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Armor pen is infinitely healthier than true damage

Sasogwa·12/27/2018, 5:00:16 PM·61 votes·16,172 views

Armor penetration is a great way to deal with resistance stacking without making those useless. It reduces the effectiveness of armor without making it worthless. True damage says fuck it to a balanced system and makes armor utterly worthless.

Look at a graph comparing armor pen effectiveness compared to true damage effectiveness, in function of armor. That graph will tell you true damage conversion literally scales infinitely more than %pen. It's complete bullshit. Sustained true damage is an abomination that should have never started with ( you could just make physical damage with % arpen, you know. The technology is there. ) and never have continued with conqueror's.

I'm borderline fine with Darius and Cho'gath having a one-time execute with true damage, but DPS true damage is just.. not fine.

Stop taking people for dumbasses.

"but the average player doesn't really get the % pen and prefers simpler stuff such as true damage, easier to understand".

Well sorry but some people being completely %%%%%%ed at understanding basic math is not a reason to make the game unbalanced.

%pen and %true damage conversion are completely different in terms of scaling, one is somewhat fine, the other is complete bullshit. It's not healthy nor balanced to have something completely ignore armor.

For once in your life Riot, go back on your decisions. You can make Conqueror's give hybrid pen like Rageblade, good against tanks but not completely overwhelming and making the whole resistance system break down because of it.

Jax/Yi main btw

40 Comments

Ralanr12/27/2018, 6:59:04 PM15 votes

When you say that armor penetration is a great way for dealing with resistance stacking, you mean %armor penetration right? Because flat is just shit against resistance stacking and great against low resistance targets.

iiGazeii12/27/2018, 5:56:18 PM7 votes

If a percentage of damage is true damage, armor/MR isn't worthless. It still applies to the rest of the damage.

Take Conqueror for example. It converts 20% of your damage into true damage, so resistances don't apply to that 20%. They still apply to 80% of the damage that the Conqueror user deals, so they still lower the damage taken by quite a lot.

IronFiveSupport12/27/2018, 9:24:19 PM6 votes

When I first introduced a friend to this game a while ago, I explained armor pen and magic pen were the closest thing you could get to true damage.

Now you can just straight up get true damage.

Morioh Cho Radio12/28/2018, 12:55:17 AM6 votes

It doesn't take a genius to figure this out.

Dracocrash12/28/2018, 3:43:33 AM4 votes

Not counting fiora's ultimate, and just her passive, it feels more balanced than other sources of true damage like YI/vayne/camile

Cats Are Food12/27/2018, 5:01:12 PM4 votes

Please see my posts ranging back 3 years on this account. They will never retcon their decisions on true damage.

Tormentula12/28/2018, 12:22:37 AM3 votes

I'd prefer true damage over armor pen.

You can build armor then armor pen makes that feel like a waste of gold, or if you don't build anything at all then armor pen fucks you whether you start stacking armor or not. It feels like armor is completely pointless because armor pen can be built to counter it in addition to potential true damage in the game.

However with true damage, you can build health and that does counter true damage. If camille does do 400 true damage, you're still completely negating it by buying a item 3068 or item 3071 . True damage is a lot simpler then made out to be, the only problematic cases is when we're talking about % based true damage such as Vayne Fiora , where it doesn't matter what you build they counter it. You can't counter armor pen because armor pen is meant to be a counter of its own, true damage is just damage which can be countered by health stacking, and if there's specific abusers that either do too much or break the rules of beating them with health stacking, they need addressed, the mechanic itself is fine, its users are not.

ModAcademy Kayn12/27/2018, 9:12:55 PM2 votes

"but the average player doesn't really get the % pen and prefers simpler stuff such as true damage, easier to understand".

Where the heck is this quote from?

Hügö12/28/2018, 11:29:19 AM2 votes

Armor pen is healthy as long as riot doesn't have the realy smart idea "You can now stack up to 100% armor pen".

MOLTinaTOR12/28/2018, 12:30:25 PM2 votes

True damage is just ridiculous. The fact that there's a type of damage in the game that you can't build against is messed up >:(

Rabbi Shekelberg12/28/2018, 1:46:36 PM2 votes

Really? infinitely healthier? because the current way i see it is that armor stacking makes physical damage almost do nothing, and after 1 armor pen item it acts like the armor never existed in the first place. Riot need to balance the armor so that it would be more consistent throughout the game, stacking wouldn't be too powerful and item 3071 / item 3036 shouldn't instantly make it useful. Same goes for Magic damage/resist but its even worse

Arammus12/28/2018, 8:17:30 PM2 votes

armor pen... INFINITELY better than true damage infinity... item 3031 ... true damage lul

DuskDaUmbreon12/28/2018, 12:56:37 AM2 votes

Can you actually define the difference between %pen and true damage conversion?

vegeta000712/28/2018, 6:15:45 AM2 votes

ur comparision of dominiks to conquorer is not 1:1 utilizing conquorer is not as easy as buying dominiks (FITE me if u disagree)

even though u have illustrated that 20% true damage conversion is better than 35% pen, we cant say that true damage in general is better than %pen in ALL situations

buying armor should never counter true damage (imo) , as that is what it is meant to do health is what counters true damage. and %hp damage is countered by resistances so buy the items needed for that game specifically.

