i feel like anti-armor should be in kits more than it should be in items

falconPAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWNCH mentioning full AD teams in his newest no-effort post reminded me of this

You have , and its upgrades, and the Lethality items.

Lethality on its own isn't really an issue; it's flat pen, and armor stacking counters it so it's still most effective vs squishy targets. I'm kind of opposed to any stat pen but it's not going to leave League so w/e

I think Cleaver and LW are the problem. These two items are anti-armor, because they're % reduction. And they stack with Lethality, so assassins that invest into a Dominik's will actually do.. a lot of damage to a tank even if they're heavy on armor.

But the real issue IMO is that these are core items. Cleaver went from a general item with 10% CDR and a chunk of AD and health, picked mostly on fighters and some assassins, to a Juggernaut item with more health and less AD, and then back to a general item that's pretty much standard on every fighter. Compare this to the old standard fighter rush item which gave you a lot of damage, no health, some lifesteal and some waveclear. No CDR and no armor shred. Almost none of its previously core users buy this item anymore; the only one I see frequently with it is Fiora. Cleaver also bolsters your effectiveness vs squishy targets; there's really no problem of rushing the item. ( Of course... tho )

Lord Dominik's is just horse shit. Not only do you get 45% bonus armor penetration, you get up to 15% extra damage vs targets with up to 500 more health than you. And there's no real tradeoff to building it; you're still getting 50 AD, and even something as minimal as a Sightstone on the enemy support will boost your damage vs them.

This means that tanks need to be balanced around the fact that these items will be built nearly every game, i.e "If you DON'T build these items, you're going to get rolled over by their front line." It's not a very good way to balance the game.

I don't know if this is THE solution, but I think that the best way to address this would be to make anti-tank power specific to champion kits, instead of being on two items that are almost universally friendly. You could also change the items to make them more niche so that if you build to wreck tanks then you don't also get to slaughter squishies even easier, but I doubt we'll ever see that.