Patch 4.5 - Heal vs Barrier - What is Best after Patch 4.5? - League of Legends Guide

- Hello everyone and welcome to another HDCommentary. My name is Bob and today I
will go over the recent changes of heal and calculate what is better right now:
Barrier or Heal.

- Heal has been buffed this patch and made me reconsider my choice between barrier
and heal. I'm sorry to break the news but heal is actually better now. I will show you
why in a second, but first off, let's take a look at the changes.

- From a cooldown of 300 seconds, heal's cooldown has been reduced to a sweet 240 seconds.
And not only that, but the heal amount has been increased by roughly 100 at max rank as well.

- Because of this heal increase, you now only heal yourself and 1 targeted ally champion.
The heal amount is equal to both you and your ally. This means that if your support takes
heal, it will have the same effects on the ADC as well.

- Additionally, heal now removes healing reduction effects after casting it. To make this
clear: the heal WILL be affected by it, but after the heal the effect will be dropped.
It also gives a speed buff of 30% movement speed for 2 seconds on both you
and the targeted ally.

- To sum this up: Heal is now actually viable. When I first heard this I thought that heal is
insanely strong now, and on the field it has proven that heal is actually really nice now.
The real question is: Would you replace barrier for heal? Or would you want your support to
run heal?

- I asked this question to myself and decided to figure it out. I've sketched some scenarios
and will calculate whether heal or barrier is stronger in those scenarios. So, without further
ado, let's get started!

- In the first scenario I wanted to check whether heal is good against ignite. I researched how
much damage ignite does and how much damage you would take with barrier or heal. Surprisingly,
with heal you take less damage on every level than with barrier.

- You don't only take less damage from ignite, you ALSO remove the healing reduction effect of it.
This means that if you have spell vamp or lifesteal, you will notice that you get way more HP
from heal than with barrier.

- However, that's if you ONLY get ignited. Let's take a look at how burst damage works out. We have
a champion dealing 600 damage in 1 second. If you are not ignited, heal is usually better. Even
though it has like 20 health less, it gives you the full HP back and is not only a shield.

- But if you do get ignited, this would mean that your heal will heal 50% less. Here are the calculations
on that example. This is calculated with heal and barrier at max level.

- In case of a burst without any time to fight back and lifesteal, barrier comes out ahead with 217.5 less
damage taken from the burst. This is quite a significant difference and could definitely mean the difference
between death or not.

- However, these kind of situations barely exist unless you put yourself in a terrible
position. Usually you will be able to fight back, lifesteal some back and even get a mikael from your support
to cleanse away that ignite. If you don't have ignite on you, heal is by far the better one, even with burst.

- Also, how often do you see people go through their entire barrier shield? It happens sometimes, but it also happens
that you're not using it to full extent, thus wasting the summoner spell. With heal you would've had that HP back.

- That was basically the only situation where barrier would've been better than heal. However, we only looked at the
amount that YOU heal, but you also heal someone else with that same amount. Aaand don't forget the movement speed
buff either!

- So by far heal is better than barrier. The only thing you could do is run a heal barrier lane if you want to use
barrier. Let the support have heal and yourself have barrier. It is probably the strongest right now to run heal
barrier on bottom lane, because exhaust would only be better than heal in the lategame where carries hit over 1000.

- Conclusion: Heal is better. On bottom lane run barrier on ADC and heal on the support to be the strongest. On any
other lane: use heal instead of barrier unless you play vs an extremely strong burst champion. Against that it's
probably even better to use exhaust than barrier though, after the exhaust buff to damage reduction.

- Thank you for watching and I hope to see you next time in another HDCommentary!

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