Lethality isn't all that bad

TequilaZombie·2/17/2017, 10:07:58 AM·3 votes·1,219 views

I mean, what exactly is Lethality doing? Allowing full damage builds to quickly kill squishies? Isn't this what is supposed to happen to a squishy if caught out?

For the Tanks, a full Lethality build is not a problem, all the Lethality that a champion can stack won't even be able to penetrate a Frozen Hearth. However, the sheer amount of % Armor Shred and % Armor Pen makes so that Tanks have much less effective Armor, and this causes Lethality to be a problem for them.

When a and reduce a 600 Armor Tank to a 260 Armor Tank, Lethality becomes that much stronger against them. Even if Lethality is a bit overtuned right now, it is only a problem because of a bigger problem we've been having for quite a while.

8 Comments

Ahristocats2/17/2017, 11:36:13 AM3 votes

lethality is actually a problem against tanks

due to cleaver and lrd i saw it many times with my eyes, a miss fortune killing a full build zac in 1.5 sec of her ulti

or a talon killing a nautilus in ~~6 seconds because of black cleaver built on jayce

Penns2/17/2017, 10:49:47 AM2 votes

If a full damage build is allowed to quickly kill squishies because thats what its supposed to do, why isnt a full armor shred build allowed to "shred" a tanks armor tho?

Hexs Fortune2/17/2017, 11:25:45 AM2 votes

Squishies will die no matter what by definition. Riot is taking measures next patch to reduce the power of lord dominiks and black cleaver, because as the OP stated the problem is the percent shred

Risen292/17/2017, 11:36:39 AM1 votes

{quoted}

For the Tanks, a full Lethality build is not a problem, all the Lethality that a champion can stack won't even be able to penetrate a Frozen Hearth. However, the sheer amount of % Armor Shred and % Armor Pen makes so that Tanks have much less effective Armor, and this causes Lethality to be a problem for them.

When a and reduce a 600 Armor Tank to a 260 Armor Tank, Lethality becomes that much stronger against them. Even if Lethality is a bit overtuned right now, it is only a problem because of a bigger problem we've been having for quite a while.

You are mistaken. Few people on this forum seem to understand how ineffective flat armor pen really is against tanks. In the scenerio you listed, all three lethality items will only grant you 5% additional damage against that tank (260 down to 210). Anyone who builds all lethality is a burst champion, so that extra 5% will not help them against a tank who is still negating 67% of their damage at 210 armor. Especially with all the health they have on top of that. They would have benefited more by replacing the lethality items with attack speed and crit.

I used the example in other threads of a game where three of the enemy went lethality builds, and they got absolutely crushed by my swain when all I did was building was HP/AP items and zhonyas.

Flat pen is absolutely meaningless against a tank, regardless of whether or not it's combined with Dominiks and black cleaver. The later two do all the work on their own even if you take out the flat pen.

In that same game, at the very end when all three of their inhibs were dead, they switched out their flat pen for percentage pen and attackspeed/crit, and they almost made a comeback to win because of it. But they had already lost too much by that point so we won.

Why did they build percentage pen only at the very end? Because they asked why we built so tanky, and I told them it was because they stupidly built all flat pen. They only changed what they were doing once I told them that. They were completely ignorant, like most of the whiners on this forum, just how bad flat pen is against moderate amounts of armor of health.

Risen292/17/2017, 12:46:57 PM1 votes

Cleaver + Dominiks is terrible for bursting down squishies.

3 Lethality items is useless against an armor stacking tank.

Cleaver + Dominiks + 3 lethality will burst down a squishy, but 3 lethality would have done that by itself.

Cleaver + Dominiks + 3 lethality items won't allow you to burst down a tank. The lethality items add almost nothing to the equation.

If you want to kill a tank you need Cleaver + Dominiks + Attackspeed/AD/Crit. But if you do that you won't be able to burst down a squishy in spell rotations, you'll have to AA them down quickly instead.

So all this whining about how lethality and armor pen being stacked together betrays that people don't understand how they really work together.