How the Mastery Nerfs Made Lethality Stronger

With the mastery nerfs in 7.4 I feel that Lethality is even more important for champions. The early damage payoff makes up for the damage that was removed from the masteries this patch. This also weakened attack speed/crit builds, as those items have no raw AD and you no longer get that extra AD from masteries.

As a marksman main (mostly MF) if you try to build a Reaver first item, it takes so long because of the cost, and often times the Dirk will put in more work than the BF sword, and you notice the enemy marksman will have Ghostblade or EoN plus half another item before you can even finish Reaver. If you try to build a Rapid Fire cannon second item, your damage suffers because well there's no raw AD on that item, so you lose trades versus a full Lethality build. The Lethality items providing cheap raw AD and shred are way more gold efficient, and allow you to spike earlier than with attack speed and crit. With the high damage output from other champions that were designed to kill marksmen in one hit, marksmen need to be able to do as much damage as they can with each auto. We don't have time to sit back and shoot someone 16 times.

The price of Reaver and IE together is way less gold efficient and provides way less utlity than the YG and EoN combo.

Everyone says, "But crit is better later!" While that may be true, Lethality helps you early. If you get fed early, then it really doesn't matter if you have crit or not later, as you'll probably still be doing enough damage that it won't matter.