Originally Posted by Viro Melchior

Going to split hairs on you here.
Last Whisper is not a counter item.
Void Staff is a counter item.

Enough champions don't have scaling MR, and those that do scale to a lower value than their armor.
Plus, flat penetration for magic damage is fairly staple (almost every caster will have 23 + 8% by endgame from boots, runes, and masteries).

This results in anyone who *doesn't* get MR being reduced from 30 or 35 to 4.5-9 MR.
If your target has that little MR, there's no reason to get a Void Staff. You're better off building a higher AP, or higher durability item.

In contrast, all champions reach 80 armor or more without runes/masteries. And the "core build" items for adc champions doesn't include any flat penetration. Which means you only have your 12 pen from runes, which drops them to 68 armor or more. At that level, picking up a Last Whisper shows remarkable improvement in your damage output.

Therefore, I think that Void Staff is something you only buy if the majority (3+ members) of their team build significant (more than 30) magic resistance. Meanwhile, Last Whisper is something you build no matter what (and thus, not a counter build).

Originally Posted by Xypherous

Warmog's Armor is not as powerful as most people make it out to be at the moment - However, the incentives to build it are there, because there is no readily apparent counter that your opponent can take.

Essentially, let's say I gave you two options:

Option A is generically strong and has no real weaknesses.

Option B is situationally strong and has a real weakness.

In general, players will tend to gravitate towards option A unless option B is so overwhelming powerful that it dwarfs option A's power. Part of this is the natural human tendency for risk aversion - part of it is because it you can't point out a situation where something is bad - you automatically gravitate towards that because there's nothing telling you 'no'.

We've seen this effect before on the more generalized fighters like Irelia. In order for a champion to be seriously considered versus Irelia - their strengths had to frequently be far more dominant than Irelia ever was to be considered "viable" - when you could just choose Irelia and have a safe time. In general, whenever we've done Option B without adding a real weakness to Option A - the results that came about are frequently more toxic or infuriating than Option A ever was.

For example, a lot of Riven's number tuning and damage was tuned to overcome Irelia's sustain strength - and making her all physical damage so that armor was an effective counter.

What this meant was that Riven was simply more toxic and frustrating to fight against than Irelia ever was - because in order for her to be played, she had to overwhelmingly destroy Irelia for people to justify picking her when she had clear counters.

Originally Posted by hashinshin

I always thought the weakness to defenses was that offense out scaled defense.

But I guess LoL has to reinvent the wheel again just to show that they're not like DotA, and therefore create more problems than even DotA managed to create.

Originally Posted by hashinshin

For example, a hard counter to a ranged army in WH40k is not a unit immune to ranged damage (though god knows they've probably created one of those already) but rather a unit that can move and charge 24+ inches.

Originally Posted by Xypherous

the counter cycle

Originally Posted by Xypherous

Warmog's Armor is not as powerful as most people make it out to be at the moment - However, the incentives to build it are there, because there is no readily apparent counter that your opponent can take.

Essentially, let's say I gave you two options:

Option A is generically strong and has no real weaknesses.

Option B is situationally strong and has a real weakness.

In general, players will tend to gravitate towards option A unless option B is so overwhelming powerful that it dwarfs option A's power. Part of this is the natural human tendency for risk aversion - part of it is because it you can't point out a situation where something is bad - you automatically gravitate towards that because there's nothing telling you 'no'.

We've seen this effect before on the more generalized fighters like Irelia. In order for a champion to be seriously considered versus Irelia - their strengths had to frequently be far more dominant than Irelia ever was to be considered "viable" - when you could just choose Irelia and have a safe time. In general, whenever we've done Option B without adding a real weakness to Option A - the results that came about are frequently more toxic or infuriating than Option A ever was.

For example, a lot of Riven's number tuning and damage was tuned to overcome Irelia's sustain strength - and making her all physical damage so that armor was an effective counter.

What this meant was that Riven was simply more toxic and frustrating to fight against than Irelia ever was - because in order for her to be played, she had to overwhelmingly destroy Irelia for people to justify picking her when she had clear counters.