Reign of Gaming

RoG Article Recap

• Season 3 Itemization Preview
• Season 3 Itemization preview Update - Armor Penetration and its effects on the scaling of our Attack Damage Casters class
• AD Carry Itemization - Looking Back at Season 2 and Forward to Season 3 By GentlemanGustaf

Season 3 Itemization Q&A

With the Itemization preview came a lot of new questions. Xypherous has been answering a great deal of them for most of the day. We have rounded up all the questions and the answers for your easy viewing. 

So we're going back to pre-Season-1 mode? I thought it was removed because it made armor stacking terrible against penetration stacking? 
Yes and No. Armor stacking was terrible against penetration - but Armor Penetration never worked on abilities in Pre-Season 1.

So a change was made for the purposes of balancing AD carry damage output - which you know was actually more affected by things like Green Elixir and the craziness of Last Whisper than any actual systems change.

Will new black cleaver still reduce armor for allies, or is it a selfish passive, like last whisper? 
Armor reduction applies for your team.

The point of BC here is to be a smooth transition from lane dominance (Brutalizer) into mid/late game effectiveness (25% armor reduction.)

So, if you're a tanky AD Caster, like Renekton or Garen, you'll be shredding the armor of the enemy team. While if you're a selfish AD Caster like Pantheon or Talon, you might consider Brutalizer into Last Whisper.

What about someone like kayle who gets the ranged splash? The attack itself is physical but splash is magical? Correct? What about the interaction with her passive and this thing? Would it be multiplicative or addative? 
Kayle's splash is indeed magical, so Kayle does not AE shred.

Kayle's passive stacks multiplicatively with this item. All % reductions scale multiplicatively. If they don't, that's probably a bug we need to fix. XD

Will these changes also effect flat pen vs % pen magic damage? 
Yes.

Won't this item be something ADs, such as corkie would want to get now when dealing with high armored targets? 
Yes and no, in a lot of ways.

Corki, in particular, has interesting interactions with this new BC due to Gattling Gun being silly with it - but for many carries, Last Whisper still provides superior penetration %.

im really starting to hate these small little teasers....stop trying to build up hype riot.....shame on you....shame on thy
The main goal is to explain everything that we can so that when the tide hits, you guys have a good grounding of what is to come.

Sure, we want people to be excited - but for me personally, I'm more worried about people not understanding all the changes and thus these previews help to get people geared up to understand the scale of the changes we'll make.

I am curious if hitting multiple bullets of graves buckshot would trigger The Black Cleaver multiple times. It seems like it should based on the other abilities described, but those are all DoT effects and this damage is calculated all at once. 
Buckshot does indeed fire 3 bullets that can proc Black Cleaver 3 times. Graves is an AD Caster.

The trade-off here is whether Last Whisper or Black Cleaver makes more sense for you and your team. Black Cleaver promises early lane dominance into team shred, while Last Whisper is a mid-late game selfish armor penetration.

Item Active abilities. These are severely under-utilized at lower play, but incredible at higher levels. Along with the DFG rework, what sort of options have you considered for rebalancing actives, or for keeping new actives in check? 
In general, we're trying to introduce more actives that can be used either out of combat, or pre-combat and then adding some actives with lower cooldowns - so that people can get used to actives in their rotation.

However, we still don't want active overload, where the majority of your items are actives. That's actually been something that's been interestingly messy to combat. :P

So if I buy a Black Cleaver and a Tiamat, will the splash from the Tiamat cause armor reduction? 
Based on how it's coded, probably not at the moment - if I think about it. Tiamat has always had kind of odd interactions with stuff like this for a long time. 

I'll make a note to look into that specific code interaction as Tiamat is weeird. Did you know Tiamat can splash magic damage *if* the autoattack is 100% magic? Tiamat is weeeird.

I feel like it is a problem with Specialization, for instance u mention that CC will be improved by incoming new items, but actually whether a AP mid champ will select these items instead of damage since I feel like that have damage to burst down a single target in team fight is better than a improved CC 
The current additional CC adds for Tanks/Mages are slow based and have very use-cases. One is more of a location control basis, while the other one is a search and destroy basis that's much longer ranged.

How to win as wukong? Just rune and mastery for as much flat armor penetration as you possibly can, and get Black cleaver after picking up an armor pen item. 140 armor bruiser giving your team problems? NOPE. SUFFER ALL TEH DAMAGES 
Well - Yeah. But then you run up into a 3k HP Mundo/Singed with 80~ armor and massive regeneration and you're like 'Wait a second, you didn't build any armor! ABORT. ABORT. I REGRET EVERYTHING.'

