FOTM Report: Divine Sunderer Quietly Dominating

While everyone is focused and complaining about Heartsteel champions, it's easy to lose sight of all the low-key-overpowered champions quietly winning the rock-paper-scissors game of tank slaying. It all comes down to one item: Divine Sunderer.

What's the Real Balance Threat?

While everyone is focused and complaining about Heartsteel champions, it's easy to lose sight of all the low-key-overpowered champions quietly winning the rock-paper-scissors game of tank slaying. It all comes down to one item: Divine Sunderer.

 

+ 40 Attack Damage

+ 20 ability Haste

+ 300 Health

UNIQUE – SPELLBLADE: After using an ability, your next basic attack within 10 seconds deals 125% base AD (+ (Melee 6% / Ranged 3%) of target's maximum health) as bonus physical damage on-hit, for a minimum of 150% base AD and a maximum of 250% base AD against monsters.

If the target is a champion, Heal for 68.75% base AD (+ (Melee 3.3% / Ranged 1.65%) of target's maximum health) (1.5-second cooldown (begins after using the empowered attack) ).

1.5-second cooldown dealing 6% of the enemy's maximum health is absolutely insane when you're on a non-squishy champion. There's a good reason why bruisers are feeling confident going all-in when offense is the best defense.

Coupled with the heal scaling off a target's minimum health, tanks end up dealing negative damage to bruisers if they can't burst them down during CC windows.

Who's Getting the Benefits?

The most egregious offender of this item is clearly Fiora, whose low cooldowns and non-targeted on-hit proccing dash makes using Divine Sunderer effortless and free. Similarly, other bruisers with low cooldown on-hit spells also enjoy the same benefits.

In order of highest to lowest, here are the top 10 Divine Sunderer packing champions statistically, which are all over 50% or higher (source):

1. Vi - 53.3%
2. Wukong - 53.3%
3. Trundle - 52.9%
4. Fiora - 52.6%
5. Warwick - 51.8%
6. Illaoi - 51.4%
7. Nasus - 50.9%
8. Camille - 50.8%
9. Poppy - 50.6%
10. Yorick - 50.3%

Meanwhile, here are the lowest Divine Sunderer users:

1. Jax - 49.9%

That's right, Jax is the ONLY Divine Sunderer champion with a sub-50% win rate, and just barely. There are other bruisers lower on the win rate list, but those are Goredrinker or Striderbreaker users with limited synergies with Divine Sunderer as a result of higher cooldowns or lack of on-hit abilities.

Conclusions

Statistics should always be taken with a grain of salt but when you start to see a correlation this strong, you can't help but wonder...does Divine Sunderer indeed need a nerf or are these champions simply using everyone's Heartsteel builds as their personal health batteries?

What are your thoughts on Divine Sunderer? Strong or not? Comment below!