Assassins start the game dealing true damage. This meta is a joke.

Thanks to Riot Game's brilliance, assassins are now literally able to stack lethality in all of their rune slots and as soon as they rush dirk, they basically deal true damage. (24 lethality at level 1 iirc) It's not exactly true damage, but assassins start the game dealing up to 20% more damage with just runes alone since most laners start the game with ~30 armor give or take. (~23% Damage Reduction) You can see how there's not a lot of armor to be shred in the first place. The bar to get to true damage isn't exactly a high one.

For those of you who don't understand why lethality is broken, let me do some simple math for you.

Before lethality and the rampancy of armor penetration, assassins had the raw AD from their items to help kill their targets. The counterplay to this was items like Zhonya's that gave you armor so you could damped some of their damage. Assassins used to build Youmuu's because of its armor penetration, but this was only one item and it was manageable.

That was all fine and dandy until Riot decided that giving assassins 2 full AD items with armor penetration stats was a good idea. The thing is that assassins' damage doesn't change. They didn't sacrifice AD when they were given lethality. Essentially, Riot gave assassins a counter to their own counter. Anyone going up against assassins now have lost their only source of protection versus them. The 50 lethality that assassins can get from items alone completely invalidates a Randuin's Omen's armor value.

A carry would have to dedicate 2 full items to armor just to get back to pre-lethality survivability (which was questionable even then). This is simply not a realistic build for a carry who expects to actually deal damage. They're stuck in a position between doing shit damage or getting one shot. That's not even considering that most carries don't even have to health to build that much armor in the first place.

This is especially bad with AP mids who are FORCED to run Zhonya's first item just to not get one shot by them and in doing so severely hinders their ability to scale into the mid game. The very act of laning versus an assassin automatically puts you behind in items.

On top of that, many assassins like Talon and Zed are surprisingly oppressive in lane with reliable poke that only compounds the problem. We're seeing assassins 1v2 at level 4 or 5 while getting ganked and it's pathetic.

The worst part of it all is that Riot knows lethality is completely broken, but they're not doing anything about it. We will more than likely have to put up with this one-shot meta for at least a few more months until Riot decides to either nerf heavily or better yet: completely remove the lethality items they added since new items weren't even necessary in the first place.

Only time will tell whether or not soloqueue continues to be a complete clown fiesta.