A PSA about Lethality: Its strong, but inflexibility is stronger

So many people complain about lethality and yet they dont change their item purchases/runes/masteries in order to deal with it.

Atm, getting will get you 50 lethality. Runes/masteries will get you another 33 lethality (24.4 from reds/quints, 8.5 from masteries). That's 83 lethality, at level 18. (Riot could probably reduce the lethality values on everything just a tad so that stacking it isnt so effective.)

But when champs complain about lethality while running/building no armor, that is what makes me mad. it is incredibly easy to counterbuild against lethality. 9 armor from flat armor yellows, or 27 armor from scaling armor yellows in your rune page. The break even with the flat armor runes at level 9, around when champs are getting their first full lethality item.

You can get an early for 800g to sit on for a later , you can pick up an early for a later. Chain is 40 armor, seekers is 30, scaling to 45 armor. You can ask your support to rush a , as it gives 40 armor to the bonded target. At level 9, if you're running scaling yellows, have a chain vest and your ally is picking up knights vow, you would have 89 bonus armor. This isnt even when lethality is completely effective yet, as it is still scaling up with levels. Yet, you have more bonus armor than they are ever going to have lethality, in effect making it useless, as the reason that it is so strong is that it reduces most champs armor to 0, making their physical damage true damage.

http://tryhardmode.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/armorreturns1.jpg here is a graph showing effective damage reduction vs armor amount. Armor/MR work on a limiting returns function, meaning that damage reduction evens at 50% (100 armor), but it doesn't grow as fast when armor increases above 100, but goes down MUCH faster when below 100 armor, making lethality builds against people who build 0 armor so effective. The average squishy champ has 75 armor at level 18 from base armor alone. Which means people running full lethality deal true damage to them. But against someone who has built 80+ bonus armor, they are only dealing 60% of their damage (40% damage reduction from ~65-70 armor) Meaning that the isnt going to kill you in one rotation of skills.

So yes, lethality is strong, but even Riot has said that they are going to deal with it and try to reduce its power. But the real OP thing about lethality is how brain dead poeple are about trying to counter it, in their builds, runes and playstyles.