How to Build Against Lethality?
Real talk, I've been having trouble dealing with champs who abuse Lethality and can't seem to find a way to reliably deal with it.
Any advise would help.
26 Comments
armor.
The stat itself is specifically designed to punish low-armor or no-armor targets.
So if you're playing adc or mid and end up against someone who's running lethality, buy a cloth armor or two. They'll eventually turn into your guardian angel or zhonyas so you're not really hurting yourself in the long run. Just shuffling your items around a bit.
So you can do something like grab a pickaxe and a cloth armor instead of your BF rush. or you can do something like rushing seeker's armguard if you're a mage or whatever.
The point is, if you build armor, you're basically negating the lethality on the item they bought and all they get is the AD stats. This makes the item an extremely inefficient buy for them, and as far as just pure gold value -- you're probably on even footing. (or maybe even ahead!)
If you've got pickaxe + cloth and they've got serrated dirk, you spent 875 on 25 AD and 300 on 15 armor, and they spent 1100 on 20 AD and some lethality that doesn't matter anymore and basically doesn't count.
You win.
40+ armor mitigates the usual two lethality builld of 
, 60 negates full lethality
/
covers the 40, and 
covers the last 20. Depending on your champ, splitpushes can also opt for 
and supports for 
But the issue you're facing isn't from the lethality itself, but from raw AD outscaling raw Armor by a factor of 1:2
Tabis stop building mercs every game some ccs are avoidable some ccs aren't going to be used for you mercs is only good when there is an abundance of cc that is usually aoe and it's not a knock uo knock back or a pull as those cc's aren't reduced by tenacity
buy tabis if you are at risk of getting beaten up by an assasin after that health will give you the highest amount of defense and if at 3k hp you are still being focused by an assassin and killed by them get ga zhonya or stoneplate
I think the real issue is that if you build against the Lethality then you are still going to get creamed by all the % health and true damage and cleaver wielders because that armor doesn't mean anything to them.
So, great, you stop the enemy assassin from murdering you that's step one. After that though you are still a big target for everyone else.
But yeah just build armor. If an AP user then the armguard first. If an AD user then you have two options, you can either build the armor component for GA and finish it later (further improved by that you can take stopwatch in runes for part of the components and save yourself against one of their ultimates) OR you can take ninja tabi.
Funny thing is it probably sucks to be an assassin right now. Everyone has a ton of mobility and ways to make it hard for you to jump them. So, to allow them to at least partly do their job they introduced lethality.
I have no idea why you would want to play an assassin though in a world full of tanks, dashes, teleporters, champs that have weird passives where they will suddenly disappear somewhere else or transform or gain a huge shield, etc. For them to even be somewhat viable tanks had to be almost phased out of the game for an entire season. Tanks are just starting to make a come back now, which is funny because Rammus was strong for 1 patch and then instantly nerfed.
I don't think the problem is Lethality, I don't think understanding Lethality is what is holding you back from climbing
So the first thing you need to do is stop building 
on Xin Zhao if you want to climb. This is because DPS is multiplicative and you already have a massive attack speed steroid in your kit and runes, your E and HoB, so going 
is just much better for fighting and ganks (Think, what is better 10×1 or 6×5, one is 200% higher than the other even though both numbers sum to the same amount, 11)
You also need to build Trinity on Xin, I see you go Bloodrazor into Merc Treads+Thornmail most games. You see that your build has no specialisation or real fighting emphasis? It's pretty bad. You also buy very few control wards and never upgrade your yellow ward trinket to sweeper at level 9, when you need to have objective control
To counter Lethality you can skirmish better with better items, if the enemy has burst you can buy stopwatch and turn it into GA. Merc treads are only really better than tabi if the enemy team has a lot of cc, never buy them for the MR
I think you should watch Tarzaned's guides on XIn Zhao if you want to climb with him, because you're a bit of a weight to your teams playing Xin Zhao the way you do now
"Champs who abuse lethality"
Man's doesn't realize lethality is one of the worst stats in the game and is basically useless lmao
Armor
Armor
do the major work on denying lethality because Duskblade applies on basic attack wich tabi reduce and provide armor on top of it. After that, any Health/Armor do the trick easily. Deadman's Plate do an amazing job on diver/juggernaut or renduin omens if you face also critical damage enemies.
armor, unless they also bought last whisper/bc in which case you die
Literally any armor item
I mean... everyone's saying armor but... pretty much assure you that if you're playing anything but a bruiser or someone with zhonya's/stopwatch and the assassin has duskblade, ur just gonna die. Games damage kind of transcended counter building. If ur an adc and enemy rengo or talon gets even slightly ahead, tabis and GA armor will not save u from being one shotted, I guarantee it. U'll be lucky if it even requires them to land all of their abilities to 100-0 u.
Not rly sure y this isn't considered a problem by riot, but it is what it is.
Get fed and buy it first.
Massive amounts of armor faster than they get lethality works okish
Each champ is countered differently. But if all you wanna do is counter lethality just buy 6 armor items. WTF kind of question is this?
Tell us what you play and what you struggle against and we can help.
Build damage, try to oneshot enemy before he does that to you. Season9 in a nutshell.
I have been building my Ashe with Black Cleaver and Phantom Dancer. Works great on Ashe, because her Q procks all the stacks in one shot.