Some suggested changes to lethality and flat magic pen, considering their current state.
So Riot has announced that they don't really like the current state of Lethality and that they want to buff it. I think it's not only lethality that is somewhat problematic right now - flat magic penetration, the magic damage counterpart of it, also has similar problems
After looking at it more specifically and after testing a lot of lethality and magic penetration stacking builds myself lately, I think I've idntified the core problems these two stats have and I want to suggest ways of how I would deal with those problems.
I thought at first I would explain how and when you buy armor/magic penetration and why.
First thing you have to learn is that the damage reduction you get from resistances doesn't stack linearly with how much resistances you have, it has diminishing returns, which means that the more of a resistance you stack, the less damage reduction it will give you.
Here's an example: 25 armor/MR will reduce incoming enemy damage by 20%. You would think that 100 armor/MR would reduce it by 80% at first, since it's 4 times the 25 armor/MR, but it actually only reduces incoming enemy damage by a total of 50%. The formula for resistances is 100/(100+MR or Armor) btw.
So not only does this mean that you get less damage reduction the more you stack resistances, it also means that the less resistances you have, the more it hurts if these resistances get taken away or penetrated.
This is where flat armor and magic penetration stacking builds come in. The point of these build is to get the enemy's armor as close to zero as possible and to make those diminishing returns matter more. So this is how you have to look at flat armor and magic penetration - it's not good against tanks, it's good against squishies who don't buy a lot of armor and magic resistance in the first place - hence why it's so popular on assassins and champions with a lot of ability base damage.
Next up you have to consider the one big difference between armor and magic resist. Armor will start at a really low value but every champion gets armor per level which means that with every champion you start at a value of about 18-30, depending on what champion you have and it will scale up to a value of 70-100, yet again, depending on what champion you have.
MR on the other hand is different. Every ranged champion plus Yasuo and Kassadin will have 30 base MR and not any MR per level, so they stay at that value. Every melee champion in the game will have 32.1 MR and get MR per level so that they have 53.4 base magic resistance at lvl 18.
So what does this tell us? First of all it just shows us why almost every rune page in the game contains flat armor seals that give you 9 armor in total. While MR always starts at 30-32, having 30 base armor is considered a luxury and you have to get that early armor to not make these diminishing returns hurt so much.
Flat MR runes on the other hand are rarely taken and you usually get scaling MR runes instead, because you already have a high base value but even on melee champions you will end up with almost half as much MR as armor in the late game.
This also tells us why lethality was introduced and why it replaced flat armor penetration. Snowballing flat armor pen stackers would just absolutely wreck the underleveled enemy opponent. Lethality on the other hand is keeping this factor in check by scaling with the enemy level.
And on the other hand, this also tells us why flat magic penetration remained unchanged and doesn't scale with enemy level - because MR doesn't really scale that well with levels either while having a high base value.
So now that we know how resistances work, let's look at how armor and magic penetration works.
First, there is a specific order of when what kinds of penetration ar applied.
- Non-stat flat resistance reduction, for example Amumu's Passive or old Abyssal
- Non-stat percentage resistance reduction, for example Kog'Maw's Q or Black Cleaver
- Percentage resistance penetration, for example Void Staff, Last Whisper, Darius E
- Flat resistance penetration, so lethality and flat magic pen.
With all that in mind, we can finally come to an actual example for a penetration build.
If you want to burst squishies with an armor penetration build, you want to buy all 3 Lethality items and Black Cleaver and get lethality marks and quints. With this build you will get 82 lethality, so 82 flat armor penetration at enemy lvl 18 and a max of 30% armor reduction from Black Cleaver.
If we take your average marksman now, for example Jhin, he will have 80 base armor plus 9 from his seals - and in most cases no armor item.
First, Black Cleaver will penetrate this armor by 30% as you can see above, so Jhin will end up with about 62 armor - the flat lethality will get that value to zero. You can't penetrate beyond zero btw.
As you can see, Lethality builds are absolutely devastating against squishies, now let's see what happens if Jhin buys a GA.
He will now have 80 base armor plus 9 from his seals plus 60 from Ga, so a total of about 150 armor.
Black Cleaver will reduce by 30%, so he will have 104 armor after that and after lethality is applied he will end up with 22 armor.
This is important. Because of the way diminishing returns work, that 22 armor will reduce the enemy incoming damage by a whole lot, almost 20%. If you have a tank or a bruiser that has more base armor and buys more armor items this effect is even greater. This goes to show just how good penetration builds are against squishies and how much buying 1 or 2 armor items helps with that.
Next let's take another example of a penetration build, this time with magic penetration instead of letalty. In this case we will have someone with magic penetration quints and marks, Sorcerer's Boots, Liandry's or a Haunting Guise and a Void Staff. With this build you will have around 44 flat magic penetration and 35% magic penetration.
Let's look at Jhin again. Like every marksman, he has 30 base MR but gets no MR per level except from runes - he has 9 scaling MR Glyphs which give him a total of 56 MR.
This will be penetrated by 35% so now he has about 36-37 MR, which will get penetrated by the rest of the flat pen.
Now again, he buys an MR item, in this case a Banshee's Veil which gives 70 MR ( which is a lot btw, go buy it, every marksman main out there ). Jhin will now have 126 MR.
