Due to the changes to Warden's Mail, Frozen Heart, Glacial Shroud, Thornmail, and Randuin's Omen as well as the addition of Dead Man's Plate, defensive builds have been changed when AD based champions are concerned. This article will cover a build that works against critically striking AD Carries, as well as talk about how some of the armor items interact. Though there are still outliers, Kalista and Tristana being prime examples of high damage that is non-crit dependent. However, champions like Ashe, Master Yi, Yasuo, and Tryndamere can be rendered less effective with a simple three item combination. That combination consists of Ninja Tabi, Thornmail, and Randuin's Omen.

Let us first take a look at Thornmail itself. The changes to the damage return on the passive have given it a minor nerf, but it still gives you a good way to return the damage of your opponents. The passive in its older state would return 30% of the unmitigated damage back to the opponent as magic damage. This was a pretty nice trade due to the 100 armor given by Thornmail put you easily to the point of cutting an enemy's basic attack damage in half. The current Thornmail still gives the 100 armor but has a change to the damage return. The damage returned is 15% of unmitigated damage plus a flat value equal to 25% of bonus armor. This makes Thornmail less effective by itself, but leads to why it works well in tandem with other items. As well as it being a good choice for certain champions with abilities that grant bonus armor such as Malphite, Taric, Rammus, and Leona.

Randuin's Omen was also nerfed in some aspects. It lost 10 of its armor value putting it at 60 armor, and it lost 100 of its health value putting it at 400 health. However, these nerfs came with a good trade off in the form of its new passive, a 10% reduction in the damage of critical strikes. The "Reinforced Armor" Mastery grants this effect as well. Randuin's Omen is a suggested early item when faced with high crit teams due to its decent stat spread and its inexpensive build path. An interesting point to note is that the percent damage reduction from critical strikes is an additive stacking passive which means 2 Randuin's on the same champion would grant 120 armor, 800 Health, and 20% reduction in crit damage. Randuin's Omen also applies an attack speed slow to anyone who attacks the wearer; this makes Randuin's a key piece of gear against any team with high critical damage.

The last item may come as a "duh no kidding" choice, but the fact that I still see people playing tanks and complaining about getting crit to death makes me believe that it is necessary. Ninja Tabi, also known as "those armor boots you get against Tryndamere". The unique passive on Ninja Tabi is a 10% reduction of basic attack damage on the whole; this is often overlooked by tanks who believe that the Tenacity from Mercury's Treads is superior over all boots. These boots alone are a great addition against any team who has a focus on basic attacks for a bulk of their damage. Ninja Tabi are a good idea to pick up early on in the game, when basic attack trades are more common and since the passive scales smoothly throughout the entire match length.

Now that I have explained the three items, I don't feel that I need to explain why they work so well together. The massive percentage damage reduction from the Tabi and Randuin's cut the power of critical strikes down tremendously, and that only helps you survive to get your Thornmail's full effectiveness. The amount of damage return onto an opponent with high crit damage will be massive. Additionally, stacking on a Sunfire Cape if you are able to gap close to the target or building a Dead Man's Plate to increase your sticking potential; these two items add tremendously to your ability to survive in fights against high AD threats. Frozen Heart is not always recommended with this kind of stacking, since Thornmail will make you easily achieve armor effectiveness cap and HP becomes more valueable to you than just additional armor. However, Iceborn Gauntlet's sheen passive makes it more useful in combination with Thornmail than Frozen Heart.

Bear heavily in mind that this kind of armor stacking comes with the large trade off of being very weak to enemy mage and AP assassin threats. You need to be able to identify when you have gotten yourself armored enough to being adding some much needed Magic Resist to your build. Luckily, Guardian's Angel and Zz'rot Portal are very good at increasing both stats and are very good to build on tanks for team fights and splitpush respectively.

Do you agree? Disagree? Have a better build? See something I missed? Let me know in the comments. gl hf and I'll see you on the Rift.