Math: Malzahar

Malzahar is a champion dear to my heart. He's the reason I became enamored with League of Legends, and despite the fact he's only rarely been competitive I still consider him one of my favorite champions.

I was curious how well Malzahar might work in today's Health stacking meta, so I put together a few spreadsheets to examine the question. The spreadsheets model the ideal case where all of Malzahar's abilities, most importantly Null Zone and Nethergrasp, do their maximum damage.

The first and most obvious takeaway is that Malzahar represents a significant threat to any tank he can lock into his Null Zone, provided he has a Deathfire Grasp. Even with 3500 Health and 210 Magic Resistance, the amount of Ability Power Malzahar needs to potentially eliminate a tank or bruiser outright is well within the bounds of reason.

This is important, not because we would expect Malzahar to flawlessly one shot tanks all the time, but because it illustrates how much of a threat he poses even to tanky champions. In the idea case, Malzahar needs as little as 340 Ability Power to crush a thoroughly decked out bruiser or tank. With the core of items required to do so only filling four slots, Malzahar has plenty of room to build defensively.

Is Malzahar a viable pick to focus down a scary bruiser or tank? I don't know, but it's something I'll have to test out the next time I have the opportunity.

PBE: Thresh Math Mk. II

Not long after I completed yesterday's math on Thresh's passive a PBE update went out. This removed the Magic Resistance from Thresh's passive (at least in the tooltip), which obviously changes the math.

So with the recent update we must modify our equation for value:

Gold Value = (# of Souls / 2 + 12.75) * (18 + 20) - 1296g

With the factors representing MR removed, this gives us the following numbers:

• 50: 138.5g
• 100: 1088.5g
• 150: 2038.5g
• 200: 2988.5g
• 250: 3938.5g

So the value of Thresh's passive is roughly one-half to two-thirds what it was previously.

Beyond curbing the absurd value of Thresh's passive, this change serves an important function. Before it was incredibly easy for Thresh to become impossible for AP carries to kill. Being able to exceed 100 Magic Resistance without any items or runes was silly. With the Magic Resistance removed from his passive, he'll no longer be the most abusive mid champion since LeBlanc's release.

PBE: Thresh Math

Thresh has hit the PBE, and he brings an interesting new mechanic, soul collection.

Every time a minion or jungle monster dies near Thresh it has a chance to drop a soul, with larger minions/monsters having a near 100% chance. Each soul Thresh collects gives him permanent Armor, Magic Resistance, and Ability Power, and also increases the damage of his auto-attacks through Q. The first handful of souls are worth more than later ones. For most numbers (beyond 30 or so) the math is simple:

Bonus Armor/MR/AP = Souls / 2 + 12.75

At 100 souls Thresh has 62.75 bonus Armor/MR/AP. That's a lot, and as a result Thresh's base Armor and Magic Resistance do not increase with level.

So how valuable is this passive anyway? To understand that we first must understand what Thresh has lost by losing out on level-based Armor and Magic Resistance.

All champions that have scaling Magic Resistance gain 1.25 per level, resulting in an additional 21.25 Magic Resistance at level 18 which Thresh misses out on. Magic Resistance costs 18 gold per point, so we'll have to subtract 382.5 gold when calculating the value of Thresh's passive.

The highest Armor scaling in the game is 4 per level and the lowest is 2.7, meaning 48.6 - 72 Armor that Thresh will not have at level 18. Armor also costs 18 gold per point, so that means another 1296 gold (to make the harshest assumption) subtracted from the value of Thresh's passive.

Finally, Ability Power costs 20 gold per point (based on Needlessly Large Rod). So the math for the gold value of Thresh's passive is fairly simple:

Gold Value = (# of Souls / 2 + 12.75) * (18 + 18 + 20) - 382.5g - 1296g

That gives us the following values at various soul numbers:

• 50: 435.5g
• 100: 1835.5g
• 150: 3235.5g
• 200: 4635.5g
• 250: 6035.5g

Generally speaking, 100 souls is what I would expect an average player performing normally to collect by the mid-game. 200 souls would be fairly typical for the late game. Expert players might collect as many as 150 or 300 souls (or more) at those same points respectively.

As we can see, this passive is worth a ridiculous amount of gold even once we've accounted for the loss of per-level stats, and that's without considering that all of these souls add to the damage of his Q's passive. Thresh gains so much without gold that he makes an ideal support. So long as he carefully times his warding excursions he'll easily stack hundreds of souls and be ridiculously tanky for a support.

Quote: On Math

"Is this just math that you do as a solo-queuer to make yourself feel better? Or is this real?"

-Megyn Kelly

Linkdump: Elobuff

I am a man of science. Without the intrepid energy of scientific pioneers much that we take for granted today would not exist. As a boy my father taught me that the drive to discover was nothing without the willpower and knowledge necessary to slog through masses of nigh-incomprehensible numbers.

Elobuff.com is a website that promises to do most of that slogging for you, at least when it comes to LoL. If you, like me, enjoy the math and statistics side of gaming then this website is for you. The subscription of $6 per month is fairly steep for such a specific service, but given the volume of data they process it's not unreasonable.

The website can be a treasure trove, but numbers can also be overwhelming and meaningless. Take the full tour before you spend any money.

I've subscribed, and am looking forward to seeing what I might learn from data I have never had the time to personally collect.