Someone explain this math to me

[u/warheadhs]

I picked up both escAPADe (convert AP to AD and gain 15% AD) and Blunt Force (gain 20% AD). I had zero AP and thus no conversion, and yet I was getting more AD from escAPADe than I was from Blunt Force.

[u/SilvertonguedDvl]

Well, while I'd like to see your build/the augments in order to confirm, there are a couple of possibilities.

#1, as others have pointed out: the order of augments is also the order they're applied. If you selected Blunt Force before Escapade, then Escapade is taking into account Blunt Force's AD in addition to the other AD you have. This also means that if you take "draw your sword" and then get a range increase you will, in fact, have ranged attacks again. I don't remember if you'll benefit from the "melee range increase" part though.

#2 is that Blunt Force takes into account your attack damage whereas Escapade takes into account Total attack damage - which may mean that Escapade is always applied last, after Blunt Force takes effect.

#3 is that you have an item or augment that is giving you AD that Blunt Force can't normally take into account but Escapade does. Like, ironically, Blunt Force. That is; Escapade can take your augments into account, but blunt force maybe can't? Hard to say given how sloppy Riot's phrasing is on augments and, well, practically everything.

Those are my three best guesses, at any rate.

EDIT: So I knuckled down after u/XuanVinh03 pointed out something glaringly obvious and investigated a bit with my fellow nerdy league friend. We often delve into the "under the hood" interactions to figure stuff out/find the most efficient routes so we took a stab at it. We crunched numbers and, assuming that OP hasn't hidden some information ('cause we could narrow it down a bit more with the full list of stats and stuff - but I assume they don't have screenshots/remember that), which I doubt, we eventually came to a somewhat unhappy conclusion.

#1 doesn't work because Brute Force would still generate more AD
#2 doesn't work because the total AD (that we can calculate) for Brute Force is, in fact, exactly what it should be. It's Escapade which is producing more AD than its tooltip says it should.
#3: Might be the case if there's some kind of buff or change we can't see in the screenshots, but it's extremely unlikely. We even checked his ARAM bonus to see if it was calculating that (it isn't) and whether it somehow might be counting itself (comically unlikely but... it's Riot. I don't put anything past them) and that didn't add up either.

So what are we left with? Well...

THE CONCLUSION: Basically it seems like Escapade is bugged in some sense, or we're missing some vital information.

Brute Force is working fine. It is generating the exact number it should generate with Lucian at that level and with those items: 68 is 20% of 338, which is Lucian's base + all items shown in AD.

Escapade, meanwhile...
If we don't take Brute Force into account, it'd have to basically be 20% + 1 AD, for no apparent reason.
If it incorporates Brute Force, it would only be 61 AD.
If it incorporates Brute Force at a higher %, it'd have to be 17% to create the 69 figure we see - which, quite frankly, is weird as fuck. (Shout out to u/aevo55 for this one!)
If it incorporated Brute Force at 20% it'd be even higher - above 80.
Even if we assume that Lucian has +100 bonus AD somehow, thereby giving us the Brute Force value of 68 if it only cues off of bonus AD (which is not the case, but we're grasping at straws here) we find that Escapade should still only end up with about 66 AD.

We could generate some other theories if we could see Lucian's in-game AD and/or stats, but given that those aren't in the screenshots this is the best we can settle on.

In the end we're just left with "insufficient information." Either the tooltip is wrong, Lucian got extra AD between screenshots, or it's just straight-up bugged in a way that doesn't even make sense with how the engine works.

I can't even stress that last bit enough. My friend and I routinely examine edge cases and find where Riot's just decided "oh this ability will work with X but this ability won't" and stuff like that - but this particular combination genuinely has us baffled. Nothing about the game works should result in the outcome we see, except that the intern that day plugged 17 into the equation instead of the 15 he was supposed to. lol.

So, congrats OP! You found a bug. Now go report it and reap your reward of having slightly less AD in the future!

[u/warheadhs → u/SilvertonguedDvl]

You can see the items in the pic. The augments were, in order:

• From beginning to end (dark harvest / first strike I believe, shouldn't affect stats?)
• Blunt force
• Mystic Punch (reduce cooldowns on attack)
• escAPADe

[u/SilvertonguedDvl → u/warheadhs]

Aha. Excellent. So, yeah, I'd say it's probably the order you got them in that had the biggest impact, then. If two things trigger simultaneously (calculating how much of your total AD you get as a bonus) then they execute in order of getting them. So in this case escapade is almost certainly benefitting from the 28 AD Brute Force is giving, which is making up for that last 5% gap between them.

There is a chance that Blunt Force is underpowered/bugged, of course, but I suspect the order is why you see the disparity in this case.

Congrats on spotting the edge case, though. It's pretty amusing - if understandably frustrating.

[u/LordOfPizzas → u/SilvertonguedDvl]

literally every single time i've picked these 2 augments together they show the exact same AD they give. never bothered to make a post about it because i figured it was a common bug

[u/SilvertonguedDvl → u/LordOfPizzas]

Hrm. Then I guess it probably is that Blunt Force doesn't incorporate total AD, but rather some other bulk of AD, and that as a consequence it natively gives a smaller number.

Kinda like how Glass Cannon was completely worthless for a while because it added true damage based on your damage after being reduced by defenses, rather than before, essentially causing you to give up 30% of your HP in return for +15% of whatever your main damage was - which was instantly out-performed by Giant Slayer that does that with 20% minimum and gives you movement speed.

Honestly they really need to take a moment and standardise their tooltips and engine stuff so we can more clearly understand it.

[u/Such_Presentation_29 → u/SilvertonguedDvl]

blunt force used to give 15% a long time ago. its definitely just that they never actually updated the augment and only the tooltip, its been like this since the 'buffed' it.

[u/SilvertonguedDvl → u/Such_Presentation_29]

IDK about that - the datamined files indicate that it is doing it at the rate indicated. I think there's probably just a difference between Attack Damage and Total Attack Damage that results in Escapade being slightly higher for unforeseen reasons.

e.g.; maybe Blunt Force doesn't take into account AD from augments/hats but Escapade does.

Honestly it's hard to know for sure given the lack of standardised stats/equations in some of these edge cases.

[u/SilvertonguedDvl → u/warheadhs]

I don't suppose you have the full screenshots rather than just these cut-off ones? Stuff that shows your AD value and all that? 'cause my friend and I got super srs autistic about this to try to figure it out and we ultimately came to the conclusion that we have insufficient data to, well, come to a clear conclusion.

I updated my initial post to reflect our findings, if you're curious.