This will be penetrated by 35% so now he has 82 MR and the rest of the flat magic pen will bring it back down to 38 - which will give you a total of 28% magic damage reduction, which yet again, helps a lot.
Alright, now after we've taken that little lesson in LoL maths, let's take what we've learned and look at the actual problems armor and magic penetration stacking builds have right now.
First of all, I would propose that flat armor and magic penetration should be able to penetrate past zero.
If you look at champions it just makes sense. The point of flat armor and magic penetration is to punish the enemy squishy for not buying resistances. Look at the example of Jhin again - once he has bought those resistances he gets rewarded but he should also get punished by not buying them with getting negative resistances and receiving bonus damage because of it. Otherwise the overcapped flat penetration we have in both the magic penetration and the armor penetration example is utterly useless and it creates a generally unhealthy dynamic.
Not only would it make sense against champions, it would also fix a much, much bigger problem for penetration builds, which is the fact that every kind of minion in the game except for super minions has 0 armor and MR and a lot of jungle camps also have 0 armor and MR, sometimes even negative MR.
This means that even if you wanted to take magic and armor penetration runes, you couldn't because the fact that you can't penetrate the resistances of minions and monsters past 0 means that they are useless against them. Lethality builds will have to take flat AD for last hitting instead and magic pen builds will have to take AP quints. And the only real reason why every AP champion takes magic penetration marks in the first place is because of the fact that they are the only real option for them, since there are no AP or CDR marks.
If you could penetrate the resistances of minions and monsters past 0, this would help a ton and it would allow penetration champions to actually take penetration runes instead of getting forced into taking something else.
Next up I wanted to talk about two items that have aspects attached to them that just don't really make a lot of sense if you consider the things that we've learned.
First it's Duskblade of Draktharr and the fact that it is a lethality item that gives true damage.
This just doesn't make a lot of sense. True damage is something that you want if you DON'T penetrate the enemy's resistances because it takes armor out of the equasion completely. It is also something that you'd want to have against tanks and not against squishies without resistances.
Take the Jhin example again. If he doesn't build any armor items a lethality build would get him down to 0 armor, which means that you would already deal true damage to him. Not only that, if the penetration beyond 0 thing would come into play you'd actually want to have physical damage over true damage, because physical damage would get enhanced while true damage stays the same.
I think the total value of Duskblade's passive should go up and be replaced by physical damage, not true damage, because it just makes much more sense.
The other item I wanted to talk about is Liandry's Torment. It has a similar problem to Duskblade because it has stats on it that just don't go well with flat magic penetration. The biggest aspect would be that it gives percentage damage of the enemy's current health that gets enhanced if the enemy is CC'd.
As we already established, flat penetration is good against squishies - so why does it have percentage damage, that is good against tanks? Why would it get enhanced by CC when you can't really expect burst mages and AP assassins, which want to have flat pen to do a better job at bursting squishies, to have any CC? And why does it deal more damage if the enemy has a full health bar instead of dealing more damage if the enemy is low on HP? After all, assassins and burst mages who would want flat pen want to finish people off with their damage and kill low HP targets, not attack targets that have a full health bar.
And it is also the only real flat magic penetration option besides Sorcerer's Boots which is a shame.
I would suggest that Liandry's torment doesn't have flat penetration on it anymore because as we established, it just doesn't make any sense. To compensate for that fact, it would get plus 20 AP to become a 100 AP item without any penetration.
Haunting Guise would also not have it's penetration passive anymore - instead, it could be a mini-version of Liandry's DOT.
But all that leaves us with a really big gap to fill - the gap of another flat penetration item besides Sorcerer's Boots.
I think this item should be designed to specifically cater to the needs of burst mages and AP assassins, who would want to have it the most since flat pen is specifically made to make you deal more damage aginst squishy targets. It would give you AP, flat magic penetration and a unique active or passive to further enhance it's identity as THE flat penetration AP item.
It would also have an early stage item that would give AP and flat magic pen, to be the new Haunting Guise, just without HP.
So what would a game with these changes look like?
You would see much more flat magic penetration and lethality rune pages because the champions who would want to have it wouldn't get cockblocked by minions and monsters anymore, on top of them being able to punish squishies more who refuse to buy resistances.
Lethality builds would rise in popularity and not be as bad anymore, especially now that the change to Duskblade happened.
Flat magic penetration on the other hand would also rise in popularity, with the shiny new item available to them that would allow them to burst squishies better.
For the longest time now, Syndra, LeBlance, Fizz and other bursty anti-squishy AP champions have caused problems. Since they didn't have a proper flat pen build available to them to make their job of bursting squishies easier, they had to have more power in general which made them able to not only burst squishies but also burst bruisers and tanks when they were strong.
Now that isn't a problem anymore, squishies will keep getting bursted by them with the new flat pen build while tankier targets will have a much easier time dealing with them because they stack resistances to counter the flat pen build.
After a few adjustments to these champions they would end up in a much healthier spot than before.
On top of that, the extra 20 AP on Liandry's makes it a new attractive item for poke mages and control mages that are struggling with tanks.
Let me know what you think of these suggested changes!
