Talk:VPBE/@comment-24951773-20161030080155/@comment-1330314-20161030091829

I wouldn't call it a "noob trap", as it's on many very good assassin items, but I agree that Lethality as a stat has terrible clarity. It's impossible to know at any given moment how much flat armor penetration you're actually getting, and calculating damage amplification from flat pen and the enemy's armor is already impossible to do on the fly. To the average player, Lethality will just be an arbitrary number that promises more damage against squishies, rather than a stat they can understand intuitively.

Personally, I think the best replacement to flat pen would just be more AD, and perhaps more items focusing on movement speed. Any additional physical damage will be naturally reduced against armor and will naturally contribute to additional burst, and placing a focus on stats like CDR and movement speed would prevent those items from being core on all but a select few marksmen. In the end, those items would be healthier even if they do get picked by marksmen, since they'd make more generic use of the AD, instead of just killing squishies faster as they do now with flat pen builds.