seemingly absurd thing to let the effect, which deals very strong damage, scale according to the attack damage. This is to ensure that champions with such strong damage can still be killed and keep the balance for League of Legends.