Yup. Although in that situation, you'd probably need an ally with those items rather than yourself, because you need the crit chance to make the crit damage actually do something. Or it's ridiculously late game and your opponents decided to get very little armor against a physical DPS for some reason.

Basically, in order for crit damage to be better, not only do you have to pick a certain champion (Shaco/Ashe), but your enemies and allies have to play into your strategy, and you have to buy a certain set of items, and it has to be a certain period in the game. Which is like saying a pawn can be better than a rook because if it makes it all the way to the other side of the board without the enemy stopping it, it can become a queen.

You are right. I played Trynd last night and used my ArPen page and got just as big of crits as I did with my Crit dmg page. I still lost after a long game because .... well Trynd just isn't what he used to be... but boy was I hitting hard when I could actually hit people.

ArPen gives harder crits than Crit Dmg. If you don't understand this after reading the post then please uninstall.

ArPen vs Crit Chance is much more foggy, ArPen gives more DPS but Crit Chance increases your burst potential (up to 100% naturally).

all right i'm a little confused here . so please correct me if i'm wrong .

target has 100
i have 29 armor pen from runes
and i usually get last whisper and black cleaver .

-armor reduction: 100-60 (5 stacks from cleaver) = 40 armor
-% armor penetration: 40 * .6 = 24
-flat armor penetration: 24 - 29 = -5 armor

so wouldn't it still be good to combine last whisper and black cleaver ?

a couple questions:

if I follow the armor penetration rune scheme, is attack speed (last whisper) or attack (black cleaver) better for SHACO, since only one is needed? My other items are: Infedge, phantom, berserker boots.


and generally how much armor do squishies and tanks have late game?

Nein, my good sir. Only reduction can take armor to the negative, penetration stops at zero. If you're going to buy Last Whisper, please ignore Black Cleaver and instead buy Bloodthirster or Infinity Edge. Due to the fact that reduction is applied first, Last Whisper effectively makes 40% of your reduction redundant.

Also, at Def Exe: On Shaco, your priorities are Damage, Crit Damage, and Armor Penetration. You generally assume that you hit the target at most twice. Backstab deceive, a second attack, and a shiv to seal the deal. If you have failed to seal the deal with this, you probably just died. Last Whisper is better because 40% armor penetration immediately beats out 12 after each attack applies. Also, please throw out that Phantom Dancer and replace it with an item that actually helps Shaco, like Bloodthirster (which btw is also a better use of your second BF sword than Black Cleaver due to having 25 more damage).
Also, as to armor: A character with no armor items has ~70-80 armor at level 18. An armor-stacker like Rammus might easily break 400, considering Frozen Heart, Warden's Mail, Guardian Angel, and Thornmail are all made with both a Chain Vest and a Cloth Armor (and thus have armors between 80 and 100) and he has a passive massive increase to armor when his Defense curl is on.

How does pure ArP fare against crit chance marks (8.4%) and crit damage quints (13%)? I was always under the impression a mix of chance/damage was the most effective build for both early and late game potential.

The solution is to nerf armor penetration, and not to buff crit damage.
Balancing up is a bad idea in a game that already has instant kills.

I determined this a while back, kept a bit quiet on it. I was happy for scrubs to stack Crit Dmg while I was owning face with ArPen.