You don ' t build Basic or Ability damage . You build a Power stat , which scales your abilities and autos according to which hero you are . For example a Gideon stacking Power would see more of an increase to his spells while a Sparrow building Power would see more of an increase in her auto attack damage . Armours will be Basic and Ability , which means Basic Armour allows you to protect yourself from more autoheavy teams Rampage , Murdock , Feng Mao for example while buying Ability Armour would reduce abilitybased damage to you and therefore would be good against teams stacked with casters . Or you could just build both , as will be the case if you are a tank . I think the main idea they had here was to give squishy characters a more meaningful choice with their oneor at least few defensive items . Currently let ' s say a Sparrow would build a Spiked Boneplate . She ' s now protected against everything both Countess and Rampage would do to her . With the changes , she would now need to choose specifically between reducing ability damage to stop Countess ' burst or reducing basic damage from Rampage ' s punches . TLDR there will be no ADAP , only Power , which affects each hero differently in terms of what it improves how much by . The new armours are there so one defence stat eg Energy Armour doesn ' t invalidate multiple sources of that damage eg Gideon abilities and Murdock basic attacks .