During the Pre-Season 2022, Shadowflame was one of the new items added to the League of Legends shop. This item, upon release, proved to be an extremely powerful tool, granting mages a substantial amount of AP, magic penetration, and a decent amount of health. Moreover, the magic penetration provided by this item increases when attacking low-health targets. Therefore, this item is regarded as an excellent tool for finishing off opponents.
However, it seems that, by some miraculous means, Shadowflame is providing players with less magic penetration than what is described for this item. Specifically, a player known as Shatofu1 conducted an experiment using Annie’s Q ability while equipped with Shadowflame. It turns out this item provides less than 1.6 to 2.9 magic penetration; the lower the opponent’s health, the greater the loss.
With a skill dealing 500 damage and targeting an enemy with 1000 health and 20 magic resistance, Annie’s Q with Shadowflame should theoretically deal exactly 500 damage. However, in reality, it only dealt 486 damage. When testing on targets with health values ranging from 1100 to 2500, this player also found that their skill dealt less damage than what was indicated in the item description.
If you look at the figure of 14 damage lost, many might think it’s not significant. However, this is just the metric for one skill dealing 500 damage. For mages, they have many skills that deal damage, and the damage values are often greater than the aforementioned 500. Therefore, the lost damage compared to what you should receive from Shadowflame can be quite substantial, and you might find yourself missing out on crucial kills as a result.
This may very well be a bug in the damage calculation for Shadowflame, which puts this item at a significant disadvantage. Perhaps in the upcoming patch 12.1, Riot Games will need to address this bug so that the damage deficit experienced with Shadowflame no longer occurs.