The invulnerability effect of Zhonya’s Hourglass is increasingly being used by tanks.
Zhonya’s Hourglass is one of the most iconic and unique items in League. Apart from the Stopwatch added as a component of the said item, players cannot buy anything else that will grant them inviolability.
Some believe that this effect is much more valuable than the stats of other items that can be purchased in the store. What arguments do players use, and how does one of the Riot employees answer them?
Zhonya’s Hourglass effect is too strong?
Zhonya’s Hourglass is the only full item in League of Legends to include an effect that allows the player to gain immortality for 2.5 seconds at the expense of immobilizing them and making them not being able to cast skills or attack. The item grants AP and Armor, suggesting it is for mages looking to gain some physical damage resistance.
Zhonya’s Hourglass being a core item on tank junglers in pro play really shows how insane the damage levels have become in this game.
Right now, two of the most popular junglers in pro play are Jarvan and Volibear. These are traditionally bruiser/fighter type champions but they are being built full tank in pro play in the current meta.
The current meta build is tank item mythic (Turbo Chemtank) into Zhonya’s Hourglass second.
This indicates to me that pro players have realized that you just can’t build enough tank stats that it outvalues stasis. 2.5 seconds of invulnerability is just way more valuable because it’s higher effective tankiness.
The player writes that, in his opinion, the best option for tanks should be to buy items that are intended for tanks. Characters like Ornn and Sejuani that have built-in magic resist and armor can handle the amount of damage, but in other cases, the Hourglass effect is really valuable.
Riot Phreak commented on the thread. The data that designers have from the solo/duo queue does not indicate that the item discussed is that strong.
Just to devil’s advocate, from solo queue data Zhonya’s performs pretty weakly on every jungler I’ve checked. It’s very hard to check this exclusively in high-MMR since there aren’t that many samples (880 games of Zhonya’s second on J4 in D2+ over the last month for example).
Again, this is fairly clumsy since intuitively stronger players would be better at using active items but as a direct comparison, Frozen Heart is cheaper and appears to win +4.5% of the time over Zhonya’s but this is low confidence because of low sample.
I’m personally unconvinced as an analyst that Zhonya’s is actually correct. It feels good, I’m sure. But so does spending 2600g on not just a Chain Vest. I don’t really believe it’s correct to spend 1.5k on just a repeating stasis when there are much better options out there.
Even though Zhonyia is not such a strong item in Rioter’s opinion, and the invulnerability effect is not worth 1500 gold, the employee admits that the overall damage in the game is too high. There are too many offensive items in LoL, and mages have access to too many cooldown reductions.
Players in the jungle have much less gold at their disposal, and when a champion like Viego has Divine Sunderer and Guardian Angel in his inventory since the 20th minute of the game, Volibear can only afford a Mythical item and one Legendary. In this case, it is difficult to buy enough resistance to get better results than those offered by the Hourglass.
Riot is probably still looking at the damage and at some point, it will come up with a solution that will ultimately reduce it. This would have a direct impact on the popularity of the item in question in the game and probably prompted the tanks to build the items that were intended for them.