Talk:Armor/@comment-98.218.151.42-20120211050119/@comment-4087140-20120216000116

Anon: At the same time, it is ultimately more effective to build both health and armor instead of just one or the other, because they multiply by each other to determine survivability (or "effective health" or whatever). If you spend x amount of gold to triple your armor-factor (i.e. going from 0 armor to 200 armor), that makes you three times as hardy, but if you spend the same amount of gold to double your armor-factor and double your health, that makes your four times as hardy. Three and three  on  make him 757% as hardy against physical damage. Six Warmog's or six Thornmails alone makes him 489% or 414% as hardy, respectively.

What I'm getting at here is that it's difficult to sit and explain that there aren't diminishing returns when it is still in fact more effective to go build something else after a while. If you have a million armor, sure your survivability will still increase if you grab another Thornmail, but nowhere near the benefit of increasing health from 200 to 400; the latter would double your durability whereas the former would only increase your durability very slightly (in comparison). Same deal with attack damage and attack speed; for the purposes of autoattacking they must both be built up to have maximum effectiveness.