How to Balance the One Shotting Crisis

I personally would like to know what would make lethality feel better to play against without remaking the tank meta from mid season 6. I have been trying to think what would make it so that it was far less painful and I realized AHA!

Just lower base armor and damage stats. Boom. Problem solved, drop the mike.

In a more well explained way, here it is: So I play DnD and every Dungeon Master's (the person running the game) is something called power creep. Power creep is when statistics endlessly climb up and up and up. When damage is high with player characters, the enemies (monsters and NPCs) have to have higher armor stats of their own, and vice versa in order to keep the game fun and balanced.

Now here is where Riot has made their mistake:

ALL CHAMPIONS HAVE BASE RESISTANCES

It honestly that simple. Think about it, if has built his full lethality one-shot-o-matic build, that has become standard, his attacks ignore a portion of armor, increasing his damage vs tanks like . However, the poor who has built no armor and is desperately trying to remain relevant ALSO take additional damage from Jayce BECAUSE SHE HAS ARMOR. Armor penetration is and always should be a trade off. Building raw damage doesn't work against strong tanks such as so they must build armor pen to get around those resistances, however, that means their general damage should be lower. The idea being that the gained ability to ignore resistances is greater than the damage lost by itemizing differently. Now this mechanic hold true, BUT the drop off in damage is not severe enough against squishy targets because they gain a part of those benefits against them since they have base resistances I will now use some math to show this. DISCLAIMER: I know that numbers aren't necessarily accurate I am just making up numbers for ease of explaining

A tank has 100 armor, doubling their effective health An enemy has built items to have 400 AD, basic attacks against the aforementioned tank therefore do 200 effective damage (because their effective health is doubled the comparative damage is half). They now have an option, they can buy some armor pen, reducing the tanks effective armor against them to 75 and making their attacks do 250 damage (again, relative) each or they can buy an item which give them an additional 50 AD, making their attacks do on 225 damage against the tank (still relative)

Obviously the choice here is to build the Armor pen because it increases the amount of the tanks health they can reduce by an additional 25 damage per attack. The problem is when that same math is applied to a squishy with say 25 armor.

The squishy has 25 armor, increasing their effective health by 25% The same enemy still with 400 AD, should do 320 damage against that target. Now when they make the armor pen choice here is the math. Gaining the same reduction of armor by 25, the squishy effectively has 0 armor, meaning the attacker does the full 400 damage. As opposed to taking an additional 50 AD, which would make their attacks do 360 damage on hit.

The choice here is still to build armor pen because the gain to damage is STILL TWICE AS EFFECTIVE TO BUYING THE AD. This is why Lethality (excuse all the times I said armor pen) is almost always a better choice and why DPS has become irrelevant.

The solution, while it may seem counterintuitive is to reduce the base armor of squishies AND REMOVE NEGATIVE ARMOR. If the aforementioned squishy has 0 armor, then they take the full 400 damage, now when presented the lethality vs AD choice, there is 0 benefit to choosing lethality against the squishy target, meaning they still only take 400 damage, but taking the AD increases the damage vs that target by 50, a literally infinitely more beneficial choice. However the trade off still stands vs tanks where the efficiency of armor pen is double that of raw AD.

The immediate flaw with this idea is "OH NO THEN PEOPLE WILL JUST BUILD TONS OF DAMAGE THE PROBLEM ISN'T SOLVED"

Well actually, that's the whole point of tanks... DUH. Tanks are not meant to kill everyone, they are more of a large nuclear deterrent scaring the enemy away from building full damage lest the Maokai laugh at you meager attacks. Also, Riot can just lower the general AD of everything, or raise everyone's base health.

So to conclude, Lethality is too efficient against squishy targets. Solution: reduce base armor of squishies so that the Lethality is less efficient against them. Even better is to eliminate negative armor, but even then, oh well negative armor already gives diminishing returns. It may seem counter intuitive, but lowering the armor on squishy champions would actually increase their ability to resist burst, especially if their healthbars get a bum to make up for it.

In the long run,

• Tanks would remain both relevant but able to be dealt with by building lethality.
• Lethality would lose its efficiency against squishes, preventing the Camille and Jayce's from just wrecking EVERYONE
• Assassins would still have a legitimate route to burst down small healthbars, making and relevant but counterable by high armor tanks
• Generally more counterplay, especially in itemization

Unfortunately there are a FEW downsides

• Big META shakeup
• Bruisers like and would probably become far more situational and less effective as anything other than a way to prevent tanks from getting out of hand
• Jayce and Camille mains will be sad (Boo Hoo)

Thank you, and please give feedback