League of Legends is a well-balanced game (yes, yes, really. For a game with 160 characters, League of Legends is a real lesson in balancing, it’s too often forgotten by only retaining the worst aberrations proposed by the devs ). Only the game is far from symmetrical, and for once we’re not talking about Summoner’s Rift. AD Champions have no equivalent to AP’s Zhonya’s Hourglass (ADCs have been crying about it since S1), while AP’s lifesteal mechanics are generally ridiculous (with their fair share of exceptions, Vladimir in the lead ). Among the controversial stats is tenacity, one of the most complex mechanics in League of Legends and one that brings a lot of problems.
Association
Tenacity is a stat used to reduce crowd control duration. The more your champion has, the less time he will spend stunned, stunned, slowed etc etc. This stat is not only essential for tanks and bruiser if they want to successfully reach the backlane at some point in the game, but is also very effective on fragile characters. Regaining control of your character more quickly may mean surviving a lightning attack, and then regaining the advantage. This stat is very hard to get, as there are only two items (Mercury Boots + Solar Cloak which gives 5% tenacity per item completed) and two runes that can provide it. Other items or spells can help fight crowd control (QSS in the lead), but none provide this passive stat.
Also, historically tenacity is tied to magic resistance. This is likely because mages often had control effects when the game was released, but it’s become less and less obvious over the years. Same, the QSS, the other key item to fight against CC also brings RM. Today to have an object with tenacity, you have to invest in a statistic that is not necessarily useful in the given situation.
Limitation and prison
Tenacity is designed so that it cannot be stacked easily. It is not clearly indicated in the game, but the tenacity obtained on the different objects/runes does not stack directly. It is calculated according to this formula (with the list of objects/runes/powers and the category to which they belong):
What lies behind this formula is an artificial limit, making it very difficult to exceed the 30% tenacity cap today, if not downright impossible for the majority of champions. This is understandable, if it were possible to reduce control effects by 80%, without having to sacrifice too many stats, then some characters like Morgana would become totally useless. If we introduced more objects with tenacity, then the limit artificially set by the game could explode, and this would upset the whole balance of the latter. Nobody wants to play against Tryndamere, Jax or other Zeri who could not be stopped or caught.
Framed like this, tenacity seems like just a bad decision, but it’s far from it. This stat wasn’t meant as a response to any particular champion, but to have the ability to take some of the frustration out of facing teams with a lot of CC. Every player has experienced this extremely slow spin, where you can’t do anything but watch yourself die for 6 seconds. Tenacity is supposed to offer a good answer by transforming these 6 seconds into 4 seconds (yes well that’s 33% less and not 30%, but that’s for example!), and it’s in this kind of situation that it takes on its full meaning. It is not certain that it would be kept in a League of Legends 2, at least in its current form, but another mechanism would then perform the same function.
League of Legends officials in Korea have thrown the game into shambles by unveiling patch 12.10. In a video compiling the changes, the developer included images of an as-yet-unannounced skin and hinted at the big event of the summer.