Dear Riot: Analysis on Lethality, and how to start to make all marksman equally optimally

In this post, I’m going to give an analysis on how we got to this “lethality” meta, and relate this to why I think the wrong approach is being taken to balance lethality meta. I will then explain what I think a better course of action would be and why. First, let’s go way back to when the old Last Whisper was replaced with Lord Dominik’s Regards. Last Whisper gave a percentage of total armor penetration, while Dominik’s gave a higher percentage of bonus armor penetration. The context for this change made sense at the time. AD carries were struggling when top laners or junglers would stack 4 armor items. Sometimes it took too long to farm up a last whisperer which could come in as a 3rd item at the earliest, and with ad carries having no other armor penetration alternative, it seemed necessary to add a mechanic that would allow AD carries to deal significant damage even when a tank stacks 4 armor items. Now, let’s analyze what this change did. While this made it easier to deal with tanks who hard stacked armor, it made it much harder to deal with tanks, who weren’t hard stacking armor but rather just 1 or 2 armor items. Base armor was and is still a thing, and it normally gets to be between 75 or 100 at level 18 for almost all champions in the game. The new Dominik’s was no longer able to penetrate this kind of armor growth, so with no other supplementary armor penetration items for ad carries to buy, it became seemingly much harder to kill tanks who had only purchased one or two armor items. Now, let’s think about what we’ve seen a lot of in the past year or more.

We had a pretty big Lucian phase, where the standard build was ghostblade and black cleaver (no crit Lucian). We continued to see a lot of ezreal who had muramana to help supply additional damage. We also continued to see some utility ad carries, like ashe and, as of late, varus. Jhin was also added to the game. We saw Caitlyn come back into the spotlight, but that was moreso a result of changes to her champion and the removal of lane swaps than to anything else. Aside from Caitlyn, we haven’t really seen a meta of ad carries that utilize critical hit chance ever since the addition of Dominik’s. We’ve seen armor penetration ad carries, utility ad carries (ashe, sivir, varus, etc), and Caitlyn.

The reason for this is simply because it is no longer easier to win the game with a critical hit stacking AD carry, because most of the damage becomes null and void without the addition of more armor penetration beyond Dominik’s. That’s not to say Dominik’s is strictly a bad item, but rather, it’s often not a very viable option when it stands on its own; it does still provide a lot of potency when mixed with other armor penetration items in the build. After looking at patch 7.4, it seems to me like the Riot balance team is taking an angle to bring down the power of lethality and other armor penetration items. The problem with this angle is simple, and I’ll try to describe it with a general analogy. The task an AD carry has is to kill things with auto attacks. Let’s say we’ve got 2 options that an ADC can pick from to do this: option A and option B. Let’s say there’s a meta where option A is far more potent a path to take than option B. Obviously, for variety’s sake as well as balance, we want both options to be equally optimal. To bring these options to the same level, we can either make option B better, or we can make option A worse. The angle taken to accomplish this balance should not come down to something like flipping a coin. If option A is more than just a superior option, but seemingly overpowering in comparison to other champions and roles in the game (outside of ADC), then the optimal decision would be to bring down the strength of option A. However, if the situation is that option A is not overpowering in an overall game sense, but rather option B is simply not optimal enough to try and win a game with, then the course of action should be to increase the strength of option B.

The immediately aforementioned scenario is where we currently find ourselves in. Targeting lethality and black cleaver will not make option B better – it will only make both options available for those building attack damage to be less than optimal. If you ask me, the correct course of action is to re-strengthen option B, to the point where other ad carries can find a place to deal damage once again. (A Jinx should be able to deal more damage than a Varus).
Now is the part where I propose a solution to fix the problem of AD carries only having one viable path available to them. Since the problem began with the addition of Lord Dominik’s, it makes sense to return to that item for a solution. The question is this: How can we increase the potency of Lord Dominik’s regards as a stand alone item, while not over powering AD carries or AD champions who would buy it with other armor penetration items? If you ask me, the solution should come down to a simple distribution of percentages.

The problem that introduced the new item was tanks hard stacking armor items and AD carries needing a cheap alternative to let them become relevant without having to wait for 2600 gold. Because of this, I think it makes sense to keep the idea of having a cheap, 1300 gold component that provides a significant amount of armor penetration. But rather than increasing the amount of bonus armor penetration in the fully completed item, it makes sense to me to add some percentage of either total or just base armor penetration. I’ll leave the number crunching to the balance team to figure out what the best percentages might be, but I believe that this solution is the key to seeing a full array of marksman with different strengths that are all optimal at the same time.