User blog comment:Shinaliss/Efficiency Plots of AD and AP vs Penetration/@comment-4091261-20140923195534/@comment-6000413-20140924102057

Hi there.

A lvl 9 Darius has a minimum of 81.5 AD. his cripplin strike deals 163 damage. His scaling ratio is 200% = 2. Thus his StD is 2/163 = 0.0123. making penetration more cost*damage efficient when your opponent is below 140-150 armor.

That is exactly the same for basic attacks. Any multiplier to total AD with no base (like critical strikes) will have the same StD of a basic attack for that particular champion.

A lvl 1 Draven has a minimum of 50 AD. His basic attack has an StD of 1/50 = 0.02, that, I agree, is not in the plots... I can extend them, of course, but a more realistic situation would be a LvL 3 draven with two longswords, a point where you can really choose between penetration and AD. Without masteries that would be 77 AD, for an StD of 1/77 = 0.13. This value leads penetration to be more cost*damage efficient if the enemy has below around 110 armor.

Of course, the brutalizer also has CDR. If you find that completely useless you can say that the gold cost of penetration rises to 43.7, which is very bad and even worse than the AP table. Still you can look at it to have an idea of that pure autoattack efficiency.

Even in this worst case scenario (you don't consider CDR), you are loosing around 437 gold in damage by buyng brutalizer if the opponent has below 50 armor. This means around 10 damage per hit.

I could make another table with efficiency not considering CDR for pure autoattacking champions. That changes a lot of things and brings down the brutalizer a lot, actually.

Still, at 200 AD, penetration will remain efficient if the enemy has below 50 armor.

If the question is: should an AD carry buy a brutalizer?

The answer is: if you have physical damage abilities to exploit CDR and the penetation on your base damage (Cait, Draven, Quinn, Vayne, Jinx, maybe Twitch and Ashe), probably yes. If you have magical abilities and long or static cooldowns (Tris, Corki), probably no.