Will these new items affect armor pen quints/red runes????

It seems like since you adjust how you calculate flat armor pen vs % armor pen you'd also want to nerf flat armor pen runes to compensate. 
Yes, we'll be doing a pass on all flat / % penetration sources to get them in line with the new formulae.

Currently, max ar pen is too binary in lane, while Last Whisper is *far* too strong because of how it anti-synergizes with flat armor penetration.

The values aren't too far off - in the ballpark of ~ 5% or 5 points for adjustments. Basically, if you only had one source of penetration, you'll see your penetration values go down as a whole because those were overtuned to be independent systems rather than interactive ones.

Xypherous, I am concerned that the nerf to flat armor and MR at the beginning of the game will result in skill being too much of a modifier for the early game. 
A lot of games use skill caps that allow worse players to overcome better ones in certain circumstances - I'm talking something like 5% of the times. An example is MTG's land flooding or screwing, or the randomization in items in Mario Kart.
Now, I'm not saying that skill shouldn't be what ultimately decides a game, because it certainly should, but maybe armor and MR level the playing field for less skilled players to gain a reasonable footing against more adept ones. 
In the long run, skill will overcome and the better players will take the game for sure. But giving less skilled players a fighting chance, in something as moderate as armor and MR, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

A little confused on this. We're going to hit flat armor / mr penetration values early game - because right now if you don't do flat armor and magic resistances early - you essentially have zero armor or magic resistance by 6 minutes into the game.

There was a give and take. If game lasted too long, you sell brut and buy LW. What's the problem? 
There's two problems here:

1. Early game pen values were essentially tuned to be viable up until mid-game, which means that if you didn't stack early armor, you had zero armor.

2. Stacking early armor turned the flip-side of the problem onto the AD in question - because now they needed to give up their current advantages (Brutalizer) in favor of a % solution even if their flat penetration was good enough to kill a carry.

3. Meanwhile, carries just get a the amount of % armor penetration from Last Whisper so Tanks die while AD Casters pay a 600 Gold Tax for being in the late game.

Xyph - currently, if you get Last Whisper/Void Staff for 40% penetration, plus the same-resistance 10% penetration mastery in the Offense tree, you get 40% penetration, plus 10% of the remaining 60% armor/MR for 46% penetration. Can this be changed to be additive rather than multiplicative, so you get 50% reduction?

Or is this particular mastery no longer a thing? 
No. Additive % Penetration is kind of a warped concept as it makes stacking exponentially more effective than you ever intend.

Every % point past 50% has over twice the returns that the first % point gives you. Every % point past 66% has over three times the return that the first % gives you.

Additive % Penetration is a great way to simply cause players to stack and invalidate armor. Armor would no longer have a point.

What about flat reduction, will it apply before or after %penetration? 
Reductions are on the opponent. They are always applied first.

Penetration is on you. It is always applied second.

Does this mean that a champ like Xerath that gets a void staff will become a late-game monster if he gets an early lead? 
We may potentially have to go back and look at characters like Xerath / Darius - but honestly, I question whether or not building Armor against Darius worked in the first place and Xerath will basically kill whoever he wants once every 60 seconds.

So what are your goals for early game laning in regard to Armor vs. Ar.Pen? Is early Ar.Pen not intended to be the counter to early game Armor Stacking? 
If not, what options do characters like Talon and Riven have in lane vs. Early Armor Stackers? 
Flat Penetration can't counter early game armor stacking. In fact, Flat Penetration currently *loses* to early armor stacking. Chain Vest > All the Penetration you can buy ever.

Just pay attention to what you are doing and make sure you don't give someone wukong-esque armor shred and aoe potential ( who has the slipperness to pull it off) AND percentage health damage. In other words, wukong isn't a problem because if he is built this way he obviously caters his damage to a specific kind of target. 
Physical % Max Health damage characters won't be any more abusive than if they had just gotten a Last Whisper. And if they have both - well, they're paying for it in other ways - such as having lower AD than a full IE or BT build for example.

Does this mean that a champ like Xerath that gets a void staff will become a late-game monster if he gets an early lead? 
We may potentially have to go back and look at characters like Xerath / Darius - but honestly, I question whether or not building Armor against Darius worked in the first place and Xerath will basically kill whoever he wants once every 60 seconds.

