Despite holding a high position with substantial responsibilities as the Lead Champion Designer for League of Legends, Riot August still streams to answer player questions. These discussions even attract attention from professional League of Legends players. Specifically, Riot August received a very notable question from Fnatic player Bwipo regarding the balance of percent health damage effects.
FNC Bwipo: “Is there a reason behind allowing percent health damage effects to scale with Attack Damage? Buying items that increase Attack Damage has already helped champions deal better damage to low-health targets. This seems too difficult to balance.”
Riot August: “Are you referring to Fiora? The story is this: percent health damage means that no matter how tanky you get later, you can still be taken down within a timeframe. If we don’t let this effect scale with attack stats, people would just build full tank on champions (here, Fiora) and easily take down opponents. This would clearly make League of Legends incredibly unbalanced.”
Fiora’s passive scaling with Attack Damage forces players to build items with this stat. Vayne also finds herself in a similar situation where her percent health damage scales with attack speed. This explains why Yasuo now only has an effect on critical damage on his ultimate, making players have to build damage items for these champions instead of full tank and just easily take down everyone.
If you didn’t know, about 3 months ago, streamer SoloRenektonOnly posted a video about building Fiora tank. What’s interesting here is that even building a lot of tank items, her Fiora still has a lot of damage output and can deal significant damage. If Riot didn’t let this effect scale with attack stats (here is Attack Damage), the tanky playstyle would likely become meta and make League of Legends heavily unbalanced.
Therefore, Riot has to ensure that champions with significant damage potential can still be taken down and maintain balance in League of Legends. Remember that League has previously witnessed a champion that was incredibly unbalanced like Ekko Tank, and Riot August does not want to see this happen again.
Riot August also added that balancing measures will also be applied to Viego and make this champion no longer dependent on the Blade of the Ruined King.