During the preseason, armor penetration was reworked into a new system called Lethality. In short, Lethality still removes a flat amount of armor, but it takes time to ramp up. This change was introduced during the assassin update in patch 6.22 to prevent assassins from snowballing the game out of control with a single item. However, assassins would start to do less damage as the game progressed, so the late game amount of Lethality was buffed to be slightly greater than the amount of armor penetration you could have before. This way, assassins could be less dominating in the early game but still be useful later on. Regardless, it was still fairly weak in the early game because of how little Lethality you could have until you finished a few items.

If you really wanted to notice the damage you got from building Lethality, you had to stack multiple Lethality items. Currently, the only Lethality items in the game are Serrated Dirk (an incomplete item), Duskblade of Draktharr, Youmuu’s Ghostblade, and Edge of Night. With boots, that accounts for four item slots, leaving you with only two slots to choose between a Last Whisper upgrade, more cooldown reduction, life steal, or a utility item such as Quicksilver Sash or Guardian’s Angel. With those three Lethality items, you would get 50 Lethality, 58.4 with the Precision mastery, and a whopping 82.4 with Lethality Marks and Quintessences. Without any armor items, most champions have below 90 base armor at level 18. You'll practically be dealing true damage to anybody that doesn’t build armor. Granted, it was an expensive build, and Lethality took a bit of time to stack up, so many players were hesitant to try out the build. At least until Riot buffed Lethality.

In patch 7.2, a few changes were added to help out the champions building Lethality. They increased the early game scaling for Lethality and buffed a couple of items. This made it more appealing to build Lethality, for both bruisers and marksmen. With Lethality's scaling starting at 60% instead of 40%, it was starting to grant a power-spike much earlier in the game. If that wasn’t enough, Duskblade got a good damage buff and Edge of Night got a massive cooldown decrease, making it much easier to use. Players started to try out the build, and as you can guess, you could one-shot a lot of squishy champions, deal massive amounts of poke, and have plenty of utility with the item passives.

If Lethality is the strongest AD centric build, then it makes sense that the strongest champions are ones that can abuse it. Although the Lethality changes were made for the updated assassins, old spell casters like Riven and Jayce thrive and are able to one-shot enemy champions even faster than before with the new build. Without Black Cleaver, their ability to chunk tanks is hindered, but now your main focus is to kill the carry and get out. It’s definitely a different mentality from before; the focus has shifted to catching people out of position and killing them before they can react. The new one-shot build makes it much easier to carry games, which is likely why there are so many top laners on the ladder this season.

Top lane fighters aren’t the only ones that can use the Lethality build. After the Youmuu’s nerf, people were unsure if spell caster marksmen such as Jhin and Varus would return to their former glory. With the changes, they’re stronger than ever. Jhin can now solo carries with his ult, and a single Varus arrow is bringing squishies to half health. They also have the added bonus of being able to cast spells from a safe distance. They have CC, burst, and good laning phases against supports such as Malzahar and Zyra. Above all, they have long ranged poke that very few champions have. They don’t have to walk into range of many of the fighters that can now one-shot them. If you properly hide in the fog of war, catch people in chokes, and maintain your distance, you can easily land your skillshots.

The Lethality changes have brought upon a rather volatile meta. Kills can happen anywhere - top is no longer a playground exclusively for tanks, and bot laners now do considerable amounts of damage. As time progresses, the build will probably become more popular on champions like Kha'Zix and Miss Fortune. It’s brought around an interesting change, and we can only wait to see how these high damage threats affect the competitive scene.

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