So what are your goals for early game laning in regard to Armor vs. Ar.Pen? Is early Ar.Pen not intended to be the counter to early game Armor Stacking? 
If not, what options do characters like Talon and Riven have in lane vs. Early Armor Stackers? 
Flat Penetration can't counter early game armor stacking. In fact, Flat Penetration currently *loses* to early armor stacking. Chain Vest > All the Penetration you can buy ever.

Just pay attention to what you are doing and make sure you don't give someone wukong-esque armor shred and aoe potential ( who has the slipperness to pull it off) AND percentage health damage. In other words, wukong isn't a problem because if he is built this way he obviously caters his damage to a specific kind of target. 
Physical % Max Health damage characters won't be any more abusive than if they had just gotten a Last Whisper. And if they have both - well, they're paying for it in other ways - such as having lower AD than a full IE or BT build for example.

The new BC's penetration applies after doing damage. In other words, for people like Talon to get the reduction down, he has to blow his full combo. Now what? I mean, it's still useful for your carry, but this BC doesn't seem to be as friendly to assassins as you guys seem to want it to be... 
It depends. On a low armored target, Black Cleaver % reduction won't be doing much for you anyway so you should tap your full-combo. 

On a high armored target, think about pre-applying some stacks via autoattacks before blowing your main damage spells. Pantheon's Spear Shot, for example, has something akin to a 4 second cooldown. If you're really up against a tank/bruiser with high armor / low health - suddenly that pre-fight harass becomes much more important to how your full-combo pans out.

You do realise that by buffing black cleaver... this makes AD Tanky Champions much more overpowered 
Yes and no? AD Tanky Champions output a wide array of magical and physical damage mostly. Udyr and Shyvana for example, are split pretty heavily between magical and physical - while characters like Darius and Irelia do magic/phys/true. 

They don't care about your armor. They care about their *own* armor.

If you're talking about Garen specifically, being overpowered, that's kind of his own thing - but again, one of the largest sources of Garen's damage is magic-based.

Basically: Is Early Armor Stacking going to continue to be a trump card against champs like Talon and Riven in Season 3? (e.g., Ninja Tabi + Chain Vest = Lane Over.) 
Most likely. That's a problem with those specific characters doing all physical damage and not a problem with the overall strategic decision-making as a whole, in my opinion.

There'll be some slight tuning on resistances (because resistances are a little bit too cheap in our game overall) - but Talon / Riven were made essentially assuming that armor-stack should hard-counter them.

So this new Black Cleaver, we can now initiate fights with MF's ult and just shred the entire enemy team's armor values, correct? 
Yes. There's a slight trade-off between optmizing MF's damage by buying Last Whisper or buying BC and shredding everyone for your team.

I would get BC on MF if I had some more physical damage characters on my team but they didn't have good ways of applying BC, like a Lee Sin/Kha'zix or something.

Kha'Zix deals a high amount of physical damage with a percentage of their missing health added on to it. Now he gets to shred their armor as well? This pretty much destroys your "if they stack health but don;t build armor it won't work" argument. 
Kind of. Kha'Zix would be much better served building Last Whisper if he was simply murdering people by himself. 40% Armor Penetration > 25% Armor Shred.

Black cleaver on darius' bleed. Holy ****. 
Darius' bleed is magic. >_>

AD Assassins have only succeeded by jumping in, bursting, and hoping the enemy is either dead, or too stupid to counter-attack and just gave you a free combo off of them. 
Yes - this is absolutely true. But % reduction won't actually *be* effective against the enemy that you're getting that play pattern off of.

See, if you're doing the whole 'jump out of shadows + murder' - you want to be targetting a squishy character with low armor anyway. This isn't meant to be the core item that causes 'Talon jumps out and murders a tank with 250 armor' syndrome. Talon / Kha'zix still want to murder the carry with 60 armor. In that case, % reduction isn't going to do much for you.

However, it does give you an opportunity if you are skirmishing these types of heavy bruiser men. Getting multiple rakes/Kha'zix W's off in a pre-fight skirmish will greatly enhance your burst combo.

Pantheon will be restored to his former glory. 

Muhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

*hides so Xypherous can continue his awesomeness*

So from reading a post from Morello, he stated that he does not believe in any form of hard counter and that the only thing possible should be a soft counter. your arguments seem to contradict each other. 
Probably - but if your character has linear scaling and 100% physical damage - that's just going to be what happens. That's my own fault as Riven's designer that she gets hard-countered by armor. 

Morello has to talk about very high-level of what is good for the game as a whole. Individual designs don't contradict that, it just means that the individual designs are flawed in that regard.

