A reminder to Boards about ADC items in Season 6

Look at the big picture.

Yes, ADC items are getting reworked. Some of them are getting buffed compared to their current state (ER, Hurricane), some are getting nerfed (IE, BotRK).

Yes, tank items are getting their price increased across the board, with occasional slight stat increase.

However, putting these facts together is meaningless without considering the most important link betwene those two item classes:

#Last Whisper is getting heavily nerfed.

You heard that correctly. "But they buffed it from 35% to 40%!" No they did not.

• Old LW penetrates total armor, which means it's effective against everyone.
• New LW penetrates bonus armor, which means it's effective against tanks only.

So by purchasing LW the ADC focuses on damaging tanks, and gives up on power against non-armored targets.

"Well but they'll deal more damage to tanks than before". Again, not true.

#New LW upgrades deal more damage only if you have more than ~600-800 armor

Most tanks and fighters have about 80-90 base armor once lategame hits. This is a number the new LW can't touch. Let's now see how effective the old and new items are:

| Base armor | Bonus armor | Total armor | -35% total | -40% bonus |-|-|-|- |80|20|100|65|92 |80|70|150|97.5|122 |80|120|200|130|152 |80|170|250|162.5|182 |80|220|300|195|212 |80|320|400|260|272 |80|520|600|390|392 |80|560|640|416|416

The simpler version of the math is:

#Unless your bonus armor is 7 times higher than your base armor, the new LW upgrades penetrate less armor.

So please, look at the whole system before going haywire over the details. Do you guys want another "skarner rework on PBE was meh, we want him buffed" syndrome?

If you want to find some true problems, take a look at the Warlord's Blodlust mastery and consider how frustrating will it be on champions rushing IE or ER. But then again consider it has a cooldown and will not be a "free 15% lifesteal" in lategame.

...Or the whole fact that the meta requires an ADC on every team while assassins, mages, true supports, fighters and tanks are interchangeable or outright expendable - and that's not because ADCs are OP in every situation, but because nobody else can go against them in 2v2 lanes, and even if they did, a laneswap can always happen. Also the fact that nobody else can reliably take down towers.

...or the fact that some true tanks like Sejuani and Sion have been dumpstered when the OP state of Cinderhulk brought them to popularity for a short while, and even though Cinderhulk has been nerfed to a balanced state, these champions remained overnerfed.