Nico Minoru with recoil masteries

Squammo

When I first saw recoil tree as recommended masteries in her spotlight I got quite excited, since I run them most of the time. Got her 4 star in arena and took her for a spin in RoL. Started firing off a few heavies to check out the adrenaline mechanic of hers and after those her health was at 70%. I was quite surprised to see her adrenaline bar shrinking at an incredibly fast rate. At first I didn’t understand what was going on, but soon came to the conclusion that it has to be the debuffs on her. I always assumed that adrenaline had nothing to do with health and masteries had no influence on it, so why are the poison and bleed interacting with the rate at which the adrenaline bar is shrinking? Even when going poison immune she will still be losing a huge chunk of health while the bleed is still up and gaining any kind of adrenaline.

Squidopus

What’s happening is that an equivalent amount of Adrenaline is lost when you gain health for any other reason, presumably as a measure to prevent you from “double-dipping” with Adrenaline and other regen sources*. Your Adrenaline is being consumed by the constant Willpower healing from having the Double Edge and Liquid Courage Debuffs on you.

*As a specific example, take Dragon Man who regenerates 85% of all damage taken from hits while Unstoppable. If other regen sources didn’t drain Adrenaline, you’d actually be able to heal more hit damage than you take instead of just being able to ignore most of it. You’d get similar problems with a lot of other champs like Weapon X, Sauron, Mysterio, etc.. Maybe not broken if you squint really hard, but probably a little too cheesy at minimum.