Talk:Zed/@comment-5557556-20150423095708/@comment-6281696-20150426131034

Obviously if you remove base armor and armor penetration in its current form you'd need to apply a considerable amount of other things to rebalance things. E.g. The damage people can put out needs to be seriously toned down, or we'd need a base damage reduction that's just always there, items would most likely need to give less armor/MR (or it'd need to scale differently), and a host of other things.

As for it involving no counterplay, currently you have the opposite situation where there is no counterplay towards penetration, or at least percentual penetration (ha, your armor is now half as effective and there's bugger all you can do about it). At least flat armor reduction and armor effectivly negate eachother, making them counters towards eachother. If for example flat armor reduction only worked against the bonus armor (and not your base armor) it'd be surprisingly balanced since it doesn't come in such excessive amounts & having it apply only against bonus armor helps protect the squishies from abuse.

As for less strategy, literally everyone and their mother appears to be building penetration currently, hell I've seen people build it before any real armor has even been bought and that isn't even rare. So really, you won't lose anything. In general there's really not much strategy going on, it's mostly cookiecutter builds anyway..

Also, it wasn't a serious idea given that it has not been worked out in any way whatsoever when I said it, though you've made it into one somehow. As for liking the principle behind armor penetration, yes of course I like the principle, however the execution in LoL is god-awefull. The execution of itemization and stats in general is given that riot refuses to do much with respect to restrictions and drawbacks on items leading to abusive cases where people use hyper effective items to push as much as possible in a single build. Which is then hailed as an expression of creativity, freedom and skill while anyone with a working brain spending 10 minutes looking at the items can figure out half the optimal builds.. Anyway, different rant.

As for the entire thornmail being ignored. It does not matter if the 100 armor is 50 from thornmail and 50 from idunno, randuins, what matters is that a 100 armor is ignored which is the equivalent of not wearing that thornmail if the guy didn't have any penetration. Effectivly negating the item. The gold spend on that thornmail is effectivly completly negated against the gold he spend on his penetration. On top of that, the percentual penetration just continues to negate more and more gold as long as he builds armor, at least flat penetration stops after you've topped the amount it gives. Now in itself this wouldn't even be too bad if it weren't for the fact that outside of armor/MR tanks have fairly little going on in terms of defenses (To become a pure health tank you'd probably need somewhere around 10K health as a minimum which is just not going to happen, and health regen is too low to rely on given that the average fight lasts like 5 seconds), while the damage dealers still have all their AD, crit, attackspeed and whatnot left once the penetration has been removed from the equation. Which skews the balance heavily in their favor. If you want these kind of excessive amounts of penetration then tanks need to get alternate ways of survival that are equally as potent as armor/mr to give them an oppertunity to respond.

E.g. give me an item that just blocks a large flat amount of each hit. Or that gives me a constantly recharging shield that recharges to full in 2 seconds and blocks say 300 damage, or that reduces my opponents AD by 40%, increases my armor by 30%, makes 20% of my armor MR and vice versa, increases my armor by 1% for every % of missing health, use your imagination. This basicly doesn't exist for defense, while there are myriad of mechanics for offense.

And before you moan about those examples being OP, they're examples of mechanics, the numbers are utterly arbitrary.