Breastplate of Valor - Balanced?

Plenty of items serve dual purposes. Gem of Gaia, for example, provides not just ample protection against magic users, but also lots of MP5 to keep yourself sustained. Focused Voidblade gives you not just power and penetration, but also protection to stay alive a bit longer. Jotunn's Wrath, similar deal. Get power and CDR. There are lots of items that exist for providing dual purpose because one-dimensional items are rarely ever good on their own, and they need dual purpose items to supplement them.

So please, stop being insistent about this. I'd rather see them buff the weak Chronos' Pendant than nerf an item that has been fine this whole time into the dirt.

I think you're putting words into my mouth. I never said nerf Breastplate of Valor into the ground, and I'm not meaning to come across as overly insistent about anything. I'm putting out my opinion on a game discussion forum. It's fine if we disagree.

Personally, I just think it does too much. Would anything change if Breastplate gave you 15% CDR and Mail of Renewal gave you 25% instead of what we have now, or would the split still be 99% Breastplate/1% Mail? I don't think nerfing the protections a little so Agni or Chang'e were killable from the 7 minute mark to the 25 minute mark would hurt either. I'm just a little curious why you're calling Breastplate 'fine' when the whole point of the topic is that it's in every build. What's too strong if being in every build is fine?

My whole point was that buffing Chronos' Pendant isn't going to matter with this iteration of Breastplate around. Who's gonna buy a magic power/CDR item when they already have all the CDR they need from their defense item (that's not really optional)? May as well buy a magic power/penetration item instead. Maybe that's a meta issue rather than a strictly item issue, but still. HiRez should probably be factoring in the power of defense items when they fill in the surrounding stats.

And Jotunn's Wrath does way too much as well, but that's another topic :P Hide of the Urchin is the other one on the list.

If Mail of Renewal were changed to give 25% CDR instead, people would just take the mail, because nothing has been done about the pendant. It is still a garbage CDR item at the moment that needs a lot more power to justify purchase. Jotunn's Wrath used to be like that a long time ago, then it got the added punch it needed to be viable.

The meta always gravitates towards the most ideal picks: If you make a core item useless because you think it's too good and it gets nerfed, another item will fill in the void. And then you will insist that the next best item is too good, and the cycle keeps repeating. You cannot avoid this outcome, it's how a meta works. It's all about min/maxing to metagamers.

Well we disagree on the strength of Mail vs Breastplate for sure. I don't think Mail of Renewal is 15% more CDR away from being core meta with how buried it is right now. It gives a really small amount of protections.

I would love the idea of bridging the gap between them though. Then you would have two items that fit the very strong niche of defense/cooldown, with you being able to choose between what you valued more in health vs mana. Right now it's a question of whether you'd rather have mana/defense/cooldown/ or health/way less defense/way less cooldown (for more money.) It's an imbalanced situation. To me, there's no downside of giving people room for preference in builds. Building defense might not be an option, but maybe health vs mana is. It just seems silly to me to have two items that fit the same niche, with one being significantly better than the other. It's not a min/max scenario, it's a common sense scenario.

I suggested a rework to Chronos' Pendant because CDR/Power is just a weird niche. You can only really get away with skipping defense if you're really ahead, and even then, it's probably not a good idea. Seems like you have to at least buff Pendant 'and' add a strong defense item that doesn't have CDR. Make people pass up CDR if they want the best mage defensive items and more CDR items become relevant. More items in general are probably needed.

It is a min/max scenario though. 25% CDR is very noticeable, whereas 10% is a drop in the bucket unless you've already got Shoes of Focus and Idol of Concentration or Winged Wand, the latter of which is not a good pick. You would rather have all that CDR in a single item rather than having to split it across multiple items you might not really need the benfits of. You are maximizing cooldown reduction and minimizing power loss that might be incurred through building other items with lesser CDR boosts.

The min/max comment was just emphasizing that there really is no competition between Breastplate and Mail as they both currently exist. Breastplate is significantly better. There's no complicated thought process involved.

You would rather have all that CDR on one item, yes, but that's just one part of the item. Would you rather have 25% CDR on an item that cost a little more and gave you 35 less protections and some health, or would you rather have 15% (10 is really low, I thought Mail gave 15 before I looked it up,) and extra protections and a lot of mana. It's probably character dependent, and would vary across builds in the game. I don't think it's as cut and dry as CDR >>> all.

Alternatively, you could just give them the same CDR and turn it into a health vs mana question. Either way, variety in builds is good. It's lame that there's one 'correct' ADC build and 4 items are set in every mage build.

It's still min/max.

Yes, I would still take the 25% CDR if it were on a slightly more expensive item. In terms of effective health, both items actually come very close to each other.

For a tank, CDR is a HUGE deal. If you don't have CDR as a tank, you suffer from downtime where you're just a walking brick wall that can't really do anything.

For mages, it's not quite as big a deal because Polynomicon exists to help apply damage between casts, but you still want to be able to spam more. For that, you have to pick between Pendant and Breastplate.

If the Breastplate and Mail had the same CDR, Mail would almost always win out, because Mana is almost always a throwaway stat except on certain gods like Ao Kuang, or people using Book of Thoth.

Don't touch this WONDERFUL PIECE OF EQUIPMENT!

Well I don't know too much about the specifics of min/maxing, so I'll have to take your word for it on that front.

Still, the whole point is that there's room for balancing. Make one item better and a lot more expensive (kind of like Ankh vs Mystical Mark start in solo lane,) or make them close to the point that you might want to skip extra CDR on some characters in favor of a little extra survivability because the enemy jungler is starting to get fed.

As it is now, is there any scenario where you would build Mail of Renewal or Chronos' Pendant? I'm pretty confident that the Pendant is never viable, but I can't say I've thought too much about the Mail. Either way, level the playing field a little so there's a reasonable case to be made for any item. If an item only fits in 1% of builds, why bother having it in the game?