My thoughts on Black Cleaver post 1.73:
Nobody is stacking it now. This is a great thing, and a huge step in the right direction. The instant you have players stacking one item over and over instead of buying one of the multitudes of other options, you know you have a problem. The Stack Cleaver was invalidating a whole chunk of items for a large set of champions, and that is not the case anymore in 1.73. So thumbs up on this end.

That said, it is still an amazing item and is still rushed on most AD casters because of what you get from it. Health, flat pen, % pen (for your whole team, in a way), and cooldown reduction all on one item is really, really good. I'll be honest, I still feel like BC is a bit too strong, but I think more of my concern lies with the whole penetration system and available sources of penetration, rather than just with Black Cleaver. Being able to combo Cleaver and Last Whisper, and THEN add in any flat pen from runes/items/masteries is what I think is too strong.

With the way things are working now, I would like to see % penetration reduced some more, so that when I buy armor (the intended counter to physical damage), it actually feels like a good investment. But that's enough about penetration, on to other things now!

Global Cooldown Aura:
The problem with Global Auras is that while they may give some help to champions needing it, you also give that help to champions who are already dominating Dominion, pushing them further out of line. I don't think this aura will do anything to help Dominion overall, but we are in pre-season so I don't necessarily mind testing it out for a couple weeks.

Thanks for putting these kind of threads up Nome. Shows that you really care about the health of this game mode, and I'd love to keep helping.

Black cleaver is a mandatory item because it gives all you want on an ad caster in one cost effective package. It is good versus high and low armor tagets. This aspect kills item variety, imo.

The lack of penetration aura makes it mandatory to get black cleaver or last whisper for any ad character, otherwise the amount of armor (even witchcap!) built against you will trivialize your damage. Another obstacle to item diversity.

I feel like the %cdr wouldn't harm anyone and help to make the game more dynamic and fun!

Moving a portion of mandatory stats like penetration and cdr to the global aura is a right move, cause everyone will build those stats anyways. They can spend their gold on more specialized items.

I think Black Cleaver is still too strong. Combined with Last Whisper, it wrecks armor really hard. I think it should be removed or toned done for Dominion.

5-10% Cooldown Reduction aura could be cool, seeing how the scaling CDR from defensive masteries was removed. I find it a bit annoying to be more or less forced to go 21 points into utility to mkae up for the CDR loss. Furthermore, it's a bit annoying to play tanks now. Malphite and Leona are probably still strong, I suppose, but other tanks are falling behind.

Tanks and supports seem overall weaker, with only the elite tanks and support still being viable. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I feel it is at the moment. It would be nice to have those types of champions available, since going back to the 3 bruiser 1 AP meta isn't as interesting, in my opinion.

i dont think an aura for everyone helps at all cos everyone gets it and everyone loves cdr. a new ap item with decent cdr that is worth getting would be nice. bft sweeper = 20cdr what are my choices after that? nothing that i want i only get it for the cdr. kindle gem op

I think BC and BFT are both still too strong and your viability is currently strongly correlated to how compatible your champ is with one of these two items. Black Cleaver needs to have % reduction or flat reduction, not both, because an item with both presents no counterplay. BFT works too well on champs who don't build AP and doesn't work very well on AP champs who have longer cooldowns, who are the ones that need the most help right now. It needs to have AP scaling on the passive and might benefit from the DoT duration being refreshed by autoattacks so champs that don't have the spammable spells to keep it going can maintain it.

Switching to the new armor pen order (which I really wish would just be reverted, but probably isn't happening) and removing the aura pen helps AD casters and bruisers (who build their own pen) more than carries of either type, so I consider this a step backwards. Would it be possible to have a special % pen added to the aura that is calculated after flat pen?

As for CDR, that was one of the things in my list of aura changes, so I'm glad to see it. Is there any way we could see a specific CDR bonus to ults? Or, perhaps a better option would be to refresh all your cooldowns whenever you go back to the summoner platform, but it gives you a debuff that prevents this from happening again for 30 seconds, so Karthus doesn't just sit there being Karthus all day.

It's just not APs that need CDR. Tanks and supports need CDR to. To be fair, there probably are less viable supports and tanks than there are APs. For APs, you have stuff like Kassadin, Diana*, Zyra*, Brand, Fizz**, Teemo*, Evelynn, Ahri, Ryze, Poppy. For tanks, you have Malphite, Amumu, Leona, maybe Blitzcrank, maybe Rammus. Some of these are more bruiser/tanks than pure cc tanks. For supports, we have Lulu and Janna, maybe Sona. It seems to me that support and tank players currently have less viable options than AP players.

*They might not be viable due to the latest nerf. We will see.

**I'm not sure how viable Fizz is anymore.

As for the lack of Penetration Auras, it does help make some champions a bit tankier, but on the other hand, it means that those champions will lose damage. I've noticed this especially with Lulu and Malphite, who cannot deal as much damage as they used to, but they are still squishier than they used to be, so it's a net nerf for them. I'm sure this applies to many other champions as well.

That being said, with the way penetration works atm (ie having both %-pen and flat pen being way too strong), having an armor pen aura is probably not a good idea. Personally, I think it was better to have flat pen being calculated before %-pen, but I suppose Riot don't want to change that back.

I'm on the fence regarding the penetration auras particularly magic pent since bruisers tend to be more problematic than others.

Black Cleaver is in a good place, its a good item and gives an alternate build option.

Global CDR I do not agree with, people will say it helps mages but it will also help those bruisers...