2014-01-21, 03:37 PM
The point of stacking armor is not to mitigate harass, but to ensure you can get a point where you can walk up to the ADC and fight them full on. If you buy tabi and warden's mail, and the enemy ADC buys a BT, the enemy ADC spent 3.2k gold for a damage spike, while you spend 2k gold to essentially bring their power level to below when they bought a BT. Which means, you effectively have 1k gold up on the top laner ADC (so the lane will be as though the enemy ADC has no items while you have 760 gold's worth of items). This combined with S4 defensive masteries and lower minion damage + turret damage allows you to walk up to enemy ADC, force a fight, and make them back off since they lose it.
Assuming a caitlyn vs tank with 18 armor, caitlyn with 21/x/x masteries and tank with x/21/x masteries. Both only have starting items, Caitlyn gets +3 AD/level, while the tank gets 3 armor/level. Caityln has 115 AD with masteries and doran's start, tank has 69 armor with masteries (pen + Havoc not factored in yet) and - 8 damage from auto's with doran's shield. With 6% pen factored in, 69 -> 65 armor. Factoring the tank's items + masteries, Caitylyn does (115 - 8 - 2 - 2)*1.03*(100/170) = 62 damage/auto at lv 11. Now let's say she buys a BT, and the tank buys warden's mail + tabi. Caitlyn's AD is now 189, while the tank's armor is now 136, which gets pen'd down to 128. Caitlyn now averages (189 - 8 - 2 - 2)*1.03 *(100/228) * 0.9 * 0.85 = 59 damage per auto attack if we treat warden's slow as a 15% damage reduction. From this, we can see that buying armor does shut down the ADC top's damage by reducing the ADC's damage to a point where she's paying 3.2k gold for an item and you're paying 2.44k gold to make sure that she's paying 3.2k gold for 12% LS, making it so that potions will pretty much mitigate the harass (I see that as magically mitigating harass). Since your items are more efficient and you're 760 gold ahead, there is no point in taking harass when you can use your advantage to force engages.
Assuming a caitlyn vs tank with 18 armor, caitlyn with 21/x/x masteries and tank with x/21/x masteries. Both only have starting items, Caitlyn gets +3 AD/level, while the tank gets 3 armor/level. Caityln has 115 AD with masteries and doran's start, tank has 69 armor with masteries (pen + Havoc not factored in yet) and - 8 damage from auto's with doran's shield. With 6% pen factored in, 69 -> 65 armor. Factoring the tank's items + masteries, Caitylyn does (115 - 8 - 2 - 2)*1.03*(100/170) = 62 damage/auto at lv 11. Now let's say she buys a BT, and the tank buys warden's mail + tabi. Caitlyn's AD is now 189, while the tank's armor is now 136, which gets pen'd down to 128. Caitlyn now averages (189 - 8 - 2 - 2)*1.03 *(100/228) * 0.9 * 0.85 = 59 damage per auto attack if we treat warden's slow as a 15% damage reduction. From this, we can see that buying armor does shut down the ADC top's damage by reducing the ADC's damage to a point where she's paying 3.2k gold for an item and you're paying 2.44k gold to make sure that she's paying 3.2k gold for 12% LS, making it so that potions will pretty much mitigate the harass (I see that as magically mitigating harass). Since your items are more efficient and you're 760 gold ahead, there is no point in taking harass when you can use your advantage to force engages.