What about Draven how does HE feel about the new BC. 
Draven would probably prefer if someone else got it so he could stack AD and axe your face off. That AD Carry scaling.

Are you worried about Renekton at all with this new Black Cleaver? His E already has an armor shred mechanic, and how he get's even more of it. I guess people really can't counter him with armor anymore. 
Renekton's 'E' lasts 4 seconds. He typically can't kill you within that time.

However, you should probably run away if Renekton is partnered with like.. a carry - because yeah, the two of them working in concert will destroy your armor and then murder you.

So is it intended that Kayle can cause 36.35% armor Shred with this, her passive and Righteous Fury active to the entire enemy team? 
Righteous Fury is magical splash damage I believe.

Probably - but if your character has linear scaling and 100% physical damage - that's just going to be what happens. That's my own fault as Riven's designer that she gets hard-countered by armor. Morello has to talk about very high-level of what is good for the game as a whole. Individual designs don't contradict that, it just means that the individual designs are flawed in that regard.
Additionally, I didn't say that as strongly - I heavily favor soft-counter approaches, not that we use zero hard counters.

how I'm suppose to do multiple Rakes and maintain debuff stacks with skill that have so long cd and without going into melee range to auto attack and getting exposed to CC and burst from tanky bruiser? (and no I'm not gona build 40% cdr on talon >.>) 
You'll manage. Bruisers kill assassins who aren't slippery. That's kind of a core-tenet of the world.

the splash damage is physical 
Let me look this up later. I'm pretty sure the splash damage is scales off a % of your attack damage + bonus magic damage - but it's all magical damage in the AoE.

Out of curiosity, would this new black cleaver be a good buy on Twitch? The cd reduction easily makes you able to e and stealth more, and due to his ulti... Eh, eh? Gets rid of their armor, and has armor pen? 
Maybe, if you really need CDR. Twitch does a lot of true damage in lane - so I'm not sure if early Brutalizer helps him all that much. I would assume that Twitch would prefer LW being a thing.

How will the new Black Cleaver interact with Physical DoTs? (Talon's Q and Draven's passive for example).

Current evidence from in game mechanics that function with "damage applied" (For example, Galio's Bulwark or Poppy's Paragon of Demacia) suggest that each tick of the dot will apply a stack. Or is it coded to ignore DoTs entirely? 
It should work with DoTs.

I'll probably figure out some way to code it so that the total shred duration doesn't go nuts with DoT's - but I think the concept of 'apply a DoT, wait for the DoT to burn their armor and then do my burst combo' is a cool gameplay pattern.

Doesn't having BC build out of brutalizer completely obsolete Youmou's? 
The core identity of Youmu's has always been 'Click this button and then mercilessly autoattack their face off.' If you're getting Youmu's - you're choosing to get the burst of speed benefits rather than rather than the highest raw damage possible. Retuning the active will be enough on this front, I think.

Also, this looks totally wrong on Garen's Judgement. Garen's judgement does not apply on hit effects. By definition the black cleaver applies it's debuff on hit. So... are the changes to black cleaver going to reflect on EVERY character that does physical damage? 
Black Cleaver's new effect is *not* an on-hit proc. It triggers whenever damage of the appropriate type is dealt to the enemy.

So, to get the full effect of this kind of item, the burst assassin character would have to walk up to the target and AA them a few times? What version of the game are you playing? That is useless on assassin champs then. If I want to burst down someone like Jayce or Darius I would have to build a good amount of health, or armor or both, to land a few AAs and survive. 
You realize that Talon isn't the only AD Caster right? And even if it were the case - Assassins have no right being able to murder everyone they please at a moment's notice with impunity?

You're an assassin that takes out high priority targets. You *don't* just get to murder everyone in the game without tradeoffs.

this^ why would an ad caster get it when they can get last whisper? 
A couple reasons:

1. It has a combination of flat penetration, CDR and % reduction on the same item itself.
2. It's a relatively smooth build path from brutalizer - thus giving you a way for your early game curve to enter your late game curve.
3. It leaves a lingering 'after-effect' for your team even if you fail your assassination attempt.

So, for example - #1 just gives you the stats you need at the right time. CDR, flat pen, % reduction, attack damage - all on the same item. Slot efficiency.

#2 means that your lane build can effectively transition into something that - while it's not perfectly optimal for selfish damage - does actually transition out into a mid/late-game build.

#3 means that your full-combo not only deals more damage - but effectively marks that target for further incoming damage from your team. Characters like Pantheon or Renekton, for example, can often fail to finish off their entire target - but that character is effectively weaker in a lot of ways from follow-up attacks from pretty much anyone.

