Can you have >100% armor pen?

Eedat·Oct 12, 2015·2 votes·3,675 views

Can you have more than 100% armor pen and send someone's armor into the negatives? If so, do you deal greater than true damage if the enemy's armor is a negative value?

For example: 's max level Q is a 30% armor shred. If you add Wukong's Q (30%) + Black Cleaver (30%) + Last Whisperer (35%) + Youmuu's (20 flat pen) + Armor Pen Runes + Armor Pen Masteries = >100%?

15 Comments

TehNACHOOct 12, 20153 votes

No.

BUT, you can reduce an enemy champion's armor below 0.

Penetration has a hard cap of being unable to push the opponent's armor below zero, however if you somehow reduce your target's armor to below 0, you start dealing bonus damage.

Brimaz The KingOct 12, 20151 votes

Not bonus damage true damage.

67chromeOct 12, 20153 votes

Mostly Nope.

Largely due to how % armor penetration stacks with itself. If you have 50% and 50% armor penetration, you will penetrate 75% of a target's armor. Because you penetrate 50% of it, then penetrate the remaining 50% by 50%. Due to this interaction - the only way to get more than 100% armor penetration is if you have 1 source of armor penetration that gives more than 100% armor penetration. At least with % penetrations alone.

With both %armor pen and flat armor penetrations, they are physically incapable of reducing the effective armor of an opponent below 0 because of the game's codding, so even with a really crazy combo you can't reduce armor any lower than 0.

All that said - flat armor reductions are quite capable of reducing armor below 0, But they are applied before any armor penetrations come into play, so you need to reduce over 100% of an opponent's armor with such flat debuffs alone.

Due to how % stacks with % as mentioned above, %armor reduction debuffs don't really help.

With where base armor and per-level armor on champions is, as well as a complete lack of itemizing for flat armor reduction, it's pretttttty much impossible to reduce armor below against champions as you'd need a very specific team comp to pull it off. The squishies squish still manages a solid 60 armor through bases @18, and 75 is much more common for pretty much everyone. Base starts pretty close to 30 by the time you actually do trade with an opponent as well - which is a pretty high number all things considered.

All that said - the low armor on minions/monsters does allow champions with high in-built flat reductions the capacity to reduce minions/monsters well below 0 for some pretty epic hits.

Particularly useful for winning the "largest critical strike" field in the post-game screen. Nasus has the largest flat reduction I'm aware of, his Spirit Fire reduces armor and MR by 40. Manage to get that Triforce's 15% crit chance to kick in on a Q vs. some poor minion, and you can probably get upwards of a 2k crit within a respectable ~33 minute game for ultimate bragging rights.

EedatOct 12, 20151 votes

What if its a low armor target? Say you reduced 70% of an opponents armor with % Armor Pen. Say they are a squishy and only have 100 armor at this point. This would bring them down to 30 armor correct? What if you also had a Youmuu's for 20 flat pen + Flat Armor Pen Marks for another 12 flat pen for a total of 32 Flat Armor Pen. Would the enemies' armor drop to -2 then?

RandomoniumOct 12, 20151 votes

Flat armor pen gets applied first so if your target had 100 armor it would get reduced to 68 from Youmuu's and your marks and then the 70% would take affect reducing the target's armor to 20.

RenascentOct 12, 20152 votes

The order of calculations according to the wiki is thus:

Armor reduction, flat
Armor reduction, %
Armor penetration, %
Armor penetration, flat

Therefore, if you somehow get 70% armor penetration, and 32 flat armor penetration, and attack a 100 armor target, you might think it would go: (100*0.3) - 32 = -2 effective armor.

HOWEVER, armor penetration cannot "penetrate" beyond 0. Even if a target is already in the negatives, flat and percentage penetration will have no further effect.

tl;dr Penetration won't reduce beyond 0. Armor shred will.

umbraˉOct 12, 20152 votes

The more of a stat you have (Armor Pen, Magic Pen, tenacity, etc..) the harder it becomes to increase. So if you have Last Whisper + the masteries you're gonna have 39% armor pen not 41%. If you have 35% tenacity + masteries you're not gonna have 45% you will have 42%. It gets harder and harder.

Bouncemaster ZacOct 12, 20152 votes

With flat reduction, absolutely yes. Go in the jungle and click on one of the small monsters. They all have 0 armor. Hit them with something that reduces and the info tab on them will show it go into the negatives. You deal true damage plus a bonus as they have anti-armor at that point.

DreadlocksOct 12, 20151 votes

I'm not gana do the math for you because i'll probably fuck it up, but I will tell you that a Percentage armor penetration stacks multiplicatively with other percentage armor penetration abilities. Which in some mathematical way is less than additively. So I'ma guess No, but I could be wrong. Last I heard, since they changed the way black cleaver worked it was no longer possible to get true damage from armor pen. But I'm not 100% friend. Hope someone on here is more informative than me lol.

Brimaz The KingOct 12, 20151 votes

Instead of making their armor go negitive you just do true damage.

Sire HippingtonOct 12, 20151 votes

armorpen? nope armor shred? yes, that can work, however usually only vs low armor targets, as %pen scales multiplicativly, so wo with fullstacked BC can shred only ~55%(35%+30x1-0.35) rather than 65%(35%+30%). So you usually need alot flat shred, or a combination of both. Corki with BC is quite good, his E applys BC really fast, and shreds up to 40 flat armor. Though i'm not sure if flat shred is applyed befor or after %, quite possible that it doesn't work the same way as pen.

I guess the most flat shred you can put together is corki(40)+nasus(40)+tarik (25+5% of his armor) As far as i know, all remaining armor shreds are %

kJsOct 12, 20151 votes

I'm not sure about this but isn't there a cap to how low armor can get?

Wind WhistlerOct 12, 20151 votes

Armor penetration is different from armor shred. You can get slightly over 40 if you get Warrior enchantment, Youmuu's Ghostblade, and Brutalizer, and some armor pen runes, which will be enough to ignore all of their armor as long as they're really low level (think 1-5) and aren't classified as a tank or fighter, as they usually have a bit higher base armor. So while it is theoretically possible, it's definitely not a recommended option.