Which is it?
Are we hating on tanks or are we hating on assassins? Do we want more armor to survive assassins and inadvertently strengthen tanks in the process? Or do we need more damage to deal with tanks, maybe another %health true damage item to eliminate a tank as quickly as you might a carry?
We can't have it both ways. We can't nerf tanks AND assassins simultaneously. That's just counterproductive.
Dynikus3 votesI don't really see lethality is op threads anymore. They did a good job bringing it in line I think. It's still built, but it's not overbearing anymore.
Irelia Bot2 votesBased on differing views I have seen armor is to strong on it's own and the counters to armor are too good at bypassing armor making armor pen become mandatory.
You get major physical damage reduction form armor up until someone buys BC + LW + a leathery item or 2 and then suddenly 60%+ of your armor is nullified even if you are a malphite with 400 armor.
I do not work for Riot's balance team but my fix to this would be making armor pen/reduction types not work together. BC would be locked out from being bought with LW or Lethality and then flat armor pen would be removed before % armor pen making players have to pick what kind of enemy they want to contend with be it high armor tanks who you would get LW to deal with or squishies which you would get Lethality to deal with.
If tanks become literally unkillable after this then nerf armor or the tanks who are proving to be too tanky.
Kilanost2 votesThe problem isn't with lethality on its own. The problem is with lethality + LW item damage on a target that is being attacked by someone with a black cleaver. In other words, the problem is with how all of the armor pen stats work together. all these things together can reduce a 300 armor tank to an effective 75 armor lulu. With that much armor, you've also failed to build MR so you're very vulnerable to magic damage. Why not stack health you say? Because an unbelievably large number of champions have skills that do %health damage. If you play a champ that doesn't have that, dont worry because there's still these items that scale damage with enemy health: 
. For the and don't forget you can throw in 
to have their on-hit effects effectively increased to 150% effect per hit over two hits once its stacked.
People who complain about tanks are the people that weren't building their pen items early enough and thats all it is. Even now i see my adcs in games delaying a LW till they've finished the rest of their build first.
Lethality as a stand alone stat in the game is a great thing. It opens up different build paths. The fact that there is so much of it that people are running around doing true damage to adcs is a problem on top of the fact that it stacks so ridiculously with BC stacks and LW items.
If you look at any 2 of the 3 armor pen stats alone without the 3rd you also get to something a bit more fair. For example if you changed BC to make it so it increases physical damage dealt to the target instead of decreasing armor and kept the other stats the same, you'd approach something better than the current system. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
This poor armor pen system is likely a big part of why tanks were on the block for a rework. Somewhere around mid game tanks become unbelievably strong with people delaying their pen items (before lethality or on champs that dont build lethality). Then somewhere around 30 minutes, there's this sharp change. Everyone who can build a BC, Void staff, LW item, or a full set of lethality items, has them. At this point the tank becomes a walking punching bag because he can no longer fulfill that role he's built toward all game.
To put this into perspective, consider the 300 armor tank above having his effective armor reduce to 75. thats a reduction of 225 armor. Using 20 gold per point of armor, that negates 4500 gold worth of stats which is the gold value of almost 2 full items.
Or just shy of the armor of 2 thornmails and a ninja tabi.
Or the armor on 4.5 deadmans plates.
This is why i will almost guarantee that, as part of the tank rework, tanks will be given either 1. healing, 2. shields, or 3. (my prediction given galio's kit) %damage reduction like Maokai ulti. They will also be given more reliable CC. The cost of this will be their damage output.
So look for those changes. I'd say until the tank update, this whole lethality vs armor debate should be tabled because its obvious riot thinks something's wrong.
The bigger question right now is has the overabundance of lethality made stacking lethality completely unfair to anyone else who is not stacking armor/health (you can get up to 85 lethality with the new items whereas before when it was just armor pen, the max was something low like 35ish if i remember correctly). If there is an AD assassin on the enemy team, you can't even really build "bruiser" anymore because that much lethality with a BC or a LW item essentially doesn't leave you much better off than your bot lane cait/lulu duo.
Greenlee192 votesI feel tanks need their dmg nerfed. I don't think tanks should be able to destroy everything but I also don't think they should be quickly killed either. If a tank gets fed and the team is ahead let him be almost impossible to kill Just like if a carry gets fed they destroy everything.
PureSilvrr1 votesCant we find Balance and Harmony?
Warlord Scrap1 votesIf everythings op then everythings balanced right? Wrong im not having nostalgia goggles i truly miss the longer time to kill era of season 1 and 2.
Veraska1 votesThe boards isn't a hive mind
Fraggleroc1 votesArmor has been weak and on the back-burner for a long while now compared to other stats.
If u do not believe me, play a full-armor items champ vs a similar champ equipping other stats.
ZerglingOne1 votesIn this case we don't need to tweak the existing levers, we just need more levers.
We need an armor/AD item that has a similar or even functionally identical build path to 
That way we have a specifically anti-AD lifeline item, an anti-AP one, and a general one with more stipulations.
We need an armor + spellshield item that can share a unique passive with 
.
We need another item to build out of 
that is an armor bruiser caster item like 
.
I think the 2 most important are the first one and the last one.
An AD/armor lifeline item would be absolutely integral to stopping a snowballing enemy bottom lane. Just like it does for AD assassins against mages mid.
An Armor/AP abyssal scepter style item (that even shares a unique passive) would be the other super important one. I know the unique effects tend to be similar, but different enough, so let's say it does something like increases your AP by 5% per enemy champion in the AoE.
That way it fulfills a similar role while having a different identity.
Genocide Victim1 votesTanks are overpowered