There are times you still want Last Whisper though. Definitely. If you feel like optimizing the most selfish damage possible in the quickest time-frame - You will get a Last Whisper instead of an early brutalizer.

When you make the call for BC - you're really deciding a couple things

1. I'm building a brutalizer in lane to transition out.
2. I'm going to focus on either killing squishy targets *or* softening hard targets.

So Sivir's AAs, Q, and W are gonna proc BC's armor shred?
Think I know what FotM is gonna be. 
Go go.. support-Sivir for an AD comp?

BC would be ideal on a carry if you're supporting lots of physical damage characters on your team.

However, if you're the highest damage source on your team and you have lots of magic characters on your team - pick up the Last Whisper instead.

cannot see a situation where I would buy this new item on a ranged ad carry. 
Yes, this is correct. You would only buy this item on a ranged AD carry if:

1. You had one or two physical characters on your team.
2. You had a way to easily spread out physical damage to the other team.

Would it be particularly stupid/bad to just stack LW and BC? Just because they stack multiplicatively doesn't mean they don't stack at all. 
Well - I mean, you must *really* hate armor - but theoretically, with a full build of LW/BC - you could ignore something like 70% of the armor thrown your way.

At a certain point though - if you're considering both LW and BC - it might be a good call to ask *your* friendly bruiser to pick up BC and you to pick up LW and then coordinate some pain.

So you covered how armor penetration is going to work, will the same switch around be done with AP flat Pen and %? 
Yeah. Sorc Shoes / Haunting Guise / Void Staff is stronger while Sorc Shoes / Haunting Guise / Abyssal is weaker for the purposes of negating enemy MR.

Sorc Shoes / Haunting Guise both took a flat pen hit, by balanced out by the fact that they work better with your 10% pen from masteries - it doesn't really equate to a lot of damage difference.

And what exactly possessed Riot to think this was a good idea? This didn't work the first time, since it made armor useless to even bother purchasing, and you already have champs that not only reduce flat armor, but also percentile armor. Why is this going to work the second time if it didn't work the first time? 
Sure, I can hit this.

Armor Penetration Pre-Season 1 looked liked this:

1. You could start with 40+ armor penetration. (Recall, we nerfed flat armor penetration runes)
2. Last Whisper was overpowered. (+40% AS, +20 AD)
3. Green Elixir was overpowered (Gave roughly 50% more statistics.)

The problem with armor penetration in this setup was that flat armor penetration was the de-facto standard for your rune page as a carry, but Last Whisper was also the highest damage multiplier after your infinity edge, and Green Elixir could fill in for the critical strike.

This led to carry damage turning on at roughly 17 minutes with full armor penetration.

In today's world - look at the differences:

1. Green Elixir is weaker.
2. Flat armor penetration runes are weaker than before.
3. Last Whisper isn't triple multiplicative statistics, only double.

It's much harder to full-spec armor penetration *and* have all your other multiplicative statistics at once. Basically, we changed the armor penetration formula to hurt carries - but the actual problem with carries was the ease of their build up.

IPL Returns to Las Vegas: Buy Tickets Now!

The IGN Pro League (IPL) returns to Las Vegas for another dose of intense international competition. IPL is hosting its fifth major tournament from November 29 through December 2 at the luxurious Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. The tournament introduces a new structure, beginning with four teams in a live qualifier fighting for a single spot in the main bracket. Once the final team is determined, a total of sixteen teams will battle for over $100,000 in prizes. 

Teams from all over the world will travel to IPL 5 to face off on the Fields of Justice, including Team SoloMid, Counter Logic Gaming Europe, Moscow Five BenQ, Team WE, Singapore Sentinels, and the Season Two World Champions Taipei Assassins. Head over to IPL’s League of Legends website for acomplete list of the teams attending the event, the tournament structure, and the match broadcast schedule. 

As veteran Season Two teams hit the tournament circuit, new teams have a shot at challenging these top teams. And with the Taipei Assassins in attendance, every team will attempt to prove that they have what it takes against the reigning League of Legends champions. 

The competition will be intense under the Las Vegas sun and you won’t want to miss a single moment of the action. If you’re planning to join in on the fun at Vegas at IPL 5, purchase your event passes nowbefore they sell out.

Can’t make it to the event? IPL has you covered! Many of the matches will be live-streamed andVODs will also be available.

 S2 Profile Borders

 Coastward over on reddit was able to grab a picture of the upcoming profile borders on the PBE