Hey guys, DiffTheEnder here with a brand new mathcrafted article on a couple of masteries. Hope you enjoy it and make sure to leave some feedback!

Basis

One of the biggest changes in the preseason was the rework of the mastery tree. Along with completely new masteries, the placement of certain masteries was also changed. One of the masteries that was once easily taken while speccing 21 points into the defence tree is the one known as “Reinforced Armor”.

From first impressions, it sounds like an amazing mastery –  you negate a significant portion of incoming critical damage – what could possibly be better? The answer to that question would be Perseverance, the defensive mastery that lets you regenerate 3% of your missing HP every 5 seconds, or is it?

The Season 4 mastery tree causes a dilemma when putting 21 points in to the defence tree. How do you decide between two amazing defensive masteries? Do you go down the left side of the tree for Perseverance/Second Wind or go down the right side for Reinforced Armor/Evasive?

There are a few combinations of the tree that will allow you to take Second Wind as well as Reinforced Armor – but you give up valuable points elsewhere in the tree (eg. lost points in Tenacious – which is an awesome mastery!)

First, let’s take a look at Reinforced Armor…

Reinforced Armor and Evasive

Both of these masteries work similarly in terms of calculations. Any damage you take is first mitigated by any armor or magic resist you have, and is then multiplied by the damage reduction percentage.

For instance, let’s say you are going to be taking a 500 damage critical strike, and you have 100 armor. The 100 armor negates half of that incoming damage to result in you getting hurt for only 250 damage. This 250 is further reduced by 10% to 225 as a result of Reinforced Armor.

Now that the concept is out of the way, let’s hit you with a graph.

Click through for a closer inspection!

A quick explanation on how the graph is read:

• Your current armor (x-axis) – This is how much armor you have in the game. Eg, if you’re a late game Renekton – you might have 200 armor, and that point on the horizontal axis is where you want to be looking.
• The blue line – This shows you how much “hidden” armor’s worth of resistance you have against critical strikes due to the “Reinforced Mastery”, the value can be read from the..
• Armor increase against crits (y-axis) – Refer to “the blue line”

Interpretation

The interpretation is quite simple here. Realistically this mastery point is worth 20-30 effective armor against critical strikes. This is NOT the same as actual armor as it only applies to critical strikes, which may only hit you once in every (?) hits. This gives around two “Cloth Armor”‘s worth of effective resistance against critical strikes, however critical strikes may happen as little as once every 4 or 5 hits. We’ll be generous and give this a rough valuation of 300g for one mastery point.

We can do the same graph for the modified value of 4% for Evasive

As you can see – since the damage reduction is only 4% (compared to Reinforced Armor’s 10%), the effective resist increase of Evasive is only 37.5% compared to that of Reinforced Armor. A more interesting point to note here however, is that AoE damage is a lot more common than critical strikes.

So while this may only be worth 10-12 points of magic resist. It is usually activaated more often than Reinforced Armor. However it still only offers a minimal amount of gold value (<400g).

Now let’s compare these to the supposed super mastery..

Perseverance

This is by far one of the strongest masteries in terms of gold value (you can’t put a value on tenacity!). Let’s take a look…

Most tanks these days have around 3000 HP late game. If they are missing 1667 HP, they get 50HP per 5 seconds, or a bonus 10 HP per second. This is the equivalent of a running Health Potion. Let me try to put this in other terms to show you how strong this mastery can be with 3 points in it:

• The “Exalted with Baron Nashor” aka Baron Buff, gives you regeneration equivalent to 3% of max HP per 5 seconds. This mastery offers half the regeneration ability of Baron when you are at half HP.
• At 50% HP, this mastery equals the passive on Warmog’s Armor and exceeds it if you are at any lower HP.
• 50HP per seconds (if you’re missing 1667 HP) is 10 Rejuvenation Beads worth of regen or 5 Doran’s Shields. That’s 1800 gold worth of Rejuvenation beads.
• If you are missing 167 HP (which can happen as early as level 1), 3 points in Perseverance will give you 5 HP/5, aka a free Rejuvenation Bead worth of health regen.

Now since this is a comparison of masteries – it wouldn’t be fair to compare a 3 point Perseverance to a 1 point Reinforced Armor. So you can go ahead and divide the above values by 3 if you want a fair comparison to a single mastery point in Reinforced Armor.

An important note here would be that Perseverance unlocks Second Wind — which boosts the above numbers by a FURTHER 10%, due to the increased regeneration when you are below 25% HP.

Conclusion

Both Reinforced Armor and Evasive are decent masteries that have their own benefits. They both offer a gold value of less than 500 gold realistically with each mastery point. Perseverance is a tricky beast as it can offer insane gold value depending on your max HP, possibly 600+ gold per mastery point.

There is one thing I did not mention in the rest of the article, and that is that Health Regeneration is not useful in short teamfights against wombo combo AoE teams. If you are up against an Orianna, Vladimir, Miss Fortune, Amumu and Leona – you’re going to regenerate about 50HP, before you die (aka negligible). However health regeneration is useful in prolonged teamfights that last anywhere longer than 5 seconds as well as helping you sustain in laning phase.

Personally, I always opt to go for the left side of the defence tree with points in Perseverance and Second Wind, as I find early game sustain is a priority and that 20-40 points worth of invisible resist that only comes into effect situationally late game is not comparable to the reliability and strength of Perseverance.

As always, I hope you enjoyed the article, please leave any feedback or thoughts!

Cheers,

DiffTheEnder