I brought this up earlier and I think now I can mention it NOW because people now realize the big problem with penetration and reduction. The Black Cleaver is the chief example of attempting to solve problems with physical damage from Auto-attacks and Abilities.

• Black Cleaver
• Last Whisper
• Malady
• Hurricane

I don't think many people have noted that they have had no issues with caster magic types. They have only noted several based off the following items, used or unused.

Black Cleaver is an issue. Due to the restructuring of % before flat in reduction and penetration, Black Cleaver is suddenly a huge 'buy' item. for 865 and 5% penetration more gold, you get 10 more AD, 15 armor penetration, 10 CDR, and 250 hp. That is a huge chunk for buying one item a tier higher. The % reduction is before penetration, so it's good not only for the user, but the team. But it gets better, nothing on this item is unique.

Last Whisper is an issue. What? Yes it is. The cost is significantly worse than Black Cleaver (BC). It's a last ditch item after all the ditches. It doesn't benefit as much as BC because allied reductions come AFTER the penetration. (such as Taric and Jarvan) Worse, the base items are not as useful as a brutalizer. Funny, Brutalizer + 1663 = Black Cleaver. A BF Sword is 1550. Remember, LW effects do not stack.

Malady gets +5% AP as magic damage, It seems like nothing until you remember the Offensive tree has the same effect of +5% AP as magic damage. Now it is 10%. On any champion that uses an 'on-hit' (not on-attack-on-target) ability scaling from AP, this becomes a huge problem. The viability has skyrocketed because they got scaling from two things, not one. It is nice for AP, but was obviously not intended for on-hit type champions. Look at the remake of Lichbane with +75% AP as magic. Why not that too? Because it doesn't have Attack Speed or MR reduction and is significantly cheaper.

Hurricane is another interesting case which has gone too far. You can tell it was meant for on-hit. However a lot of people have forgotten that it is also for AD range types as 50% of the AD gets spread. Time to do some thinking. If malady does ~30 damage a hit, a AD would have to have 60 AD to do the same amount physically. Wait, MR vs Armor issues. At some point someone is going to be making a LW or better yet a BC. Anything that didn't work in the old builds still won't work. But if you replace one item with a Hurricane, it suddenly works! Even better, all armor and MR items increased in cost, so now its even better!

But all this is a slap to one thing: Armor and MR cost increases. AD items got cheaper, Armor items got more expensive. They said so in their own patch notes. I don't think many people thought that BC was not going to have unique effects or that it would be so cheap and cost effective compared to LW.
There are a few things notable. These items all have to deal with Auto-Attacks, physical damage, and on-hit. I made a post earlier about itemization to deal with this. The point is that the items attempting to help 'physical damage casters' is not going to work with a blanket 'physical damage improvement by armor reduction/penetration'. The issue is the auto-attack VS abilities. This can be broken down further to the following issues:

• Auto-Attackers
• Physical Ability Damage
• On-hit
• Physical + Magic Ability Damage
• Attack Speed

Trying to help the physical ability damage, they forgot a few things.
No physical damage item had CDR before. Now they stacked CDR with penetration AND HP. Now physical casters have something that provides them with everything. Now auto-attackers have something to boost their ability usage. On-hit items took a hit, but on-hit items with abilities with on-hit effects got a huge boost. Physical + Magic Ability Damage still not addressed. AS got a nerf.


Now the big question: What are your solutions?

Here's my comments.

Black Cleaver is an issue, I agree. And the fact that it's stats are cheap and it's not UNIQUE makes it OP. But that is why it's getting nerfed soon.(Everything on it except for Health if I can remember) Riot already knows of this.

Last Whisper is fine as it is. It allows any AD to fight against any champion stacking armor. It's just like the AP counterpart "Void Staff". These are not items you would buy right away, but items you would buy later to get more"bang for your buck" if they stack Armor/Magic Resist.

Malady is fine as well. I can see what you mean when you can get 10% AP (not 5%) on auto attack from malady and 5% AP on auto attack from Spellsword Mastery, look at it this way. If an AD champ builds Attack Damage, they get that benefit from auto attacks and abilities that scale AD (example:Talon). But and AP champion that builds Ability Power only benefits in their abilities, and NOT from their auto attack (example:Ahri). The three exceptions that comes to mind are Teemo's Poison, Zigg's passive, and Diana's passive. But most mages are not gonna build Malady because they don't benefit from Attack Speed. And having (saying its early/mid-game with 300 AP) 300AP only gives you 30 extra damage from auto attack with Malady (45 dmg with Spellsword Mastery). Having someone like Teemo and Diana can benefit from this, but it's not as Op as you may think it is.
Oh, and ALSO, Attack Speed stats in Season 3 are 20% more costly. So it's nerfed in that aspect as well.

Hurricane is good, but with reason. Hurricane is built for ADC's. ADC's have always been about bursting a single-target down with auto attacks, and with most ADC's are their main source of damage. This item now gives ADC a "cleave" ability that hits 2 more targets for 10+50% AD. So now the ADC doesn't have to worry too much about focusing the wrong target and gets penalized for it because the carry can ONLY do single-target damage. Just like every game, the ADC is usually the first target to kill in games if all players in a game are on equal grounds (assuming no one is fed) because of them being naturally squishy and being the teams best sustain damage dealer.
IMO though, I do have mixed feeling about the extra hits applying "on hit" effects. Things like:
- Life Steal
- Kog Maw's "W" for percent damage
- Vayne's W for percent damage
can be very scary in a game. But I main Jungle, so I don't play ADC enough to know in practice. But I did fight against an ADC Kog Maw with Hurrican. And let me tell you...once their Sona ulted us...Kog Maw made very quick work on us with Hurricane and his W.
And comparing Malady to Hurricane is like comparing Deathcap to Infinity Edge. They seem similar for the boost it gives, but they can't be compared.

