The age old question of mpen/apen?

Velasan·Nov 4, 2014·1 votes·335 views

I've been messing with my rune pages and googling an answer for this. In general I've seen that characters with low ad/ap ratios want penetration runes.

However, there is still no straight answer for characters who are in the middle somewhere. It seems like apen/mpen should give more overall damage, but other people claim that's only true at low armor levels and you should always go AD, others say pen scales better and you should always take it instead. Especially on ADC's I'm seeing an overwhelming amount of players take the pure AD rune route.

There are enough variables that it's not as easy to just calculate it out like you would with some runes (or ad vs attack speed for that matter). Is there some threshold where pen becomes better than ap or ad runes? What is your experience?

2 Comments

StaconaNov 4, 20141 votes

assassins and pokes champions would favour armour pen --- ranged ad and bruisers for the flat ad --- mages always take mpen reds, as far as quints, blues and yellows go that is up to the individual

Kuroi86Nov 4, 20141 votes

ADC takes AD for squishy targets, they have low base and need it. Assassins have good base and ratio so can go either way but pen seems to be the stronger alternative at the beginning of the game. Bruisers have great ratios so AD is the way to go. Mages is a split, high ratio wants AP, low ratio wants MagPen (Fiddle and Vlad) Champs that don't burst so much as they do magic dps.