League of Legends players blast “useless” antiheal in Season 13
Riot GamesLeague of Legends players are desperate for more ways to counter opponents that have high healing, with many asking for more counterplay for tanky, high healing champions that are prominent in Season 13.
League of Legends Season 13 brought with it myriad item options for tanky champions, as well as some new options for damage characters looking to keep their sustain high in teamfights. Jak’Sho and Ravenous Hydra are the main culprits here, with both items having deceptively high healing.
This is on top of the already high healing from champions like Aatrox and Soraka, with the former champion having an almost 100% pick rate at Worlds 2022.
With the prominence of healing on champions and items that are strong in the meta, League of Legends players are asking for some more options to counter healing.
League of Legends players call antiheal “useless”
There are a few ways to prevent healing in League of Legends, but the main two are Grievous Wounds via an item that has it (e.g. Mortal Reminder, Thornmail, Chempunk Chainsword), or by using the Ignite Summoner Spell.
Ignite is the strongest in this area with a 50% healing reduction, but only for its full duration and on a pretty hefty 3 minute cooldown.
Soraka, a champion that lives and dies based on how strong healing is in League of Legends.A reddit thread discussing the strength of healing in the emerging Season 13 meta highlighted some of the issues many LoL players have had dealing with healing champions in their matches.
Antiheal is good in theory, but, in practice, there are some holes. For instance, Thornmail requires hard CC to be at its most effective, making it so that a tank like Ornn gets much more value out of the item than someone like Dr. Mundo. And, speaking of Mundo, healing can be very strong.
Meanwhile, antiheal items have much worse base stats than their counterparts in most cases, and they don’t have any additional passives that make the items worth buying beyond their purpose of countering healing.
On the flipside, hard-nerfing healing across the board would make a champion like Soraka extremely weak in comparison to her counterparts. As pointed out multiple times in the thread, healing in a game like League of Legends requires a delicate balance.
That won’t keep players from thinking that this delicate balance has dipped a bit too far into healers’ favor.