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Make armor pen/shred/lethality exclusive to champs that buy them.

DeusVult··1 votes·1,797 views

At the moment the "best" champs in the game are the ones that can stack all 3 lethality items, a LW item and find a way to put black cleaver in their build. That way they deal true damage to anyone with less than 100 armor, and near enough to true damage to anyone who isnt an armor stacking tank.

Now I'm fine with the principle of lethality (which is just renamed flat armor pen). You stack enough of it, you deal true damage to anyone who doesn't buy any armor. You excel at killing squishy champs. League saw the same thing during league of black cleavers when the armor pen wasnt unique and you could stack 5. if you want to stack a certain stat to excel at killing a certain type of champ (those with low armor/health) then there is nothing wrong with that. The same goes for it you stack crit/AS and % bonus armor pen because you want to take down the other teams frontline.

The thing that I have a problem with is when it becomes viable to pick up this single stat and have it good against EVERYTHING, making building against it useless. So when a champ stacks lethality, and LW and black cleaver so that they delete squishy champs yet still deal amazing damage to people with 450+ armor, that is when the stat and the items associated with it have a problem.

What could be done?? Riot could make it so that Lethality is applied before % armor pen, as it was before season 2. And they could make it so that the armor shred of BC and the % armor pen of LW dont stack.

If they really wanted to take a bold step they would just make the 3 things mutually exclusive so that if you specialize to kill someone, you dont double dip to get bonus's on something else. So if you built lethality than you dont gain anything from % armor pen, or BC's armor shred. And vise versa. So if you're building for 600 Varus Qs on the enemy backline, you dont deal as much to the enemy frontline. Or if you build Cait to shred the enemy frontline, you dont get to benefit from lethality if you Q/ult hits an enemy backline champ. Or if you name is Jayce, you don't get to triple dip and ignore armor altogether.

Because on their own there is nothing wrong with these stats, its when there is nothing barring you from stacking them that problems arise. (FYI item 3142 item 3814 item 3147 item 3036 item 3071 is 285 bonus AD, with 50 lethality, and 45% bonus armor pen. With black cleaver, and lord doms passive. Against a 500 armor tank (probably with higher health) just from these items alone they are going to bring it 142.5 armor for damage caclulation.)

11 Comments

MaeDoSan1 votes

Deal

MaeDoSan1 votes

Hopefully this is done simultaneously with the tank rework so that tanks don't obliterate squishes with their base damage nor get all their armor shreded

CancerBasedGod1 votes

No one should be building 5 pen items... EVER...

Asayake 5150glow1 votes

{quoted}

No one should be building 5 pen items... EVER...

Boots replacement.

CancerBasedGod1 votes

... That would cost an insane amount... You can't take the optimal build at 70 minutes and claim it will work... You would be slow and an easy kill for the first 30 minutes... You would lose.

Kilanost1 votes

So the order these things are applied in are:

  1. percent armor reduction (BC)
  2. flat armor reduction (something like nasus spirit fire)
  3. flat armor pen (the product of your level with the lethality formula)
  4. percent armor pen (Last whisper items)

This order of operations is very important because it it somewhat self balances when using realistic numbers. starting with 100 base and 200 bonus armor:

  1. Black cleaver: 300(1-0.3)= 210 armor
  2. no flat armor reduction in that scenario
  3. flat armor pen (lethality assuming level 18): 210-50=160.
  4. LW item (this is where it self balances a bit): [ (armor modified by above 3 steps) - (base armor)]* (1-0.45) + (base armor) = (160-100) * (1-0.45) +100 = 133 armor after all reductions.

So you go from 300 to 130. Seems shitty and it is...if you do nothing but stack armor. What you want to be stacking is HEALTH with a bit of armor.

with % reductions from LW and BC, building less armor in favor of stacking health actually reduces the value of the BC and LW passives against you. Someone with 300 armor is not likely to have built a whole lot of health OR doesn't have any MR. If you build just enough armor so that lethality brings you exactly to your base armor, the LW item has zero effect. From there, stack health. That is the optimal way to build your tank against that kind of set up. If you want, you can build the armor items early, then when someone buys that LW item, assuming you're at full build and have gold to waste, you can sell one of those heave armor, low health items for something with a bucket of health. But its just more realistic to plan for this ahead of time. In addition, stacking health also makes you tankier against magic damage so its really a twofer.

Edit: for clarification that number for armor to make LW passive a non-issue is probably around 210ish given 50 lethality and BC. I'd figure it out, but what i typed above is more math than I've done in years and I'm spent lol

DeusVult1 votes

This formula hasnt been correct since season 2. When Riot changed flat and % pen and when they are applied.

% pen is applied BEFORE flat pen, so that in Riots words, it feels better to buy both.

So it goes %shred, flat reduction, %pen, flat pen (lethality).

So if they have 300 armor ( which is average on every tank except Malphite Rammus ) then they end up with 65.5 armor. 300-90=(210*0.55) - 50 = 65.5

65.5 is nothing for someone who went full tank (akaitem 3068 item 3742 item 3143 item 3047 item 3065

DeusVult1 votes

Also, as far as 300 armor with little health, the average tank has 88 base armor at level 18. You can take another 27 from scaling armor runes, 50 from sunfire, 50 from dead mans, 60 from deadmans and 30 from tabis. That brings us to 305 armor. With masteries (5%) 320+

As far as health, a tank with 2000 base health, 1500 from item 3742 item 3068 item 3143 + more from other items they might grab. So your looking at a 3500+ health 320+ armor tank. Not really that hard to get to.

Irelia Bot1 votes

They should switch it back.

That logic was fine at the time since we would at most see something like 30 flat armor pen if someone was actively trying for it past the patch known as the league of cleavers.

Now it is proving to be too effective having 200 armor reduced to around 100 between the effects of BC and LW only to have armor reduced by another 50 because of Lethality.

Kilanost1 votes

this is incorrect you're confusing the LW item's % bonus armor pen with % armor reduction

Irelia Bot1 votes

Lethality is fine and working as intended when used alone but BC and LW are working too well at nullifying armor and removing an extra 50 armor at the end with lethality is not making armor feel at all effective in the game currently.

I don't want all damage to be removed which would be just as bad as the current state of the game where way to much armor is easily ignored.

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