Reign of Gaming

Frankly, you won't find a completely correct website out there...those crowd-sourced websites are a good place for you to start though...they usually have some concepts listed up at the top that explain tactics for use in "countering" a champion...you'll have to look at those concepts and decide...are these concepts useful during lane phase? For example, you don't counter Nid during lane phase...she's hard to gank, she can farm even when she can't duel and she has incredible sustain...the traditional counter to poke teams is hard engage...so some sites will list Amumu as a counter...but Amumu can't lane against her (some sites won't list him at all because people only consider laning counters...something to think about there too). He counters her once teamfights start because he allows your team to engage quickly on the other team without taking poke. This kind of stuff is just stuff you have to think through. Counter sites are good to start from, but you have to think through the reasons why someone voted that champion in...maybe that's not the champion you need to pick for laning phase...

That's the kind of stuff he means..."countering" is a much more complex concept than just picking a single champion to counter another champion.

Seeing as how silver bolts consists of only about 10-15% of her damage even in an ideal situation, I'm at a loss as to how LW is bad on Vayne since 85-90% of her damage is Physical. Maths have already been done to show that IE/PD/LW is still one of the highest damage combinations of items out there...there are different choices for different situations, but I highly doubt MOST pro players are wrong and you are correct. While certainly possible, your statement is incredibly arrogant without any maths to back it up.

27 here...sometimes I feel old...I think the grandparent post was partly tongue-in-cheek though lol.

The problem with this argument as others have stated is definition. Diminishing Returns is an economic term as it has always been. It helps to describe the opportunity cost of purchasing one thing or another as we are faced with when we buy items. Thus, using the definition as provided by the general populace is critical. We can't just redefine terms as we see fit and expect reasonable discussion. When we discuss diminishing returns, we should always discuss it using the definition given by Critifaceded.

Thus buying resists isn't a case of diminished returns, BUT it IS a case of negative opportunity cost as we COULD be buying some health and resists both to maximize their multiplicative relationship. This is the same as the AD, AS, Crit problem. While buying one of them isn't a case of diminishing returns, buying the optimal mixture gives us the most optimal case possible due to their multiplicative relationship.

Diminishing Returns is a worst case scenario when evaluating opportunity costs...however, just because something isn't the most optimal path doesn't mean it has diminishing returns, however similar the concepts might be.

To be fair, Vladimir's nerfs for a long time were deserved because he never had a weakness...he came into his power early on in lane and then was a lane bully...and he didn't fall off late game at all. He's kinda in a weak spot now, but he's always been tough to balance. Your other examples are better...I agree with your main argument, but I don't want it detracted with because your first example is iffy.

I don't know why you are explaining this to Winrar, who created the first gold-efficiency spreadsheet, but feel free to continue to rant. He's explaining how CONCLUSIONS drawn from these stats can be wrong. You see, there are two parts to statistics. Anyone with a calculator can do the first part which is the math. The problem is when you try to make conclusions based on the results of said math that assume something incorrectly. Winrar is trying to make the point that many of the conclusions that people make are spurious and based on assumptions that whatever has the best gold/stats ratio must be the best choice for the job when many of the gold efficiency ratios depend greatly on a specific situation.

I used to be involved in the WoW theorycrafting community. There were things that you COULD theorycraft, and things you couldn't. There were things that you could estimate, and things that were so difficult to estimate that respected community members made arguments for the value of the items with respect to other items and the community would accept/reject these arguments and move on. This is the case in League as well...many abilities/runes/masteries/items have difficult to pinpoint values in terms of gold-efficiency because of situational use or dependency upon other statistics for their value.

Most of the people here know full well HOW to calculate gold-effiiciency and its great that you can join our ranks. However, you have to be careful the conclusions you draw from these ratios. Do you make decisions that are based solely upon gold-efficiency or do you take situations into account? The maths provided on this site are perfect for drawing conclusions...most of the authors do a good job (in general) of explaining the situations where some conclusion does or does not reply.

A good example of this comes from your own reply. 60 AD is WORTH the same as 22% lifesteal, but why get lifesteal if you don't have the opportunity to auto attack enough for it to matter? You didn't tell anyone anything useful other than the fact that 60AD has the same gold-efficiency as 22% lifesteal. In order to translate this into in-game knowledge, you ALSO need to quantify this by stating that Pantheon doesn't care as much about that 22% lifesteal and it isn't going to help him as much as more AD would. More importantly...late game, when you have two teams fighting and your AD carry spends money on lifesteal while their carry spends money on AD and the crit/AS to go with it, you're team is going to be wiped out first because of their higher damage. Lifesteal has a place and time, but gold-efficiency doesn't convey any of this. If you have 5 items on an ADC build, including BT already, what's better, getting more lifesteal or stacking more AD? It's quite obvious that there are points in the game where lifesteal is not worth as much as AD because of the situation. This is EXACTLY what Winrar is saying. He's stating that the quality of articles/statements that he's seeing is decreasing due to plucking the desired statistic out of context and making broad generalized statements without that context.

Malz has % health damage...and good sustained damage from his dot, a silence, and good area control from his Q and pool...I really never saw him as a burst mage (not arguing that he doesn't have burst, but his real kit is sustained damage with nice CC).

After talking with a friend, I realized that I wasn't making the implications of this quite as clear as I could have...reducing 400 armor to 50 armor should be considered gimicky and abusive. You would expect that to do such an extreme thing, you would need to pick a very specific team comp. While playing against a team, you would see this team comp coming and could counter it. Ok...well, the first problem is that...there are a plethora of AD champs with Armor shred. I listed a LOT above (I also forgot Vi in that list). The second problem is that you don't have to rely on a specific, small pool of champs to make this comp viable like you would if you trie to run a magic shred team.

