The main issue with armor pen/reduction currently is that armor does not compare to health.

You will not have 60%+ of you health ignored because of a few items that literally everyone is buying.

Simply put the biggest issue comes form armor pen+reduction being too good against both tanks and squishes with no trade offs.

Why would I buy a frozen heart just to have at least 60 of the 90 armor it provides ignored when I could by a Warmogs instead which currently does not have people building it's more effective counter in the % current health from BotRK.

The only downside is that Warmogs is not much health anymore and every time Riot has touched it in the past few years the amount of max health it can provide goes down.

Yes the prospect of those BotRK changes makes me happy but it also makes me worried since there has been no solid solution to the current state of armor pen/reduction being so abundant with the high synergy it has. If Botrk becomes too strong there will be literally no defensive stat to build against AD.

Sure masteries are part of the issue with damage creep and some are getting hit with the nerf hammer but the huge amount of armor that can be ignored compared to how it use to be is another huge part of damage creep. I would almost argue that it has not been a creeping up of damage but more a case of defense being made less effective and easily countered at least when it comes to physical damage.

There are several ways to address this issue be it making flat and % bonus not work together or even switching flat back to begin applied first making it so that buying 200 armor on top of a base of 90 results in it being -60 then having the remaining 140 bonus reduced by 45% to 77 meaning that the base armor is not even touched and the tank has 167 out of 290 in this situation unless someone comes in with a Black cleaver reducing another 30%.

Let us not forget why Lethality is so much more abundant than flat armor pen once was. It is to allow assassins a better chance at killing squishy targets. It should not be getting aided by LW to the full effect allowing for both assassins and marksmen to easily take down a 400 armor 3800 health Rammus.

And for those who do not remember. When flat was changed to applying after % we did not have 4 items that provided flat armor reduction. It was Ghostblade which still had crit and Black Cleaver in the League of cleavers which quickly had the 15 flat armor pen reduced to 10 and made unique literally the next patch along with weaker armor reduction meaning a max of 30 flat armor pen from items was likely to show up outside of that one patch.