The Pre-Season Changes To ArmorPen ( Now Lethality ) Items Will Hurt Jhin/Lucian/MF etc. A LOT

In s6 more and more Marksmen started building armor penetration builds instead of crit - their high base damage, AD scaling, need of early game power and lack of interaction with crit and/or attack speed led to this.

Let's take Lucian for example. He is a lane bully and mid-game oriented marksmen that falls off in the late game by nature - even before he started building armor pen. He also is one of the more ability-oriented marksmen, his damage does not almost completely focus around his auto attacks like for example Jinx's or Twitch's does.

So why is the armor pen build so much better on him than a crit build atm?

First, we need to look at how armor penetration works. First, non-stat armor pen from outer effects like Black Cleaver's Passive or Wukong's Q apply, then percentage armor pen, then flat armor pen ( now lethality ). This does actually matter a lot when you look at the way diminishing returns work. Deminishing returns of resistances make it so that the more armor or MR you buy, the less amount of damage reduction they grant you. The other way around, the closer you penetrate the enemy's armor to zero and the less they have, the more flat armor penetration will hurt them.

Now factor in that every champion has armor per level, which means that they have less armor in early levels and more in the late game. This means, that if you buy armor pen in the early game against targets that don't stack a lot of armor ( literally every marksman ) you will deal a lot more damage - until the late game, where this does not matter as much since by then your enemy will have been able to pick up armor through levels and items. And since percentage armor pen applies before flat armor pen, this will also mean that you will get them closer to zero than if it was the other way around.

Lucian loves this. He is an early game and mid game champion, so since armor pen is centered around the early game and Youmuu's will give you 20 flat armor pen which is a ton, this gives him an extreme power spike - even though this spike will fall off later on.

Next up it's the fact that Lucian does not want a lot of attack speed since a lot of his damage relies on abilities and in his special case he also has a passive that gives him free autos. His abilities don't scale with attack speed anymore ever since they changed his ult in the last pre-season, so he doesn't want it and would favor raw AD instead, because his abilities definitely scale with that.

Another thing we have to factor in is base damages without AD scaling. First, there are of course his abilities. The base damage of which is only constant with ability level, which on his Q for example will ramp up extremely quickly up until level nine. There's also fervor of Battle which is nothing but on-hit base damage. Base damage does not scale with anything but penetration, so that's another reason for Lucian to buy it.

All this combined make the Youmuu's into Black Cleaver item path exceptionally good on Lucian and similar item paths really good on similar champions like the ones mentioned in the title. Every ability-centric marksman that may even have a good early game to top it off must go for this build since they just don't scale well enough with the classic crit build. The only exceptions are Ezreal because of his unique on-hit interaction on his Q and Corki, because he obviously can't go for an armor pen build since he is the archetype magic damage dealing marksman ( explains a lot of his current sruggles btw ).

So what is changing in the pre-season that will nerf these champions so badly?

First off it's the fact that lethality is basically the new armor pen that scales with enemy level. Youmuu's for example won't give you 20 flat penetration right of the bat anymore but will instead grant you 8-20, based on the enemy's level. This of course sucks for most marksmen who buy this to make up for the general early game weakness of their class and it especially hurts the early-to mid-game centric marksmen like Lucian who want to enhance their power around these stages. Now factor in the currently early-game oriented meta and it looks pretty grim for them.

And while I agree with this decision since armor pen currently is really toxic and no Marksmen should have that much strength early on, even Lucian, it gets even worse.

Youmuu's will now cost 200 gold less but it will also not give any attack speed any more, which is absolutely terrible for Marksmen. Instead, you will now get 20 out of combat movement speed to make up for it - which is not really a great stat on marksmen.

Duskblade is equally bad for marksmen now, none of the AD caster marksmen have stealth interactions for it's passive, won't really walk into much wards to clear with its other passive and also take a big hit considering it has lost 10 AD and is now also lethality-based.

Because of this I expect the winrate of most of the champions I have mentioned to drop by several points - and I think Lucian will take the hardest hit, his winrate will probably drop by 3-5%, maybe even more.

And after we have collected enough data in the pre-season to be sure that all these champions are now struggling, I propose either two of the following things.

1) Create More Crit Interaction In AD Caster Champion Kits Jhin and MF already have something like that on their ultimates and they seem to work so I think that more of these could potentially be implemented to make the Essence Reaver crit build more attractive. Maybe mini-crits on Jhin Q's, MF passive or Q's, Lucian ults etc.

2) Create a Caster-Marksman-Oriented Lethality Item If they get something in return for the loss of Duskblade and Youmuu's that is specially designed for them, this will most like be able to get them back to their current status.

Maybe the game designers are already avare of this issue and already have Lucian and his caster-marksmen buddies on their radar but if not I'd sincerely ask you to consider the above for 6.23 or 7.1.