The most straightforward interaction in League of Legends is dying. When you run out of health, you will die. It's as simple as that. While new players might interpret dying as an inevitable occurrence, veterans will see each death as a lesson on how to improve. Perhaps you missed a crucial skillshot or engaged on a target that you couldn't quickly burst down. Other deaths are related to things like positioning issues, but sometimes you can't help but admit you were straight-up outplayed. The myriad of reasons why you can die can be daunting, but luckily Riot installed a 100% foolproof, absolutely perfect, vomit inducingly intuitive tool to properly analyze each death you take while you play.
The Death Recap.
This thing is so amazing, I don't even know where to begin. It pulls information from sources that feeble triple digit IQs couldn't even hope to wrap their brains around. It's like, shit man, it's like, it's telling you what's happening in the future or something. I mean, there's a reason why Riot hasn't changed the death recap in nearly a decade. Legend has it that the original engineer who designed it back in 2009 was instantaneously ascended beyond the mortal realm the nanosecond she hit compile, vaporized off the face of the Earth. Bravely wandering into the crater where she sat, developer Kuo-Yen "Xypherous" Lo was lucky enough to salvage the program off her hard drive. The toxic fumes left in her wake did corrupt his mind, however, which eventually led to the design of Fizz. Xypherous brought the data back to Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck, who vowed to never respect another female employee as much as her.
Anyway, I'm getting a bit off-topic. The primary purpose of this thread is to unlock some of that ancient knowledge so that you may properly understand what's going on in your death recaps, as confusing as it may seem.
Exhibit A - Things that don't actually do damage
This is a common culprit of death recap problems, where lesser minds may complain that they are taking damage from an ability that doesn't appear to do damage. In this case, we can see that I clearly took 138 damage from Volibear's passive, which restores 30% of his maximum health. Now, I want you to closely observe Volibear's items. He is stacking a lot of health, which increases the damage of his W due to the 15% bonus health ratio it has. His passive, which restores health, is therefore categorized as bonus health, and since he is clearly being buffed by his passive, the death recap is actually telling you the amount of bonus damage his W is doing to you from the healing of his passive. Incredible.
Exhibit B - That move doesn't exist
This one is a little tricky, since it appears that I took 48 damage from nothing. To understand what's going on here, you need to have deep knowledge of Jayce's internal mechanics. Unlike other champions that physically alter their form to gain a new set of moves, such as Elise or Nidalee, only Jayce's weapon switches, leaving the user intact. To streamline this change, Riot coded Jayce's weapon as several minions stapled together so that they would not have to create two separate Jayce models for form switching. In this specific scenario, Jayce hit me with a Shock Blast, auto attacked me with his cannon form, switched to hammer form, and then ripped my tendons apart with Q. It's very clear what that damage is now; the auto attack from cannon form is coded as minion damage, but since that minion was technically destroyed due to the switch to hammer form, the game no longer recognizes it, resulting in a blank square with no information. Pretty obvious, really.
At this point, this one should seem fairly obvious, but I'll go ahead and explain it anyway. Wukong's W, not unlike Jayce's weapon, is coded as a large minion. Wukong obviously used his E and W at the same time with his blindingly fast APM, registering Nimbus Strike as an ability used by the minion. Now, some of you critical thinkers out there may be wondering,
Buh-buh-but, uhh, if da jayce cannon damage is still attached to jayce, then why is da wukong, duhh, why is da wukong a separate minion?
Well, you mouth-breathing neanderthal, wipe that drool off your keyboard and listen up. Jayce's weapon is still attached to his body, where as Wukong clearly creates a clone that does his damage for him. Therefore, it is categorized as a minion independently doing damage from the user. Once you start to see the logical consistency of death recap, it becomes much more useful for analysis. However, there are a few cases that can elude even the most well versed in death recap intricacies, such as the following:
Exhibit D - what the fuck is going on
Alright, just... just listen to me, okay? Just shut up. Okay. So, Ekko. Ekko and Master Yi are two champions. They both do damage, and a whole lot of it, you know what I'm saying? And, if you look closely, well... you can see here that Ekko bought a Jungle item. Now, who else is a jungler? Master Yi. That's right. They can both jungle. And, fun fact, you might not know this if you didn't play back in the day; Master Yi could build AP and do crazy damage with his Q and heal a lot with his W. So, what's happening here is that AP Ekko Jungle is being... coded as... you know, you actually didn't Jungle AP Yi, you would go mid and farm. Ekko is primarily a midlaner. Okay, yeah, okay, so, what's happening is that the game is recognizing Ekko playing an off-role and substituting a more popular Jungler in his place to make it easy on Riot's algorithms for data collection. In order to keep their champions in their optimal or suggested lanes to prevent new players from misinterpreting the meta, Riot always keeps their champion statistics and data consistent with their best role. You see a guy playing mid Janna? Nope, that's Zed. To Riot, that's Zed. Therefore, the bonus damage inflicted by Ekko's Lich Bane is instead recognized as Master Yi damage so that Ekko's statistics and winrates aren't negatively affected by playing him in a suboptimal role. Yes, that's it. That's the reason.
Hopefully this helps you guys understand the Death Recap better. I'm looking forward to a new era of flawless logic and reasoning when approaching this tool.
