User blog comment:KeithCornell/Riot's Pre-Season 2017 Changes - Assassin Updates and more (OPINIONATED)/@comment-1330314-20161023215324

There's a fair amount here I agree with, especially the criticism of Lethality. While the flat pen's power curve sort of matches onto that of most assassins (strongest mid-game, less good late-game), the stat severely lacks clarity, and still requires enemy armor to work, despite being more effective against lighter-armored targets. I really think the stat needs to go.

Regarding the other assassin items, though, especially Duskblade, I like the common theme of striking from the dark. While Duskblade's on-attack effect isn't really the greatest (the Lethality-scaling true damage is a weird implementation when physical damage would synergize much better with it), I think it's appropriate for it to have a blackout effect.

I also personally don't really like control wards, as I think the removal of invisibility detection has fragmented the catch-all true sight of vision wards into a mishmash of different detection and anti-detection effects. If stealth wards had been updated to use camouflage, we wouldn't need control wards at all, and I'm not looking forward to still having to use a hard-counter item to counter another item that, by all rights, shouldn't be hard-countering standard sight.