League of Legends Season 26 The Era of ADCs: When Is Lord Dominik’s Regards Actually Worth Buying?
January 5, 2026
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The 2025 season was defined by a meta centered around pure tanks and bruisers.
From the perspective of mana-dependent AP damage dealers, Liandry’s effectively became an inefficient item. Its build path no longer included a mana component, and its Ability Power was reduced by 10, significantly lowering its overall value. This change directly resulted in a structure where tanks became stronger while mages lost efficiency.
On top of that, Sundered Sky established itself as a near-exclusive core item for bruisers. It enabled an abnormal power curve where champions could achieve tank-level survivability while maintaining high DPS at the same time.
In the 2026 season, Lord Dominik’s Regards receives the return of the Giant Slayer effect.
The effect previously seen in Arena and Teamfight Tactics (TFT), which grants 15% increased damage against enemies with 1500 or more bonus health, is added in exchange for a 5% reduction in armor penetration.
In this article, we aim to answer the following questions:
In League of Legends, damage is not calculated through a single formula but through a multi-step process consisting of Pre-mitigation, Mitigation, and Post-mitigation, which together determine the final damage value. Since physical and magic damage follow the same calculation logic, this article focuses exclusively on physical damage.
This is the initial stage of damage calculation. At this stage, base damage is determined by the attacker’s skill coefficients, level scaling, attack damage provided by items, and critical strike chance and multipliers. Up to this point, the calculated values are completely independent of the target’s defensive stats, with armor and penetration-related values applied only in subsequent stages.
The second stage is the core phase of damage adjustment. Effects are applied in the following order: percentage armor reduction, flat armor reduction, percentage armor penetration, and flat physical penetration. Assuming no special modifiers are involved, the final armor value can be defined as follows.
Here,
This resulting value is then used as the denominator in the final damage calculation, producing the following damage reduction coefficient.
In other words, the damage dealt at the Mitigation stage can ultimately be summarized as follows.
The new item effect introduced in the 2026 season, which grants 15% increased physical damage when the target has 1500 or more bonus health, is applied at this stage. If we denote the fixed amplification coefficient as H, then H = 0.15 when the condition is met.
The final damage calculation can be expressed as follows.
Flat physical penetration (L) is applied by subtracting a fixed value from the target’s armor. It is highly effective against champions with low armor, with the strongest impact typically felt in the 1–2 core item window. However, once opponents begin stacking armor items, the relative damage gain drops sharply, causing its efficiency to decline rapidly as the game moves into the mid to late stages.
Percentage armor penetration (P) reduces armor by a proportional amount and reaches peak efficiency against targets that have built armor items, usually after the 2–3 core item mark. Its priority increases significantly when facing champions with high armor values, but it performs poorly against low-armor targets.
The 15% bonus damage amplifier (H) is applied multiplicatively at the final stage of damage calculation. As long as the target meets the 1500 bonus health condition, damage is increased by a fixed amount regardless of armor values. Because of this, it delivers the highest efficiency against tanks after 3 core items.
Against targets with low armor and less than 1500 bonus health, especially in the early stages of the game, the previous version of Lord Dominik’s Regards remains more efficient. In many cases, other DPS items may even outperform it in terms of overall value.
However, once the 1500 bonus health condition is met, a clear breakpoint begins to emerge against tanks with two to three core items or more. At this point, the loss of 5% armor penetration is more than offset by the bonus damage. If there are two or more enemies with at least 1500 bonus health, Lord Dominik’s Regards becomes a core item capable of delivering maximum efficiency.
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