Ever wondered what Tenacity is in LoL and how it really works? Here is what you need to know about one of the most important in-game stats.
Image Credits | Riot Games
Tenacity is an in-game stat that reduces the duration of crowd controls. The more tenacity you have, the lower the duration will be. That said, the duration cannot go below 0.3 seconds and the duration is calculated at the time of application. Tenacity is capped at 100%.
Also, there are some crowd controls that are not lowered by tenacity: airborne, drowsy, nearsight, stasis, and suppression.
In modern League of Legends, tenacity has become a crucial element that can win you games. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an assassin, a bruiser, or a tank: you will need a bit of it to avoid dying too fast.
How does Tenacity Work?
Tenacity is calculated in percentages and it can be obtained from different sources: champion abilities, items, runes, as well as summoner spells. Having said that, the increasing amount of tenacity sources brought the developers to make a small reform on the tenacity calculation, making it a lot trickier.
Image Credits | Riot Games
For this reason, we will be going through how the system exactly works, and use some common in-game examples to give you a better idea. The current sources that can grant tenacity are:
Items
- Elixir of Iron
- Iceborn Gauntlet
- Mercury’s Treads
- Mosstomper Seedling
- Silvermere Dawn
Champion abilities
- Garen’s Courage (W)
- Milio’s Breath of Life (R)
Runes
- Legend: Tenacity
- Unflinching
Summoner Spells
Neutral Buffs
Read more: LoL Tier List - Best champions to climb SoloQ
Increasing Tenacity in LoL
The tenacity stats are split into three different groups, from A to C. Combination of effects in the same type will stack multiplicatively, while the combination of multiple types will stack additively.
The mathematics regarding the total tenacity is as follows: (1 – ((1 – A1)(1 – A2)(1 – …))) + (1 – ((1 – B1)(1 – B2)(1 – …))) + (1 – ((1 – C1)(1 – C2)(1 – …)))
Group A
- Mercury’s Treads
- Anathema’s Chains
- Elixir of Iron
- Iceborn Gauntlet
- Legend: Tenacity
- Unflinching
- Mosstomper Seedling
- Chemtech Blight
Group B
- Milio’s Breath of Life (R)
- Silvermere Dawn
- Cleanse
Group C
- Courage
- Brittle
- Rift Scuttler’s innate negative tenacity
Can Tenacity be reduced?
There are also a couple of ways to reduce the tenacity statistic of your opponents, preventing them from resisting your own CC abilities. Theoretically, tenacity can even be reduced to a negative number, causing crowd controls effects to last longer. That said, in modern LoL, they are unlikely scenarios.
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Currently, there are only two ways to reduce Tenacity:
- Ornn’s Bellows Breath (W) and Call of the Forge God (R) apply the Brittle passive, which is a unique status effect that reduces tenacity by 30%
- The legendary item Anathema’s Chains reduces the Nemesis’ tenacity by 20% while at maximum stacks of Vendetta. This can stack additively with Brittle for a total of -50% tenacity.
Little bonus trivia: the Rift Scuttler monster also has -100% tenacity, making crowd controls effects twice as effective on it.
Calculation Example of in-game Tenacity
For instance, if a jungle champion has Mosstomper Seedling with Mercury’s Treads and also Legend: Tenacity at maximum stacks, then his total tenacity will be as follows:
- Group A Tenacity modifiers = (Mosstomper Seedling) 20% × (Mercury’s Treads) 30% × (Legend: Tenacity) 20%
- Final Tenacity = (1 – ((1 – 0.2) × (1 – 0.3) × (1 – 0.2)) Group A Tenacity modifiers
- = (1 – (0.8 × 0.7 × 0.8))
- = 1 – 0.448 = 55.2%
If you add up Ornn’s Brittle effect (which is calculated additively since it’s from Group C), then the total amount of tenacity on the champion is:
- Group A Tenacity modifiers = (Mosstomper Seedling) 20% × (Mercury’s Treads) 30% × (Legend: Tenacity) 20%
- Group C Tenacity modifier = -30%
- = ((1 – (0.8 × 0.7 × 0.8)) – 0.3)
- = 1 – 0.448 – 0.3 = 25.2%
Meaning that the champion only gets approximately a 25% crowd control reduction.
Read more: What is lethality in LoL?
