RIot have announced that they are working on buffing Fighter items to make a distinction between nimble fighters and more buff bruisers. However, they've, as usual, overturned some stats on the new passives.
According to RIot, since the Preseason 2021 item overhaul, light fighters like Irelia and Xin Zhao have felt a lot more like unpunishable tanky murderers than they really should.
S the solution they've seen fit to implement is to give Deaths' DAnce a buff to healing, and a minor nerf to damage reduction.
Death's Dance's Ignore Pain passive ability now stores 30 percent for melee and 10 percent for ranged of all types of post-mitigation damage received, not including true damage, which is successively taken as true damage over 3 seconds instead. It now also applies to damage on shields.
The true kicker, however, is the Defy passive of this item. Instead of healing for 15 percent of your maximum hp, which made this item more useful on tankier champions, you now heal 175 percent of your bonus AD if a champion dies within 3 seconds after you've dealt damage to them.
Riot Games
This change is making the item more than viable on all AD assassins, and even AD carries in the game. If we thought the Goredrinker meta was bad, we have yet to see what Death's Dance has in store for us.
That is not to say that, with changes to other items such as Sterak's Gage, the Fighters will not be strong as well. But tankiness with damage is expected from these champions, while glass cannons will now be made of a Newtonian fluid. The more you try to strike them down, the more they turn solid.
