How do you counter Black Cleaver, building more armor which is just going to be negated anyway? The most conceivable way I could see would be to build Thornmail, but that only works against basic attacks, not physical abilities such as Talon's Rake, Pantheon's Heartseeker Strike, or Garen's Judgement.

black cleaver is by no means overpowered, the stat's on it are decent but stacking it really only allows you to stack the shred faster, whereas that gold could have been spent on other options.
for riven, you would have been better off grabbing another bloodthirster and a warmogs for the even more AD and waaay too much health, allowing you to dive varus better. or randuins.
talon is a fed assassin, he's SUPPOSED to kill you. If he can do it in one combo you should have countered by building health or a GA so that he kills one person, the team focuses him, and you pop back up, albeit low. Talon goes mid because he can combo out and wreck ap's after 6 because they dont have much defense. If you don't build any defense as he gets more fed it's his job to slit your throat

In most games I'd say the counter is probably going to be more champion-centric than anything you can do with items. Most of the champions that stack Black Cleavers are ones that dive into the middle of a team or pick off priority targets that are straggling.

The best way to counter divers is just with ridiculous amounts of CC. When a competent Alistar or Nautilus is nearby, diving to their buddy is more or less impossible. Sticking together also helps, Bruisers in general excel at 1v1 duels - so they'll destroy pretty much any champion in a 1v1 regardless of how many Black Cleavers they may or may not have.

Also, if you can get a tank that actually has a solid defensive steroid the armor penetration won't be that impressive. Alistar's 70% damage reduction doesn't care about how much armor penetration you have, and Malphite's 40% armor booster will pretty much erase any benefit from armor penetration against him.

For items I'd say things like Frozen Mallet and Rylie's Crystal Scepter are probably the best counter-building options. You get plenty of HP to survive the burst rotation, and kiteability to survive the journey to better positioning - or get that Cleaver Stacking fiend stuck in a bad spot long enough to take significant punishment for jumping on your face. Gap closers are cool and all, but mostly solve the problem of being melee once - not indefinitely.

Your team didn't have much health, and there was no randuins, and it looked like the enemy team overall did really,really good I dont know if bot lane and mid failed as well as jungle but that was the whole team fail not just talon carrying the whole team.

So much this. I was a Talon 2 days ago with BC, LW and full pen masteries and the Malphite had tabi, glacial, and abyssal and my full burst combo plus an auto or two took less than 1/5th of his health. Inherently tanky champs are still tanky as heck.

And OP, if you had spent that money on bloodthirsters with a LW like a s2 riven, you could have carried just as hard.

I just don't find it fair that you can stack three of the same item and excel in a match as far as I know that's not how this game should work, The black cleaver is really just OP due to the passive +15 Armor pen that's pretty massive plus the passive. I shouldn't have to build a CC heavy team due to an Item, like I said I don't want the item to get nerfed into oblivion just make the +15 Armor pen unique or the passive unique, If you want this with brutalizer that's fine but stack these just gives to much to Assassins and naturally tanky champions, I've also heard people have been going against the meta with this item so if someone could elaborate on that it would be great.

I honestly think the shred needs to be unique or not 100% chance applicable by AoE. I've been seeing many games in which they only run ad assassin mid and get at least one black cleaver and a LW on everyone on their team (minus support) and watch armor stacking be worthless. This makes AP carries much less viable in team compositions with blackcleaver as they do not benefit from the black cleaver shreds and AD only team comps much stronger. Also, it's already proven that ad assassins mid normally have a good chance to win mid lane (talon, lee), making playing AP mid successfully much harder. On another note, AD damage tends to be more sustainable than AP damage, which is why ADC wins games late game when nuking tends to be weaker.

Black cleaver synergy>double WOTA + abyssal scepter synergy as all lanes can benefit more from it ( AD top, AD mid, ADC bot, AD jungler vs top/mid AP + rare fiddle jungle). Get Taric support to shred armor even more!

So, TL;DR: All AD team compositions with black cleaver shred and LW is very viable due to synergy and potentially counter current meta. However, don't take everything I said to heart as I am only a low gold level player. The pro scene may be completely different, but I do want to see a pro match with an all ad comp to see what happens.

Lmao

It's not the shred that is crazy, as it caps at 30% no matter what. The problem is the CDR, FlatPen and Health that stacks. 1 k health, 40% CDR and 60 Flat Pen ontop of whatever other armor pen you have, makes a fairly scary champion.

Well it's getting nerfed. So this thread has been made pointless.