So, you don't have to pidgeonhole your team while trying to pick a comp that synergizes in this way like you would  if you wanted a Magic shred team (remember there's only a few magic shredders...Kayle, Nid, Karthus, Trundle...I can't recall any more of them...and Trundle's is on his ult and Nid's is conditional...Karth and Kayle max out at 15% and there's no MR Black Cleaver equivalent to stack more % shred). You could bring Karthus and Mummy, but that's always been the case. Always viable and very synergistic...When you see this teamcomp, you know that Karth and Mummy are gonna hard engage and AoE ur team to death. So you counter the AoE team with an anti-AoE team comp.

What do you do when you see Vi jungling and Renekton top with Talon mid and some AD carry botlane? Well, after reading my comments, you know what they are doing. How do you counter it? Armor? Well that won't work as we already discussed...I'm not sure what the counter would be as the pool of champs that can use this tactic is so large that finding a counter to the whole pool is going to be harder.

Actually, this is not 100% accurate. Xin gets some armor and MR when he ults true...but you could reduce that from his kit and he would still be useful because of his utility.

Regarding Jarvan's tankiness, his Demacian Standard is pretty nice as is his % damage, but there are a lot of champs now with % damage.

Here's what I think is more likely the cause of brokenness that you see:

There are 4 types of armor/magic resist nullification - Flat penetration, % penetration, Flat reduction, % reduction. Only one of these is VERY rare in the game - % Magic resistance reduction (Karth, Nid, Kayle, Trundle...).

So what you ask? Well...you can only stack a certain amount of each type of nullification. BUT, if you're AD based, you can stack all 4 types on your team. In fact, people have already shown examples of reducing armor from high amounts to almost none by stacking Armor nullifications. You can't even come close to this with AP champs. Granted, if you could, everyone would scream bloody murder as AP champs burst people from 100-0 in lategame fights without counterplay...

Here's a list of armor shreds on champions for those of you that aren't familiar with them:

Xin has a 15% shred, Jarvan has 26%, Renekton has an AoE 35%, Wukong has 30%, Rammus has a flat 30 reduction...Corki has a max of flat 40, Kayle has a MR/Armor reduction of 15%, Nasus has an AoE flat 40, Nidalee has a 40% armor/Magic Resist reduction that's conditional but lasts for 12s...Urgot has AoE, conditional 25%, Trundle has 25%-50% armor reduction, Taric has a flat 30...I think that's just about all of the shreds for comparison

I don't think it's individual champs that are the problem. The ability to cheaply itemize for armor nullification has just led teams to realize the synergy between these stats and led to new team comps that use these synergies effectively. The one champ that I notice in there that's problematic is Kayle...her 15% shred is actually both types...meaning Kayle is super synergistic with all team types...especially with AP Kayle's new popularity. Nid has both too, but it requires stepping on a trap...though with good placement and forcing teams through choke points, I could see counting on that trap being a viable strategy.

Either way...just some thoughts. It seems obvious that pro teams have figured out these synergies and are using them (how many games do you see champs with these shreds in their kits...pretty much every one right?). I feel like the problem isn't that some champs have tankiness built into their kits because if that was the case, we'd be complaining about leona, alistar, shen, malphite, pantheon, trundle, chogath, mundo, garen, etc. who all have strong, high uptime tankiness built into their kits. As a community, we're not complaining about them nearly as loudly as we're complaining about seeing Jarvan, Xin, Renekton, Wukong, etc in every game. Ok you say, but I'm not complaining about it...well are you complaining about Talon, Lee, Panth mid? Those AD casters are quite often paired with armor shreds so that their damage continues to be relevant lategame. Not always mind you...just noting a trend I see in the commonly complained about champs.

How about all AD teams...just stack armor right? Nope. Armor Penetration Equation incoming (lets look at 100 armor and 400 armor, carry vs tank):

(Armor x (1-%Red) - FlatRed) x (1-%Pen) - FlatPen

I can get 25% Reduction from BC, 35% from Renekton's AoE shred. I can get LW for 35% Pen and I can get 25 (runes) + 20 (Ghostblade) + 10 (BC) for 55 flat armor pen. I could try and add a champ with flat reduction like Taric for a flat 30 reduction to show how crazy this can get. 

(100 x (1-.25)x(1-.35) - 30) x (1-35) - 55 = 18.75 armor after reduction and so after pen = -42.8125 = 0...True Damage

(400 x (1-.25)x(1-.35) - 30) x (1-.35) - 55 = 52.25...400 armor on a tank reduced to 52...think about how ridiculous that is.

Now granted, not everyone stacks their teams like this. But all AD teams are possible with how easy it is to itemize for Armor Nullification. And percent shreds are the strongest because they allow all of the rest of the team to benefit from the nullification. Renekton's is one of the strongest being AoE based.

I dunno...I don't think it's that J4 and Xin are super strong...I think they're kits just happen to fall into line with the new changes. People hate Xin because he's a pubstomper and punishes bad positioning, and he was SO broken on release, but I'm not convinced he's broken by any means. He's strong and maybe he deserves a nerf, but it's not his ult that's the problem. It's itemization and the fact that his kit works well with item changes for S3

Nasus actually is one of the strongest laners in the game. Once again, as A2ZOMG mentioned, however, he is very team reliant mid game. He counters autoattackers and there are no melee autoattackers that can effectively trade with him in lane if he isn't outright dumb. To beat Nasus in lane, you must have a strong ranged harass and enough sustain to spam it when he wants to lifesteal back up. Post 6, Nasus can sit in lane as long as he wants without any problems, ganks or not. I don't play Nasus on a regular basis because his kit doesn't lend itself to the current meta, but it's not a bad kit by any means. These buffs will more than likely make him even more of a terror than he already is to lane against.