And last, the cost increase on Armor and MR.
Riot is trying to allow assassins to come back into the game. As you noticed, stacking Armor and MR shut down a lot of assassins in Season 2, and the tankier team had the advantage if they had fair damage on the side. Top champions used in IPL5 that were most impacted were either:

AOE CC:
- Sona
- Amumu (Tanky)
- Evelynn (Tanky Build)
- Cho'Gath (Tanky)
- Zyra
- Gregas (Tanky)

or

Mobile Champs:
- Ezreal
- Lee Sin (Tanky Build)
- Corki
- Evelynn (Tanky Build)
- Twisted Fate

Having Armor/Magic Resist built on any of these champs (even if it's one item, like a GA for the non-tanky champs) made it really difficult for assassins to deal. Plus, Riot is trying to change the meta from tanks to assassins based on the item changes.

Here's the impact sheet that was used to estimate each champion's impact on IPL5
http://i.imgur.com/ZZH65.jpg

Also, on a side note. If you are anywhere from 1200 elo to 1600 elo roughly, you will notice MOST bans consist of these 4 champs:

- Shen (Tanky)
- Malphite (Tanky)
- Blitzcrank (Tanky)
- Alistar (Tanky) (not banned as much recently)

Because they have strong CC and are very tanky.

But like I said, this is personal opinion of what I've read, played, and see when playing and learning LoL Season 3.

Bump in curiosity of peoples opinions.

The armor penetration and armor changes and the champions that actually use Black Cleaver being viable is more obnoxious than the Cleaver itself. Jumping on top of someone and bursting them down is basically the play style it helps out, which isn't particularly fun to play against, as getting killed without being able to react to it generally sucks - and Talon, Zin Zhao, Pantheon, and Garen are better at pulling that off now. Only change the Cleaver really needs is to have a few unique attributes on it, certainly the CDR and probably the armor penetrations. For actual armor penetration, I feel it's important to note that in Season 2 flat and %armor penetrations were about the only attributes that offered diminishing returns when stacked together, were everything else is multiplicative with other attributes (even DPS and EHP).

Last Whisper is only good when opponents have plenty of armor, were the %DPS increase makes it worth purchasing. Against 0 armor that %armor penetration gives you +0% DPS. Against 1k armor it's closer to 50%. And with the armor and penetration changes, I wouldn't be surprised if health stacking became a thing - which this doesn't help against, at all.

For Malady each point of AD is roughly equal to 2 points of AP - so for even with a combination of Malady and Spellsword Masteries you're only getting 20% cost efficiency for purchasing AP for auto-attack power. Which means you still have to cover 80%+ with abilities or built in on-hit effects, being able to pump out another 0.4 AP ratio every time you attack just to output the same DPS as a dedicated physical damage dealer. Oh, and everything powered by AP can't critically strike, so I hope you have solid base values or utility on everything you're boosting with AP.

Hurricane is pretty cool, I can see that being painful in team fights. It's not great early on though (unless you CS by inadvertently pushing waves and you duel champions by standing still). Most of the on-hit effects that would be broken on it don't apply with it already (Vayne's Silver Bolts can only effect 1 target at a time, Kayle's Rightous Fury isn't considered on on-hit effect for it). You also can't aim were the bolts go and tend to attack things at maximum range, so with minions, monsters, and targets simply not being close enough that potential 100% DPS boost from the extra bolts will end up going to waste a considerable amount of the time, even with skilled players. It's also important to note that AoE abilities with high potential damage don't deal much less damage than single-target abilities more often than not as well, the fun with AoE largely comes down to a reward for utilizing it optimally. That said, a potential 100% DPS bonus does seem rather considerable - though you can get more with Tiamat and Hydra.

Hurricane's on-hit is not the problem you think it is. The range for the secondary targets is fairly small (comparable to old tiamat), and it only scales well with on-hit, which has become extremely expensive. Flat AD is cheap now, so that has only 50% scaling with it. You mentioned Vayne's W, but that is not applied by the item, only to the main target (or else it would never stack at all, since it requires 3 consecutive hits on a single target to activate). Did I mention that on-hit is EXPENSIVE now?

Malady and spellsword are much needed. Hybrid champions like teemo, varus, kayle, jax, kog'maw etc. used to be timid about buying AP based on cost effectiveness of their scaling vs cost of AD, and lead to a lot more favor of ad-inclusive items. The bonus 15% helps balance the ratio out, meaning a kog'maw with malady, Ruann's, and a deathcap would not be a bad decision, whereas old builds preferred bloodrazor even to the likes of nashor's.

As for cleaver, just make the flat pen unique. Stacking for the % is not a huge issue, it just means you reach the 30% cap faster. (yes, the cap is 30% even with 4 cleavers, you would just get there in 1 hit.) LW was never a problem.