that armor pen buff isnt that notable on early game when its hard carries. but a xin wukong garen or darius will start bashing faces in from lvl 1 . the best way to make sure the armor pen buff wont make strong early game AD chars faceroll is make the buff scale with levels. starting with a low amount and going up when the game progresses

I honestly don't think it makes much of a difference. 15% of 30 armor is 4.5. That's a 3% increase in damage. At 50 armor it reduces 7.5 armor. That's a 5% increase in damage.

They're probably running Arpen marks + quints, 25 flat arpen or 31 with the flat armor pen mastery. And of course the more flat arpen they have the less the extra 15% actually does in comparison.

Also it's 12% now, it used to be 15% but it was lowered quite some time ago, so my math is wrong and is overstating what actually is.

Keep in mind all those champions you listed except Garen have strong armour pen bonuses in their kit. Even on SR it's hard to defend against a Xin when you lose 15% of your armour just by him touching you; THEN you factor in the mastery and rune bonuses.

I think the armor and magic pen %s should be switched.

Physical damage dealers don't really need any help in Dominion, it's the mages who get screwed over and need that tiny boost to their damage.

1. % pen helps squishies more than tanky champs

2. Magic damage is in a perfectly fine place (see: Kassadin, Lulu, Brand, Swain, Amumu and the multitude of hybrid damage champs who dominate bot lane), the problem is AP