League Post: Lifesteal and Spellvamp are dumb and “anti-fun” and promote passive blah blah

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because League of Legends is the only thing I ever think about. Lifesteal and Spellvamp are annoying effects that are harmful to the game, and if you wanna get REALLY nit-picky, which I am always happy to do, they don’t make any sense, either.

For one thing, and you may have noticed this, healing is a very powerful effect. It is the difference between living through a fight and dying in the middle of it. Characters who have heals are usually balanced around the fact that they have heals, and healing spam is the reason everyone hates Soraka (especially Soraka Bot).

So what happens when you give healing effects to the guys who least need healing effects? Well, annoying gameplay for one.

See, early on you have this nice little balance. Supports have the heals and the shields and the buff effects, and the DPS does DPS and relies on their support buds to help them.

By late game anyone with leech effects can and will kill anyone without them in a 1v1 situation, which granted doesn’t happen very often and this fact may very well be why. Melee and Ranged DPS have a steady stream of healing thanks to Lifesteal on their auto-attacks, and Mages can burst heal themselves with Spellvamp while they murder their target from afar.

Riot has been trying to balance Leech effects since the beginning, and the unfortunate fact is that you simply can’t. Either they don’t do anything or they’re too strong, and I think it’s high time to just straight up remove them, eff tha hataz.

Take this completely fictional anecdote: You’re near bottom lane and see the enemy’s ranged carry pushing the minion wave. She’s alone because the other four are up top dealing with your Renekton, who is just dominating the entire game, oh man what a sexy beast.

So you jump her and get with the stabbing. She has a bloodthirster, and you have a comparable, maybe even superior item setup, but you end up losing because she effectively has more health than you. However, it’s a close fight let’s imagine. She’s got double-digit health left, and your jungler is on his way to finish her.

But oops. A minion wave arrived and she just healed to full by auto-attacking it. All that hard work you just did has been entirely undone in a shorter time than the fight even took and now your jungler is probably backing off because f that noise.

If you’ve played League of Legends at all, then this has happened to you at least a number of times. That’s how lifesteal works. It is free healing as long as there is a target nearby, and if you’re in a game then there is always a target nearby.

If you don’t care for entirely unsubstantiated stories on unofficial websites, here’s a video you can watch that demonstrates a slightly more hilarious case. As much as I hate linking to videos where a Renekton loses, I think it backs up my point pretty well.

The other problem is that Lifesteal and Spellvamp are always attached to items that provide huge AD/AP boosts. Bloodthirster for AD, Will of the Ancients for AP. Lifesteal, for all of its power, doesn’t force the player to choose between damage and sustainability. You buy one of those items and presto, you can do both.

Now I would consider Spell Vamp a slightly more “balanced” Leech given that you need to actually use spells to gain the benefits of having it, which means that there is a price attached (cooldowns, mana/energy/whatever) but you’re still gaining free health while simultaneously doing big damage. It ends up resulting in stalemates where both teams just kinda dance at one another poking and poking back with neither team being able to do any lasting damage to the other. Then one person makes a mistake and then the fight is usually decided right there.

Spell Vamp is also the reason that Riot hasn’t been able to balance Vladimir at any point in League’s history. Vlad’s drawback is that his spells cost health, but as soon as you start loading on Spell Vamp then the healing benefit becomes greater than the cost and Vlad, who already has the ridiculous passive ability of “getting more health with more AP” becomes even harder to kill. What is his drawback then? Uh, I dunno, I guess he has a stupid haircut. Oh but his legendary skin looks amazing so I guess he doesn’t have any then.

Now some characters have built-in Lifesteal and Spell Vamp, but you know what? That’s fine. That’s just one of their abilities. They are balanced around it. Warwick’s got his sustain and it’s just enough for him to be very strong without being overpowered (although as of this writing they’re apparently considering reducing it and giving him more damage instead) and Ryze only has spell vamp when he uses his ultimate, which is a fair trade.

Giving the big guns on your team free heals all of the time marginalizes supports, so it’s not surprising to see that they’re such an unpopular role these days. Who wants to play the loser who has to sit bottom lane and not do anything while the other four players are having fun? It’s not gonna pick up in 30 minutes either, ’cause by then your capacity for clutch healing and exciting saves becomes pretty “eh.” Who knows, though? You might be able to save people left and right with your badass playing, but as long as they have that Bloodthirster in their hands they’re not going to value you as much as they should. Sorry. No I’m not sorry actually.

Oh, right, I also said I was gonna talk about how they don’t make sense. How do bullets bring you back health? Do you just feel so good about shooting people that your wounds mend themselves? Whatever.

There’s my piece. I don’t see anything fun about two guys with a ton of lifesteal wailing on one another until their teammates can arrive and help, and neither should you. Because it isn’t.

And no, this isn’t just me looking for subtle Nasus nerfs, although I’m happy to say they’d probably be included. This is a legitimate complaint from me, a guy who has to deal with lifesteal personally and is upset that it doesn’t apply to his abilities.

Nerf Nasus.

Addendum: I forgot to mention ignite and other -healing effects.

My answer is you shouldn’t need a summoner spell just to kill someone, particularly because you won’t always have it when they’re around.