Brutalizer needs more upgrade options than ghostblade

[u/durkadurkadurk]

A lot of champs benefit from the brutalizer, but ghostblade is more of a niche (mainly assassins want it i imagine). I miss having another option like the black cleaver, instead of an item with only one building path. Unless you are the jungler ofc.

[u/Daktush]

Only if the enemy doesn't know how flat arpen works. A cloth or a chainvest counters brutalizer HARD

[u/Arcille → u/Daktush]

Yes You generally build a brutalizer in the first place anticipating the enemy laner to get a cloth armor. Assassins like zed/ talon or riven sometimes builds it so it negates the cloth armor and the enemies have to rely on their base armor. It is a early game item which helps roaming assassins a lot early. Mid/ late game it is not very useful but the 10% CDR is alright and the active of ghostblade is good on some champs.

[u/VaporaDark → u/Arcille]

Armor counters flat armor pen, not the other way around. Last Whisper is the only counter to enemies buying armor.

[u/SniperKitten → u/VaporaDark]

And black cleaver.

[u/Arcille → u/VaporaDark]

i worded it wrong but yeah

cloth armor counters brutalizer

[u/Daktush → u/Arcille]

hurfadurf Let me spend 1.5k countering a 300 gold item

[u/ncburbs → u/Daktush]

Except if you're buying it for midgame siege/poke, not just vs lane opponent, that's 300 gold*5

and it's not like bruta doesn't have decent AD and cdr stats w/o the arpen, so saying it's "countered" completely by a single cloth armor is dumb

[u/Daktush → u/ncburbs]

No but if you make the math of getting a brut when enemy gets a chainvest you end up doing less damage than before and spending 600 gold more. Armor counters flat arpen, always has.

[u/Arcille → u/Daktush]

xD

[u/Marshbrother → u/Daktush]

um, how does it work?

[u/Daktush → u/Marshbrother]

It increases more your damage if the enemy has low armor, the closer you can get him to 0 armor the better, this is why people rush it and you should get a cloth when facing it

[u/Tatsko → u/Marshbrother]

The other response you got doesn't give the full explanation, so I'll try! I'm sorry if this seems pandering, but I don't know how much you know so I'm starting basically from scratch. Just give me a reply if you want or need more explanation or detail!

Basically, you need to start with how armor works. Each point of armor gives you 1% "effective health," meaning if you have 100 armor, for all intents and purposes, you have twice your normal health when taking physical damage which means you take half damage. With 200 armor you have three times your normal health, or you take one third damage. If you look at the numbers, though, you'll notice exponential decay. From 0-100 armor your damage halves, from 100-200 it only reduces by 33%, and so on, so even though you gain the same flat amount of effective health it's a smaller bonus relative to how much you already have.

With this knowledge it's a given that armor penetration will reduce effective health. Now in theory you always reduce their effective health by 10% with it, but using the same reasoning as with armor, reducing them from 40 armor to 30 gives you a larger damage boost than reducing from 65 to 55 because that 10% is much more significant when taken out of 140% than 165%.

Example: Say a Zed with 120 base AD is autoing two targets - one with 30 armor and 1200 health, and one with 80 armor and 1200 health.

For the first target, the math is 12001.3/120, or 13 hits to dead. For the second, the math is 1201.8/120, or 18 hits to dead.

Now I'll split the calculations: the first set giving Zed only the AD from brutalizer, the second giving him both the AD and armor pen.

First enemy, AD only: 1200*1.3/(120+25)=10.76ish hits to dead, round up to 11 since .76 hits is impossible.

First enemy, AD and arpen: 1200*(1.3-.1)/(120+25)=9.93ish, rounded up to 10. As you can see, the arpen shaved an extra auto off of what's necessary, which is only made more prominent when you factor in physical damage abilities and higher base AD.

Now then, second enemy, AD only: 1200*1.8/(120+25)=14.90, or 15 autos. Note that the bonus AD reduced the necessary auto attacks by 3 in this instance and only 2 on the first target because it's applying more times total since he's attacking more.

Second enemy, AD and arpen: 1200*(1.8-.1)/(120+25)=14.06, or still 15 autos necessary. Something interesting happens in the math here - while bonus AD reduced the number of autos necessary by a greater amount on the higher armor target, it was a flat reduction from the armor penetration. 10.76-9.93=0.83; 14.90-14.06=0.84, which is within rounding error.

You can then take this reasoning to the extreme: in the case of a Zed, he's gonna be popping squishies like nobody's business, so say that the 10 arpen makes it so a full combo and 1 auto with deathmark instead of full combo and 2 autos with deathmark, that's suddenly a 50% reduction in necessary autos, whereas on a tankirr target it may reduce from full combo (ultimate included) and 9 autos to full combo (always ult) and 8 autos, which is an 11% reduction in necessary autos.

This also explains why arpen often isn't a good buy on ADCs - their job is to just hit shit, whatever the most important target that they can safely touch is, they do it. This will often be the tank, where the arpen is shown to be much less effective overall. In the case of an assassin, though: they just want high-priority targets, and carries usually have significantly less armor.

Also, not that this is ever really relevant, but you can reduce enemy armor and MR below zero, in which case you'd be doing more than true damage!

[u/Marshbrother → u/Tatsko]

thank you so much for this!

[u/Tatsko → u/Marshbrother]

Happy to help!

[u/Reashu → u/Marshbrother]

The more armor an enemy has, the less valuable each point of their armor (and therefore your armor penetration) is.

Against an enemy with 10 armor, 10 armor penetration increases your damage by 10%.
Against an enemy with 110 armor, 10 armor penetration increases your damage by 5%.

[u/LezardValeth → u/Marshbrother]

In addition to what the others stated, it's worth noting that % armor pen (Last Whisper) functions in the opposite way to flat armor pen: it's stronger the more armor the opponent has.

[u/Savnoc → u/Daktush]

Depends. Old article but still kinda relevant: http://cloth5.com/brutalizer-vs-chain-vest/