One thing that I have been noticing in my solo queue games for the past few months is that players don't understand the difference between attack damage and physical damage. I see players getting angry when their team has a lot of champions that build attack damage claiming that “if the enemy team builds armor we automatically lose.” Their concern seems to be that their teams don't have a solid balance between AD and AP building champions. The real concern however should not be AD vs AP, but physical damage vs magic damage.

To first understand what I am talking about, let us analyze the difference. AD (attack damage) and AP (Ability Power) are merely stats just like health, crit chance, or magic resist. There are three different types of AD. Base AD is the amount of attack damage your champion will have at any given level with no items, masteries, runes, or buffs. Bonus AD is the amount of attack damage you have from all sources that are not your base AD. Total AD is a combination of your base and bonus AD. Some champion abilities, such as Graves's Q scale off of bonus AD and others, such as Caitlyn's Q scale off of total AD. In addition, your total AD stat is the amount of physical damage your auto attack will deal. Ability power is easier to understand than attack damage. It is nothing more than a stat that buffs the effectiveness of certain abilities based on a fixed percentage.

On the other hand, Physical damage and magic damage are purely damage sources. Auto attacks and abilities that deal physical damage can be mitigated with armor. Abilities that deal magic damage can be mitigated with magic resist. The tendency is that abilities that scale from AD usually deal physical damage and abilities that scale from AP usually deal magic damage. This is not a strict rule however, and seems to be the source of confusion among players. Therefore, you want a solid balance of physical damage vs magic damage, and not necessarily Attack damage vs physical damage.

A prime example of what I am talking about is the champion Nidalee. Recently, players have been building her as an AD bruiser in the top lane. While utilizing this build Nidalee ends up with a fairly low AP stat and a fairly high AD stat, however, all of her damage dealing abilities still deal magic damage. I have noticed that in order to mitigate the amount of damage Nidalee deals players will only build armor, completely ignoring the fact that this will only mitigate her autoattacks and none of her abilities. Another example is Corki. While Corki builds almost exclusively AD, his Q, W, and R all deal magic damage. This combined with the low cooldown on his Q and R is why you will occasionally see players build magic penetration boots while playing Corki.

Some other examples of abilities that scale off of AD yet deal magic damage are Shyvanna's W and Lee Sin's E. Other abilities such as Kayle's Q and E, Shaco's E, Ezreal's Q and R, and Evelynn's Q have both AD and AP ratios. Lastly, one very interesting ability is that Miss Fortune's W makes her auto attacks deal a bonus 6% of her AD stat as magic damage.

There are also a handful of champions that have magic damage dealing abilities that tend to go under the radar and don't have an AD stat attached to them. It is worth mentioning a few of the more popular ones such as Zed's passive, Shen's Q, Garen's R, Trundle's R, Yasuo's E, Gangplank's R, Pantheon's W and R, Tristana's W E and R, and Varus's W and R.

Wrapping things up: Please note that I did not list every single example in this article. I hope that the distinction between AD and Physical damage is now clear and you will keep this in mind during your solo queue games. Another quick note is that I realize a lot of these abilities may not be the core damage dealing ability for your champions, but the take away from this article should be not to fret the minute you see all AD building champions, because split between all of you, there might just be enough magic damage to make it through the game.