Absolute Madman does math on PBE lethality changes
Here is a little bit of the math behind the lethality changes that I decided to do out of boredom, maybe this will show the relevance of the changes to lethality on the PBE, but this again is just math and not a real-world reflection of League of Legends here is the wiki's entrance on lethality:
"Lethality is a new statistic introduced in Season 2017 to replace flat armor penetration. It grants flat armor penetration using the following formula:
Flat Armor Penetration = LETHALITY × (0.6 + 0.4 × level ÷ 18) The target's armor is treated as being reduced by an amount for purposes of damage calculation, but cannot be reduced below 0. Flat armor penetration stacks additively.
Example 1: 20 lethality causes a target (level 18) to take damage as if its armor was 20 less, so a target with 30 armors will be treated as though it had 10 for purposes of damage calculation (the target's actual armor value will not change, however). Because the target's actual armor value does not change, anything else depending on that value also doesn't change (e.g. Rammus' Spiked Shell)."
So with the changes to the lethality items on the PBE, lets see what this means, but before that, lets actually see how lethality even works I’m just using random examples here, so this won’t be an accurate reflection of what happens in game, but maybe this will build some intuition on these changes. let’s say you and your opponent are both level 10 generic champions with 40 armors and 1000hp, and let’s say that you have an ability that does 200 physical damage that doesn't scale with your AD (just to make the math easier.) Now the formula for armor damage multiplier is 1-(100/(100+armor)) so with 40 armor you will have 28.57% damage reduction, lets round that to 30% just for convenience. now the amount of damage this spell does to the target would be 200*(1-0.3) which is roughly 140 damages now if we do all that math again but factoring in how much armor pen that the lethality on youmuus gives, at level 10 youmuus gives around 16 armor pen so 40-16.5=24 armor, which is 20% damage reduction, now the ability does 160 damage. with the new lethality changes, you are only losing about 1 damage (all right before doing any rounding the damage is actually going from 161.87 to 159.74) in this case with is literally irrelevant, but this first case was to show a general idea of how irrelevant this is all on its own. now let’s take a look at a more realistic case to show you how much of a difference this actually makes
So, lets set up a more realistic example, let's take 2 level 15 Draven’s who autoattack each other once with a spinning axe, both Draven’s have a duskblade, edge of night, and a youmuus, and for now we can assume neither of them have duskblade's passive or anything else and lets assume one Draven is pre nerf vs post nerf, lets compare their (relevant to our case) stats with them having just these 3 items, assuming that these are the stats at level 15 and that spinning axe is maxed out Attack damage (for both) = 103 + 55 + 55 + 55 = 268AD (165 Bonus AD) Armor (for both) = 78.8 armor HP = 1645 + 250 = 1895 HP Total lethality (pre-nerf) = 60L ethality (post-nerf) = 54 Lethality Draven’s spinning axe does 55 physical damage plus 105% BONUS AD, so in this case it would be 268+55+165*1.05 = 496.25 Physical damage, both Draven’s have 78.8 armor and are level 15. (numbers rounded to 1st significant digit) Pre-nerf Draven will ignore 56 armor, thus dealing 404.1 damage after lethality Post nerf Draven will ignore 50.4 armor, thus dealing 386.5 damage after lethality Now assuming they are just auto attacking each other and they have a spinning axe ready on every auto, the number of autoattacks they need to kill each other is equal to HP/Damage (usually this number would be rounded up because you cant have a fraction of an auto attack, I wont do that just to point out something) so in this case, pre nerf Draven will take 4.689 autos to kill the other while the post nerf Draven needs 4.903 autoattacks to kill the former Draven. Now in reality they will both need 5 Q+Auto’s to kill each other, it can still be seen that the second Draven would be at a disadvantage if anything else was factored in.
To conclude, although these nerfs aren’t very significant, I think that really this would mostly affect much closer case scenarios, but in reality, in the near infinite possibilities of league of legends, I can’t really say how much of an impact this will have until it is put to practice. Let ne know down below what you guys think.
link to some maff stuff so u can see the underlying work of some of the lethality calculations
P.S: I used Draven in this example as the math for his work was the simplest to show, I’m not saying this is by any means the most optimal way to build Draven, I just wanted to use clear and simple math to showcase a more realistic example… but I mean lethality Draven isn’t really a bad build on him ;P