there are times where u encounter %hp true damage like in case of vayne, fiora and other %hp champs with conquorer

these cases may look overwhelming as there is (almost) literally nothing u can buy against them but their numbers are all balanced for fair play. league is not just rock paper scissors anyone that uses conquorer to deal effective damage to tanks are need to be built semi damage oriented, leaving them squishier in teamfights than tanks

but conquorer users excel in 1v1 situations vs tanks in splitpush scenarios , like they are supposed to. considering they are weaker than tanks in the teamfights

riot has to look at all the scenarios that give certain champions advantages over others. this makes the game more diverse, exciting and ull have more than one win condition( which is a good thing)

i do see ppl complaining about base damage of tanks all the time. when they deal a respectable amount of damage when they buy none, packing a crap ton of cc and sustain in the form of shields or heals to boot (poppy for example)

that is ofc necessary as well, for poppy to excel more in teamfights when compared to say conquorer irelia. and this fact is what compensates for the fact that conquorer irelia can do a % of her damage to poppy , independent of the amount of armor stacked

so instead of talking about the inherent game mechanics that counter each other, "my duskblade proc does 25 damage to rammus. i paid 2800 gold for an item that became literally useless against this guy"

(im sure the guy who mentioned the 500 armor (who mentioned its unfair for conquorer to do so much damage ) ever stopped to think of the other side of the story, where the item value of the assasins are literally nullified against tanks that like to deal damage when having 500 armor)

or

"i get dealt 1/5th of the enemy's intended damage even if i have 1k armor" ( which tbh is not very high, compared to the amount of items invested , intended to do 100% of the damage)

or

"i purchased infinity edge, berserker boots, stormrazor and a static shiv as tristana which is worth a lot more gold than the duskblade,yoummu and black cleaver that the talon who 1v1d me with had purchased"

id say true damage is in a healthy spot, so are tanks ( i mean the concept of true damage and the concept of tanks) but game balance is a different story that riot is ofc looking into every patch

these "unfair mechanics" i mentioned so far adds spice to the game and makes it non linear and non "stat-checky" and using these mechanics to ur advantage and smartly exploiting the weakness of every class is key to victory

Daddy Ants12/27/2018, 7:05:31 PM2 votes

Fiora's true damage isn't that high tbh, nor is Vayne's.

20% of their damage approximately.

Yi does 50-60%+ due to Guinsoo's + E + Conqueror.

fƒ1512/28/2018, 10:38:39 PM1 votes

just build health kappa

SuffocateMeDaddy12/28/2018, 2:50:18 AM1 votes

Great, just give armor penetration to everyone so bruisers can be fucked over again just for your fetishistic idea that it will somehow fix issues with tanks. True damage from conqueror is NECESSARY FUCKING EVIL WE ALL HAVE TO ACCEPT IF WE WANT ANY OTHER CHAMPIONS THAN TANKS ON TOP LANE. WAKE THE FUCK UP ALREADY.

DragonShea12/28/2018, 6:10:02 AM1 votes

True damage should be low by default unless it's an execution ult or champs that are designed around it. the problem is that Conqueror does it's job too well. it's should be a tank busting Rune but it's adds too much damage to dps's. It shouldn't grant extra AD. Reduce it's true damage conversion down to 10% and increase true damage by 10% from sources other than conqueror.

Meany Sting12/28/2018, 8:06:32 AM1 votes

Well yes it is. Problem is true damage is neccesary in some cases. Say enemy tank with frozen heart and randuins+sunfire cape and tabis is split pushing. Enemy trynda will not be able to 1v1 kill that person even with ignite if enemy is say poppy. Now if poppy can split push 1v1 safely while having teleport and better team fights, it invalidates trynda completely, or say yasuo etc unless true damage exists to be actually able to kill those targets.

The problem right now though? True damage is too high and you are better off stacking hp and just getting armor on the side. Which means brusers and juggernauts are better off then tanks are. Building steraks, titanic hydra + dead mans and same tabis gives you more survviability vs true damage, while also giving you more damage and better 1v1 most of the time all the while clearing the minnion waves much easier. Building over only 1 armor and 1 MR item makes more sense then buying multiples, a thing which a lot of tanks relies on.

It makes a lot more sense right now to have maybe 150 armor, 120mr and 4k+ hp while having respectable damage rather than 3.5k hp 250 armor and 150mr with lower damage as person in 1st case will survive more burst expecially if he built steraks

He4rtkiller12/28/2018, 12:18:53 PM1 votes

People freak out when they hear the term "True Damage" like it's something inherently over powered and therefore shouldn't be allowed for many to use. True damage just deals the same amount of damage to tanky and non tanky targets. It's a tool that is used when you want to ensure that a character deals enough damage to tanks while not overkilling squishy champs.

I assume OP is talking about %armor pen and not flat because flat armor pen does the opposite of true damage, it's strong vs squishy while weak vs tanky champs.

The OP suggests that %armor pen would be better then the current conqueror because true damage makes armor useless. While true damage does make armor useless lets not forget that conqueror makes 20% of your damage true damage so 80% of your damage is still being reduced by armor. Now, I'm not saying that conqueror is a great rune or in a balanced state. What I wanna say is that imo the potential rune with %armor pen would do essentially the same thing that conqueror currently does which is increasing damage in a way that is way more effective vs tanks then vs squishy champs.

Meritas12/28/2018, 1:09:52 PM1 votes

I think that the only unhealthy bit is %Max HP dmg. Everything else(when in decent amounts) can simply be countered by flat health purchases.

Ok sure but why12/28/2018, 4:51:39 PM1 votes

Even 100% armor pen?

Kadexe12/28/2018, 9:02:46 PM1 votes

What's the difference between having 20% armor penetration, and dealing 20% true damage with my attacks?