There is no counterplay to AD anymore

Armor is not an effective counterplay to AD damage because for the cost you spend on armor, it gets countered easily by runes, masteries, and items such as . Stacking HP doesn't work because there easily bought and viable items like that counter HP stacking; end result: tanks and really anyone building armor defensively are wasting their gold on a stat that ends up not providing any real benefit.

The same is not true for most sources of magic damage because magic damage is generally dealt in short bursts in large numbers but with long delays between each hit, making magic resist a very cost effective stats in nearly every situation unless the enemy is dealing periodic or frequent magic damage like , , and .

The thing that makes AD so overpowered is it generally costs nothing to use and can have a less than a second cooldown; also it can crit doing 2-2.5x normal damage and AD items give both crit and attack speed naturally, making it scale like crazy. on the other hand AP only scales off AP items and only at certain rates for different champions, thus AP is more balanced and more easily balanced.

But as far as AD goes there is no effective counter to it, that is why pure "wall" tanks like and have fallen out of favor because armor does not work anymore. Instead pure CC/disables are the new "tanking" skills as they stop any and all damage from taking place while acting as flashy "playmaking" moves for the masses. Champions that are the "new" tanks you see a lot in LCS,

**So how to fix the problem? nerf armor penetration enough that its either a late game item or something that costs alot to build. We don't want to eliminate penetration, but armor needs to be an effective counter again, not so much for the tanks, so other mid laners can build reactively if say or gets ahead for example. At the present these two get picked all the time because there is no effective counter unless you get 300+ armor, even then it barely slows them down. **

Previously penetration was better off in that it was calculated in a way that made flat armor penetration bad if you wanted % -based armor penetration. Not sure why this was changed because it has made the current problems we have. it used to calculate flat armor pen before %-based armor pen, meaning if you wanted a high percentage of %-based armor pen, having flat armor pen was bad; it made %-based armor pen built for late mostly as it gave more benefit vs. people who built a lot of armor. These days its reversed and effectively nullifies any armor you build.