Teamfight Tactics Season 5: Judgment Day is counting down the days until its official release across all servers alongside patch 11.9. New champions, new Traits/Classes are being explored by players on the PBE server. Notably, the items upgraded to Dark have drawn significant interest due to their power and mechanics.
Some items when upgraded to Dark have proven to be significantly superior to their base versions, providing much more power and even having the potential to completely turn the tide of battle. Recently, Riot Mortdog, the project director of Teamfight Tactics at Riot Games, expressed surprise at the power of Natural Armor after its Dark upgrade.
Specifically, according to calculations from Riot’s design team, using Dark Armor with 2 additional champion slots in the team (Natural Armor only provides an extra champion slot) means that if players lose a round, they will lose double health compared to normal. This creates a certain risk to avoid the situation where “everyone and their mother hunts for Gold Shovel” as seen in some metas from previous seasons.
However, Mortdog revealed that he could not have anticipated how powerful Dark Armor would be until he tested it himself. Specifically, when he upgraded this item to Dark in round 4-1 and then spent all his gold to roll for champions, he won every round from then on.
It can be seen that the power of Dark Armor is overwhelmingly superior, even compensating for the risks it poses. Let’s consider a calculation: when you are in round 4-1, around level 6 or 7, having a Dark Armor is equivalent to having 8 (or 9) champions. Thus, as long as you spend all remaining gold to hunt for strong champions, you’ll be far superior to others.
And with continuous victories thanks to a “brute force” strategy, at level 8 (or 9), players will have a lineup of 10 or 11 champions with several 4 and 5-star champions enough to crush any current lineup.
Dark Armor is indeed powerful, but it’s likely that when TFT Season 5 officially launches, Riot will make appropriate adjustments to avoid players fighting over Gold Shovel and making games become monotonous.